Untouched

A tide of hot color swept across Jenessa’s cheeks. For several seconds she was literally speechless. Then she whispered, ‘Beautiful? Me?’

‘Jenessa, where have you been all your life? Yes, beautiful.’

Alice gave a sigh of repletion. ‘My, oh, my, I wish I’d had my video camera for that,’ she said soulfully. ‘Better than Another World.’

Jenessa scarcely heard her. Like a woman in a dream she walked over to the little mirror that hung over the sink and stared at herself. She had no need of make-up, she thought. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes shining; she looked as fully alive as a brightly colored butterfly dancing from flower to flower in the sunlight.

Behind her Finn said abruptly, ‘We’d better go. We’ve got to figure out our route, and I need some kind of time frame so I can phone my company. Thanks for the boots, Ruth—coming, Jenessa?’

Trying to gather her wits, Jenessa dropped a kiss on Stephen’s fluffy hair, hugged Ruth and Alice, whose eyes were almost popping out of her head, and walked outside to the van. Driving gave her something to focus on, and Finn said not a word as they crossed town to the motel. She parked in front of his unit and followed him into the room. The door clicked shut behind them.

His luggage was neatly stashed against the wall, the blue shirt he had been wearing last night was hanging over the back of one of the chairs and a bundle of papers and maps had been thrown on the bed. The maps seemed to steady her; she knew about maps, knew how to read them and transpose the thin lines on the paper to the actual contours of the land. She took a deep breath and said with commendable matter-of-factness, ‘Show me where you want to go.’

He sat down on the edge of the bed, unfolding a map of the whole province as well as two detailed topographical maps. ‘We’ll fly by helicopter into this lodge,’ he said, ‘I have connections with the oil companies, and I can get a ’copter any time I want one.’

Casually Jenessa sat down beside him, one leg tucked under her, following the line of his finger to a lake well south of the highway. Her eyes widened in dismay. Caribou Lake. Of all the thousands of lakes in Newfoundland, Finn Marston wanted to go to Caribou Lake.

‘The lodge is called Caribou Outfitters. Run by a guy called Lloyd MacDonald—calls himself Mac; I’ve already talked to him. Do you know the area at all?’

‘I know it very well,’ she said raggedly.

He shot a quick look at her. ‘You’ve been there before?’

‘Many times.’ With at least partial truth she said, ‘I used to work for Mac. A couple of years ago. I don’t see why you need me if you’re going to his lodge; he has his own guides.’

‘I’m only using the lodge as a base. This is where I really want to go.’

With true incredulity Jenessa watched his finger move still further south into a network of lakes and still waters that she could have traced on the map with her eyes shut. In a cracked voice she said, ‘That’s Hilchey land—what do you want to go there for?’

‘You’re familiar with it?’

‘He’s dead—old Mr Hilchey. He died six months ago. Why do you want to see his property?’

‘I asked you a question, Jenessa—are you familiar with that land?’

She gave a short, unamused laugh. ‘I’ve walked every ridge and barren, and canoed every waterway from Caribou River to Indian Brook.’ And if she had ever hated anyone in her life, it had been George Hilchey.

Finn spread out one of the topographical maps. ‘It’s a huge area; how could you know it so well?’

The names on the map jumped out at her. Osprey Falls, Beothuck Pond, Juniper Lake. Names and places that she had discovered as a child and loved with all the passionate intensity of a child. To the east lay Spruce Pond, where she had lived with her father for thirteen years on a tiny cove in sight of two tree-clad islands; her eyes shied away from it, for she had never once gone back there and now doubted that she ever would. She said, hard-voiced, ‘Why do you want to go there, Finn?’

His mouth tightened. ‘Curiosity,’ he said.

‘That’s no kind of an answer!’

‘It’s all the answer you’re going to get. George Hilchey used to have a summer place here on this lake—I want to visit it, and check out the area while I’m there.’

‘I wish you’d told me this last night,’ she said tautly. ‘It would have saved both of us a lot of trouble. For reasons that are nothing to do with you, I can’t possibly go there.’

His eyes narrowed, the force of his will-power like a blast of cold wind. ‘You’ll go,’ he said.

‘One of Mac’s guides will take you in—you’d have to go by canoe.’

‘Canoe?’

‘It’s the only way to get there.’

‘I’ve never been in a canoe in my life!’

‘A new experience for you,’ she said ironically.

‘Jenessa, in case you haven’t heard of them, there’s a marvellous twentieth-century invention called a float plane. It lands on lakes. This place is riddled with lakes.’

‘You see these crosses on the lake? Those are rocks. Big rocks. They don’t bother marking all the little ones. Plus there are deadheads in those waters—submerged logs—from the days of the log jams on the rivers. No pilot in his right mind is going to risk a float plane on those waters.’

‘We’ll take the helicopter in.’

‘No clearings. Hilchey’s summer place hasn’t been used in twenty years—the alders will have taken over.’

‘For God’s sake!’ Finn exploded. ‘It’ll take days to get in there by canoe.’

‘A week, I’d say.’

‘Then another week to get out—I haven’t got that kind of time to waste.’

She shrugged, tamping down a mixture of emotions too complicated to analyze. ‘Have the helicopter fly low over the land; that should satisfy your curiosity. It’ll cost you a small fortune, mind you. Although,’ she added with a touch of malice, ‘you’ll be saving seven hundred a week.’

‘But you’re saying the ’copter can’t land at the summer house.’ He got up from the bed, prowling round the room like a caged bear. ‘Couldn’t you get there in less than a week?’

She shook her head. ‘That’s back country ... a strong wind can easily hold you up for a couple of days. Besides, if your guide has any sense, he’ll keep you two or three days at the lodge learning the essentials of canoeing before you set out. There’s whitewater on some of those rivers, and you’re miles from anywhere.’

He glared at her. ‘So now it’s three weeks!’

‘Finn,’ she said curiously, ‘how long is it since you’ve taken a holiday?’

‘I forget.’

‘The wilderness has its own time scheme. Dawn and dusk, winds and rain ... you can’t force it or control it.’

‘I don’t think you understand—I run a multi-million-dollar business,’ he snapped. ‘Big-league stuff.’

‘Then go back to it and forget about George Hilchey’s summer house,’ she said indifferently.

He thrust his hands in the pockets of his jeans. ‘It’s a wonder to me that none of your clients has ever shot you rather than the moose.’

Jenessa laughed, abandoning their argument, because after all it was nothing to do with her how Finn got to the old summer house. ‘One or two of them have contemplated it, I’m sure.’

Her eyes were dancing, her pose on the big bed unselfconsciously graceful. Finn took a step toward her, halted and said levelly, ‘Excuse me a minute.’

He went to the phone, punched a great many numbers, eventually said a few phrases in a language unknown to Jenessa, and finally rapped, ‘Jonah? Finn here. What’s up?’

Jenessa smoothed the map flat, fighting back a wave of nostalgia for the woods and waters of her childhood, and heard Finn say, ‘You did? On the second attempt? It fit the flange? Then it was worthwhile doing the trial run... When do you think you’ll pull out? You’ll join them in Venezuela by Thursday? Yeah ... I’m thinking of taking two or three weeks, Jonah. By the sound of it you’re coping just fine without me. If you need anything while I’m away you’ll have to go via Moswell’s helicopter and a place called Caribou Lodge; the ’copter pilot will know where that is. You did a fine job. Get Brian to keep on top of all the finances, won’t you? Okay, all the best.’

He put down the receiver and turned back to Jenessa. ‘What time can we be ready to leave?’

‘I’m not going!’

‘You agreed to guide for me. You can’t go back on that.’

‘You mean you can fire me but I can’t quit?’

Without emphasis Finn said, ‘You wouldn’t want me putting the word round that you broke a contract, would you? Even if it was only a verbal one.’

Jenessa got a lot of her work by word of mouth. In a surge of pure rage she said, ‘Is this the way you act in the business world? No wonder you made it to the top.’

‘I do what it takes. You’re going to guide me to the Hilchey place, Jenessa—I won’t take no for an answer.’ He gave her the faintest of smiles. ‘Anyway, I’ve just agreed to take my first vacation in over five years—you can’t let me down now.’

With utter clarity Jenessa thought, I have a choice here. I can stay home and wallpaper the kitchen. Safe and ordinary and boring, and if Finn blackens my name I’ll survive. Or I can risk going back to the place where I grew up. Seeing it from the perspective of an adult. I’m twice as old as I was when I left... I’m not thirteen any more, raw with pain and filled with fear. Maybe the old magic will have gone. Maybe it’ll be just another place, nothing special.

Maybe it’s time I laid that particular ghost to rest.

‘Why are you so interested in the Hilchey land?’ she demanded. ‘Are you some kind of high-powered lawyer settling the estate? Although you don’t act like any lawyer I ever knew.’

‘Not once in my life have I ever contemplated joining the legal profession,’ Finn said pithily. ‘I only wish I understood why that land’s so important to you—why you won’t tell me what your connection is with it.’

She couldn’t possibly explain it to him. As she shook her head, her green eyes wary, he said, ‘I’ll ask Ryan.’

‘Not if you value living, you won’t.’

‘I’ve stepped into something, haven’t I?’ he said slowly. ‘Something pretty major as far as you’re concerned. Maybe Mac will tell me when we get to the lodge.’

‘Mac will tell you exactly what he thinks you want to hear—he’s a master at that.’

‘And to think,’ Finn remarked, ‘that I almost didn’t come here because I figured I’d be bored.’ In one of the swift shifts of topic that she had almost come to expect of him, he added, ‘Are you afraid to spend two or three weeks alone with me?’

She raised her chin. ‘I’ve never been afraid of a man in my life.’

‘There are some you should be frightened of.’

‘You’re not one of them,’ Jenessa said, and wondered if she was speaking the truth. If her behaviour of the last eighteen hours was anything to go by, perhaps she should be afraid.

‘So what time are we leaving?’ Finn repeated softly.

One last chance to see the land she had roamed as a girl. To choose risk over safety. Biting her lip, she muttered, ‘Ryan will organize the gear but I’ll have to look after the food... I’d say by four. I’ll talk to Mac and tell him we’ll be there in time for supper.’

She was staring down at the map and missed the triumph that raced across Finn’s face. He made another phone call, arranging for the helicopter to take them to the lodge. Then he sat down on the bed again. ‘So, Jenessa Reed,’ he said, ‘we’re on. We’re spending the next two weeks together.’

The choice, she had known all along, hadn’t only been a matter of the land. Her mouth dry, she said, ‘As employer and employee.’

‘We’re already more than that, and you know it.’

Certainly she had never been so outspoken to any of her other clients. ‘That’s all we are,’ she said stubbornly.

With unexpected violence Finn said, ‘I don’t have a clue what’s going on here! But I’ll tell you one thing—you’re totally unlike any other woman I’ve ever been with. Nor, for some reason, can I believe that I only met you last night.’

Inwardly terrified, outwardly composed, Jenessa quipped, ‘You feel as if we’ve been arguing forever?’

Some of the tension eased in his face. ‘You’re certainly the most contentious woman I’ve ever met.’

‘But you said yourself the sample was small,’ she answered gently, and stood up. ‘I’d better go; I’ve got a lot to do. I’ll be back here at quarter to four.’

Finn stood up too, his body moving with a lazy grace. Very deliberately he held out his hand. ‘I’m glad we’re going to be together,’ he said.

She could not, without adding bad manners to contentiousness, refuse to shake hands with him. Reluctantly she stretched out her own. His grip was firm, his palm warm against hers. She looked down, in one glance seeing the lean length of his fingers with their well-kept nails and the dusting of dark hair on the back of his hand, where the bones and sinews moved under the tanned skin. His wristwatch with its new leather strap looked expensive. His forearm was tanned as well, corded with muscle. Then the faint tang of his aftershave drifted to her nostrils, and underlying it she caught something far more elemental and more powerful: the scent of the man himself.

She glanced up, her nerves as alert as if she had just sighted a fresh bear track on the trail, her senses acutely aware of the sound of his breathing and the warmth of his body across the space that separated them. She had touched a man before, of course she had. But never had she felt such an instinctive vigilance, so total and instant an involvement; with a lurch of her heart she found herself comparing it with the strange bond that united the hunter and the hunted. Pulling her hand free, her green eyes bewildered, she muttered, ‘Two weeks could be a very long time.’

‘It’ll be as long as we need,’ Finn said cryptically. ‘I’ll see you later.’

She hurried outdoors into the sunshine, wondering what she had gotten herself into. She had told the truth when she’d said she’d never been afraid of a man; even Mac had never really frightened her.

But Finn Marston was different. Dauntingly different.

He wouldn’t take no for an answer. And he thought she was beautiful.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE next few hours were hectically busy for Jenessa. She drove straight home and told Ryan about the proposed trip to the property that George Hilchey had owned. As Ryan raised bushy white brows, she warned, ‘I don’t want to talk about it and I swear if you so much as breathe a word to Finn about my connection with that land I’ll move out and I’ll never come back.’

This was indeed a dire threat. Ryan solemnly ran a dirty finger across his throat and said, ‘You want me to load up the two backpacks?’

‘That’d be a great help. Water tablets, flashlights, tents, tarp... you know what we need, Ryan. The food’s going to take a bit of organizing; I’ll head out to the grocery store after I call Mac.’

She got through on the radio-phone to Caribou Lodge on the first try. ‘Mac? Jenessa Reed here. I’ll be arriving at the lodge around five-thirty today with a man called Finn Marston; can you put him up for a couple of nights?’

There was a fractional pause. ‘So he hired you, did he? I didn’t have a guide free.’

She knew Mac well; beneath the innocuous words he was angry. ‘As you’ve already spoken to him, then you know what he wants,’ she said calmly. ‘We’ll be canoeing to the old Hilchey place, but I’ll want to be around the lodge for two or three days first; he’s never been in a canoe before. Any problem with that?’

‘He can have a room in the lodge. You can go in the guides’ cabin.’

‘We can rent a canoe?’

‘A seventeen-foot wood and canvas.’

‘Great. We’ll bring our own food and gear. Thanks, Mac.’

‘See you,’ he grunted.

Mac didn’t want them there. She’d bet her bottom dollar on it. More undercurrents, Jenessa thought, and for the life of her couldn’t understand what they might be. Yes, she’d turned Mac down two years ago. But they’d met since then and he’d been at his most charming, as though to show her that he couldn’t care less. Frowning, she started on the grocery list.

At quarter to four she stuffed the last pair of clean socks into one of the side-pockets of her backpack. Ryan had already loaded Finn’s into the van; although she hadn’t had the time to check its contents, Ryan had been packing for long trips most of his life and wouldn’t be likely to have forgotten anything. Paddles, life-vests, the Duluth packs with the food... they were all in the van, too.

‘Move it, Jenny,’ Ryan hollered.

She swung the pack on her back and hurried outside, and they arrived at the motel at five to four. Finn was standing outside, his duffel bag and haversack at his feet. He put his gear in the back where Ryan was sitting and sat in the front beside Jenessa. ‘We’re late,’ he said.

‘The helicopter won’t go without us,’ she responded evenly, and swung out into the traffic.

When they got to the hangar, the oil-company helicopter was parked on the tarmac. Jenessa had met the pilot before, a man in his forties by the name of Wally. She introduced Finn and they started loading gear in the helicopter. Crouched in the rear, she said, ‘Could you pass up those two canvas bags, Finn? Careful, they’re heavy; they’ve got all our food.’

Finn grasped the leather handles of the first bag, levering it up to the level of the helicopter floor. Jenessa leaned forward to take it from him, and as he gave a final heave saw him gasp with pain, his features contorted. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked in quick concern.

He shoved the pack toward her, not meeting her eyes. ‘Yeah... out of shape, that’s all.’

He didn’t look like a man who was out of shape. But she swallowed any other questions because Wally had begun his pre-flight check and they were already late. Carefully she leaned her cherrywood paddle against the pile of packs and jumped down to the ground. ‘That’s it—let’s go.’

Ryan gave her a light punch on the arm and said gruffly, ‘Stay away from souse holes, won’t ya?’

Jenessa grinned at him. ‘Finish the wallpapering while I’m gone.’

She climbed into the back seat and strapped herself in. As Finn eased himself into the passenger seat, twisting his body in the confined space, another spasm of pain tightened his features. If there was something wrong, she thought grimly, he should have told her. She had first-aid training, but there were no doctors where they were going.

Within minutes they lifted off the ground. As the houses diminished beneath them, she adjusted her headset, amused to hear Wally, as much as he was capable of being deferential, deferring to Finn. Whatever Finn did, it must be big league; helicopters, as well she knew, didn’t come cheap and helicopter pilots were notorious for their independence. Then she saw Finn unfold his map. ‘Can you fly me over this island, Wally?’ he asked. ‘There should be an old house on it.’

‘Sure thing,’ Wally said easily. ‘The boss told me to take you wherever you wanted to go.’

Jenessa didn’t want to fly over the Hilchey land. She had counted on entering it gradually, adjusting day by day to the landscape she loved. Biting her lip, she watched as the town and the grey ribbon of highway dropped away behind them, to be replaced by the dense green of trees and the paler green of the barrens. Within half an hour they had reached Caribou Lodge, its tall windows bouncing back the sun’s glare. Wally followed the twisting course of the river south, pointing out the lakes and ponds to Finn. Her eyes glued to the window, Jenessa saw the white patch of Osprey Falls and the meandering trail of Beothuck Brook with its groves of silvertrunked birches. She had caught her first trout in that brook, and had swum with her father in the pool below the falls, the cold water making her skin tingle... Juniper Lake, Little Bog Pond, Cranberry Lake—one by one they slipped below her. Then, in the distance, the cove on Spruce Pond glittered in the sunlight.

She was too far away to pick out the cabin where she had grown up. To her horror her eyes crowded with tears, blurring the landscape into an impressionistic haze of blues and greens.

Finn turned in his seat. ‘Jenessa, do you—what’s wrong?’

Wally, too, glanced over his shoulder. Wishing both of them a thousand miles away, swiping away the tear that had trickled down her cheek, she choked, ‘Nothing.’

Finn’s eyes bored into hers. He knew she was lying. But he’d wait for an explanation, she thought uneasily. Wait as a hunter must wait. He said brusquely, ‘Can you pick out the house if we go over it?’

She nodded, fighting back emotions as keenly felt now as they had been when she was thirteen. She’d been a fool to agree to this, an utter fool.

Blinking hard, she saw below her the shores of the unimaginatively named Middle Lake, with its egg-shaped island in the dead center of the lake. As Wally brought the helicopter lower and the trees took on individual shapes and sizes, the angled line of a roof high on the cliffs at one end of the island sprang into view. ‘There,’ she said. ‘You can even see the remains of the wharf among the rocks,’

‘No place to land,’ Wally said cheerfully. ‘Too bad.’

Finn said nothing. He, like Jenessa, was staring at the ground, his jaw set, his face empty of expression.

Wally brought the helicopter round, heading north back toward the lodge. Jenessa gazed down at her linked hands in her lap, breathing deeply to settle her nerves. With a bit of luck Finn wouldn’t remember she’d been crying; and Mac had never been overly observant—he wouldn’t notice any traces of tears on her cheeks.

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