And even more than that, he seemed to genuinely care about her.
Kate wished she had the nerve to move closer to him, to sit beside him and rest her head on his shoulder. Let the wine and her own exhaustion break down the last of her barriers. Right now she’d be perfectly content to let him protect and defend and be the strong one. She wanted to lean into the warm, solid strength of him and let him shoulder the load for a while. She was so tired. So very, very tired. She glanced across the fire and was startled to see that he was watching her.
“Tell me why you won’t use my plane,” she said.
For a long time, for the longest time, she thought he wasn’t going to respond. The loon called again, a lonely, haunting wail that pierced her heart with a pain like she’d never felt before. And then, finally, after an aching eternity, he spoke.
“I already told you why. You of all people should understand the independence thing. I don’t need to ride on your coattails and I’m not going to. I appreciate what you’re trying to do, Kate, but I’m a big boy. I can take care of myself. I’ve been doing it for years.”
“Yourself, yes, but what about Hayden?”
“It won’t come down to that, but if it does I’ll do right by him. Now, before you say another word, why don’t you try moving a little closer? It’s getting cold. I promise I won’t bite, and you’re way too good-looking to be sitting there all by yourself, brooding about a plane.”
“AND THE FOURTH star to the left of Antares is called Pleiades, and it’s where all the Sky Dragons go to play after they’ve saved the universe from the scourge of the Magogs,” Mitch said, concluding his narrative of the night sky.
The fire was out and the arctic night was as dark as it was going to get. The wind had died, the lake was still, and the sound of the waves against the shore had died to a faint whisper. Kate’s breathing had become even and regular. He could feel the moist flutter of her breath against his neck and the pliant warmth of her body pressed against him. Was she asleep? Would she wake when he moved? Had she heard any of what he’d said?
He shifted slightly and she nestled against him with a soft sound, her arms curling around his neck. He scooped her up with him as he rose, lifting her effortlessly, not because he was so enormously strong, but because she was so light.
Too light.
He carried her through the door of the tent and she roused as he tried to position her as gently as he could on the bed. She made another soft noise as he untied her running shoes, slid them from her feet and wrapped her in the warm cocoon of her sleeping bag. It was dark enough inside the tent that he couldn’t tell if her eyes were open or not. He shucked out of his boots and pants and dropped into his own bed, glad the air mattress hadn’t sprung a leak because he was still sore as hell and didn’t feel like sleeping on the cold, hard ground.
“Mitch?” she murmured ever so quietly just before he drifted off. “Pleiades isn’t a single star, it’s a group of stars representing the seven daughters of Atlas, but I loved your story about the Sky Dragons.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
BACON FRYING. Coffee brewing. The fragrant tang of wood smoke. All these savory, pleasing aromas mingling together in the cool arctic air roused Kate from a blissfully dreamless sleep. She lay with her sleeping bag drawn up to her chin and came awake slowly, reluctant to leave that place she’d drifted off to in Mitch’s arms the night before…or had that just been a dream after all? She turned her head on the pillow. No, his mattress was right beside hers. He’d moved it there when she’d asked him to. Small-voiced. Reluctant. Needy. Pleading. He’d let her fall asleep in his arms, and his presence had banished the nightmares that had plagued her ever since she’d been diagnosed with cancer. She hadn’t slept as well in over three months and she hadn’t felt so at peace ever before in her life.
Hayden was still dozing. She could see the tawny thatch of his hair poking out of the sleeping bag laid out along the tent’s far wall. She heard a stealthy pad of paws just before Thor poked his wolfish head through the tent door, yellow eyes studying the place where Hayden slept for a long moment before the dog backed out again. Thor was waiting for Hayden to get up and go outside to play.
Mitch was cooking breakfast.
The wind picked up, causing the tent door to flap and sunlight to stream through the opening, laying a band of warmth across her legs. She could hear birds singing in the stunted spruce trees around the tent site, waves breaking against the shore, Mitch’s voice saying something to Thor. It was time to get up, but it was so very sweet lying here, absorbing the morning this way, taking it into her soul little by little, committing to memory all the sounds and the smells and the feelings, secreting them in a special place where she could draw on them later to help get her through the hard times to come.
Footsteps approached and Kate closed her eyes, feigning sleep, as Mitch did what Thor had just done, pausing outside the tent door, peering inside to see who was up, then retreating silently. She wondered how many times he’d already done that in the course of the morning. She also wondered what time it was. The sun was well up in the sky. Kate drew a deep slow breath and released it, stretching as she did. She felt so good it was almost possible to believe she wasn’t sick at all, and that the past three months had all been a bad dream.
Maybe the doctors had been wrong.
Getting dressed was a simple matter of pulling on her sneakers and lacing them up. She reached a hand up to adjust her wig, marveling that she’d managed to keep it on all night. Although she hadn’t even considered what might happen if it came off while she slept, she was grateful it hadn’t. Her hair was no more than a fuzzy dark shadow, growing back slowly after that last round of chemo.
When she went outside, Mitch wasn’t at the Coleman stove. The bacon was draining on a paper towel, the flame under the frying pan had been extinguished and he was standing down on the lakeshore with a cup of coffee looking across at the mountain. Kate washed up, poured herself a cup and joined him there.
“It seems I missed the sunrise for the second morning in a row,” she said. “You should have woken me.”
“You can catch it tomorrow. You needed the sleep.” He gave her a slow up-and-down. “Looks like it helped. Not that you looked anything but beautiful yesterday, but yesterday was a damn long day.”
“Preceded by an even longer day,” Kate said, startled by his unexpected compliment. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I crashed an old Stationair into the side of a tall mountain two days ago. The air mattress could’ve been thicker and the bath I took this morning was a little chilly.”
Kate took a sip of the strong black coffee and regarded him over the rim of her cup. He hadn’t shaved and with all the cuts and bruises on his face, she doubted he would for a few days, but the shadow of stubble only enhanced his virility. “You swam in the lake?”
“Very briefly. I’m surprised the ice is out. Feels like that water should be frozen solid.”
“How long have you been up?”
“Long enough to drink nearly two pots of coffee and get the canoe ready to go.” He nodded up the shoreline and she spotted the old aluminum boat and a pile of gear next to it. “Thought Hayden might want to try his hand at fishing.”
“What about Hayden’s mother?”
“Does she like to fish?”
“She used to, when she was a young girl.” She smiled at the memory. “There was a creek that came out of the mountains and flowed through a high, pretty meadow and sometimes I’d ride up there on my horse Gunner with an old cow dog named Tootch. I’d catch a slew of cutthroat trout with my grandfather’s fly rod.”
“Then what would you do?”
“Sometimes I’d build a little fire in the gravel beside the creek and cook a trout or two in the frying pan I always carried in my saddlebag. Other times I’d bring a few home for my parents, but most of the time I let them all go because they were just too beautiful to kill.”
“That meadow sounds like a
nice place.”
“It’s a glorious place. The Crow used to winter there. You can still see the rings of stone that anchored the bottom edges of their teepees, and there’s an old line camp on the creek, too, built in the early nineteen hundreds, back when Colt Drummond ranched that whole valley, but the logs are mostly rotted away now.”
“So this place you grew up was part of an old cattle ranch?”
Kate nodded. “I had a great childhood. Idyllic. I was outside all the time. When I was twelve I got a job working for the Drummonds taking care of their horses. There aren’t many cattle left on that ranch, but they raise great quarter horses, some of the best in the country. I loved that job and those horses.”
Mitch watched her while she spoke, slowly sipping his coffee. “If you liked it so much, why didn’t you stay in Montana and become a horse rancher?”
“Because I’d spent most of my childhood working on bigger dreams than that. Katherine Jones was going to be a pilot. An astronaut. A space shuttle commander and the first woman to step foot on Mars.” She shook her head with a wry smile, remembering. “What about you? Why did you join the air force?”
“It was the cheapest way to get the flight training I wanted and I thought the lifestyle would be glamorous and romantic.”
“Funny how dreams and reality duke it out with each other.”
“Sometimes it isn’t funny at all,” Mitch said. “You ready for breakfast?”
IN EARLY June, the summer tourist stampede had yet to begin, and thanks to Ranger Rick’s nod through the gate at the Savage River checkpoint, Wonder Lake belonged to them that day. The fish, if there were any, weren’t biting, but that didn’t seem to faze Mitch, who was intent on teaching Hayden how to use a fly rod while the wind blew the aluminum canoe like a leaf across the choppy surface of the lake. Kate spent an hour on the water with them, then opted for land and poked along the shore with Thor at her heels, looking for fossil stones and gathering an assortment of geological wonders, then wandered onto the taiga to pick a handful of wildflowers. She returned to the campsite, put the flowers in an empty beer bottle filled with water, set the bottle on the picnic table and then arranged around its base all the different stones she’d picked up along the shore.
Never in her strictly regimented and ladder-climbing military life had she spent so much time doing nothing at all and enjoying every precious moment. She thought about fixing lunch and having it ready when Mitch and Hayden tired of fishing, then thought about a nap, and the nap won out. The interior of the tent was warm from the sun and smelled of canvas and wood smoke. She curled up on Mitch’s sleeping bag because it smelled like him, which she found comforting. Thor lay down beside her, and with two deep breaths she was sound asleep.
It was Thor’s low growl that woke her.
She opened her eyes and watched the dog stand, hackles raised. She heard the footsteps and knew it wasn’t Mitch or Hayden, not the way Thor was behaving. She pushed to her knees and stood, cautiously peering out the door and coming face-to-face with Ranger Rick, who stopped dead in his tracks. He was carrying a cardboard box and gave her a sheepish look.
“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t think anyone was home. I was just going to leave this and go. Didn’t want to bother you.”
“That’s okay,” Kate responded, realizing she must look as if she’d just been woken up from a nap, since she had. “Mitch and Hayden are out fishing.”
“I saw them out there. Me and the guys got a bunch of stuff together for you. That’s what’s in this box, along with a phone message from the governor and another from the head of the park service offering you the run of his private lodge. The messages were still coming in when I went off duty. There’s a few here and I guess by now there are probably at least that many more. I hope you can read my writing. Anyhow, I thought you’d want to know. The news coverage of Mitch’s plane crash and the fact that you were the one to find the crash site went national. We don’t have TV at the checkpoint so I wasn’t privy to the broadcasts. Seems the whole world somehow knows you’re hiding out at Wonder Lake though, and someone named Wally gave them the satellite phone number to the ranger station.”
Kate nodded. “Thank you, Rick. Sorry about that. We gave Wally that number in case of an emergency. I didn’t realize he’d hand it out to anyone trying to get hold of Mitch.”
“Oh, I think it’s you these callers wanted to talk to. Anyway, it’s no problem. I was glad to help out.” Rick set the box down just outside the tent door. “Tell Mitch he’d have better luck fishing out on the tundra. He might snag a caribou.”
“I will. And thanks again for coming by. It’s a long haul from your checkpoint.”
Rick grinned. “Not nearly as long or as risky a road as Mitch took the day he hauled us rangers out of that fire. You take care, ma’am, and good luck to you. For what it’s worth, I’m going to sign up for the donor registry and so are the rest of the rangers.”
After he’d departed in the park service truck, Kate carried the cardboard box to the picnic table. The messages he’d spoken of were handwritten on phone message sheets, stuffed into an envelope that was on top of what appeared to be an eclectic mix of food and alcohol. The alcohol was mostly home brew, stuff Rick and his friends had concocted. The food, ditto. Kate unwrapped a package of smoked salmon and broke off a piece, smelling it first before sampling. It smelled great and tasted even better. Cold smoked and delicious. So good she’d eaten half of it before she heard the scrape of metal on stone and glanced up to see Mitch beaching the canoe and Hayden jumping into the ankle deep water with a satisfying little-boy splash, wet sneakers be damned. Thor bounded down to meet them and Kate wiped her greasy hands on a paper towel, hoping she didn’t look too much like the cat that ate the canary.
“Catch anything?” she asked.
“Nope,” Mitch replied, “but it looks like you did.”
“As a matter of fact, I caught a salmon and smoked it while you were out on the lake. Here. Try some.”
Mitch broke off a piece and put it in his mouth. “That’s mighty tasty. Guess we’ll have to keep your mother on as camp cook, huh, Hayden? Take a taste of that.”
Hayden crinkled up his nose at the offering but took it from Mitch and bravely took a tiny bite. Kate had to squelch her smile. He never would have done that for her.
“Well?” Mitch said as Hayden chewed with solemn concentration.
“Yuck.”
“Yuck’s okay with me as long as you try it first,” Mitch said. He broke off another piece and ate it with great relish. “Did I see Ranger Rick skulking about?”
“He caught me napping. He left this offering and some phone messages.” Kate delved into the cardboard box and began setting the contents onto the picnic table. “Apparently, your ranger friends like to ferment things. There’s birch beer and salmonberry brandy…. And look, another package of smoked salmon.”
“This must be our lucky day. We don’t catch a fish or even get a nibble, but a smoked salmon lands on the picnic table. Who were the messages from?”
Kate shook her head and pushed the envelopes toward him. “I haven’t read them and I’m not sure I want to. The interview at the hospital was televised and Wally gave our contact number to every caller. Let’s eat lunch first. Hayden, are you hungry?”
Hayden nodded. Mitch sifted through the envelope of messages. Kate pushed to her feet and opened the cooler, inside of which were enough sandwich makings to last a week in the bush. She selected a package of sliced turkey breast from Yudy’s deli, a head of lettuce and some mayo.
“Jeez, this one’s from the governor,” Mitch muttered, scanning the first of the messages. “He saw the newscast and now he’s pushing for a statewide drive for bone marrow testing. The local chapters of the American Red Cross and Blood Bank of Alaska are on board to conduct the testing and provide the test kits. Everything’s set to begin next week. He wants you to agree to a press release to kick the whole thing off.”
Kate got the
loaf of bread out of the metal foot locker and began making the sandwiches. She heard Mitch rustle through the stack of messages.
“This one’s from the chief of the village of Umiak. It’s in Ranger Rick shorthand, but it says his young nephew died of leukemia because they couldn’t find a donor in time. Only the Blood Bank of Alaska carries the Tepnel kits and they would have to go to Anchorage to pick them up. He says Alaskan native families are huge, but few are on the registry because they can’t afford to be. The travel expenses from isolated villages keep most natives from being tested. He says the bone marrow needs to be waiting for Kate, not Kate waiting for a donor to be found, and because Kate is in the news now, she can bring more awareness to this problem and help save lives.”
Kate spread the mayo and laid the slices of turkey breast on the bread while Mitch studied the next message.
“Here’s another one, but the writing is hard to decipher. ‘I have forty-three-year-old friend Tuttu, native of Kotzebue, has the same leukemia. Tuttu had twin brother, would make the perfect bone marrow donor, but separated at birth. She thinks he is already dead, but others have been searching. Tuttu’s grandfather raised winning sled dogs for the Iditarod in the 1960s.” Mitch turned the piece of paper over and continued reading slowly, squinting with concentration. “His name may have been Kikikagruk and he may have been the first Eskimo ever to own an airplane, a Beechcraft Bonanza. If we could find some other family who might know where Tuttu’s brother is, she might find the will to live. We are all praying for you, Kate, and hope you can help us to help Tuttu.’”
Mitch glanced up at her as he folded the message and returned it to the envelope. “Heavy stuff.”
He opened the next and read for a moment in silence. “Hey, this one sounds right up our alley. The head honcho of the park service is offering us the exclusive use of his ‘rustic’ lodge in Kantishna. Rustic! It comes with a hot tub, a full bath and a private airstrip.” He held up a key that was inside the envelope and shook it enticingly. “He’s serious. Says it’s empty and will be until the end of the month. All ours, if we want it.”
From Out of the Blue Page 17
