‘Folk at the airport must be in quite a spin,’ he grunted, returning to the room.
She abandoned the blanket for as long as it took her to tug the large socks on and pull them almost to her knees. Between their heat from below, Will’s body heat soaking into her torso and the fire at her back, she finally started to feel the frigidity abating.
From her skin, anyway.
‘Not a sight they’ve probably had before, I guess. The plane was bigger than the entire terminal.’
‘Oh, it’s happened before,’ Will said, easing himself down onto the edge of his dining table, across the small space. About as far back from her as he could be without leaving the room again. ‘Courtesy of being the best piece of concrete for a thousand miles.’
Talking about airfields was a close second to talking about the weather. Awkwardness clunked between them like a bit of wood broken loose in the stove.
‘I’m grateful you can give me a bed,’ she finally said. ‘And that you remembered me.’
Those eyes came up. ‘You thought I wouldn’t?’
She swallowed against their blazing focus. ‘Wouldn’t remember me? Or wouldn’t help me out?’
‘Either.’
Thought. Feared. Potato/potahto. ‘I wasn’t sure whether you’d say yes.’
His grunt sounded much like one of the six dogs that had settled down into every available corner of the room. ‘And leave you to the bears?’
She glanced back at him, though he seemed as far away now as Nepal was from this place. The only sounds in the cabin were the crackling of the wood stove and the wide yawn of one of his canine brood. Neither did much to head off her sleepiness.
‘So, where should I…?’
That seemed to snap him back to the present from whatever faraway place he’d gone. Remembering Marcella, she imagined.
Sudden sympathy diluted her own tension.
Will had lost so much.
‘Second door on the right,’ he said, standing aside to unblock her way. ‘Bathroom is across the hall. Go easy on the water use—I truck it in.’
The irony of that in a region practically mired in water most of the time—
She picked her way carefully through supine dogs but stopped just as her hand found the doorknob. ‘Seriously, Will. Thank you. I wasn’t looking forward to sleeping in a waiting room.’
‘I’m better than that, at least,’ he murmured, holding her gaze.
No ‘you’re welcome’. Because she probably wasn’t—again. No ‘it’s lovely to see you again, Kit’, because it almost certainly wasn’t.
Had she really expected open arms after the last conversation they’d ever had?
Will sagged against the door the moment his unexpected guest closed it quietly behind her. How far did you have to go to outrun the past? Clearly, the top of the world still wasn’t far enough.
Five years…
Five long years and that time had compressed into nothing the moment Kitty Callaghan had stepped through his front door. The moment he’d answered his phone. His heart hadn’t stopped hammering since then. Maybe he should have just let it ring, but he’d recognised the number and he knew that the airport wouldn’t have called him at this time of night without very good reason.
It had never occurred to him that the reason would be her.
‘Shove up, Dexter,’ he murmured nudging the big brown male blocking access to his favourite chair. The dog grumbled but shifted, only to whomp down with exaggerated drama a few feet away, and Will sank down into his pre-loved rocker.
Old man’s chair, the woman who’d sold it to him had joked.
Yup. And if he had his way he’d still be rocking gently in it by a roasting fire when he’d been in the north long enough to earn that title.
Just him and his dogs… As it was supposed to be.
Last time he’d seen Kitty, she’d been hurriedly tossing her belongings into the back of a dodgy Nepalese taxi and scrambling in after them. Couldn’t get off their hillside fast enough. Marcella had wept as her favourite new distraction had departed only ten days into her month-long stay, but he’d kept a careful distance—his heart beating, then, at least as hard as it was now—relieved to see the last of her, certain that Kitty’s departure was going to make things with Marcella right again.
He’d worked on their relationship for three more years and it had never been right again.
Which made having Kitty here an extra problem. A man didn’t move halfway around the world to escape his past only to invite it right back into his front room. Especially not given how they’d left things.
But… Polar bears.
‘It’s bigger than it looks back there,’ a soft voice suddenly said behind him.
He lurched upright in his chair.
For so long the only voices other than his in this place had been canine. But, somehow, the walls of his cabin absorbed the soft, feminine tones. As if her words were cedar oil and his timber walls were parched.
He struggled for something resembling conversation.
‘Plenty of prefabs in town, but I wanted something a little more personal.’
‘And private,’ she remarked, glancing out of the window. ‘It’s very isolated.’
Yep, it was. Just how he liked it.
‘A mile’s a long way in the Boreal. But I have neighbours up the creek and Churchill’s only ten minutes away if you know the roads.’
Twenty-five if you didn’t.
Did he imagine it, or did her eyes get a shade more anxious at the seclusion? Maybe she, too, was remembering the electricity they’d whipped up between them back in Nepal.
He didn’t whip up much of anything these days. No matter who was asking.
It just wasn’t worth the risk.
‘So… I think I’ll head to bed,’ she said and, again, it somehow had the same tone as the crackling fire behind him. ‘In case they get the plane back in the air early.’
That wasn’t going to happen. Churchill was set up for small aircraft—twenty-to-thirty-seaters coming and going across the vast Canadian North like winged buses—and its apron was barely big enough to turn a colossal jet around, let alone get it airborne without a support team. Someone was going to have to fly engineers and safety inspectors up here to help prep the plane
