Winter Dreams

by Simmons, Trana Mae

  Shaking his head, Sandy turned away. "Come on. We need to start back."

  Without any further forethought, Laura reached out and curved both sets of her mittened fingers into his ribs, tickling him fiercely. Sandy jerked away from her with a shout, and she followed him. He hit his boot heel on his sled anchor and tripped, sprawling onto his back. She stood over him, fingers arched.

  "Laugh!" she ordered. "All work and no play makes Sandy a dull boy."

  He laughed. Propping her hands on her hips, she stood there and watched, deep satisfaction flowing through her. They'd been working hard for weeks, and he'd been totally serious virtually the entire period. It was time the man learned hard work and fun could go hand in hand.

  Hadn't he ever laughed with his wife?

  When Sandy sat up and stared at her, she realized she'd spoken aloud. For a moment she didn't think he would answer her. Then he did.

  "Yes, Colleen and I laughed," he said in a quiet voice. "A lot. We had our serious times, but we also had fun together. And we enjoyed every minute of our time with each other."

  Covering up a stab of something she didn't recognize in her emotions, Laura backed away a little and propped herself against her sled. "I suppose it's really none of my business, but I have been curious about your marriage."

  He remained sitting, bending his legs and resting his forearms on his knees. For a second she wondered if he would think her too forward. She'd always been allowed freedom to ask questions and talk about anything that came to mind with her father and David. Looking back on it, she guessed her father may have been concerned about being both mother and father to her, since her mother died when Laura was only two. She was fully aware, though, that not everyone — especially the other women she knew — was allowed the freedom she had. Hopefully, Sandy would take her inquiry as natural curiosity, a trait shared by almost all the rest of the world's female population.

  Sandy's eyes deepened to that lovely teal color as he contemplated her comments, and she waited for him to speak — or tell her that he didn't want to discuss his marriage, at least not with her. With all the time they spent together, she saw no need to be standoffish. He'd also made it clear they had to develop a close, dependable partnership if they were to run the Alaskan race together. That, with a strong partnership between the two of them, they could protect each other from danger.

  And she'd never have to face looking at one of her dogs as an entree!

  "They say everyone has a twin somewhere in the world," Sandy said at last. "And I noticed the day we met in Grand Marais that you looked quite a bit like Colleen. But the more time I spend with you, the more I realize how different you are from my wife." He chuckled and shook his head. "I couldn't imagine Colleen deciding she wanted to go with me when I ran in a race, although I could definitely imagine Tracie demanding that. Tracie looks like her mother, too, and I'd be willing to bet she's going to be her mother's twin some day. But she's very different — a combination of my traits and Colleen's, I guess."

  "You never said how your wife died, and I've never asked Tracie. I was afraid it would upset her to talk about it."

  Sandy rose to his feet, dusting the snow from the back of his trousers. "Colleen died of pneumonia. It started out as a simple cold, but by the next day, she was down in bed. She died the day after that. I guess the saying about time healing is true, because Tracie and I are coming to grips with it now. We've started to talk about her between ourselves — and with Cristy. So if Tracie wants to talk to you about her mother, I have no objections."

  "I'll remember that. And much as I hate to be the one to call a halt to our training today, we did both promise Father we'd attend the Commissioner's meeting this evening. I'll need time to get ready. Father expects me to look like a woman rather than a man in training when he puts me on display at those things."

  Chuckling at her parallel, Sandy yanked at his sled anchor, but it refused to pull free. "Yeah, I remember. Did he say why he wanted me there? I'm not really a part of this town yet."

  "He's very mysterious about what the meeting tonight entails," Laura said. "Usually I can tease a secret out of him, but all my wiles were useless this time. The only thing I can figure is that it's something he's sure I'll really like, and he's drawing out his pleasure at anticipating my reaction."

  When he yanked on his sled anchor again, Laura smirked at Sandy's back. She hadn't anchored her own sled, depending on her dogs to obey her command to stay until she ordered them on. Suddenly she leapt onto her sled runners and cried, "Mush!"

  "Hey!" Sandy yelled after her.

  "I'm just taking advantage of a situation that's to my benefit!" she yelled back at him. "Like I would in a real race! Catch me if you can!"

  Remembering his mention of the marsh, she guided her team in that direction. Her dogs, fresh once again after their rest, pulled her behind them effortlessly, and she laughed joyously, enjoying the ride. She couldn't imagine anything more fun than racing across the snow, the noise of her dogs' excited barks the only sounds making it past the roar of the wind in her ears.

  She saw the large brown animal on the other side of the marsh when she topped a slight ridge. The moose raised its huge, antlered head, but she'd encountered plenty of moose on her runs, and her dogs knew to avoid them. She didn't slow the team.

  This time, though, she forgot she was training the yearling pup with the team. She always harnessed the new dogs right behind Blancheur, trusting her lead dog to provide an example of expected behavior. Blancheur justified her trust. He swerved the team's path to give the moose a wide berth without Laura even shouting a change of direction. Unfortunately, the pup went berserk.

  She'd dubbed the pup Trouble, and he lived up to the name. Lunging against his harness, he stumbled and rolled when the rest of the team didn't follow. The unexpected action pulled Blancheur into a misstep, and he turned on Trouble with a growl. Screaming at the dogs, Laura grabbed her sled anchor and threw it out, then reached for the whip she hardly every touched.

  Blancheur was already tangled with Trouble, and Trouble's harness-mate jumped into the melee. The two dogs behind the fighting bunch twisted backward, tangling their own harness as they tried to avoid getting pulled into the fray. The rest of the team howled and barked, half of them straining to join the fight and the others wanting out of there before they got bit.

  Busy worrying about the dogs, Laura missed the moose's charge. When she glanced up, it was within a hundred yards of her, head down and five-foot-wide span of antlers sweeping the ground with deadly intent.

  The moose weighed well over a thousand pounds, hooves as large as the iron skillet Katie used for fried chicken pounding the ground. Those antlers could cause severe damage — or death — to whatever they encountered. Vicious eyes glared, and Laura heard its snorts and grunts of rage even over the dogs' growls and yaps.

  Oh, God! Sandy didn't carry a rifle and neither did she. Laura looked at her whip, realizing at once how ineffective it would be against the huge animal. Hoping prayer would work better, because that seemed the only thing left, she uttered the first one coming to mind: The Lord's Prayer.

  A rifle shot did ring out, and a bullet plowed into the ground in front of the moose, showering up snow. The moose slid to a halt, head lifting and another bellow of rage coming from its throat. It glared to the side, and even the dogs quieted. When Laura saw Buck with his rifle still on his shoulder, standing beneath a pine tree, she breathed a sigh of relief. The moose turned and trotted away, and Laura grabbed the skinning knife from her pack on the sled, hurrying up to the dogs.

  "Be careful with that knife," Sandy called as he halted his team a ways back, so as not to antagonize her dogs again. Anchoring the sled, he walked towards her.

  "This harness is in too big of a mess to untangle," she told him when he was closer. "I'm going to cut it, and have Pete fix it when we get back."

  She didn't glance at him for approval, but he muttered something she didn't hear clearly. She slic
ed Trouble's harness first, and the pup bounded away before either she or Sandy got a firm hold on him. He headed after the moose, his growls interspersed with the howling bay of the hunt. The moose turned to confront its pursuer.

  "Oh my God, no!" Laura yelled. "Trouble! Whoa!"

  "Damn it, I told you to hold onto him," Sandy growled, more clearly this time. "Get back here, Trouble!"

  The stupid dog ignored them, racing right up to the huge animal and snapping at its nose. The moose swept its antlers in an arc, catching the dog and flinging it aside as easily as a leaf. Trouble ki-yied in pain when he landed, then leapt up and rushed back at the moose, skidding to a stop when the animal lowered its head again. Turning, Trouble headed back for the safety of the team, the moose on his heels.

  Sandy shoved Laura toward his sled. "Get on my sled and get the hell out of here!"

  Instead she evaded his grasp and reached down with her skinning knife, cutting the traces on her dogs' harness and freeing them. With the moose only about fifty yards off, they leapt away from the sled. The rifle cracked again, and the moose dropped, the ground trembling beneath its huge weight.

  Blancheur swerved, heading for the smell of fresh blood, and only the tangled harness kept him from speedily reaching the moose. Laura shouted at him to lie down, and he stopped, then complied reluctantly, his teammates effectively halted, also. Not unexpectedly, Trouble ignored her. He bounded atop the moose's carcass with a howl of victory.

  Buck shouted at Laura, and she turned. He tossed his rifle on his sled and mushed his dogs forward, whoa'ing them well clear of the snarled mess of Laura's dogs. Racing over to Sandy's sled, rifle once again in his hands, he asked, "Are you all right, Miss Laura?"

  "I'm fine, Buck," she said, noticing that her voice shook in contradiction to her words. "I can't thank you enough."

  Buck glanced at the moose, then back at Laura. "I was trackin' that moose, but I never thought it would — " His eyes rolled back in his head, and he fainted dead away at her feet.

  Gritting his teeth, Sandy held back a mixture of lingering fear and the burgeoning anger quickly replacing it. He'd never had any problem making decisions, but now he couldn't decide whether to check on Buck, make sure the moose was indeed dead, discipline that half-baked pup Laura had hitched to her sled prior to their run — or grab Laura and alternately shake and kiss some sense into her!

  A vision of what Laura's tiny body would have looked like had the moose not been stopped pushed all other thought aside. And for once he didn't give a damn about his responsibility for her safety being part of his job. He cared that she still stood there unharmed and untrampled — unbroken and unbloodied. That she was still able to look at him with those wonderfully eloquent green eyes. That she could still make him laugh and tickle him with those delicate but expressive hands, should she ever want to again.

  Those eloquent eyes met his gaze just then, filled with the lingering traces of her terror. Sandy grabbed her and pulled her into his arms. Striving to chase the picture of what-could-have-been from his mind, he buried his face on her neck, desperately whispering her name. She wrapped herself around him, clinging tightly, and he caught the sound of a muffled sob.

  Lifting his head, he cupped her face and gazed into tear-misted eyes, which reminded him of leaves after a brief spring shower. His stomach hollowed, and he would have done anything he could to take the fear from her face.

  "Laura, are you going to be all right? My God, you kept your head so well I almost can't believe you're crying now."

  "I'm not crying," Laura denied even while a shiny tear slithered down one stark-white cheek. "I . . . oh, Sandy. That moose was so huge. And I could feel the ground shaking under my feet while it charged."

  His thumb flicked the tear away from where it landed, at the corner of her mouth. "It's over," he whispered, barely managing to get the words past his clogged throat when her tongue tip appeared for a brief instant in the spot where his thumb had just been. He could imagine the salty taste she captured from the tear, and it took everything in him not to cover her mouth with his own and share that taste.

  Her arms remained around his neck, and a shudder ran through her. There wasn't even a breath of space between them, yet somehow she snuggled closer.

  "I'm all right," she murmured. "I know I am. Yet my legs feel like unset jelly."

  "It's the aftereffect of your fear."

  She gave a half-strangled giggle. "Too bad I'm not Tracie. You could kiss it and make it go awa — "

  His lips cut off her words and his mouth swallowed her gasp of astonishment. For a negligible moment, she stiffened in his embrace, then answered the kiss as she had in the dreams he had no control over during the night. With no restraint. With no further hesitation. With all the ardor and fervor he had come to associate with Laura Goodman — a woman who embraced life with the same intensity as she returned his kiss.

  For a long time nothing else mattered to Sandy beyond the confines the two of them occupied. He held her and kissed her, satisfying the yearning he had felt ever since the first day he laid eyes on her in Grand Marais. Most definitely ever since the dream that had stirred his long-dormant libido that night in the hotel.

  Then Buck moaned and the sound penetrated his mind. He couldn't let Buck wake and see him kissing Laura. But he couldn't break free, either. Just one more second. One more second to last the rest of eternity, while she was married to another man.

  Laura was the one who broke the kiss, and Sandy found the willpower somewhere to let her. Desire rather than fear misted her eyes now, and her kiss-swollen lips pouted temptingly before she quickly covered them with her mittened hand.

  "I'm . . . sorry," Sandy choked out. "I lost my common sense due to the aftereffect of my own fear, I guess. I won't let it happen again."

  "I asked you to — "

  "No! You didn't mean for me to kiss you literally. You just needed a little comfort to get over the shakiness. I shouldn't have done any more than hold you until that passed."

  She straightened her shoulders, the determination he so admired in her flowing back into her face.

  "We were both rather shook up," she said, nodding her head as though empathizing her words. "Let's don't talk about it again. Forget it happened."

  Buck moaned once more, and Laura fell to her knees beside him. Sandy clenched his fists and closed his eyes briefly, gathering his decision to not reach for her anew into a firm resolve. Then he swiped Buck's rifle from the snow, heading off to check on the moose.

  Warily he eyed the moose as he approached, his concentration an ineffective barrier to the lingering feel of Laura in his arms. Up closer, he saw the hole leaking bright red blood in the middle of the beast's forehead. Buck's drinking evidently hadn't spoiled his aim. He walked on over to it, confident the animal would never rise. No doubt the reason it attacked in the first place was the rut being in full swing. The animal hadn't taken kindly to a bunch of people invading what it had staked off as its mating territory. The trouble-making dog had just sparked the situation into further fury.

  Sandy grabbed Trouble by the harness. The pup curled its top lip and snapped at his arm, lucky for it — missing. Sandy yanked the pup from the moose and forced it belly down on the ground. It took only one glance at Sandy's face to break the pup's antagonism. It whimpered and pressed its belly tighter into the snow, and Sandy spoke to it, his tone of voice getting his point across even if the animal didn't understand his words.

  "You came damned close to getting Laura killed, you sorry little son of a bitch. From now on, I'll work you with my team instead of letting Laura or Pete handle you. You'll either turn into a sled dog or you'll spend your life on a pack team instead of a race team!"

  Grabbing a piece of rope from his coat pocket, he looped it through Trouble's collar and led the dog back to the sleds. Buck was sitting up now, and Laura murmured soothingly to him, her arm around Buck's puny shoulders. They both looked up as Sandy tied Trouble to the side of Laura's sled.
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  Buck's presence reminded him sharply that it had been the other man who saved Laura, not him. His near lethal failure to protect her crashed back into his consciousness, and he told himself he needed to drive home to Laura the mistakes she had made. Emphasize the need for her to learn from what had just happened, in order to keep other similar errors from posing a threat in the future. There might not be a drunk to depend on to rescue her the next time a danger he was unprepared for threatened her.

  "The moose is stone dead," he informed them in a low growl. "And we've got you, Buck, to thank for the fact we're both alive to tell the tale of what happened here."

  Laura straightened and faced him. Her expressive face told him that she was aware his thoughts had gone from wanting to comfort her to wanting to lambaste her from Monday to Sunday for her inappropriate actions. Composed now and over her fear, she waited for his criticism, willing, just like the Laura he was coming to know so well, to take her medicine.

  "There's no need for you to say it," she said. "I know I caused this mess. I broke one of your most important rules and several other ones besides. First, I forgot to always be aware of what dogs I have in my team. I forgot I was training Trouble and he wouldn't respond like a seasoned teammate to a threat of danger."

  Sandy's respect mounted for the tiny slip of a woman, who made no excuses for herself. He didn't dare let himself think there might be something over and above the respect creeping into his heart, though.

  "What else did you forget?" he asked.

  "I forgot the dogs always have to be made submissive to me. That it's not being mean to them when I force them to obey — it's thinking of both their safety and mine. I should have had a good hold on Trouble before I cut him out of the traces."

  "And?"

  She chewed her bottom lip, her frown tugging at his heartstrings. His heart would cry a lot louder if someone carried her cold, dead body in from a snowy trail some day, though. He stared steadily at her.

  "I . . . forgot that a race is business, not fun?" she asked with a lift of a feathery brow.