Money Shot

by Susan Sey

  Relief buzzed through her, hot and startling. What the hell? She’d known the guy half an hour. When exactly had his approval come to mean something to her? She cleared her throat and stepped forward, near enough to shake hands if she wanted to. A good, friendly distance. Professional.

  “So. Any chance you can point me to the Ranger Station?”

  “The Ranger Station?”

  “Yeah. Apparently it includes quarters for summer staff that are vacant for the season. My boss arranged for me to room there while I’m on Mishkwa.”

  “I live at the Ranger Station, Goose.”

  “Oh.”

  “Alone.”

  “Well.” She had a near-hysterical urge to laugh. “I won’t be a bother. I’ll stay out of your hair, promise.” Oh God. He didn’t have hair. And what little he had, she wanted to be in so badly she could taste it. What was wrong with her?

  “What if I want you to bother me?” His eyes were hot and silvery, and her knees went weak. Ridiculously, shockingly, girlishly weak.

  “Well.” She patted his arm. It was like tempered steel under her hand, and her palm tingled with a completely inappropriate appreciation. She withdrew it hastily and dredged up a friendly smile. “I’m sure we’ll manage to keep things professional.”

  “Honesty, Goose.” He shook his head. “This won’t work without it.”

  “I’m doing the best I can,” she snapped. “There’s a fucking lot of pheromones flying around here, though. Give me a break.”

  She broke off, aghast at her language. Her tone. Her honesty . Oh God. She was falling apart. She was. She was sixteen again and racing heedlessly into a firestorm of raging desire. Again. And Rush was going to watch it happen. How could he miss it when he was staring at her with flat, unreadable eyes, likely as startled by her outburst as she was?

  Then he smiled. Slowly. It moved over the stern, unforgiving bones of his face like the rising sun moved over a cliff, transforming rocky harshness into breathtaking beauty.

  “Let’s go.”

  She blinked, still stunned by the smile. “Go?”

  “Next door.” He shook his head at her beret. “You’re staying on Mishkwa, you’ll need decent gear. Ben’ll figure you out. Come on.”

  He seized her hand in his, and a heady sizzle shot up her arm straight to the base of her skull. He marched toward the door, and she stumbled along behind him.

  “Oh, and Goose?”

  “Hmm?”

  “For the record? When I do come on to you, you won’t have to wonder.” He sent her a look over his shoulder, his eyes molten silver. “You’ll know.”

  She smiled brightly—perhaps moronically—at him. “Oh. Right. Um, thanks.”

  He grinned at her. Actually grinned.

  “Just being honest.”

  Chapter 4

  RUSH WAS enjoying the feel of Goose’s hand in his—damn, how long had it been since he’d held a woman’s hand?—when Lila pushed through the swinging door from the kitchen. Goose yanked free of his touch like he was on fire.

  “Rush? Before you go?”

  Right. Lila had wanted to talk to him about something. Which was why he was here in the first place.

  “Sure.” He turned to Goose. “Mishkwa Island Outfitters is right next door,” he said. “Ben Barnes is the owner. Tell him I said you needed gearing out. I’ll be over in a few.”

  “It was lovely meeting you, Lila,” Goose said with a bright smile. “And you, Yarrow.”

  “You, too, dear,” Lila said, returning the smile with a beatific one of her own. Yarrow grunted. Then Goose shot out the door with a haste that bordered on insulting, all expensive fabric and exotic perfume. Lila turned speculative eyes on Rush. “So . . . she seems nice.”

  “For a woman who thinks I may be gearing up to assassinate the governor.”

  Lila gave this an airy pass. “You walk around all day armed to the teeth,” she said. “What did you expect?”

  Rush didn’t really feel like getting into the Radical Agrarian thing, so he just said, “You needed something?”

  Lila sighed. “Oh, it’s nothing, but I thought you should hear it from me. It seems my dear neighbor Mr. Barnes has his shorts in a knot over the compost again.”

  Rush glanced automatically toward Ben’s place next door. Midsixties with the build and endurance of a guy thirty years younger, Ben ran an outfitter in the summers and built birch-bark canoes by hand in the winters. A pretty straightforward guy for the most part, but not overly patient with Lila’s kookier endeavors. Probably didn’t help neighborly relations at all that Lila had the kooky market pretty well cornered.

  “Ben doesn’t like your compost?”

  “Evidently not.”

  “He thinks it’s attracting Sir Humpalot,” Yarrow said from the register.

  “Sir Humpalot?”

  She arched the brow without the ring. “Sure. Seven, maybe eight feet tall? Long brown beard, big rack?” She put her free hand to her head, thumb against her scalp, fingers fanned out, miming antlers. “Unsuccessfully humping the Dumpsters since September?”

  Rush blinked at her. The kid had nicknamed a rogue bull moose with sexual identity issues Sir Humpalot.

  He frowned down at Lila. “This kid needs to go back to normal school.”

  “Normal school. Pah.” Lila fluttered her fingers in the air. “She joined your little ski team, didn’t she? That’s plenty of interaction with her peers.”

  “More than,” Yarrow muttered. Rush felt for her. Yarrow, like Rush, had fallen prey to Lila’s belief that good health required regular human interaction. The end result was poor Yarrow sweating it out with the high school cross-country ski team that Rush—Jesus help him—was now coaching.

  “If you want to talk about people who ought to reengage with their peer group, however—” Lila began.

  “I don’t.”

  “Hey, that’s true.” Yarrow sat up, her eyes dancing with wicked glee. “Sir Humpalot gets more action than you.”

  Rush experienced a pang of nostalgia for the good old days when nobody dared screw with him. “I don’t date Dumpsters.”

  “You don’t date anybody,” Lila said.

  “Nobody to date. It’s December, in case you hadn’t noticed. Single women aren’t exactly thick on the ground this time of year.” He held up a hand before Lila could mention Goose. “Single women who aren’t trying to arrest me, anyway.”

  “You didn’t date when it was July and the pretty hikers were all faking sunstroke and sprained ankles to get your attention,” Yarrow pointed out helpfully.

  “You didn’t get here till September, cuz,” Rush said.

  “Doesn’t mean I don’t hear things.” Yarrow lifted her thin shoulders. “People talk.”

  “About stuff that’s none of their damn business.” Rush turned to Lila, who was peering at him with a disconcerting intensity in those bird-bright eyes. He snapped his mouth shut. His misanthropy was showing, damn it. And he’d been doing such a good job today. Now he was in for it.

  “Rush. People aren’t talking about you out of malice. They’re talking about you out of love.” She rubbed her palm briskly up and down his arm. “They want you to be happy. We all do.”

  “I am happy.” His aunt gazed at him skeptically. “Happy enough, anyway.” She didn’t blink, only arched one pale brow. “Okay, maybe not ‘tra-la-la, baby-ducks-and-chicks’ happy, but I’m doing okay. Honest.”

  And he was. Compared with the condition he’d been in when he’d arrived on Mishkwa spring before last, he was doing fucking great. At least his brain wasn’t buzzing anymore. At least he didn’t wake up angry and leashed and whipcord tight anymore, his trigger finger ready for a quick day’s work. Something about putting a couple miles of cold, clean space between him and the next beating heart had dulled his sharper edges. Quieted the static that had lived inside his head so long he’d forgotten how blessed silence could be.

  Now, if only he could find the inner voice that used
to speak into that silence, he’d be set.

  Lila’s face clearly indicated her skepticism on this point, but it was an old argument. One they weren’t going to resolve today.

  He drew a battered notebook from his jacket pocket and gave Lila his professional face. “So. Moose been around lately?”

  She sighed and let it go. For the moment, anyway. “Not here more than any other place in town.” Lila examined the end of her long white braid. “Ben objects to me more than to my garbage and we all know it, so let’s not get all legal about it.”

  “Fine by me.” He stuffed the notebook back into his pocket and headed for the door.

  “Rush, wait.” She caught his elbow and he stopped.

  “Are you going to spit it out, then? Because I don’t have all day to wait around while you figure out how to ask me for whatever it is you want.”

  She gave him a lofty look down the length of her nose. “What, you have a more pressing engagement?”

  He ducked his head to look out the window at the fat, gray clouds tumbling down from Canada. Clouds that looked likely to steam straight across Mishkwa on their way to Wisconsin. “Weather’s coming,” he said. “Thought I’d turn that deadfall up on the ridge trail into firewood before it gets here.”

  Lila curled her lip. “Another lovely afternoon of battling nature into submission?”

  “Well, sure.” Rush liked his job for a lot of reasons, but foremost among them was the number of days he spent working up a good, honest sweat with nobody for company but his chain saw. Plus, he got firewood. It was always nice when a huge amount of effort yielded a tangible reward. Unlike this endless interview with his aunt.

  “Rush.” Lila pinned him with eyes entirely too sharp for the soft curve of her smile. “First of all, you can’t fight nature. But second? You spend too much time alone.”

  “Oh. Oh, no.” He held up his hands and backed toward the door. “Whatever it is, I’m not doing it.”

  Lila followed him. “You haven’t even heard what I want yet,” she said, her voice dangerously reasonable.

  “The last time we had this conversation, I ended up coaching a high school ski team.” And the time before that it was supervising the little anarchists who’d talked him into signing those damn Radical Agrarian papers. He groped behind him for the doorknob, unwilling to take his eyes off his aunt when she was in this particular mood.

  “Which is a problem how? They’re children, Rush. Harmless.”

  Yarrow snorted and Rush wholeheartedly agreed. Lila ignored them both.

  “The point is, you have a duty to take up your place in this community. The place that’s been waiting for you.”

  “What place might that be?”

  “There’s a full moon next week,” she said. “The coven is gathering here for esbat, cakes and ale to follow. I think you should come.”

  He frowned at her. Stripping away all the traditional language of his childhood religion, this was essentially a request for him to come to church. “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.” She treated him to her warmest smile. “Think it over, Rush. Surely you can squeeze some pondering into your busy schedule of hiking and chopping things up.”

  Yarrow swallowed a chuckle, though when he looked her way she was inspecting her nails with studied innocence.

  “Okay,” he said. “Sure.” His hand finally landed on the knob, thank you, Jesus. He yanked open the door and the fresh, cold smell of freedom filled the little shop. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Thank you, dear.”

  GOOSE TRAMPED behind Rush along a path that zigzagged up the face of a steep incline. The little Kevlar sled holding her suitcase, computer bag and purse glided along behind her, clipped to a body harness Lila’s neighbor Ben had fitted her with. He’d also thrown in a Marmot shell in a gorgeous eggplant color, complete with a down liner that—in terms of warmth rather than fashion anyway—beat the snot out of her own winter coat. He’d provided her with a pair of muscular boots that looked a lot like the ones Rush was sporting, too. Oh, and snowshoes. Of course.

  The wind pushed at her back like an impatient commuter and she leaned into her stride. Her leg muscles sang pleasantly as she drew in a lungful of icy air that seemed to rush straight to her heart like pure oxygen. Her head buzzed with the hyperclarity it provided and it surprised a little chuckle out of her.

  “What?”

  She glanced up the trail to find Rush standing on the spine of the ridge they’d been climbing toward this past thirty minutes.

  “What what?” she asked, startled. They’d been snowshoeing in complete silence since they left Ben’s little shop.

  “You were laughing.”

  “I was?”

  “Yes. Something funny?”

  “Besides the fact that I have to schlep my gear a couple miles to the Ranger Station via sled because of an arcane law banning motor vehicles from the entire island?”

  If she didn’t know what to look for, she’d have completely missed the amusement warming those pale eyes. She bet a lot of people missed Rush entirely.

  “We do allow emergency vehicles on-island,” he said. “The Urgent Care has a snowmobile. But yeah. Besides that. What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing.” She slogged to the top of the ridge and pulled up beside him. “It’s pretty, that’s all.” She glanced behind her and found the little village of South Harbor curled up next to the slate-gray boil of Lake Superior like a hibernating hedgehog. “Aw,” she said. “Cute.”

  Rush followed her gaze then looked back at her, questions about her good taste clear in his eyes. Then he stepped to the side and Goose got her first look at the rest of Mishkwa.

  “Oh my,” she said as she took it in. The island stretched out into Lake Superior like a bony, arthritic finger, all knobs and lumps and twists. She’d thought they were heading for a ridgeline, but in fact found herself now standing atop a hill that constituted the first knuckle of the finger. The peak was rounded and rocky, sporting a shallow bowl in its center, like somebody had reached out and left a careless fingerprint in a loaf of rising bread. A sturdy little log cabin nestled down in the base of the bowl, surrounded on all sides by a crowd of snow-splattered fir trees standing skirt to skirt like dancers at an ice queen’s ball. The quiet was profound, a presence rather than an absence, and it clicked into Goose’s soul like she’d been waiting her whole life to hear it.

  “Did I step into a snow globe?” she asked.

  He considered that with his usual serious attention. “I never thought of it like that, but maybe, yeah.” Rush started down the path that led into the trees. “Wait till Mother Nature shakes it up. Happens about twice a week come January. You think this is funny, you’ll think that’s hilarious.”

  “I don’t think it’s funny,” she said, falling into step behind him. The PVC-like stoppers on the leads of her harness kept the sled from running over her snowshoes on the downhill.

  “And yet you’re laughing.”

  “Haven’t you ever laughed because something really beautiful took you by surprise?”

  He threw her a look over his shoulder. “No.”

  She snorted. “And you think I’m sad.”

  “You are.”

  She frowned. Why not? He wasn’t looking at her. Not that it would have mattered if he was, as he’d already banned smiling unless she was actually happy. Which was pretty much . . . never.

  Never? Really? She scowled. It felt wonderful. Wrinkly. Snarly. She tried to remember the last time—aside from two minutes ago—that she’d laughed out of pure delight. Nothing came to mind. Was he right? Was she really so unhappy?

  No, of course not. She simply wasn’t happy. There was a lot of neutral ground between the two extremes. She’d guess most normal people occupied that in-between zone right along with her.

  “Speaking of sad,” she said, “do you know what Ben told me when I tried to pay him for the gear?”

  “That he was powerless in the face of a
pair of giant doe eyes and that megawatt smile you like to blast people with?”

  “I don’t do doe eyes.”

  “Not going to argue about the smile?”

  “Nope,” she said, and purposely beamed a fat smile at his back. It didn’t feel nearly as good as the scowl. “Do you want to know why Ben wouldn’t take the money, though?”

  “Why?”

  “He said it was because he missed his wife.”

  “His wife?”

  “Yeah. Apparently, back when they ran an outfitter up on Sawbill, she used to test-drive all the women’s gear so she could tell customers if it was really designed for women or just men’s gear cut out of pink material. Ben said he’s pretty used to being widowed—she’s been gone five years now—but he still misses her like crazy whenever he gets something new in the women’s department. He said as long as I swing by his place before I leave the island to give him a thumbs-up or -down on the gear, we’re square. Isn’t that the saddest story you ever heard?”

  She felt his gaze touch her, then a queer sense of loss when it moved away.

  “Not quite,” he said.

  Chapter 5

  RUSH TRAMPED up to the Ranger Station door, popped the clasps on his snowshoes and shoved them into the nearest snowbank. He grabbed the suitcase off Goose’s sled and led her inside.

  An eerie and somehow pleasant sense of familiarity washed over him as he ushered her into his home, but it wasn’t déjà vu. If anything, it was the opposite—a wide-awake awareness that he might be creating rather than fulfilling a destiny. Something whispered inside him, familiar as a lover, elusive as a dream. It slipped away like smoke when he reached for it, leaving both hope and regret in its wake.

  “Kitchen,” he said, passing through the tiny galley that sported a two-burner stove, a minifridge and a microwave on a peeling laminate counter. “Living room,” he said two steps later, in reference to the battered plaid sofa and wood-burning stove. “Bathroom.” He jerked his chin at the harvest-gold sink/toilet/shower combo jammed into a shoe-box-size bump-out on the back of the cabin, then turned left. “Guest quarters.” He hefted her suitcase onto the creaky twin-size metal cot perched on a braided rag rug that hadn’t seen a vacuum in many a moon. Between himself, Goose and the cot, there was maybe a square foot or two of floor space left over, and Rush felt a little light-headed, as if there weren’t enough oxygen for them both to share.