Northern Exposure

He told himself he wasn’t attracted to her, just her body, her looks. She was a woman, and he was a man in need of a good—

She removed her hand from his arm.

The sordid facts of the incident involving her in New York, described in raunchy detail in the tabloid article, crash landed in his mind. It was all too close to home, and made him remember things he’d tried for the past year to forget.

“Go back to bed,” he said stiffly. Redoubling his grip on the rifle, he eased the front door open and stepped into the night.

Wendy came awake with a start, sitting bolt upright on the sofa bed’s lumpy foam mattress. Bad dream, she realized, and forced herself to draw a calming breath. Nightmare, really—the same one she had over and over about her and Blake and what had happened that night in a Manhattan loft.

Swiveling out of bed, she banished the memory from her mind and wondered if Joe was still outside. The luminous dial of her watch read 3:00 a.m., about an hour from the time he’d left the cabin. She’d waited up for him awhile, curled on the sofa bed, but had fallen asleep. Walking to the window, she looked out. It would be dawn soon. The cloud cover had dissipated, revealing a cobalt blanket of sky peppered with stars.

When she turned toward the hall, pausing in the doorway, she glanced at the stack of skis and snowshoes in the corner of the room by the fireplace and noticed Joe’s rifle wasn’t there. Maybe he was still outside. Maybe he’d found something.

Yesterday, from the moment she’d discovered the caribou and had started tracking it, she could have sworn she wasn’t alone. Someone, not Joe, had been out there with her. She knew it wasn’t Joe because he’d shown her on the map yesterday afternoon the route he’d taken from the station. He’d only intercepted her by chance. She’d covered territory he hadn’t even been in that day, and she’d had company.

The thought of it gave her the creeps.

Shaking it off, she padded down the hallway toward the bathroom and noticed that the door to the bedroom was open. On impulse she moved toward it.

Joe Peterson was a strange animal. He reminded her a little of the rogue bull whose photo she’d been so desperate to shoot yesterday on the rock. He lived out here alone, miles from anywhere and anyone, in a world where he was master. At least, he thought he was. That made everyone else a mere minion, a position with which Wendy was overly familiar and was determined never to assume again.

She’d spent years working with all kinds of people. Except for her bad judgment where Blake was concerned, she considered herself a pretty good judge of character. Something told her there was a good reason for Joe Peterson’s less than friendly behavior toward her. By the end of the evening his cool indifference had turned to outright irritation, and it bothered her that she couldn’t fathom a reason.

Intuition told her he was a man in pain. That alone should have set off a loud warning bell in her thick head. Men in pain were a problem for her. The problem was she couldn’t not help them. Her natural instinct was to nurture, be a helpmate. That’s what had gotten her into trouble with Blake. Over the years being a helpmate had turned into being a doormat.

Never again.

At the door of Joe’s bedroom she stopped, remembering the fleeting moment before he’d gone outside, rifle in hand, recalling the way he’d looked at her mouth, her body, and had made her heartbeat quicken. There was no doubt she was attracted to him, and he to her. She hadn’t bothered fighting it because in the morning someone would take her back to her car and she’d never see him again.

The thought of that wasn’t as soothing as it should have been.

The bed in Joe’s room was empty, pillows askew, sheets twisted into a pile on the floor. Moonlight flooded the airy space. The room smelled like him, cool and green and unstable. Those were the impressions that had taken hold of her when she’d touched his arm, when she’d stood so close to him she’d felt his breath on her face.

With a start she realized the rifle he’d taken outside with him was propped against the wall by the bed. Without thinking, she took a step into the room, then swallowed a gasp.

Joe sat in a big Adirondack chair by a row of old-fashioned windows overlooking the deck. Clad only in jeans, his chest was bare, the muscles in his arms tight. There were no drapes on the windows. His face, reflecting some terrible pain, was bathed in the bright light of an August moon.

Her gaze followed his to the framed photo he’d moved to the antique nightstand. Wendy hadn’t even noticed it was missing from the mantel.

All at once she knew.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?”

Slowly, as if he’d known all along she was standing there, Joe turned to look at her. “Yes.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Why?”

She felt awkward all of a sudden, her tongue thick in her mouth. “I…”

“Go back to sleep, Ms. Walters.”

“I wish you’d call me Wendy.”

He rose from the chair and placed the photo facedown into a drawer. “How about Willa?”

Chapter 3

It was hard to pretend she hadn’t gotten under his skin, but he forced himself.

Joe poured Willa Walters a cup of black coffee, and while she sat at the kitchen table and drank it, he fixed them a quick breakfast.

“It’s not my real name,” she said after the silence between them stretched to a breaking point.

“Wendy?”

“No, Willa.” She shot him an irritated look. “It was made up for me.”

“By who?”

She shrugged. “A man I used to know.”

“One of the guys in that picture?”

The shock that registered on her face turned instantly to annoyance. “I didn’t know game wardens read those kinds of newspapers.”

He flashed her a look, but didn’t respond. He divided a panful of scrambled eggs between two plates, topped them with buttered toast and handed her one.

He expected her to refuse it, but she didn’t. Silently she accepted the food and began to eat. That was another thing that surprised him about her—she had one hell of an appetite for someone so petite.

“That picture isn’t what you think.” She glanced up at him as he joined her at the table. “We weren’t…you know.”

“Buck naked?”

She speared him with a nasty smirk. “The male models were wearing Speedos. I was in a strapless tank suit. The tabloid cropped the photo to make the situation seem like something it wasn’t. The whole thing was completely innocent. I was on a shoot—at a public beach, for God’s sake. Besides, that photo had nothing to do with the incident.”

He let that bit of information sink in while he watched her viciously jab a forkful of scrambled egg.

This morning she had dressed in her own clothes again, and had left Cat’s sweatshirt and jeans in a neatly folded pile on the made-up sofa bed. Her feet were bare, except for the squares of moleskin she’d applied to her blisters. She sat sideways on her chair, her legs crossed, affording him a good view of her slender ankles. Her toenails were polished, too, he noticed.

“New boots?” He nodded at her bandaged feet.

“New everything. My luggage was stolen at the airport, so I had to buy all new stuff.”

“Fairbanks or Anchorage?” That kind of thing didn’t happen too often in Alaska.

“Anchorage, when I first arrived. A guy nabbed my suitcase off the conveyor and took off with it. Thank God I had my camera bag on me. I’d never be able to afford to replace my Nikon.”

He watched her as she finished her toast. A dab of butter clung to the edge of her lip, and he caught himself wondering what it would feel like, what she would taste like, if he flicked it away with his tongue.

His attraction to her disgusted him.

He adjusted his position on the hard kitchen chair and croaked, “Tough break,” not really meaning it. Someone like her deserved what she got.

“Yeah, well…” She waved her fork in the air in a dismissive gesture. “That’s the least of my worries at this point.”

“I’ll bet.”

She shot him a cool look and continued eating.

With his back to her, as he rinsed out the coffee carafe and ground beans for another pot, he asked her about some of the things he’d read about her in the tabloid article. She immediately changed the subject.

“The only other road into the reserve is this one.” She whipped the folded map—the one she’d tried to get him to look at last night—out of her pants pocket and spread it on the table. “If I leave my car here—” she pointed to a remote spot on a little-used Jeep trail “—and walk in from the east…”

“You’re likely to get yourself killed.”

She glared up at him.

“Besides, the caribou won’t be there. They’ll be here.” He leaned over the table and jabbed a finger at another spot, more than forty miles from where she was planning on leaving her car.

“Oh.” Her expression darkened as she considered exactly what a forty-mile hike in a remote Alaskan wilderness area meant.

He felt the beginnings of a smile edge his lips. It vanished as she cleared her throat, sat up tall in her chair—those ridiculously perky breasts of hers jutting forward—and in a bright voice said, “Fine.”

He snorted. “You’re a piece of work.”

And that was the straw that finally broke the camel’s back. Her blue eyes glittered with anger. She pressed her lips tightly together and waited, as if counting to ten, then she let him have it.

“What is it with you? You’ve been rude to me from the moment we met. You read a bunch of twisted half-truths in some supermarket tabloid and you think you know everything about me. Which you don’t,” she emphasized.

“Even if all of it were true—which it isn’t—what do you care? What business is it of yours? That badge—” she flashed her eyes at the Department of Fish and Game emblem on his shirt “—doesn’t give you license to be a jerk.”

He enjoyed watching her while she ranted at him. Her cheeks blazed with color, her eyes turned the warmest shade of blue he’d ever seen. Abruptly she stood and came around the table at him. He didn’t know whether he wanted to toss her out the door onto her very shapely ass or back her up against the refrigerator and lay one on her.

A snappy retort died on his lips as the sound of an approaching vehicle interrupted their conversation.

“What’s that?” she said, turning toward the window.

“Your ride outta here.”

“About time.”

She followed him into the front room as the sounds of a car door slamming and footfalls scrunching across gravel drew their attention to the front door.

It opened, and Barb Maguire, dressed in a neatly pressed department-issue uniform, breezed into the room. “Hi-ya, Joe!” She saw Wendy and did a double take. “Oh.” Her gaze washed over first Wendy, then him. When she recovered from her obvious shock, a smile bloomed on her face. “Hi, I’m Barb, Joe’s delivery girl, so to speak.”

She handed him a stack of mail and what looked like a month’s worth of department paperwork. “Thanks,” he said.

The two women shook hands. Wendy introduced herself and made some polite small talk as Barb assessed the situation: Cat’s clothes on the sofa bed next to the pile of neatly folded blankets and bed sheets, two empty tea cups on the coffee table and a heap of dead ashes in the hearth.

She flashed him a conspiratorial look, grinning like the cat who ate the canary, when Wendy turned to grab her knapsack off a chair. He put on his best it’s-not-what-you-think expression, but it didn’t deter her.

Barb Maguire, a DF&G technician who was married to the department’s local wildlife biologist, had been trying to play matchmaker for him for the past year. Her goal was to get him into town so she could fix him up with one of her girlfriends. Joe wasn’t interested, but Barb was relentless.

“So, you’re a wildlife photographer. That’s…well, perfect!” She winked at Joe.

“Uh, yeah. I’m here to photograph woodland caribou.”

“Whoa. Tough assignment.” Barb nodded in admiration.

Joe had had enough. “I told her she’d be a damned fool to go looking for them on her own.”

“Do you think everyone is a helpless idiot, or is it just me?”

He started to answer, but Barb cut him off. “No, he thinks that about pretty much everybody.” She grinned. “Don’t let it put you off.”

“I don’t intend to.” With a dismissive swing of her hair, Wendy did an about-face and retrieved her socks and boots from where they’d dried overnight by the hearth. She struggled to get them on comfortably over the moleskin.

Joe resisted an overpowering urge to help her.

“Why not hire a guide?” Barb said.

“Can’t afford it.” Wendy laced the stiff boots, grimacing. “I’m covering my expenses myself. Besides, I don’t want a guide.”

“Why don’t you take her?” Barb arched a thick, dark brow at him. “You know every inch of the reserve and exactly where those caribou are likely to hole up.”

“No!” he and Wendy said in unison.

“Whoa. Sorry. I thought you two were…uh, friends.”

“We’re not,” Joe said.

“My mistake.”

Wendy’s cheeks flushed scarlet. “I’ll, um, be right back.” She headed down the hall toward the bathroom, and when they heard the door close, Barb was all over him.

“Who is she? She’s great! Where did you meet her? What happened with the two of you last—”

“I want you to take her back to her rental car out on the west road, then follow her to the highway. I want her out of here. Got it?”

Barb’s brown eyes widened. “Got it.”

“And don’t ask,” he said, as she opened her mouth to fire more questions at him.

A moment later Wendy’s footsteps cut short their conversation. “Okay, I’m ready.” She turned to him and stiffly offered her hand. Feeling awkward, he shook it. “Thank you for your…hospitality.” Her tone pushed the sarcastic-meter off the scale.

At the door their gazes met and, for the briefest moment, in her eyes he read the same unguarded fusion of emotions he’d seen in them last night when she was standing in his bedroom: compassion, longing, regret.

He was familiar with the last one. God, was he ever.

Barb called to him over the roof of her department pickup before she climbed inside. “Almost forgot. Your truck’s out of the shop. Couple of guys from the garage are bringing it up later this morning.”

“Thanks,” he said, then stood in the open doorway and watched as Barb turned her pickup around and drove Wendy Walters out of his life.

Good riddance.

But fifteen minutes later, he couldn’t stop himself from making the call.

“Wilderness Unlimited,” the operator uttered in an East Coast accent.

When Joe reached the senior editor, Wendy’s story was confirmed.

She was out here to shoot the caribou, only it wasn’t the magazine’s idea. It was Wendy’s. A photo essay slated for next month’s edition had fallen through, and Wendy had cut a deal with the editorial director to hire her as a staff photographer if she could deliver the caribou photos before the issue went to press. No small feat.

“No one’s ever photographed them up close,” Joe said into the receiver.

“That’s exactly why our little Wendy picked that particular project. She knew the magazine’s director would be champing at the bit for a coup like that. He couldn’t resist.”

“She must want that job pretty bad.”

“She’s desperate,” the woman said. “Can’t say I blame her. After what happened in that loft with that model—geez, he was only twenty-nine, Wendy’s age. So sad. They say it was an overdose of ecstasy or crack, I don’t remember which. Anyway—”

“I get the picture,” Joe said, not wanting to rehash the details he’d read in the tabloid.

“She’s trying to start over, make a new life for herself. Getting away from Blake Barrett is the smartest thing she’s ever done. She should have done it years ago. That snake didn’t even have the decency to speak to the police on her behalf.”

Blake Barrett. Joe wondered who he was. Ex-husband, maybe? Lover? Her boss?

“You take care of our girl, now. I worry about her out there on her own.”

Joe didn’t bother telling her that the photographer formerly known as Willa Walters was on her way back to the highway as they spoke. Next month’s issue would have to run without those caribou photos, and the petite blond who’d initiated a wild night of kinky sex and drugs resulting in the death of a male fashion model would have to find herself another assignment.

Preferably as far away from him as possible.

“You don’t say?” Barb slowed the green Department of Fish and Game pickup into the turnoff from the highway onto the spur road where Wendy had left her rental car.

“Yeah. The issue goes to press in three weeks. I’ve got to get those photos.”

She rummaged around in her knapsack, searching for her sunglasses. She pulled them out, along with an envelope crafted of high-quality stationery on which she’d scribbled some phone numbers. She’d been carrying the envelope around in her camera bag for the past ten days, ever since it had shown up in her parents’ mailbox.

The letter inside had been from Blake. When Wendy realized it, she’d kept the envelope with the phone numbers, and tossed the letter, unread, into her parents’ recycling bin—which was exactly where it belonged.

“Joe’s not gonna like it,” Barb said, jolting her back to the present. “You going in there on your own.”

Wendy stuffed the envelope back in her bag, and made a huffy sound. “It’s none of his business.”

“Don’t try telling him that. Joe Peterson thinks everything that goes on within a hundred miles of him is his business, and he wants it run his way.”

“Tell me about it.” Wendy smiled at her, and they both laughed.

Barb Maguire, a sturdily built woman in her early thirties with springy black ringlets framing a cherub-like face, was a breath of fresh air after spending the past fifteen hours with Warden Bug-up-His-Butt. Although, Wendy had to admit, it was a pretty nice butt.

“Seriously, if you’re planning on hiking into the east side of the reserve, you’d best be prepared for bears and bad weather.”

“I’m no amateur, despite appearances.” And despite the fact that it had been years since she’d done any camping or hiking. But she didn’t mention that fact to Barb. “I’ve got a carload of backpacking gear I know how to use and some emergency flares in case I get into trouble.”

Barb glanced speculatively at her half-empty knapsack.

“This is just my camera bag. I had no idea I was going to be out for more than a quick stretch of the legs yesterday. I spotted that caribou, and when he took off, I had to follow. There wasn’t time to go back to the car to get my gear.”

“Yeah,” Barb said, “those rogue bulls are just like men, aren’t they? Let ’em out of your sight for a minute and they’re history.”

Wendy laughed. “Speaking of history…and rogue bulls…” She looked pointedly at Barb.

“Ahh, so I was right about you two. Good. It’s about time he started living again.”

Wendy shook her head. “No, you were wrong, but I’m still curious. What’s his story?”

“Joe?” Barb sucked in a breath and readjusted her hands on the steering wheel. Shaking her head, she said, “He just can’t seem to get over it. Cat’s death, I mean.”

So that was her name. Cat Peterson. It fit her. “She was a beautiful woman.”

“You saw the picture.”

Wendy nodded.

“She was just a kid, really. Twenty-two. Nine years younger than Joe when she died.”

Wendy wanted to know more, but didn’t want to seem as interested as she obviously was. The question was why was she so interested? Men like Joe Peterson were bad news. The last thing she needed was another warden in her life. Blake had given an award-winning performance in that role for the past seven years.

“Joe lived for Cat,” Barb said. “When she died, he just retreated. Took that job up in the reserve, closed himself off from everyone and everything.”

“I didn’t know the Department of Fish and Game made remote assignments like that.” Before she’d left New York, she’d done some checking on the game reserve’s management.

“They don’t. But when that herd of woodland caribou were discovered out here last year, Fish and Wildlife Protection wanted somebody in the reserve for at least a season. Couldn’t get any takers.”

“So Joe volunteered.”

“You got it. First time the two agencies ever collaborated like this. Fish and Wildlife is technically part of the Alaska State Troopers.”

Wendy remembered Joe’s handgun. “Well, he certainly seems to be into the role, if you know what I mean. He really is a control freak, isn’t he?”

“Big-time. Which is probably the reason he blames himself for Cat’s death. Though I don’t know what he could have done to have stopped it. Cat was a grown woman. He couldn’t keep her under lock and key, now, could he? No matter how much he wanted to protect her.”

Joe was the protective type. Wendy knew that for a fact from yesterday’s little adventure. She could have made it back to her car last night before dark. She would have been dog tired, but she could have done it. All the same, no way a guy like Joe Peterson would have let her hike all that way on her own.

“How did Cat die?” she asked.

“Drug overdose. In New York last year. She was a fashion model, just starting out. Got mixed up with the wrong crowd, I guess.”

“Oh, God.” Wendy felt as if someone had punched her.

In her mind she sifted through the faces of the young female models she’d met at parties and industry events. Her own work with Blake had been mostly for men’s magazines like Esquire and GQ. She generally didn’t work with women. She knew she’d never met Cat, but wondered if Blake had.

“I, uh, recognize you from your pictures,” Barb said.

Wendy’s stomach continued to roll. Even out here in the middle of nowhere, she couldn’t get away from her past.

Barb shot a glance at the supermarket tabloid sticking out from under a fast-food bag on the dash of the pickup. “They’re still following the story.”

No wonder Joe Peterson had looked at her as if she were the lowest form of life on earth. Sometimes that’s exactly what she felt like. She wasn’t proud of some of the things she’d allowed herself to be sucked into, but that was over now.

And no wonder he was so angry—at her and himself. Wendy knew Joe was physically attracted to her, and had been from the moment he’d pulled her up onto the rock and saved her life. Once he’d realized who she was—sometime after supper and before bed, she guessed—that attraction would have been hard to reconcile, especially for a man like Joe. Given the way Cat had died, and given what he’d read about Wendy in the papers…

“Pull over,” Wendy said, reaching for the door handle. She thought she might be sick.

“Just about to. That’s your rental, isn’t it? A blue Explorer?”

She nodded, working to keep her breakfast down.

Stepping out of the truck, Wendy took a few deep breaths and felt better. Fishing the SUV’s keys out of her pocket, she frowned at the driver’s side door. It was unlocked. She was sure she’d locked it.

“Everything okay?” Barb called from her pickup.

“Um, yeah. Fine.” But it wasn’t fine. She was sure she’d locked it. “Barb, about those tabloids…”

“Oh, heck, don’t worry about it. No way I believe all the stuff they wrote about you.”

She tossed her knapsack in the Explorer, then smiled. “Thanks.”

“All set, then?”

One last question burned inside her. She had to ask it.

“How long were they married? Joe and Cat,” she added, when Barb’s thick brows wrinkled in confusion.

“Cat wasn’t Joe’s wife,” Barb said. “She was his kid sister.”

Joe snatched the phone on the fourth ring. “Peterson.” He’d been outside fixing a broken water pipe that ran from the spring up the hill into the cabin.