Northern Exposure

“Put that down.”

She felt as if she were ten years old again, caught with her hand in the cookie jar. The heat of a blush warmed her cheeks. “Sorry.” She quickly replaced the photo and clasped her hands together in front of her in contrition.

Wait a minute.

What was she doing? So she picked up a photograph of the guy’s wife. So what? She hadn’t done anything wrong. Her reaction to his censure told her she still had baggage to unload, lots of it, from her years with Blake.

“Okay, let’s do this.” Joe grabbed the phone off the desk and plunked down into the single office chair.

“Do what?”

“Your magazine. What’s the number?”

“What?” He was going to call them?

“Wilderness Unlimited. The number.”

“I heard what you said, I just don’t know why you’d want to—”

“You said you were a photographer. I’m checking it out.”

“Why?”

“To find out if you’re telling the truth.”

She couldn’t believe it. “Of course I’m telling the truth. Why would I lie?”

“You tell me.”

“This is ridiculous.” She fisted her hands on her hips and bit back a curse.

“Fine. We’ll do it the hard way.” He retrieved a back issue of the nationally renowned magazine from the pile on his coffee table. A second later he was dialing the number.

“It’s in New York.” You idiot. She crossed her arms over her chest and waited. “It’s what, one in the morning there?” She checked her watch, noting the four-hour time difference.

Their gazes locked. Gently, in a motion that screamed control, he placed the receiver back on the hook. She could tell he was hopping mad—not at her, but at himself for being so stupid.

The moment stretched on, until she couldn’t stand the tension. “All right, fine.” She walked over to the phone, dialed and handed him the receiver. “My editor’s a night owl. She’s probably still up.”

“You know her home number by heart?”

Wendy shrugged. “She’s a friend of mine.” Her only friend right now.

“What’s your last name?”

“Walters.”

“Wendy Walters. Sounds made up.”

The irony of that made her laugh.

Joe looked at her hard as he waited for someone to pick up. No one did. “She’s not there,” he said, and replaced the receiver.

“I guess you’ll just have to trust me, then.”

He struck her as a man who didn’t trust anyone. He liked to be in control, have things his own way. And that was fine with her, because she was leaving.

“I’ll pay you whatever you want to drive me back to my car. It can’t be far from here.”

“It is. You have to backtrack out of the reserve and drive around that mountain range—” he nodded at the snowcapped peaks framed in the window “—before you hit the highway again.”

“I have traveler’s checks and cash.” She hoped he didn’t want too much. All the money she had left in the world was tucked away in the small wallet in her pants.

“Doesn’t matter. My truck’s in the shop. Tomorrow I’ll get someone to drive you. Tonight you’ll stay here.”

“Not a chance.” She grabbed her knapsack off the couch where she’d dropped it, and tried to get by him. “I’ll walk.” She knew she was being ridiculous, but his bossiness irritated her.

She’d spent her whole adult life being cowed by men who ordered her around. Well, one man. But that was over. She was done with being a “yes” girl.

He grabbed her arm as she passed. “This is your first trip to Alaska, isn’t it?”

“Stop manhandling me.” She pulled out of his grasp. “What if it is?”

“For starters, you have no damned idea how dangerous it is right outside that door.” He nodded at where they’d come in. “Weather, bears, other predators—you wouldn’t know what to do if you got into trouble.”

“What makes you so sure?”

He glanced at her outfit, her boots, then swiped the knapsack out of her hand. “It’s new. All of it. You’re green as a stick.”

Add judgmental to his list of character flaws.

She bristled but let his impression of her stand. It wasn’t worth correcting. She’d be gone in the morning. She took a couple of deep breaths and resigned herself to it. “Where would I sleep?”

Their eyes met, and for a millisecond she knew the same thought that flashed across her mind also flashed across his. Now that was scary. At least she had an excuse. He was drop-dead gorgeous, and it had been a long time since she’d been with anyone.

On the other hand, he was exactly the kind of man she swore she’d never get involved with again. But chemistry was a funny thing. It defied logic, ignored rules.

Joe Peterson was a man who lived by rules. His own. But the room they were standing in told her that he occasionally broke them. His eyes told her, too, as he looked her over candidly in, what she knew in her gut was for him, a rare, unguarded moment.

“The sofa makes into a bed,” he said quietly. “There’re clean towels in the bathroom. I’ll get you something dry to wear.”

After they’d both showered and changed, he fixed them a hot supper of leftover chicken, tinned biscuits and homemade gravy. It was good. She was starved and ate two helpings.

Through the entire meal they didn’t talk, but every once in a while she’d glance up and catch him looking at her. She’d gotten that same look a lot lately from strangers. It was as if he knew her but couldn’t place her. It unnerved her and she looked away.

Later he built a fire, and they settled in front of it with steaming cups of tea. Joe paged through an Alaska Department of Fish and Game bulletin, while she stared at the photo on the mantel of the waiflike woman in the black dress.

Wendy suspected that’s whose clothes she was wearing. The arms of the pink sweatshirt were too long for her, the jeans a joke. She had to roll the denim cuffs up six inches so she wouldn’t trip.

She frowned, suddenly recognizing the backdrop in the photo. “That’s Rockefeller Center,” she said without thinking. “A professional shot, too.” Why hadn’t she noticed that before? “What is she, a model?”

Joe looked up, and his face turned to stone.

Definitely sensitive turf. It was the second time her mention of the woman in the photo had angered him. She opted for a swift exit from the subject. “This place is about as far from New York as you can get.”

“That’s the point,” he said, and went back to his reading.

Joe watched Wendy as she slept, curled on the sofa, a pillow tucked under her head. He wondered if her hair was as soft as it looked. The cut was short and tousled, and suited her delicate features. In the firelight it glinted gold.

From this angle she reminded him a little of Cat. Glancing at the photo on the mantel, he allowed himself a rare moment to remember her, what she was like when they were both young.

Wendy stirred, came awake in a slow, sleepy aura that was sexy as hell. Joe felt a tightening in his gut. Maybe Barb, one of his few friends in the department, was right. He needed to get out more.

“What…time is it?” Wendy propped herself up on one elbow and blinked the sleep from her eyes.

“Late. You fell asleep. I’ll get you some sheets for the sofa bed.”

He padded down the hall toward the back bedroom, which was used mostly for storage of department supplies. He flipped on the overhead light and went directly to the closet.

He’d never had an overnight guest at the station before. He grabbed a set of sheets, a couple of blankets, and was ready to switch the light off when he spied a stack of tabloids he’d meant to burn.

Barb brought him all kinds of reading material on her once-a-week trips to the station. He’d told her to stop buying him these trashy newspapers, but she just kept on. Might as well read something fun once in a while, she’d say.

He grabbed the stack to take them out to the fire, and did a double take.

The edition on top was dated three weeks ago. He stared at the photo on the cover. Two men and a woman. The shot barely disguised the fact that they were naked.

He remembered now. He’d read the tabloid article because he recognized the name of one of the men in the picture. Cat had known him, had talked about him. But it wasn’t the man who concerned him, it was the woman.

That’s why she looked so damned familiar!

Joe committed the tabloid headline to memory before carrying the blankets and sheets back down the hall. He paused in the doorway to the front room. His guest was looking at Cat’s photo again. He glared at her back, the headline playing in his mind like a bad record—

New York Fashion Photographer Willa Walters Overexposed in Deadly Sex/Drug scandal.

Chapter 2

If he was cool to her before, he was downright icy now.

Wendy stepped barefoot onto the wet wood deck and closed the French doors behind her. Joe stood with his back to her, gazing out at a late-night sunset whose colors looked as if they’d jumped off an artist’s palette. She was tempted to go back inside and get her camera.

The rain had stopped and the sky was clearing. Dark clouds still thrashed above them but eased into violet tipped with brilliant orange near the horizon. The snowcapped peaks in the distance looked like pink snow cones from a county fair. Wendy had never seen a more beautiful sky in her life.

Or a more tightly wound man.

Aware of her approach, Joe began to pace back and forth along the length of the deck, his hand skimming the railing. He reminded her of a caged predator. A very irritated caged predator. The question on her mind was Why?

He’d dumped the sheets and blankets on the sofa bed, mumbled a good-night, then had retreated outside to the deck, seemingly to watch the sunset. She knew that wasn’t the reason he was out there. He didn’t know her well enough for her to have made him so angry, but apparently she had. Or something had.

At this point she didn’t care. She had her own problems. She had three weeks to get those caribou photographs to the magazine. Three short weeks.

When the senior editor at Wilderness Unlimited, a sorority sister from college, had agreed to Wendy’s proposal, she’d been ecstatic. It was the first break she’d gotten since the incident, since life, as she’d known it, had blown up in her face. She knew it was the only break she was likely to get, and she was determined not to waste it.

A cleansing breath of cool air laced with wet spruce cleared her head. Supper, and the nap, had bolstered her strength. She was still a bit jet-lagged from the long flight west. That, and the fact that there were about sixteen hours of daylight at this latitude this time of year, played havoc with her internal clock.

“Warden,” she said as she moved toward him across the wet deck, thinking it best to keep their communications formal.

He stopped pacing, his back to her, but didn’t respond.

Unfolding a map she’d retrieved from her knapsack, she said, “There’s something I want to ask you.”

He didn’t even acknowledge her with a look when she joined him at the railing. “That buck today, the woodland caribou…”

“Bull,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“Caribou males are called bulls in Alaska, not bucks. I thought you would have known that, being a wildlife photographer.”

“I, uh…” He had a way of flustering her with his offhand comments. She was determined not to let him back her down. “The point is…I need to find him again.”

“Why?”

“I told you. For the magazine. My assignment.”

He turned to look at her, crossing his arms over his chest and hiking a hip onto the railing, as if settling in for a friendly chat. His eyes, however, were anything but friendly. “Wilderness Unlimited. So you said.”

She moved closer, spun the map around and spread it across the railing so he could see it. “I left my car here.” She pointed to a spot on the highway, then traced her finger along the route she’d taken into the reserve. “I first saw the bull here, where you—”

“How much experience do you have?”

“What?” She looked up at him.

“With wildlife photography. What other animals have you photographed?”

Besides the menagerie of pets she’d had growing up and her college’s mascot, a Clydesdale, the answer was none. Well, except for some small animals she’d seen earlier today. But she wasn’t about to tell him that. His smug expression and arched brow told her he couldn’t wait to point out her shortcomings.

Blake had been like that. Always making sure she knew she wasn’t good enough, wasn’t experienced enough. At every opportunity, hammering it home that she was nothing without him.

Well, here’s a news flash: Blake was wrong.

It had taken her a long time to see it. Weeks of getting over the shock of what had happened in New York, lying in the dark on the twin bed in her old room in her parents’ house, thinking about her life—what she wanted, what she was, what she could be.

Her new life started now. And she wasn’t going to let any man, particularly one who didn’t even know her, tell her she wasn’t capable of handling it.

“Moose,” she said. The lie came easy. “Deer, wolves, humpback whales, penguins. You name it, I’ve photographed it.”

“Really?” He perked right up, seeming to believe her. She felt good all of a sudden. Better than she had all evening. “Where’d you shoot the penguins? Antarctica?”

She supposed she shouldn’t make up anything that seemed too farfetched. If you’re going to lie, stick as close to the truth as possible. She’d read that once in a detective novel.

“No,” she said. “Right here in Alaska. In the, uh, arctic.”

“No kidding?” Joe smiled, his eyes glittering appreciatively in the last of the light. It was the first smile she’d seen from him, and a little shiver raced through her. Things were back on track.

“Anyway, about that bull…” She pushed the map toward him again.

“You must be pretty famous, then.”

“Who, me? No, not at all. I’m just another photographer.” She pointed to the spot on the map where they’d last seen the bull, but Joe Peterson wasn’t looking at the map. He was looking at her.

“I’ll have to disagree with you, Wendy.” He said her name as if it were a foreign word. “It would take one hell of a photographer, wildlife or otherwise, to shoot pictures of penguins in Alaska.”

Why was he so antagonistic? What did he care if she had or hadn’t photographed—

“Because, Wendy—” there it was again “—there aren’t any penguins in Alaska.”

“There…aren’t?”

“They’re a southern hemisphere species. Any wildlife photographer would know that.” He pushed away from the deck and started back inside.

She followed him. “All right, I lied. So what? I still need to get those photos for the magazine, and to do that I’ll need to find that buck or bull or whatever it is again, or another one like it.”

He marched into the kitchen and started washing their supper dishes as if she wasn’t even there, banging plates around, sloshing water out of the sink.

She muscled in beside him and spread the map out on the dish drainer. “You’re right. I don’t know anything about penguins, okay? But I do know that there are only a handful of woodland caribou in Alaska. They’re rare, elusive, completely unlike the native species that roams the tundra. No one has ever photographed them before.”

“There’s a reason for that,” he said, and plopped the dish he was working on back in the water. “It’s dangerous. The males are rogues. They’re skittish as hell and thrive in cliff settings just like the one you nearly got us both killed on.”

She couldn’t think about that. “I need those pictures. It’s important. I’m not asking you to help me, I’m simply asking you to show me on this map where I might find more caribou, bulls especially.”

He snorted and went back to his dishwashing. She noticed how strong his hands were, how tanned they looked against the white plastic plates. For a millisecond she recalled them on her body that afternoon. In a blood-heating thought that had nothing to do with photography, she wondered what the contrast would be like of his bronze hands against her bare white skin.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, and grabbed a towel. “That bull we saw today, along with any others in the area, will have bolted to the other side of the reserve. You can’t drive there. You’d have to go on foot.” He gave her a once-over, his eyes lingering for a second on her mouth. “A woman like you would never make it.”

She knew it was Joe Peterson, game warden, standing before her, saying the words, but it was Blake Barrett’s voice she heard in her head.

“Oh, really?” She stormed out of the kitchen, slapped the map on the coffee table—which, earlier, she’d moved out of the way—and proceeded to make up the sofa bed with the sheets he’d delivered.

Joe leaned in the door frame and watched her. The longer he looked at her, the angrier she got. What was it about men that they assumed—assumed without even knowing her—that she wasn’t up to the task at hand, no matter what that task happened to be?

From something as simple as carting out the garbage to something as complex as managing a runway shoot, or as challenging as finding a couple of caribou in the mountains—guys like Blake Barrett, and now Joe Peterson, thought she was helpless.

Well, hide and watch, boys.

She snapped the crisp white sheet over the foam mattress.

Hide and watch.

Joe thrashed around in bed until the top sheet was twisted around his legs like a rope. He ripped it from his body and tossed it aside, then punched up the pillows, ramming his head into them like a Dall sheep in full rut.

It was no good.

He’d been lying there for the past hour and a half, wide awake. The bright-green numbers on the digital clock by the bed read just past two in the morning. After their conversation on the deck, which had turned into an argument in the kitchen, he’d left his overnight guest to fend for herself and had retreated to the bedroom to sleep.

Only sleep hadn’t come. He’d reread the tabloid article he’d found in the back bedroom, paying particular attention to the reporter’s assessment of Willa Walters—the woman who was sleeping on his sofa bed. He knew these kinds of newspapers twisted the facts to suit their story and sensationalized every tidbit. All the same, he couldn’t get the sordid details out of his mind. He couldn’t shrug it off and let it go.

The other thing he couldn’t let go of was the idea that the two of them weren’t alone out here. He’d definitely seen a man in the woods that afternoon. On the hike back to the station earlier that evening, he could have sworn that someone was following them. It could be a poacher, as he’d first suspected, or maybe a lost tourist. Hell, for all he knew it could be a tabloid reporter following the Walters story all the way to Alaska, though he didn’t think it very likely.

He rolled onto his stomach into a sprawl, working to get comfortable, forcing all thoughts of mystery men and lying photographers from his mind. He willed himself to sleep. A few minutes later, relaxed at last, he was almost there, hovering on the edge.

Then he heard it, the faint creak of board outside on the deck.

A second later he was up, pulling on jeans and a shirt in the dark, scrambling for his boots, taking care to be as quiet as possible. He realized his heart was beating fast, much faster than normal, but it wasn’t because he feared what was out there.

He’d run into all kinds of things in the night out here—hikers, department personnel on reconnaissance, even wildlife photographers. Most of the time it was animals: a disoriented grizzly, groggy from hibernation, ambling onto the deck, raccoons digging in his trash bin, the odd moose or mountain lion. None of them were dangerous if you respected their space.

No, the reason for his accelerated heart rate wasn’t that he feared for his own safety. He did, however, fear for the safety of the woman sleeping in his front room. More accurately, he feared she’d wake up and do something stupid that would land her in trouble.

That creaking board wasn’t a figment of his imagination.

Joe stepped lightly down the darkened hallway, peering into the bathroom and kitchen, and out the kitchen windows before slipping silently into the front room.

His house guest was asleep, the covers pulled over her head. Everything was quiet except for the nighttime sounds of crickets and a light wind breezing through the trees. Joe moved to the window and looked out.

He stood, frozen in place, for a full minute, his gaze sweeping the deck, the steps leading up to it, and the forest beyond. A sliver of moon poked through the clouds, casting an eerie light on the trees, painting every surface ghostly gray.

Light exploded from the room’s overhead fixture.

Joe whirled toward the switch.

“What’s up?” Wendy leaned sleepily against the wall flanking him, squinting against the light, her hand still on the switch.

In a lightning-fast move, he flicked it off, grabbed her around the waist and backed them away from the window.

“Hey, what the—”

“Quiet!” Setting her on her feet, he looked at her hard, his eyes readjusting to the dark, and made a sign for her to be still.

“What’s wrong?” she whispered.

He didn’t answer. Pushing her back into the shadow of the door frame, he moved to the corner of the room by the fireplace and plucked his rifle from where it stood upright next to a jumble of snowshoes and skis.

He knew it was loaded, but checked it anyway, then listened hard for a moment to the ordinary sounds of the night. Wendy stood stock-still in the door frame, listening, too, moonlight bathing her face in a soft pearl wash. Her hair shone silver and swished lightly against her neck as she turned toward him.

It suddenly struck him how beautiful she was, standing there in nothing more than the old T-shirt he’d loaned her to sleep in. His T-shirt. It looked entirely different on her than it did on him.

Of course it did, doofus.

The fire in the hearth had died, and the room was cold. Her nipples stood out against the fabric of the thin shirt. She pushed off suddenly, from bare foot to bare foot, as if the floor were icy. His gaze was drawn to her small feet, upward along lithe, toned legs to the hem of the T-shirt. For a long moment he thought about what was under that T-shirt.

“Is something out there?” She looked pointedly at the rifle in his hands.

“I don’t know.” He moved up beside her, then in front of her, and, when the moon disappeared behind a cloud, strode quickly across the room to the front door.

Wendy followed.

He turned, ready to tell her to go back, but it was too late. She was right there with him, her face lighting up in anticipation, as she waited for him to open the door. No fear. Not even a hint of it. Just wide-eyed curiosity. It genuinely surprised him. She was a New York fashion photographer for God’s sake. He knew native Alaskans, women born and bred to the life here, who would have been fearful, at least cautious, in the same situation.

But not Ms. Wendy, Willa, whatever-her-name-was Walters. Caution was not a part of her makeup. That had been apparent yesterday on the cliff face.

“Are you going out there?”

“Yeah. Stay here, and lock the door after I leave.”

She placed a warm hand on his arm as he turned the lock, and the shock of it sent an odd shiver through him. “Be careful,” she said.

The whole idea of her saying that to him made him smile. It was a slow smile that rolled over his features. He felt it inside, too. It was the damnedest thing, her telling him to be careful.

Their gazes met, and for a few seconds he allowed himself to look at her. It had been a long time since he’d slept with a woman, even longer since he’d had one in his life on a regular basis. He missed it more than he’d let on to himself. He missed it a lot, he realized, his gaze slipping to her mouth, her breasts, those tiny bare feet.