The man restocking the shelves with cigarettes behind her laughed and she joined in a moment later. I frowned and shifted uncomfortably. I felt out of place and I’m sure I looked it, too.
I was dressed in a smart, black, wool suit, a long-sleeved, pink cashmere sweater, full-length camel overcoat, and my favorite, black leather, knee-high boots. Suffice it to say, my outfit didn’t exactly scream ‘law enforcement’. If anything, it probably screamed ‘lost city girl’. I hadn’t realized how ungodly cold it was here. These were my warmest clothes and I’d been chilled to the bone by just walking from my SUV to the door.
“No, nothing like that,” I replied, putting on what I hoped was a winning, friendly smile, “I’m looking for my brother, but I don’t have his exact address anymore. I’m trying to surprise him. His name is Nicholas Durant.”
I was guessing that people in rural Alaska would not realize the significance of that name. The Durant family was extremely famous, especially in the Northeast, but Nicholas himself wasn’t very well-known—especially not lately. By the blank look on the woman’s face, my assumption was correct. She didn’t know that one of America’s richest men had chosen to go off the grid in Bear’s Bend.
I showed her the photo of Nicholas I had been given. The handsome young man in the picture had striking features: a square jaw, tawny brown hair, highly bridged nose, and eyes that were bluer in the center of the iris and a greenish gold toward the edge. Except for his eyes he looked much more like his mother, a famous Irish model who absconded almost twenty-five years ago with an Australian soccer star, than his father and the CEO of my employer, Durant Industries. But his eyes were unmistakable. Richard Durant and his son Nicholas had identical green-blue eyes.
The woman looked at the picture and shook her head ruefully.
“We definitely don’t have anyone around here that looks like him,” she said, winking and when her male companion ducked back into a storeroom, “but I sure wish we did!” She added in a whisper.
“Are you sure?” I asked again, “this photo is older, so he may look somewhat different now. Longer hair maybe, or a beard. He might be going by a different name as well. My brother has always been a bit odd.”
She shook her head.
“What was the name again?” The woman asked when I just continued to stare at her, squinting at the picture.
“Nicholas Louis Durant,” I repeated. I had meant to say his name properly with the French pronunciation of his middle name, but I inevitably butchered it. I’d spent my undergrad days in St. Louis, and I’d been conditioned to say it the incorrect American way.
“The only Lewis we have around here is Lewis Cassidy…” she finally said, and my ears perked up excitedly. Cassidy was Nicholas’ mother’s maiden name. Finally! This was almost as good as confirmation.
“That’s him! Where does he live?” I asked excitedly, “I guess he’s decided to go by our stepdad’s last name,” I added, trying to maintain my stupid cover story as his sister.
The woman took in my frizzy red mane and green eyes. She glanced down again at the picture. It was possible, right? He was half Irish. My ancestors were Irish (German actually, but whatever). I could be Irish, too. Nicholas and I were both pale with light hair and eyes. What threat could I be to him anyway? I could practically see the gears churning in the woman’s head as she decided whether to help me. If she didn’t, I wasn’t sure what I’d do.
The woman sighed and shrugged as if saying “what the hell” to herself.
“He lives about twenty miles east of here,” she finally said, “just take the first right from the highway after the turnoff toward Barley road.”
I scribbled down the instructions and purchased gas, coffee, and some prepackaged dried fruit and nuts. Finally, I was almost to Nicholas. Either that, or I was about to really confuse some random guy named Lewis Cassidy. This day’s trip was now well into its eighteenth hour and the sun had fully set by the time I hoisted myself back into my rented Four Runner. The short days here were really disconcerting. I was ready to get back to the real world.
All I needed was to deliver an envelope, get a signature, and then I was leaving Alaska and never looking back. Unfortunately, I was only about twenty miles out of Bear’s Bend when a pop and squeal from under my SUV alerted me that my tire had other plans. I came to an abrupt stop in the shoulder of the small, Alaskan highway. This was not good.
Before I knew it, I’d been trying to jack the SUV up for at least twenty minutes in a snowstorm. My gloves might as well have been made of cellophane for all the good they did to keep me warm in the frigid night. Despite rubbing them vigorously together, breathing on them, and taking periodic breaks inside the heated cab, I quickly lost sensation in the tips of my fingers and was forced to rely on what my eyes were telling me in terms of their positions on the jack. It wasn’t a workable way to change a tire, and this wasn’t a skill I had ever mastered even in ideal conditions.
My eyes were struggling in the super-chilled air, which was a side effect to extreme cold I’d never encountered before. Frustration was making me tear up, but the tears froze just moments after they left my eyelids. The ice forming on my eyelashes then tried to glue my eyes shut. Without the dexterity of working fingers, I had to keep blinking over an over to try and keep my vision clear.
Maybe it would have been better if I hadn’t worked so hard to keep seeing properly because maybe I could have missed the little moose, the wolves, and the big moose.
I’d never seen a live moose before, even in a zoo. They’re freaking enormous. Way bigger than I’d thought. When the baby moose exploded out of the tree line ahead of me and skittered into the road, all I could do was stare in confusion. He was actually cute, in a weird, lumpy and lanky sort of way.
Behind me, I heard the sound of brakes squealing as someone else on the road tried not to hit the moose, but I was too shocked even to turn. Ahead of me, the situation had gone from bad to worse. What was presumably the mother moose, weighing in at an easy one thousand pounds and a height of approximately six feet five inches, exploded from the tree line and leapt into the road ahead of me, chased by a pack of eight or nine grey wolves. The baby moose disappeared on the opposite side of the road, probably relying on its mother to distract the wolves.
Without conscious thought or intention, a high, keening shriek ripped from my throat. The sound pierced through the wind with a blood curdling intensity, she attracted the attention of both the raging mother moose and the hungry wolf pack.
But it was the wolves that truly scared me.
Wolves are terrifying. I know that’s obvious, but I hadn’t understood why humans had written violent and frightening fairy tales to impress that terror on children for thousands of years until a dozen pairs of yellow wolf eyes locked on me like I was a giant, walking steak. Humans have a primal fear of wolves for a reason. Their faces are a lot like the dogs that we’ve made into our best friends and companions, but also totally alien and threatening. When I looked at those wolves there was no friendly desire to please staring back at me like with domesticated dogs. Instead, there was only a glittering, predatory intelligence and a raw, furious hunger.
The wolves reoriented their pack in an instant. It was like they were communicating telepathically with each other. They turned to me like one unit, leaving the moose mother alone in the road as they saw a much easier meal: Me. I had the tire iron in my hand, but I was so cold, tired, frightened, and there were so many of them. I knew I was screwed. I backed up, but there was nowhere to go.
The next few moments were a blisteringly cold, confusing blur. A wolf must have jumped onto me, because I was knocked onto my back and then dragged across the icy ground. Maybe I was just too cold to feel the teeth in my flesh. That was nice, I thought to myself dreamily. At least I wouldn’t feel myself being eaten. A large, canine shadow appeared in my line of sight and I blacked out.
Nothing was making any sense to me. I felt a floating sensation. Had I been eaten
? This was not what I expected the inside of a wolf to be like at all. The next thing I knew, I was in the backseat of a truck and wrapped in a shiny silver, thermal blanket. Something heavy and hot was on top of me. It felt like I was still moving.
“Stay there Harley,” I heard a man’s low voice saying from ahead of me somewhere, “you stay on top of her. Stay. Good girl.”
Time skipped and slipped as I floated in and out of consciousness. I couldn’t seem to keep my eyes open for more than a few seconds at a time. I was just too cold. The next time the world resolved into relative continuity, the feeling of movement was still present, but the heavy warm thing was gone. I could move my limbs again, and my brain felt more normal, so I opened my eyes sat up.
Moving was an enormous mistake because right next to me was a wolf.
I tried to scream, but only a panicked little wheeze-squeak escaped my lips. It sounded more like a rapidly deflating balloon than my voice (“Eeeee”). The wolf regarded me in surprised silence, it’s icy blue eyes staring inquisitively at me as I scrambled up from my prone position and realized that I was in the backseat of a truck. That wolf was not a wolf, my instincts asserted with a confidence that lowered my blood pressure without conscious effort. A moment later my rational brain saw a collar. It was a dog. A wolfish looking huge-ass fluffy white and grey dog.
“Shit! You’re awake!” A low voice exclaimed from next to me the front seat. I couldn’t see my anonymous rescuer since the wolf-dog was in the way, but I felt the truck slow and come to a stop.
The man peered around the dog to look at me, extending a silver thermos in my direction.
“Drink this,” he said.
I was too dumbstruck to do anything but stare. The man in front of me was poorly lit by the cab’s internal lighting, but I could see that he was ruggedly handsome, in his mid-thirties, and pleasantly (if aggressively) rough looking. His full light brown beard and shoulder length blond-brown hair gave him a distinctly leonine appearance, and his very white, excellent teeth did nothing to dispel that impression. As someone with a slight gap between my front teeth (my parents could never afford braces), I’ve always found good teeth especially attractive.
I don’t usually go for guys with any facial hair, but damn. With his strong features, light coloring, and broad shoulders, this one could pass for a Norse god. Even though my body felt weak and cold, my face suddenly felt flushed and hot. We stared at each other across the back seat in silence. I was literally dumbstruck, something that doesn’t happen to me. Ever. Usually when I’m attracted to someone, I babble. I wasn’t sure which was worse.
“You need to drink this coffee,” the man repeated. His voice was urgent but calm, like he was speaking to a frightened animal, “your body temperature is still too low. You have hypothermia. And your hands have second degree frostbite.”
I extended a hand out to take the thermos from the stranger, noting that my fingers were glossy-looking and red. The joints were swollen, too. These were the hands of an eighty-year-old with arthritis, not a twenty-five-year old with mild carpal tunnel syndrome.
“Thank you,” I managed to stutter after the man watched me take a few swigs of the coffee. He was right; it was helping. I could feel my wits returning to me with every sip, and likewise, my insatiable curiosity. “What, um, what happened? Who are you? Where are we? Where are you taking me?”
He took a deep breath.
“Can I answer those one at a time?” He asked dryly, and I nodded. I was just proud I had managed to push that many words out of my frozen mouth. “Well, what happened is that you got hypothermia trying to change your flat in a snowstorm, almost got eaten by wolves, then almost got attacked by a moose. How much of that do you remember?”
“Pretty much all of it,” I slurred, pinching the bridge of my nose as the details replayed themselves in my head. It was a bit fuzzy, but I remembered all those things happening.
“Ok good,” he said, “and after that, I put you in my truck to try and warm you up. That’s why my dog, Harley, was laying on you. You needed the warmth. You were pretty out of it for about an hour. Hypothermia can cause confusion and amnesia. You were sort of mumbling incoherently, but I don’t think you ever passed out.”
“Did I say anything?” I asked, and he shook his head.
“Nothing comprehensible anyway,” he added, and then smirked, “I think you might have been trying to sing for a while.”
Embarrassment pinched at my stomach and the heat returned to my cheeks. I can’t carry a tune to save my life. I can whistle really well, but I cannot sing a note. When I was a little girl, our pastor actually asked if I would just lip-synch when I was in the children’s choir. If I was deliriously singing at this sex god, I could only imagine how awful it was. At least he was looking at me like it was somehow cute.
“Who are you?” I followed up, both wanting to change the subject away from my musical misadventures and return to my long list of questions.
“Sorry,” the man said, although I could think of no reason why he would need to apologize to me, “I probably should have led with that, huh? I’m Lewis Cassidy. What’s your name?”
My shock was now complete. This was him? I studied his features for a long moment in the dim light. It wouldn’t be immediately obvious to anyone that the picture of the suave young man I had back in my SUV and the one in front of me were the same person. His eyes gave it away- blue with green on the outside edge.
I shook my head, which made me feel a bit dizzy.
“You’re Nicholas Durant,” I slurred, and he sucked in his breath in a shocked hiss, “I’m Jenna Masters. I’ve come to serve your grandfather’s will on you. This wasn’t how I thought this was gonna’ go, but um, you’ve been served.” I ended up making it sound more like a question than I intended, and I was sure that I sounded quite drunk, but I don’t think Nicholas even heard the second half of my statement.
He stared at me like I’d just morphed into Lucifer, prince of darkness himself, right there in his back seat.
2
Nicholas
January is a very long, dark, and unpredictable month in Alaska. Although it had been a balmy zero degrees Fahrenheit outside when I left home in the mid-afternoon, it was now down to negative ten. The wind had picked up precipitously, pushing the old snow around while new snow fell in thick, white flurries. I could only hope that I would be able to outrun the worsening storm. The alternative could be deadly.
I didn’t really mind, or had at least come to understand, most of the petty torments that went along with my exile in Alaska. One thing I hadn’t yet managed to master (mostly due to my propensity to stay in my cabin like the hermit I was becoming), was driving in an Alaskan snowstorm. I’m from Pennsylvania, so it’s not like I had never seen snow before moving here, but Alaskan weather is unreal. It’s a whole different ballgame when the next human being might be hundreds of miles away, and a hospital, doctor, or even a tow truck was no more than a fantasy. Driving in a full-bore snowstorm here would be well beyond my—or my truck’s—abilities, so I was well incentivized to hurry.
This is why I almost hit the baby moose. Because it’s not like those things can come out of nowhere. Even a little one like this guy was a good two hundred pounds and stood at least as tall as the average person, with another eight feet in length. Thankfully I managed to avoid crashing into him.
I slammed on my breaks and pulled off to the side of the road to take a few deep breaths. That had been much too close. The moose, for its part, looked just as shocked as me. As I came to a halt, it occurred to me that I was hallucinating from the adrenaline. Along with me in the shoulder, I thought I saw a beautiful woman trying to change a tire in the middle of snowstorm.
My hallucination had long, curly strawberry blond hair that hung down to her waist, and wore a stylish jacket and sexy stiletto boots that were completely inappropriate for the weather. She was only medium height (somewhat shorter than the moose), but she was proportioned so perfectly—
with a tiny waist, long legs, lush curves—that she looked taller. Momentarily oblivious to the moose in front of me or the panicked dog at my side, I let myself stare at the hallucination in wonder, considering how long it had been since I’d seen anyone that looked that good.
Five years. Or maybe longer. Maybe forever. There weren’t a lot of women out where I lived, and none of the women that I’d seen were remotely attractive. They definitely weren’t giving my hallucination any competition. I was momentarily glad to have pulled over because I’d have missed the hallucination entirety if I hadn’t. The snow was so thick that I’d have driven right by my dream girl.
The sound of a second moose pulled me from my reverie.
In that moment, I realized two things simultaneously: first, my dream girl was real, and alive. Second, standing unarmed and exposed on the snowy road’s narrow shoulder, she wouldn’t stay that way for long if I didn’t act quickly.
Without really even thinking about what I was doing (or more specifically, about how stupid what I was about to do was), I sprang into action. I threw the truck into park and grabbed the rifle from the rack behind me. I unbuckled my seatbelt and launched myself into the cold, dark, snowy night. The scene was illuminated by my headlights like a deadly snow globe.
I crossed the distance between my car and the girl’s in a few short strides, managing to grab her by the arm and thrust her behind me before the animals reacted. The girl went stumbling back with a little surprised whimper, falling into a snow bank, but safer now that she was behind someone armed. The wolves were momentarily distracted from their preferred diet of baby moose and had begun to reorient their pack toward the girl, but they weren’t quite hungry enough to brave two humans or headlights to pounce on her. Not yet anyway. They might have been cowardly, or they might have been smart enough to know what the rifle was. Either way, the wolves hesitated.
Down and Dirty Page 2
