Money Shot

by Susan Sey

  “Rush!” The bathroom door slapped open and he cursed the predawn darkness. If this had happened an hour from now—even half an hour—he might have caught a glimpse of Goose in nothing but a towel. A sight well worth seeing if that brief, blessed moment he’d spent with his hand up her shirt a few days back was anything to go on. But sons of Norwegian fisher folk did not sleep in, so here he was, faced with nothing but a vague shadow.

  “What happened?” she asked, her voice tight. Anxious. Was this laughing, polished woman afraid of the dark?

  “Blew a fuse, probably.” Rush reached for the flashlight he kept in the cupboard for just such emergencies. Norwegian fisher folk did not believe in unpreparedness any more than they believed in sleeping in. He flicked it on and beamed it toward the bathroom.

  She stood there, hair dark and clinging to her neck like tangled vines, fists twisted between her breasts into the towel that swathed her from shoulders to knees. His towel, he realized. Desire was a swift clench in his stomach as he took in the long, clean lines of her limbs, the way her collarbones spread like delicate wings from the vulnerable hollow at the base of her throat.

  “Can you fix it?” she asked.

  “Fix what?” He had the insane urge to lick that shallow dent. Just put his tongue right there against all the warm silk of her skin. Would it taste as sweet as her mouth had? he wondered. Could anything possibly taste that good? Even her skin?

  There was really only one way to find out.

  “The fuse.”

  The fuse? Oh, the fuse.

  He took a step toward her. “You in a hurry all of a sudden?”

  She edged behind the door. “I’m cold.”

  “Heat’s from the woodstove.” He swung the flashlight to the ancient iron stove squatting in the corner of the living room. She followed the beam and he moved closer while she was distracted. She smelled like cloves and rosemary and warm water. Spicy and clean and somehow . . . green. Fresh. He wondered if it was her shampoo, her soap or just the scent God had given her.

  Need opened inside him, raw and urgent, flaying him with sharp imperatives. Without the armor of her perfect hair and makeup, she didn’t just appeal to him. She sang to him. He wanted to snatch her up, lay her down, mark her as his. He wanted to dip his fingers, his tongue, himself, into all her secret fragrant places until he wore her scent as easily as she did. Until she wore his. Until even the greediest of interlopers would concede that this territory was taken. Held. Cherished.

  “I need to dry my hair,” she said.

  Rush smiled. “Come on and sit by the stove, then. It’ll be dry before you—”

  “I need to blow it dry.”

  “Why? Come on, Goose, this is Mishkwa. Nobody’s looking at your hair. And even if they were, it looks fine. You look fine.” God, fine? She had him half insane with lust and the best he could come up with was fine? He cleared his throat. “Better than fine, okay? You look—”

  Delicious, he was going to say. That was a good word, and perfect for the primitive churn of hunger she’d touched off inside him with that kiss of hers the other day. She was delicious. Edible. Snackable. Any word that involved his mouth and her person would do.

  “Rush.” The thin anxiety in her voice, a near desperation, pierced the haze of desire and Rush stopped. “Will you please fix the fuse?”

  He studied her, from her huge eyes to her bare feet. “This isn’t about a hair dryer,” he said. “You wouldn’t panic over a stupid thing like that. You’re afraid.”

  “Afraid?” She huffed out a little laugh.

  “Yeah. Terrified.”

  “Rush, please. What would I be afraid of?” But she shivered as she said it, a fine trembling that started in her center and moved outward until it claimed her all the way out to her fingers. Rush put a savage rein on the desire riding him, on the curiosity biting at him with sharp little teeth, and turned away.

  “Two minutes,” he said between his teeth.

  Chapter 9

  GOOSE EMERGED from the bathroom fifteen minutes later to find Rush pacing the cabin like a mountain lion flying coach.

  “Feeling better?” he asked, his pale gaze touching everything from her newly smoothed hair to her ugly wool socks.

  She touched her head furtively, but her native ringlets remained utterly straight, perfectly obedient. “You have no idea,” she said.

  “I really don’t, no.”

  She ignored the implied invitation to explain herself. Hair dryers and blown fuses didn’t begin to cover the kind of danger those curls represented.

  “So,” she said. “How far to the old mine?”

  He studied her for a long moment. Deliberating, she’d guess, whether or not to let her off the hook. How far did that honesty thing go, anyway? Did omission count? Or did it apply only to actual statements?

  “Five miles,” he said finally.

  Relief loosened her stiff shoulders. “Nice day for it. I’ll be ready after breakfast.”

  “Breakfast?”

  “Sure. You know, food in the A.M.?”

  He glanced pointedly at his coffee cup. “Breakfast of champions,” he said. “You can have a travel mug. Now let’s—”

  She gave him a pity-filled look. “I sincerely don’t know how you expect to intimidate a grizzly bear or whatever it is you have out here—”

  “Moose.”

  “—moose then, on an empty stomach.” She squatted in front of the lopsided cabinets under the little counter and found an ancient container of Quaker Oats. A quick rummage in the freezer produced a packet of frozen blueberries.

  “Skipping breakfast isn’t healthy,” she said, throwing a couple handfuls of oats into two bowls, adding water and tossing them into the microwave.

  “I don’t think a moose takes my eating habits into account when he decides whether or not to charge.”

  She lifted her shoulders and retrieved the bowls from the microwave. “We aren’t all naturally terrifying, Rush,” she told him, sprinkling both bowls with the frozen blueberries. She dug out a couple spoons, pushed one bowl across the counter to him and sat down with hers. “Some of us need fortification before a five-mile hike in the frigid, moose-strewn wilderness.”

  “You think I’m terrifying.” He peeled off his navy fleece pullover and hung it up, apparently having given up on shoving her out the door without sustenance. The long-sleeved thermal he wore underneath gave Goose her first good look at his body, and the breath left her with an audible whoosh.

  Her first impression back at Lila’s had been dead-on. The guy was built like one of those Kenyan marathoners—all bone and sinew and long, efficient muscle. Put that kind of physical purity together with the brutal edges and planes of his face, and a girl would have to be dead or blind not to appreciate the view. And Goose, sadly, was neither.

  She touched her ruler-straight hair one more time. A reminder. A promise. A warning.

  He yanked out the stool opposite hers and started eating with that methodical, food-is-fuel efficiency.

  “Yes,” she said. “I find you utterly terrifying.” She took a perverse satisfaction in knowing she spoke the complete, vile, unpalatable truth, though she’d be damned if she’d tell him why. “I’m not scared to admit it, either. No need to fish for compliments.”

  He paused, his spoon halfway to his mouth. “I do not fish for compliments.”

  “Of course not,” she said serenely. He glared at her and she concentrated on looking innocent. “If a moose does charge, however, I expect you to behave heroically.”

  “Oh, indubitably,” he said, his tone acid. But that twitch at the corner of his mouth gave him away. He wanted to smile, she knew it. And that didn’t surprise her so much as how badly she wanted to make him do it.

  “So long as we’re on the same page.”

  “Eat, Goose.”

  “Eating.”

  TWO AND half hours of hard hiking later, Rush was hoarse from unaccustomed conversation. Not that he was doing all that m
uch talking, comparatively. A lot for him, yeah. But Goose? Damn. She was some kind of one-woman word factory—full of nonstop questions, comments, thoughts, wonderings.

  Normally, Rush didn’t care for talkers. Air this pristine? This unequivocal? All words did was junk it up until there wasn’t a moment of peace or silence anywhere.

  But somehow, Goose didn’t. Maybe it was her voice—a wonder, now that he considered it, of amused musicality—or the fact that her questions were good ones, her observations razor sharp. But she’d been talking nonstop for the better part of two hours, and while Rush was a little hoarse from the effort to keep up, he wasn’t bored. Or irritated.

  Interesting.

  They crested the last rise and started down a steep incline toward the section of the island known as Copper Beach.

  “So,” Goose said. “At the risk of stating the obvious, can I assume they were mining copper here?”

  “Yeah.” Rush pointed at a handful of shallow basins dotting the landscape between the peak of the hill and the rocky beach. “See those small depressions? Look like frozen lakes?”

  Goose squinted against the glare of the morning sun bouncing off the snow. “Sure. Four—no, five of them?”

  “Right. Indians found copper here originally and mined the basins by hand. Then the white man came and sank actual mine shafts. Never got anything worth mentioning out of them, but there are five or six scattered around the island. Only one of them is really attractive to teenage daredevils with illegal alcohol, though.”

  “That’s the one where we’re headed?”

  “A-plus for detective work.”

  The trail steepened abruptly and conversation stopped while they gave it their complete attention for a few minutes. Eventually they stopped in front of the yawning black eye of an abandoned shaft. There was no sign of human activity that Rush could see, but they’d gotten a good couple feet of fresh snow since the Samuelssons had reported being here.

  “We’ll have to go inside,” Rush said.

  Goose eyed the frozen tunnel drilled into the hillside with distrust. “We will?”

  “If we want to find out if there’s been a recent party here, we will.”

  She frowned at the sagging beam capping the entrance, the rusty “No Trespassing” signs, the newer signs warning of certain death and/or dismemberment, along with the fact that the Park Service was in no way liable for any injury sustained by those boneheaded enough to proceed beyond this point.

  Rush dug a headlamp out of his backpack, slipped it on and said, “Stick close.”

  “Yeah, don’t worry about that.” Her voice was immediately no more than two inches from his shoulder. He smiled into his coat collar and led her into the main shaft, her breath a warm puff he only imagined he could feel against his sleeve. A thick darkness engulfed them as they made their way into the shaft. It extended maybe fifteen, twenty yards into the side of the hill then opened into a low, round room. Rush swung his beam across the dirt floors and found them empty. Completely empty. No beer bottles, no bottle caps, no gum wrappers, no trash. No footprints. Not of the two-legged or the four-legged variety, which was strange, considering what opportunists wild animals were when it came to decent housing.

  But there was something. Something that sent a shot of dismay straight into his gut. A flat rock sat in the dead center of the little round room, maybe two feet high, two wide, six or seven long. That wasn’t the problem, though. No telling how a rock that size had gotten there, but it had been sitting in that exact same spot for generations as far as Rush knew. No, what bugged him was the bowl sitting neatly on top of the stone table. Now that was new. Shit.

  “What the heck?” Curiosity overcame her nerves and Goose stepped away from his elbow toward the rock. “Is that a bowl? There on the coffee table?”

  Rush had to admit, the rock did look sort of like a coffee table. It was low and oblong, with a carved stone bowl sitting on it as if Fred Flintstone had abandoned his salsa a couple thousand years ago. She moved toward it and Rush stepped forward.

  “Don’t touch it.”

  She sidestepped him and peered into the bowl. Then she reached up, grabbed his headlamp and aimed it the same way. “There’s something in here,” she said.

  I’ll bet, Rush thought.

  “Looks like blood. Dried, I guess. Or frozen. Ick.”

  “It’s nothing,” Rush said. But it was a lie. It was definitely something, but not a something he was planning to discuss with Goose. “Animal blood probably.”

  Goose stared at him, and even half blinded by his own headlamp, he could see her arch a skeptical eyebrow. “What, some raccoon cut himself shaving and happened to bleed into this handy bowl?”

  “Listen, I told you, it’s nothing—”

  She reached into her own pack—damn Ben Barnes—and pulled out what Rush assumed was a field kit of some sort. She unearthed a razor blade, a cotton swab and a Ziploc and proceeded to take a sample of whatever the hell was in the bowl. Then she tucked her kit back into her pack, hefted it onto her shoulders and squinted up at him, cheerful in victory.

  “Okay,” she said. “What’s next on that honey-do list of yours?”

  Rush scowled at her and adjusted his headlamp until they could both see again. “Einar’s chickens.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The chickens,” he said. “Einar’s.”

  “Einar keeps chickens?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you need to see them?”

  “Feed them.”

  “Why doesn’t he feed his own chickens?”

  “He’s out of town, remember?”

  “Oh. Right.”

  He headed for the rectangle of blue sky and leaden waters that marked the mouth of the mine. Goose hovered at his elbow, so close he could practically hear her thinking. Close enough to feel the warmth from her breath, for sure, which screwed—in an increasingly predictable way—with his thinking.

  Which was a problem. Because given what he and Goose had just stumbled across, he had some serious thinking to do.

  And somebody on the island had some serious explaining to do.

  She blinked as they emerged into the brilliant light of midmorning, those straight, dark brows drawn together while that quick brain of hers churned. She opened her mouth, and he braced himself. He really, really didn’t want to get into what they’d just discovered.

  “Einar keeps chickens?” she asked, nose wrinkled in puzzlement. “Really?”

  He laughed, though whether from amusement or relief he didn’t know. “Really.”

  EINAR’S CABIN crouched low and gray in a rocky wrinkle on the opposite side of the island from the mines. It clung to the earth with a crooked, white-knuckled grip produced by decades of wind-whipped water. It wouldn’t win any beauty contests, but it wasn’t going anywhere, either. Not now, not ever.

  Goose squinted at it, tried to square the shabby utility of the building with the flash and dazzle of Einar himself.

  “How far are we from South Harbor?” she asked, lifting her voice above the rhythmic shush of their snowshoes.

  “It’s just around the point there,” Rush said, jerking his chin at a sharp jut of rock fighting with the swirling water straight ahead of them. “Five minutes by boat, fifteen by foot.”

  “Nice,” Goose said.

  “Grandpa was no fool. He built close enough for convenience but far enough that he didn’t have to greet—or unload—every boat that docked.”

  Goose blinked. “This was your grandfather’s house?”

  “Sure.” He kicked free of his snowshoes as they approached the cabin. She could see tarpaper between the drooping shingles as Rush propped his snowshoes against the wall. “Einar could keep it up a little better, but when Grandpa built something it didn’t come down.” He frowned out at the lake. “Not accidentally, anyway.”

  Goose kicked out of her snowshoes, too. She followed Rush as he rounded the corner of the cabin. The tiny backyard sported an equ
ally dilapidated shed of some sort that Goose assumed had to be the chicken coop. There was also a plastic-covered arch maybe ten yards long, six feet wide. It was a bit taller than Rush, and insulated on either side by a long row of stacked hay bales. Chicken wire and vinyl sheeting capped both ends.

  “Now I know your grandpa didn’t build that,” she said, nodding toward the hay-bale structure. It looked like it would come down in a stiff wind. “Is it a greenhouse?”

  “Nope. That’s the chicken coop.”

  “The chicken coop?” Goose looked back at the shed. “Then what’s that?”

  “That’s the slaughterhouse.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s not pretty but it’s up to code.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re the island’s health inspector, too?”

  “No,” he said as he shouldered open the cabin’s back door. “I helped Einar convert it when he decided to raise chickens, that’s all.”

  She considered that as she followed him into a miniscule galley kitchen. “You helped him? Or you turned his nasty old shed into a legitimate slaughterhouse while he walked around with his shirt off in case any ladies happened by?”

  He chuckled as he wrestled the lid off an old-fashioned metal trash can inside the pantry. “Some of both, I guess.” He dipped a plastic bucket into the can and came up with a scoop of chicken feed. He filled a second bucket and headed for the chicken coop. Goose followed.

  The plastic arch was maybe six feet wide, and just high enough for a tall man to walk under without stooping. A complicated arrangement of chicken wire, plastic sheeting and two-by-fours spanned the butt end of the arch, and Rush untwisted a series of wires that allowed him to swing it open like a gate. He held it open and waved for her to precede him.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Come on, di Guzman. You’re letting the cold air in.”

  Goose gave him a look that promised retribution should this be some kind of elaborate practical joke, then stepped under the PVC arch supporting the plastic sheeting.