Northern Exposure

“You didn’t find it strange that the pilot was going to be waiting for you?”

Again, despite her haughtiness, there was a vulnerability about her that surprised him. “Sometimes doctors get preferential treatment. It’s not as if I expect it or demand it, but it just happens sometimes. So I really hadn’t thought too much about it. I was more concerned with the lack of information available about Good Riddance on the Internet.”

He might’ve been living the simpler life for almost a decade but he still recognized all the trappings of money and privilege. The matching designer luggage. A fine-worsted wool suit. Real gold earrings. Dr. Skye Shanahan had packed and dressed this way for her foray into the Alaskan wilderness? He reconsidered his previous opinion about preferring to take the hunting party in the terminal instead of her. Watching the good doctor get her comeuppance might prove to be fine entertainment for the next few weeks.

He bit back a smirk and offered his hand to help her aboard.

“Haven’t you heard, Doc? We’re Alaska’s best-kept secret.”

2

“YOU CAN OPEN YOUR EYES now.” Mr. Saunders’s voice came through the headset he’d given her to put on before they’d started taxiing down the runway in the tin-can he was passing off as a reputable mode of travel.

She’d worked too damn hard to get through medical school and residency to die now. If they crashed, she just hoped she had time to throttle him with her bare hands before they bit the dust.

But right now, she had a bigger problem. If she regurgitated her lunch, and it had been a distinct possibility hurtling down the runway in this rust bucket—which was why she’d squeezed her eyes shut and imagined herself in the E.R. attending a messy gunshot wound, just to ground and stabilize herself—if she threw up, she’d have to kill him from abject humiliation alone.

From his smug tone, Mr. Saunders clearly had no idea how close he was skirting death, one way or another. Still, if she went ahead and killed him she’d no longer be plagued by this attraction to him, she thought darkly. That was one way to handle it.

“Relax, Doc. I haven’t lost a passenger …yet.”

She opened her eyes and blinked at the fast-fading outlay of Anchorage and the splendor of the mountains. “Very amusing, Mr. Saunders. A competent pilot and a comic.”

“I throw the comedy in for free.” He pointed to the snow-capped slope. “That’s Mt. Hood.”

She resented him anew. It was just wrong that while barely holding on to her lunch, she was hit with an incredible awareness of Dalton Saunders. It was as if he filled all the space around her with this broad shoulders, his scent, and simply his presence. She didn’t like it or her reaction to him worth a damn.

He was just the type of man who’d get her into all types of trouble. She’d come to Good Riddance to do a job, to get her mother off her case, to try to live up to those impossibly high Shanahan expectations that had been shoved down her throat since birth. What wasn’t on the agenda was getting into trouble. So the best thing to do was ignore the man in the seat next to her.

“Very nice. I rented a National Geographic video. We’re too far west to fly past the Wrangell St. Elias Mountain Range, right?”

He shot her a quick glance and she read a mixture of admiration and surprise in his look. “Right.”

“I did as much homework as I could, Mr. Saunders. However, I have next to nothing in the way of information on Good Riddance. Can you fill me in?”

“It was founded by Merrilee Danville Weatherspoon twenty-plus years ago. In that time, the population has exploded to about seven hundred and fifty, give or take a few.”

Oh God, it was even worse than she’d imagined. There were more than seven hundred and fifty employees in the medical high-rise that housed her office back home. “I’m afraid to ask, but what kind of amenities are we talking about?”

“Pretty much everything. That’s the way it is out here. If we don’t have it, then you don’t need it. You cut through a lot of crap and clutter that way.”

She really disliked people who presumed to know how everyone should live. “One man’s clutter may well be another man’s necessity.” She ran through a quick mental checklist of everything she’d packed. Thank goodness she’d brought it all with her.

He shrugged those impossibly broad shoulders which seemed equally impossibly close in the confines of the winged go-cart he was guiding through the sky. “We have a bar/restaurant right next to Merrilee’s place. It makes it easier when the snow’s on the ground outside.”

“That’s it? Two buildings together?” What had she gotten herself into?

“Of course not.” His grin held an edge of teasing but also an edge of satisfaction at her dismayed reaction. “There’s a hunting and fishing outfitter. And a Laundromat. It’s right next to the taxidermy/barber shop/beauty salon/mortuary.”

Instinctively, she touched her hair. She suspected the taxidermist barber didn’t charge an arm and a leg, no pun intended, the way some of Atlanta’s finest salons did. “The barber shop and beauty salon are part of the taxidermy? And all this is shared with the mortuary?”

“Yeah. You can wind up waiting a week or more for a hair cut during high hunting season.”

“Oh. Dear. God.” She narrowed her eyes at his profile. There was no mistaking the amused tilt of his well-shaped mouth. Relief flooded her. He was teasing. “Okay. Fine. I get it. A little joke at the expense of the relief doctor.”

Another shrug and he nodded to his left. “That’s the Sitnusak River. Some of the finest salmon and halibut fishing in the world. Have you ever had fresh halibut, Doc?”

“Not fresh, but of course, I’ve had halibut.”

“You’re here just on the tail end of the season, but you’ll have to try it at Gus’s.”

She didn’t expect much from anything, fresh or otherwise, prepared at a place in the middle of nowhere by a man named Gus. Nonetheless she aimed for what she hoped wasn’t a thoroughly pained smile. “I’m looking forward to it.”

“You’ve got to work on the sincerity, Doc.”

She ignored his comment. “So, Mr. Saunders, how long have you lived in Good Riddance?”

“I’m working on nine years, Doc. It was the best move I ever made.”

She was seriously flummoxed. Of all the places in the world, why would someone choose to move to the middle of nowhere? It was like taking a giant step backward. “But how’d you wind up in Good Riddance?”

“I liked the town philosophy so I stayed.”

Technically, he hadn’t answered her question, but she wasn’t going to push it.

“And that philosophy is …?”

“Good Riddance is where you leave behind whatever troubles you.”

She spoke without thinking. “It sounds like a cult.”

His laughter in the headset startled her, nearly sending her jumping out of her skin. “No cult here. Just the offer of a fresh start.”

Fresh start. That had an ominous ring. Who went somewhere so remote for a fresh start except for people who didn’t want to be found? Or those wanting to adopt a hermit lifestyle. But Mr. Saunders didn’t strike her as hermit-like. While her parents were both insanely practical, pragmatic individuals, Skye had inherited her grandmother Shanahan’s active imagination and it was now in overdrive.

“Fresh start?” she echoed.

“Yeah, you know sometimes you just want to put the past and the mistakes you made behind you. Haven’t you ever felt the urge to reinvent yourself, Dr. Shanahan? To go to a place where no one knows you, a place where you can become whomever and whatever you want to be, without any expectations?”

For a few illicit seconds she indulged in the notion of simply being. She’d always been Skye Shanahan, daughter of the brilliant and esteemed Drs. Edward and Margaret Shanahan and sister of the equally brilliant Patrick Shanahan. Expectation had been her intimate acquaintance since birth. She felt as if Dalton Saunders had peered into her very soul, had connected with her in a way no one had before. And that simply wouldn’t do. She did not want to connect with him, didn’t want to feel this emotional intimacy. She rejected the notion they could share similar experiences and came up with her own interpretation of his past, one far, far removed from hers.

“Were you in prison?”

He paused for a moment as if deciding just how much to answer and she wasn’t sure she’d get an answer at all. She’d read that Alaska appealed to a whole different kind of person. And there was something of an outlaw element, at least that was her impression from articles she’d read on-line. She found herself holding her breath for his response.

“Yep. I definitely served my time and Good Riddance was exactly what I needed when I got out.” He shook his head, as if trying to forget. “If we were flying farther north, you’d see an ancient caribou migration route. That’s what you see in Alaska.”

“Interesting.” She was more interested, however, in what he’d done time for but the obvious subject change told her he’d said all he was going to. A shiver ran down her spine. Still, she reassured herself his crime couldn’t have been too bad. He was fairly young, she’d estimate early to mid-thirties based on the crinkle lines at the corners of his eyes. If he’d done something truly heinous, he’d still be sitting in the slammer. Wouldn’t he?

The plane suddenly lurched and she thought her stomach contents might find their way into her lap. “Are we going down?” she yelled, clutching the strap to her right. “I need a parachute.”

“Easy, Doc. We’re fine. That was just a little patch of turbulence. I’m sure you’ve hit stuff like this flying in the big boys before but it feels a whole lot more personal in a smaller plane.”

His smug amusement scraped along her nerve endings. She was far from proud of the way she’d behaved, yelling in panic, but her training didn’t encompass crashing in a Cracker Jack toy plane in the middle of Remoteville, her only companion a man who’d done hard time. And that was only if they didn’t die.

“How much longer until we’re there?” It felt as if they’d been flying forever.

“Maybe a quarter of an hour.”

“Oh.”

“There’s a problem?”

“Well, I don’t see anything around yet.”

“Nope.”

Her head was beginning to throb. Maybe it was an altitude thing. She scrambled in her bag, found the travel ibuprofen and swallowed two without benefit of a drink.

“Headache?” he asked.

She glanced across the space separating them. He boasted an attractive profile—rugged jaw and a nice nose with a faint hump in the middle that led her to believe it’d been broken at some point in time. The errant thought danced through her head that he’d produce lovely children. Dear God, where had that thought come from? His potential offspring had absolutely nothing to do with her. “Yes,” she said, confirming her headache, then deliberately looking away from his too-handsome profile.

Outside her window, wilderness sprawled before her. Some people might find this enthralling, exciting, but she preferred her back-to-nature experiences to be those of sitting in her cozy den watching National Geographic specials. This was not her cup of tea—Starbucks, venti, black, sweet Tazo with light ice—that was her cup of tea.

The plane suddenly banked sharply to her right. Saunders’s voice was in her ear. “Look to your right and you’ll see something very few people are privileged to see in person. That’s a grizzly salmon fishing.”

Unfortunately, her stomach banked right along with the plane. She could clamp a spewing artery. She could reattach a missing digit. She could clean a gangrenous wound, but this, she couldn’t handle this. She caught a glimpse of a huge, brown thing but all she could think was, quite inanely, that if Saunders looked to his right, he was about to see something very few people were privileged to see in person, as well.

Without further ado, Dr. Skye Shanahan promptly tossed her cookies. Or to be pathologically correct, her lunch of tuna on whole wheat.

HE’D SEEN WORSE. Much worse. He’d seen grown, macho men lose it in a small plane. He’d seen Elmer Driscoll get knee-crawling drunk and lose it behind Gus’s place last week. But he’d never seen anyone more frustrated with having lost it.

“You okay?” he asked as she stepped out of the copse of trees wearing a pair of black slacks and a coppery brown sweater that seemed to pick up the highlights in her red hair, her toothbrush and mouthwash clutched in one hand, her soiled suit and sweater in the other.

He’d radioed in an emergency landing and promptly set the plane down. There was no way in hell he was showing up at Good Riddance with a puke-covered passenger. His reputation as a pilot would suffer, and her reputation as a physician who should be made of stronger stuff, would suffer even worse. And she’d never forgive him for the humiliation, which was neither here nor there, except who knew if he might turn up sick or injured in the ensuing weeks and her Hippocratic oath might take a back seat to the memory of arriving in town covered in barf.

While she’d changed clothes and cleaned up behind the cover of fir trees and a small stream adjacent to the meadow he’d landed in, he’d taken care of the plane.

“Do you think you could manage not to roll the plane anymore? Have you ever heard of a straight and level course, Saunders?”

He silently thanked the powers that be for her haughtiness. It simply reinforced for him that, no matter how damn attractive he found her, she wasn’t the woman for him. “You could’ve told me you were feeling sick. Better yet, have you ever heard of Dramamine, Shanahan?”

“I wasn’t aware I had a problem with motion sickness …until now.”

A piece of the fir tree sticking out of her hair offset her haughty embarrassment. By rights, he should’ve let her greet the inhabitants of Good Riddance sprouting an evergreen. However, he simply couldn’t. He reached over to pluck it from her hair. “Hold on a moment.”

It turned out the piece of tree wasn’t caught up in her hair but in the clip. Her hair tumbled down in a red cascade, settling below her shoulders. She gasped and he simply stood there, transfixed, at a loss for words.

All thoughts of haughtiness and wrong choices flew out of his head. She was, quite simply, stunning, standing in a meadow ringed by trees, with the glinting sun picking out radiant strands of gold in her red hair, her eyes taking on the hue and depth of magnificent glacier ice that had spent millenniums forming.

For one millisecond or it could’ve been a lifetime, Dalton was lost. Lost in those eyes and that hair and …well, lost in her. For one crazy moment in time he wanted to bridge the short physical distance separating them. He wanted to kiss her gorgeous mouth, bury his hands in the living fire of her hair, peel away the layers of her clothes and connect all her freckles with a trail of kisses. Then he wanted to make slow, sweet love to this prickly pear of a woman who, although she was standing less than a foot from him, was nonetheless worlds apart from him. He wanted to lay her down in the grass of an untainted meadow, with only the sun and sky and the occasional soaring bird of prey as witness to their union.

In short, he wanted Dr. Skye Shanahan like he’d never wanted anything.

Her eyes widened and for a moment he thought he saw an answering need. And then she slammed the proverbial door.

“What are you doing, Saunders?”

He realized he was holding on to the twig, which still had her clip attached. He held it up the way hunters displayed trophy kills. “This was in your hair. I didn’t think you wanted to show up with an evergreen branch sticking out of your head.”

“No, I didn’t. But it would’ve been nice if you hadn’t destroyed my hairdo in the meantime.”

Yet again, he wanted to kiss her, but this time for yanking him back to reality with her shrewish tongue. “Do you hear that, Shanahan?”

She narrowed her eyes and cocked her head to one side, a flash of panic shadowing her features. “What? I don’t hear anything. Is it a bear?”

“No. I thought I heard a faint and distant thank-you, one without any recriminations behind it. I guess it was just wishful thinking on my part.”

“Have you considered that had you not been hot-dogging, I wouldn’t have gotten sick? And if I hadn’t gotten sick, I wouldn’t have needed to hike into the wilderness and clean up in an ice-cold river? And I wouldn’t have had to worry about getting branches in my hair?”

This was rich. “So, the fact that a doctor can’t diagnose and properly treat her own motion sickness or at least acknowledge it and give her pilot a heads up is my fault?”

“You could use some sensitivity training, Saunders. And I’ve never, ever had an issue with motion sickness before.”

So far, in the course of less than an hour, she’d managed to paint him a felon, an incompetent pilot and insult the hell out of his plane. He’d had enough. “Any chance you’re knocked up, Doc? Wait. No man could get past that barbed tongue of yours to get the job done.” He foolishly, dangerously thought that under different circumstances he’d be at the front of the line to give it a try. But then again, Dalton had never been able to resist a challenge.

A blush definitely stained her face. “Saunders, do you think you could pretend to be a professional and get me to Good Riddance without further mishap?”

“Doc, it’s my raison d’être. By the way, I learned that phrase in prison.” She’d been so quick to decide he must have a checkered past. He wasn’t too damned sure Dr. Stick Up Her Ass would understand the concept of a metaphorical prison, so he’d let her roll with what she wanted to think. He’d been imprisoned in the corporate culture, the rat race, but he didn’t think she’d get that. Although he’d bet Belinda, his trusty plane, that Shanahan was doing the same time he’d been doing.

She strode toward the plane, her back ramrod straight. But her hair and eyes had told him a different story. She had passion.

“Just get me there, Saunders. I thought I’d never hear myself say it, but I’m ready to be in Good Riddance.”

3

“YOU MUST BE THE NEW relief doc,” said a sixtyish woman with blond hair who stepped forward to greet Skye. Every eye in the room had trained on Skye the moment she’d walked through the door of Good Riddance Air Field/Restaurant/Bed and Breakfast. “I’m Merrilee Danville Weatherspoon, founder and mayor.”

Ms. Weatherspoon had a melodic, distinctly Southern voice which somehow fit with the fact that the woman’s flannel shirt had lace trim around the collar and down the front and lace-trimmed flannel curtains hung at the windows of the log building. Skye liked her immediately.

“Dr. Skye Shanahan. Nice to meet you.”

“On behalf of the town, I’d like to welcome you to Good Riddance, Alaska, where you get to leave behind whatever troubles you.”

Two older men sporting caps and beards sat in rocking chairs across the room next to a pot-bellied stove, a chess table between them. On the multicolored, braided rug at their feet, a couple of thickly furred huskies lay curled in tight balls. Both dogs looked at her and then closed their eyes again. In one corner, a TV played a soap opera that no one was watching.

A very attractive man, obviously of native heritage given his skin-tone, short dark hair and flat-broad cheekbones, sat propped on the edge of the desk that held neat stacks of paperwork and two-way radio equipment, a schedule clasped in his hands. He stepped forward and offered a brief handshake. “Clint Sisnuket. Pleased to meet you.”

She returned the greeting. Disconcertingly, his touch didn’t send a little shiver down her spine the way Saunders’s had …did …whatever.

Everyone offered up a hello. But it was the where you get to leave behind whatever troubles you that stuck with Skye. That was rich in irony as what troubled Skye specifically was being in Good Riddance in the first place. However, even she possessed enough common sense and social skills, although she’d sometimes been accused of lacking both, not to say so. “I’m pleased to be here.”

See, she could tell a white lie as well as the next person. And it wasn’t too much of a stretch to admit that she was glad to be back on terra firma—and doubly glad to be out of Dalton Saunders’s company.

Speaking of the devil …Saunders strolled in at that moment. “Afternoon, Merrilee. Where do you want the Doc’s bags? She’s got one or two.”

He could save his sarcasm for someone else. She wasn’t amused. Well, perhaps she might be amused if he was someone else. But he got her back up.

“Just put them in the back of your pickup, Dalton. We’ve had a little complication, resulting in a change of plan.”

“Complication?” Saunders said.

“Change of plan?” Skye had a bad feeling.

“The roof caved in on the guest rooms upstairs.” Merrilee shook her head. “It’s just as well Scat Murphy left town when he did or I’d have kicked him out anyway for substandard work.” One could only surmise that Scat—and why would anyone trust someone whose name, given or otherwise, was equated with excrement—had done some roofing or sheetrocking. “Bull—” another name right up there with Scat, she thought “—is doing a patch job now but it’s going to take nearly a week to get it done right.” The mayor patted Skye on the shoulder. “Don’t you worry, though. We’re going to put you up in Irene Marbut’s cabin out at Shadow Lake.”

At least she had a nice normal name. “Ms. Marbut won’t mind a stranger barging in?”

“Well, dear, Irene died a few months ago so I think she’ll be fine with it. Gus went out a few hours ago with Luellen Sisnuket, Clint’s cousin,” she said, nodding to the dark-haired man at the desk’s edge, “and got the place ready for you. Well, as ready as they could in such a short time. It was the darnedest thing. I was about to go upstairs this morning to put fresh linens on your bed.” She leaned forward in a confiding manner. “Bull says it’s procrastination but I always wait until the morning of a new arrival to change the sheets so they’re as fresh as possible.” She straightened. “Anyhow, I was on my way upstairs when I heard a huge bang. If I’d been two minutes earlier, I’d have been in a world of hurt.”

“Then I’m glad you waited.” She didn’t know what else to say. Now she was staying in a dead woman’s cabin “out on” a lake. Skye didn’t miss that nuance. Good Riddance was already off the beaten path in every sense of the word. She couldn’t imagine what would qualify as “out” for these people. And though she was familiar with the dead, she didn’t, as a matter of course, sleep in their beds. It was a little creepy.

Merrilee offered another shoulder pat. “Yes, ma’am. All’s well that ends well. We’ve got you fixed right up, honey. Dalton here can give you a ride in to work every morning and drop you off in the evenings, seeing as how you’re going to be his neighbor. He took good care of Ms. Irene until she passed and he’ll take good care of you while you’re here. Isn’t that right, Dalton?”

“Dalton?” she echoed, her voice sounding weak even to her own ears. “Neighbor?” This situation was going from bad to worse. “What about other people in the area?” she asked, a sick feeling, dread rather than nausea, gathering in the pit of her empty stomach.

“There’s nobody else, dear. You’ll have all the privacy you want. Out at Shadow Lake, you can get away from the hustle and bustle of Good Riddance.”

How much hustle and bustle could there be in a town that didn’t appear to even have a traffic light? She stifled rising hysteria. It was bad enough to be sent to this God-forsaken town, but now she was about to be stuck in a dead woman’s cabin on the edge of some lake, solely dependent on an ex-convict. Somebody just take a gun and shoot her. Wait, in this area, someone might be all too willing. “It sounds lovely,” she said, her voice faint.