by Lucy Monroe
Carey had had a couple million to support his dreams. He sure didn't look like he was coming back broken like she was. In fact, he was surrounded by a group who were clearly in the industry.
Caitlin had spent eight years living the life in LA and she could recognize actors and production people as easily as she could a knockoff Chanel bag.
What were they all doing heading into Anchorage? It was unlikely they were all here for a shoot, because even though a lot of movies purported to be set in Alaska, but few actually were. In fact, it was something of a joke among residents how often the media got it seriously wrong in their attempts to portray America's largest state. But who knew, maybe they were here for a shoot. Stranger things had happened. She certainly never thought she’d be moving back to Alaska.
Not that she had any intention of asking. Caitlin wasn't the extrovert she'd been when she left Cailkirn anymore. She was a lot more judicious about who she spoke to and why. The fact she'd chosen to interact with the small boy beside her was as surprising as Carey's presence on the plane.
"They're all laughing. They're not afraid," Joey said, sounding like he was trying to process what that might mean.
"I imagine they are used to flying, sugar," his mother said.
Caitlin nodded. "I'm sure they are and they know just like I do that we're all going to be okay."
Joey's smile was worth her foray out of her self-imposed shell.
His mother's silently mouthed, "Thank you," caused an unfamiliar furl of warmth inside her as well.
Maybe Joey wasn't the only one who needed to know they were going to be okay. Maybe Caitlin needed to remember she was okay too. That she'd taken the steps she needed to get her life back. She wasn't running away from anything now, just returning to safety and the one place maybe she really belonged.
* * * * *
Tack MacKinnon finished nailing down the new stair riser on the back porch steps of the Knit & Pearl Bed and Breakfast.
It was a rare morning off for him during tourist season. Even though it was early May, he still had plenty to do getting his business ready for the busier months to come. Whether he was out blueprinting a new tour, navigating old ones and looking for changes in the land over the past year, or taking out some of the early season clients, Tack's long hours had already started.
He'd planned a trip into Kenai for this morning, but when the eldest Grant sister had phoned to ask for his help, he hadn't even considered saying no.
He might be a MacKinnon, but everyone pitched in to help the Grant sisters. The Grant sisters were the last of that particular founding family still living in Cailkirn and Alma, Moya, and Elspeth were as close to town royalty as anyone was ever going to get.
Even though Miss Alma was technically a Winter by marriage and Miss Moya, her sister-in-law, was a Grant because she'd married the only brother, most folks didn't distinguish between them. They were still “Grant Sisters". Sadly, both women had lost their husbands before Tack had even been born. The final sister, Elspeth Grant had never married.
And was one of the most vigilant matchmakers in all of Alaska, along with her sisters. Though few questioned the claim that Miss Elspeth was the most romantic of the lot.
"Oh, thank you, Tack. You're such a good boy." Miss Elspeth smiled at him from the wide porch. "You'll stay for some tea, won't you?"
"Of course, Miss Elspeth." It was getting late to make the trip into Kenai and be back in time for his afternoon tour anyway. "A man would have to be a fool to turn down your shortbread cookies."
Miss Elspeth went pink with pleasure. "Maggie Grant brought the recipe from the Old Country and it hasn't changed in nearly two centuries. Our dear grandmother passed it down to me even though Alma is the oldest."
"My da won't admit it, but they're even better than my gran's shortbread." Tack grinned up at the elderly spinster. "I'd appreciate it if you didn't mention that to Gran MacKinnon though."
Miss Elspeth laughed, the sound soft and youthful despite being closer to seventy than sixty. "Your secret is safe with me. I've got a secret of my own you know."
"Really?”
"Yes. I haven't even told Moya," she finished in a conspiratorial whisper.
"Oh?" he asked, indulging the sweet elderly woman.
"Nope."
That surprised him. The two elderly ladies had been best friends before they became sisters via marriage and were extremely close. Usually, what one knew, so did the other – and both delighted in knowing something Miz Alma did not.
The childlike delight in Miss Elspeth's faded blue eyes made him smile. "Are you going to tell me?"
"You know, I think I just might." She nodded, her straight red hair fluttering in the breeze. "Yes. You deserve it; you take such good care of us."
* * * * *
Some might the think the Grant sisters were a few crayons shy of a full box. What with all three of them still dying their hair red, claiming to be a good twenty years younger than they were and wearing fancy hats to church every Sunday. Then there was the way they Miz Moya talked to the ghost of her deceased husband, in company. And all three of the sisters were convinced their home-turned-bed-and-breakfast was haunted by the first Maggie Grant.
Still, Tack liked them.
No one in the town loved Cailkirn more or was more dedicated to the town's thriving.
None of them wanted it to turn into another Anchorage, or even Fairbanks, but Cailkirn was less than a decade shy of its two hundredth birthday. He and the Grant sisters shared the need to know it would celebrate that centennial and many more.
Miss Elspeth had fussed Tack's muscular six and a half foot frame into a sturdy wooden chair at her kitchen table and put the kettle on before she returned to her secret. "Someone's coming home."
Tack didn't want to steal Miss Elspeth's thunder. So, he didn't tell her that he'd heard rumors of Rock Jepsom's younger brother coming. Carey and a bunch of his friends had booked into the Northern Lights Lodge. With twenty guest rooms, it was the only thing resembling a hotel in, or around Cailkirn.
The vast majority of Cailkirn's tourist income came from the more than half a million guests from the cruise ships that docked daily in their ports May thru September. Day only visitors, they had no need for local lodgings.
In a bid for town harmony, Tack did his best to share the MacKinnon Bros. Tours clients between the lodge run by the Sutherlands and the Grant sisters' B&B. Thankfully the different types of accommodations appealed to different types of his "Enjoy the Real Alaska Experience" clients.
"Who's coming for a visit, Miss Elspeth?"
"Oh, she's not coming for a visit. She's coming home to stay.”
"She?" he asked in sepulcher tones, disbelief causing a major disruption in the synapses of his brain.
“I always knew she would, no matter what Alma said. Sean would have too, if he and Gina hadn't been in that terrible accident."
A frisson of foreboding spun through Tack, sliding right into no-the-hell-way.
Miss Elspeth could not mean who he thought she did. She hadn't stepped foot in Alaska since dropping out of college to marry Nevin Barston eight years ago. No way was she coming home to Cailkirn. Unlike Tack, her former best friend and the fool who'd loved her too much and too long, the petite redhead hated Alaska. She especially despised life in the small town that her parents had fought so hard to leave behind.
"Yes, my niece." Miss Elspeth put her hands together as if in prayer. "Kitty's coming home."
Tack took a big gulp of tea and then choked as he tried not to spit it out in shock at its scalding heat.
Kitty…call me Caitlin, please was coming home.
Miss Elspeth was up patting his back before he realized she'd crossed the kitchen. "Are you all right Tack? You work too hard. You need to take a day off."
He didn't mention that today, or at least that morning was supposed to be exactly that. Doing so would be churlish and there was something truly wrong about being grumpy with a Grant sister. Eve
n after she announced the woman that had broken Tack's heart and abandoned their friendship for the acceptance of people like Nevin Barston was coming home.
Moving home.
"What about Barston?"
"She divorced him." There was something in Miss Elspeth's tone.
Grief. Anger. Satisfaction.
It was all there.
"I didn't realize they were having problems."
"Well, it's not as if you listen to talk about her. You practically run from the room when Kitty is mentioned."
"I do not." Though probably? He did.
She'd been the love of his life and she'd never seen him as more than a disposable friend.
"Well, that is neither here nor there. Kitty always said everything was fine, but we could see there were difficulties. She lost her spark, our Kitty. She also lost so much weight she looked like a skeleton." Miss Elspeth had maintained the trim figure of her Miss Alaska days, but she'd never been rail thin like so many of the women he'd met in Los Angeles.
"That's not all that abnormal for LA, Miss Elspeth." He didn't like the thought that Kitty's blue eyes had lost their shine though.
Her summer sky gaze, so different from his dark one, had been the first thing his six year old self had noticed about the new girl in school. Pale with tiny freckles, she'd been so different than a boy who took his coloring from his Inuit mother. He'd been mesmerized by that difference and she'd never lost her fascination for him.
Which was why he'd never allowed himself to stick around when people were talking about her. The only way to sever his Kitty addiction had been to cut off all ties to her, just like she'd cut off all ties to him.
"If you'd seen her, you wouldn't say that. When she called from the hospital, she weighed ninety-three pounds."
Pain pierced Tack's heart, though he'd never acknowledge it. "That can't be right."
Sure Kitty had lost some weight once they moved to California to attend USC, but she'd been healthy the last time Tack saw her. Curves in all the right places, she might have been a little thin for his taste. She'd still turned him on like no other woman ever had. Kitty hadn't been bone-protruding skinny by any stretch.
Miss Elspeth sat down with her own cup of tea, her expression somber. "Our Kitty almost died and we weren't there. Moya went though, after our girl called. She stayed with Kitty for six weeks. You remember?"
"Yes." It had been the previous winter.
Despite her lifelong and very vocal lack of desire to ever visit the Lower 48, Miz Moya had said she was going south for the sunshine. Tack had thought it odd, but chalked it up to the elderly woman missing her only grandchild.
"Kitty said that's why she'd had so many broken bones over the last couple of years. They'd gotten brittle she said." Miss Elspeth frowned. "Grant bones don't go brittle. We're hardy stock. My grandfather lived to be ninety and Gran another twelve years after that. Neither had a single bone break in all those years."
"Kitty broke something?" Tack asked in disbelief.
She'd gotten into more scrapes as a kid, always taking risks. He could remember the tumble she'd taken when they'd been hiking on Resurrection Pass when they were twelve. It had about stopped his heart, but she hadn't so much as gotten a hairline fracture.
"More than one something. She didn't break her wrist, crack two of her ribs or her clavicle bone bumping into walls, no matter how brittle her bones."
Bile rose in Tack's throat. "Nevin Barston beat her?"
That son of a bitch! The primal urge to protect rose in Tack. Images of beating Barston until Tack had broken every bone that Miss Elspeth had listed, plus a few more, flashed through the red haze in his mind.
Elspeth's lips thinned in a sad line. "Kitty never said so, but that man destroyed our girl."
"She's coming home now, though." Tack just didn't understand why, if it had been that bad, Kitty hadn't come back a long time ago.
Or at the very least last spring when a pretty subdued Miz Moya had returned to Cailkirn. She'd stayed in California another full year by his reckoning.
Was her dislike for their small town life so strong she'd rather live with a monster than come back to it?
Miss Elspeth reached out and patted Tack's hand, her smile belied by the tears sparkling in her faded blue eyes. "You're right. She is moving home. And it's going to be all right."
Tack rose from the table and gave the older woman a gentle but firm hug. "Of course it will."
Tack had more doubts on that front than he'd had since bringing his broken heart home to Cailkirn seven years ago, but he wouldn't voice them.
* * * * *
Keyed up by the idea of returning to Cailkirn for the first time in almost a decade, Caitlin walked behind Joey and his mother toward baggage claim.
When they arrived a huge man stepped forward stopping the mother and son's progress. Like a lot of Alaskan men, particularly those who lived outside of the major cities, he had facial hair. Before she could stop it, an image of the close cropped beard and mustache Tack MacKinnon wore popped into her head. It was the perfect, perpetual five o’clock shadow and the only beard Caitlin had ever found appealing.
It didn’t bode well that she’d been on Alaskan soil for less than an hour and she'd already started thinking about Tack. Moisture slicked her palms at the prospect of seeing the man again, nerves superseding the anticipation she shouldn't be feeling anyway. She'd callously jettisoned him from her life, betraying years of friendship. She doubted Tack would have the time of day for her anymore, much less be interested in renewing their acquaintance.
There would be no healing of that particular self-inflicted wound in her heart. Considering how stomped on and shredded that organ had been over the past years, Caitlin was surprised at the level of regret that thought elicited in her.
She'd pretty much decided her heart was beyond fixing. She'd erected a steel wall around her emotions a long time ago and it had been tempered in the fire of pain that burned through her life. There should be no room for regret at a loss that had already happened. The last thing she needed was the vulnerability of any kind of relationship, even friendship.
Pushing aside her own disturbed thoughts, Caitlin couldn't help noticing the way Joey and his mother reacted to the man who was so clearly there to meet them. Joey was staring up at the man in rapt fascination, but his mother appeared as nauseated as she had on the plane, her gaze shadowed by trepidation.
"Is this my new daddy?" Joey asked with the keen interest and innocence of a small boy.
Shock coursed through Caitlin at the question and her brain spun with explanations of where it could come from. Daddy? They were a family of strangers, or a family in the making?
The man having the looks of a modern day Cossack, the mother with the accent and delicate pale features of a Southern belle and the little boy with short nappy hair and skin the color of coffee with just a dash of cream, they embodied the diversity so much a part of her home state.
The man stared down at the boy for several seconds of tense silence. Then he addressed the woman. "Savannah Marie?"
"Yes."
"You didn't say you had a child."
"You didn't ask."
Caitlin recognized Savannah's tense stance all too well. The Southern woman didn't know how her Cossack was going to react to her words, but she wasn't dissolving into apologetic explanations either and Caitlin couldn't help admiring that strength.
The tall Alaskan man turned abruptly and started walking away.
Savannah's shoulder's slumped, the defeat in her posture too familiar for Caitlin to ignore.
Not that she'd ever let her own sense of despondency show, but Caitlin had felt it too long and too deeply not to recognize it in another human being. She might have learned to stifle concern for herself, but Caitlin had never been able to turn it off completely in regard to others. Since marrying Nevin, she'd done her best to protect her grandmother and aunts from the sharp edges of Caitlin's life, but this overwhelming ne
ed to react to a stranger's situation wasn't something she'd experienced in a long time.
Caitlin wasn't looking for a friend, or complications to her barely pulled together life, but her feet moved of their own volition, drawing her nearer the other woman.
She reached out to touch Savannah's shoulder and offer help, though heaven knew Caitlin wasn't anyone's idea of a hero.
However before her hand connected the man turned back with a brusque, "Aren't you coming? You'll need to point out your bags for me. We've got to get on the road. The drive to Cailkirn from here isn't short."
The Southern woman's sigh of relief and whispered, "Thank God," got to Caitlin in a way that nothing else had in a long time.
Before she could talk herself out of it, she let her hand fall on Savannah's shoulder, causing the other woman to stop and turn to face Caitlin. "Pardon?"
"You're going to Cailkirn?" Caitlin forced herself to ask.
The other woman's grey gaze reflected the mix of emotions Caitlin had heard in her voice a moment ago as well as confusion. "I think so?"
Caitlin nodded. "Come on then. Let's get our bags. We're going to the same place and I'm going to talk your...friend," she settled on, uncertain what the relationship was at this point. "Into giving me a ride."
Her original intention had been to rent a car and make the drive herself. Her brain was telling her that's exactly what Caitlin should do. But she couldn't help remembering all the times in the last few years she wished someone else had stepped in as a buffer between her and Nevin. She wasn't sure Savannah needed one, not really, but Caitlin wasn't walking away until she was sure the other woman didn't.
"Oh, I don't know..."
"Don't worry. I won't take up a lot of room." Caitlin winked, proud of herself for making the comment without feeling the shame that still sometimes accompanied any reference to her body.
"But—"
"He won't mind. It's an Alaskan thing. Neighbors help neighbors. Especially in the small towns, but nowhere more than in Cailkirn."
