by Meg Maguire
“Katie.” He smoothed her hair off her face and wiped the blood from her skin as best he could. He lost himself for a moment to overwhelming emotions—relief and fear and gut-wrenching guilt, a lifetime of stale grief made fresh. He lowered his face to her shoulder and concentrated on her breathing. Each exhalation calmed him, rooted him back in the present. Kate was alive, but she wasn’t necessarily safe. Not out here, not if she was hurt.
Just as Ty began conceiving a plan for how best to get her to the safety team, her eyes opened.
“Oh thank Christ!” he boomed into the sky.
“Ty…” She sounded groggy, but she was okay. She was okay.
“Bloody hell, Katie, you scared me.”
“Where are we?”
He looked around, needing a second to recall there was a world beyond the face of the woman he’d just nearly lost. “The dogsled trail.”
“Right… And the dogs?”
“A long ways away now.” He stroked her hair, still frantic. “How do you feel? Is anything broken?”
She frowned. “I’m not sure. Let me try and stand up.”
“Careful.” Ty thought he might pass out himself, she’d given him such a fright.
“Ow,” she said, making it to kneeling.
“What?”
“Just bumps, I think. Nothing major… Oh God!” She stood up in a flash.
Ty whipped his head around, scanning for bears and avalanches. “What?”
“The equipment—the cameras! Do we have any cameras?” She looked overwrought. Unbelievable.
“Jesus, I don’t know. The sled dumped about half our stuff. Worry about it in a minute—let’s make sure you’re okay.”
“I am. I feel fine.” She touched her lips and studied the blood on her fingers, made an irritated face and wiped it on her jeans.
Ty saw her arms shaking faintly beneath her sweater and he slipped his jacket off. “Here.”
She took it, still distracted. “Thanks. What a mess.” Her calculating eyes scanned the area, telling him she was already back in work mode.
“Are you sure you’re okay? Do you feel any bumps? You could be concussed.”
“I’m fine. Let’s just get ourselves assembled.” She trudged toward their jettisoned supplies.
Ty, however, didn’t want to regroup just yet. Sense had been knocked into him by the incident. It had whiplashed his brain, sending the fear that had been niggling at the back of his mind for a very long time crashing to the forefront, demanding his attention. This ridiculous project—this stupid TV show—had nearly killed his best friend.
Beneath the subsiding shock, primitive synapses burst to life in his chest. Possessive ones. Their energy jumbled with the fear and guilt, making Ty’s blood run fast and hot—faster and hotter than even he was comfortable with. He watched Kate’s body working, already recovered from its trauma, and an instinct rose inside him, sharp and insistent. It burned through the angst and replaced it with other urges—urges not just to protect and shield this woman, but to possess her, to take her. To tear away that lone wall that kept them from being everything to one another.
A SHORT DISTANCE AWAY, Kate took a deep breath and made an inventory of the items she could see. She pulled Ty’s proffered jacket on, glad for the warmth and for a reassuring layer of protection. She needed to turn her attention back to the show, because in truth, the accident had scared her witless. She’d grown plenty used to adrenaline rushes since she’d taken this job, but this was a thrill too far—the closest she’d ever flirted with a major injury in all the time they’d been doing this. Too close for comfort. Even Ty seemed disturbed, and that in itself was scary.
More than a mere mortal, however, Kate was first and foremost a professional. No way she was going to stand around wasting time now that the damage had already been done. One of the cameras had been pitched in the accident. Kate unzipped its padded case and breathed a sigh of relief to find it in one piece. The show would go on.
“Good news, boss.” She held it up to show Ty, but he didn’t respond.
Ty’s eyes seemed to be looking through her, his energy even more intense than usual. His boots sloshed as he walked to her. She watched him swallow deeply, expression fraught as though he were unraveling.
“Yeah, Ty?”
He swallowed again, his eyes darting back and forth between hers. Something fierce was brewing behind the deceptive blue-green calm.
“It’s okay. We’re both okay,” she began, but his face told her the words weren’t registering. His arms rose and encircled her, cautiously at first, then he pulled her tight against his chest. One broad hand cupped the back of her head, pressing her face into his neck, the other fisting the oversize coat.
“Dear God,” he said, his mouth pushed so hard into her hairline that it sounded as if his voice were coming from inside her skull. “I never imagined I’d come so close to losing you.”
“I’m fine, Ty.” She tried to pull away but his embrace was tight and needy, so she let him hold on. She’d never seen him like this, so rattled. It embarrassed her a little, intimidated her a lot…. His breaths came fast and shallow, and Kate returned the hug with her free arm, hoping to calm him. “It’s okay.” She rubbed his back, an upright version of what she did when his insomnia drove him into her bed.
Ty’s body loosened. His hands released their death grip and he let her go, stepping back a pace and staring at her. His eyes were round and unfocused. Kate caught the corner of his mouth twitching.
She zipped the camera back in its bag and set it aside, looked nervously up at Ty. “Are you okay?”
Shaking slightly, his hands cupped her shoulders, the way they had dozens of times before. She felt her eyes widen and she squirmed as his palms slid up to her neck.
“This so isn’t the time, Ty.”
He ignored her protest, thumbs pressing against her pulse points as the script dictated. Lips on her temple. Snow began to fall.
“Knock it off,” she said.
“What?”
“Your stupid flirting shtick.”
His mouth slid farther still, until she heard his soft voice right in her good ear. “I’m not playing right now.”
She faltered. “Don’t be a jerk.”
He shifted so their noses touched, right on cue. “Then tell me what you want me to be,” he whispered, his lips grazing hers. That wasn’t part of the script.
“What I want you to be?” she whispered back, flubbing her lines.
“Who am I to you?”
The Shift again, but this time it was different. Intense, and not a game. All she managed to say was, “Who are you?”
“Yeah.” She felt Ty’s smile more than she could see it from this close, heard it in his words. “What am I, Katie? Your boss? Your friend?”
“Both,” she mumbled. Her heart had lodged in her throat like a rubber ball, cutting off her oxygen.
“Could I ever be more?”
“Are you about to kiss me?” she asked, dumbstruck, heart pounding. She’d never been any good at playing coy.
“Are you about to let me?”
She trembled. “I dunno. Frigging find out.”
Ty’s thumbs slid up past her jaw and pressed hard into her cheeks, just as his lips parted and took her lower one between them.
A kiss. An actual, technical kiss.
Kate’s eyes closed and a deep shiver passed through her body when she heard and felt a soft moan escape from Ty’s throat. A hunk of snow fell from her collar down the back of her sweater, the wet chill balancing the heat of Ty’s mouth. He kissed her again. She kissed back. He angled his jaw and opened his mouth wider, his tongue timidly flirting with hers, then going deeper, bolder. Kate’s hands were dangling limply at her sides and she got control of them, pushed them through the ends of Ty’s jacket’s long sleeves. Once they were free, she ran them up his hard, bare arms and settled them in his hair, knocking his hat off. His mouth felt dangerous—demanding and hot and wet, and he tasted
just as she’d always known he would. Kate forgot the accident and her professionalism in a flash of hormonal amnesia. She wanted more. She wanted to taste every inch of him, and to be sampled by his mouth in return, all over her body. How many nights had she lain mere inches from this mouth, listening as Ty whispered sleepy words in the dark of a tent or the back of a van? How many nights had she spent wondering if they’d ever take things too far? She’d imagined this moment a hundred times—a thousand times. And she’d been wrong. It was so much better than her imagination had ever dared to hope.
The kiss deepened and intensified. Wet snowflakes landed on Kate’s flushed face and she held in a groan as one of Ty’s strong hands cupped her head. His body pressed into hers until they stumbled back a step, her shoulders pushed hard against a tree trunk. An invisible floodgate opened between them. Ty’s kissing turned shallow as the noises he seemed helpless to control escaped him. Moans and dark, heavy breaths, grunts and sighs. His hand tightened in her hair and suddenly he wrenched his lips from hers, moving them to her temple, close to her good ear. His breath steamed against her skin.
“God, Katie.”
An old sensation crept in to banish the passion, cooling her. Fear. She pushed him back a pace. “Don’t.”
He stared down at her face. “Don’t what?”
Don’t make me fall for you. “Just don’t do that again.” She licked her lips, still burning and tender where his had savaged them. An icy trickle of water ran down her back as she pulled away from the tree, a cold, cruel finger tracing her spine.
Ty’s voice turned soft and melancholy. “Sure. Sorry.” He turned away and strode to the scattered cargo.
For a half a minute she just watched him, suppressing a hundred urges—to call out to him, tell him she changed her mind, tell him to go to hell, tell him to come back here and take more, whatever he wanted. Instead she followed suit, wandering around and gathering their stuff. Each rescued item rooted her more firmly in rational thought, wrapped her in safety, kept the fear at bay. Kept the old Kate at bay, the one who’d let her heart rule her head in her teens and early twenties, led her down too many painful paths in pursuit of affection from men who had none to offer. Grasping, needy, white trash Kate Sullivan, little miss daddy-abandonment issues from the wrong side of a town she’d never make it out of… Only she had. She’d edited out all the bad bits of herself, ditched her Boston accent and her last name and her suffocating clinginess, reinvented herself. She was different now, and Ty was like a test. If she followed her body’s wishes she’d be gambling with too much—her job, her closest friendship, her new identity. And over what? If she knew Ty at all, it’d be a couple days’ or a couple weeks’ excitement, then he’d go cold. She’d seen him do it with enough women—women far more fascinating than Kate—and she refused to be the next in line.
She watched his back as he pulled on some extra layers he’d scavenged from the remaining cargo. A tremor shuddered from deep inside her chest, and in its wake she felt the sweet relief of knowing she’d held fast to the one thing that kept her in control. Kate found her coat and took Ty’s off, zipping herself into the familiar. She clad her body in warm down, waterproof nylon, her heart in the iron and steel forged by old pain and thickened by every person she’d ever lain down and played the sucker for.
You’ve already got my life, Dom Tyler. She stared at him across the churned-up snow. Don’t think for a second you’ll take my heart.
4
“SNOW’s PICKING UP,” Ty said, looking in front of them, then behind. “What do you reckon? Turn back and head for the Greniers’?”
Kate shook her head, glad for a rational topic to refocus her attention. “The safety crew’s closer by now…it’s got to be.” She pulled her hat on and glanced around, noting how thick and dense the snow had indeed become. “But there’s a fork in the trail…it splits into two loops and they don’t reconnect for quite a ways. I don’t know which route is right, and the map’s in your pack.”
“Which is halfway home by now,” Ty sighed, looking in the direction the dogs had long since disappeared in.
Kate nodded. “Along with the GPS and satellite phone. As far as the safety crew can tell, we’re making steady progress. They won’t even suspect anything’s wrong until this afternoon, when the dogs get back home ahead of schedule with no humans in tow.”
“Bugger.”
“Yeah, bugger. We need to move fast and find the fork before the snow covers the dogs’ tracks.” Kate sputtered out a frustrated breath. She forced herself into work mode, escaping thoughts of hypothermia, of Ty’s mouth, of the ache he’d left in her body. They loaded all the supplies back into her pack and Ty shouldered it. Kate set the lone remaining camera up with its sun hood to keep the flakes from streaking the lens. Flicking the power on, she trained the viewfinder on Ty’s head and shoulders as she trudged alongside him.
His posture shifted and he reclaimed some of the hostly professionalism he’d lost since the crash. He turned to address their future audience.
“Well, this is unexpected.” He cleared his throat. “If the camera I mounted on the sled survived its trip back to town, you’ll have noticed I didn’t exactly go with it. That’s not an uncommon way to find yourself suddenly lost in the Canadian bush, either. Every year, dozens of people get separated from their dogsleds just like this, and believe it or not, we didn’t stage that.”
Ty glanced at the dark woods surrounding them, the even grayness of the sky above. Great flakes of sticky snow clung to his eyebrows and sideburns and flew into his face, making him squint. “We’re out of simulation mode now, I’m afraid, and right up against it in a proper survival situation. How’s that for a season finale? I wish I could tell you I knew how far I am from our safety crew’s camp, but I can’t. I think it’s about one o’clock now, and if I don’t come across them in the next couple hours, I’m going to have to change strategies and start working on a shelter. It looks like there could be a nasty late-season storm coming through. It’s not just me trapped out here, either,” he added, pointing to the camera. “The crew’s here, too, obviously, and I’m not taking any risks with their safety.”
Ty paused so the commentary could be cut cleanly during editing before he continued. “What you at home didn’t see,” he said to the lens, “was that my camerawoman and production assistant, Kate Somersby, finally let me kiss her after two years of torturous cock-blocking.”
“Two and a half,” Kate corrected after a pause, against her better judgment.
“Two and a half, my fact-checker is telling me. I can say for the record now that she tastes like honey and some sort of exotic spice.”
“That’s just my tea.” She tried to mask how shy he was making her feel, keeping the camera pressed to her eye, a shield against the intimacy he was trying to draw her into.
Ty continued his narration. “And when she ran her fingers through my hair, I wanted to pin her against that tree and make her beg me to take her.”
“Stop it.” Kate halted and lowered the camera. Strange energy twitched in the nest of nerves in her lower belly. “Don’t joke about that.”
“I’m not.”
She resumed walking so she wouldn’t have to face him.
“I wouldn’t joke about that. I’ve wanted that for too bloody long to find it funny.”
“Sounded like a joke to me,” she snapped.
“I’m sorry, then. But it’s not.”
“Fine. Just keep it to yourself. I don’t feel that way about you.”
“No?” For once there was no tease in Ty’s voice, just resounding, questioning disappointment.
“No. Believe it or not, at least one straight woman on this planet isn’t looking to melt into a puddle just because the great Dom Tyler deigned to kiss her.”
Ty’s eyebrows knitted. “Well, don’t make me sound like a colossal wanker about it.”
“Check your track record, Ty. Milk keeps longer than your relationships, and I’m not exactly g
unning to be the next thing that goes sour for you. Maybe you’ve forgotten, but I’m your partner and your friend. And your employee.”
“You’re also the woman who lets me crawl into her bed in the middle of the night.”
She pursed her lips. “This show has to go on, Ty. Which means you have to sleep on occasion. Which means I do what I need to to make that happen.”
“You care about this show a lot, don’t you?” Ty asked.
Kate nodded, not meeting his eyes.
“What’s the most important part of it, to you?”
How thoroughly it lets me avoid cultivating actual relationships and putting down roots. “I just like being a part of something, Ty. I like being useful and needed and depended on.”
Ty was quiet for a while and when he spoke, he sounded older. Tired. “I need to change a few things about your job description, Kate.”
Her blood chilled. She wiped the melting snowflakes from her eyelashes and looked at him, wary. “What do you mean?”
“I think you should stay home from now on. From the excursions.”
Kate felt her heart race into overdrive, this pronouncement infinitely more terrifying than any survival scenario she’d ever come along for. Her brain supplied words Ty hadn’t actually spoken, filled them in from a script she’d been living out her entire life. I don’t need you. I’m leaving you behind. All at once, she was ready to flee and cry and scream and attack.
She shook her head, awestruck, grasping for control of her temper. “You can’t do that, Ty.”
“I have to after what just happened.”
“Are you firing me?”
“I didn’t say that. I’m just saying you’re off filming. You can keep the rest of your job, just not this.” Ty waved his arm to encompass the dreary landscape.
Kate felt a tightness in her chest, a sensation of suffocating dread. “No. No. You can’t just…ditch me.” She heard the old Kate in those words and cringed at how needy she sounded.
