Wife in the Mail

by Marie Ferrarella

  Shayne knew he was going to regret what he was about to say even before the words were out of his mouth. They came out, anyway.

  “If you’ll stay until the cabin’s really inhabitable, I’ll…teach you how to fly.” He mumbled the last part.

  She turned around slowly, not knowing if she’d heard him correctly, or just imagined it. “What?”

  He didn’t want to have to say it twice. Once was bad enough. “Are you losing your hearing?”

  “Maybe.” She took a step toward him. Then another and another, until she was at his side, eager, hopeful. “Probably, because then I wouldn’t think I’d heard you saying—”

  He exhaled. Everything about this woman was difficult. “I said, if you stay, I’ll teach you how to fly. I don’t want to have to come out and identify your frozen corpse just because you were too stubborn to listen to sense.”

  She nodded in agreement, although a smile had begun to creep back to her lips. “Can’t have that.”

  Well, if she wasn’t going to bed, he was. Before he swept her back into his arms. Because this time, it wasn’t going to end in a kiss.

  That scared the hell out of him.

  Shayne strode to the stairs, muttering a careless, “Good night,” as he passed her.

  A third of the way up the stairs, he heard the strains of “Happy Days Are Here Again.” They accompanied him the rest of the way.

  The smile that came to his lips arrived there of its own accord.

  Chapter Eleven

  Sydney wondered when the clinic’s front door had last been oiled. It needed it badly, though she had to admit that its high-pitched squeak was better than a doorbell when it came to announcing arrivals.

  She looked up as the telltale creak seeped into her very bones.

  A brisk wind pushed its way into the clinic, ushering in the cold, and a small, broad-shouldered woman as if in afterthought. Sydney smiled as recognition set in. She put down her pen.

  “Nice to see you, Mrs. Hatcher.”

  The snow-white head bobbed back a greeting as the woman trudged heavily across the clinic’s outer office to Sydney’s reception desk, marking her path with bits of snow that had clung to her boots and were now gracing the floor.

  Every one of Ursula Hatcher’s sixty-three years was etched into her face with a blunt-tipped chisel. She’d been Hades’s postmistress for the past forty-one of those years and proud of it. It was her firm conviction that news, good or bad, didn’t have a prayer of spreading without her aid.

  People in the area knew better than to dispute that. Most figured she was right, anyway. Though no one had ever accused her of opening the mail, whose delivery she viewed as a sacred trust, there was little doubt that Ursula either knew, or divined, what was in those letters. And she was a great deal more colorful than the local newspaper.

  Sydney had met Ursula during her first visit to the general store. Ursula had inspected her the way she might have inspected a package suspected of concealing a bomb. Obviously satisfied with what she’d seen, the woman had given Sydney her seal of approval.

  “Got a letter for the doc. Thought I might as well bring these along, too.” Digging into the weather-beaten pouch hanging off her shoulder, Ursula pulled out a bundle of letters gathered around a medical journal. She deposited everything on Sydney’s desk.

  Sydney raised a brow. Everyone went to Mrs. Hatcher’s corner of the general store for their mail. It was rare that she made a delivery herself.

  “Going in for the personal touch?” Sydney looked her over, wondering for the reason behind the visit. “Or did you want to see him professionally?”

  Ursula’s laugh bordered on a cackle and ended in an amused wheeze. Fisting her hand, she thudded her chest through the layers of clothing she wore.

  “I ain’t never been sick yet.” Her blue eyes took on a sparkle. “Wouldn’t mind seeing the man personally, though.”

  Sydney grinned. The woman had at least thirty years on Shayne, if not more. “Isn’t he just a little young for you?”

  Ursula could only shake her head at the naiveté that confronted her. “He’s shaving, ain’t he? That makes him the right age.” She held up the top letter, waving it in front of Sydney. “Thought he might want to see this one right away. Might make a difference to him.”

  Dropping it back on top of the pile, she turned and walked out across the puddles of dissolving snow she’d brought in with her.

  Curious, Sydney looked down at the envelope. And felt her heart stop for one long moment. She recognized the handwriting instantly. Why not? She’d spent enough time waiting for letters bearing it to arrive at her mailbox back in Omaha.

  Gingerly picking the envelope up, she turned it slowly around, waiting for feelings to catch up to her surprise. When they finally did, they weren’t nearly as intense as she’d expected them to be. Or as hurtful. Even though it had been only a month since she’d found herself figuratively stranded at the altar, the edge on the pain had been blunted considerably.

  Because he was with a patient, Sydney waited to give Shayne the letter. She wouldn’t have been human if she hadn’t been curious about its contents. But that was the only thing she was feeling. It pleased her.

  She glanced several times at her watch as she waited for Shayne to be finished, wondering if Ben had made any mention of her in his letter. Had he experienced any sort of regret for his behavior? At this point, she’d accepted the fact that she was supposed to have arrived here and he had been merely the catalyst that brought her. Grateful to him for having taken her out of the place where she’d been, Sydney realized that she had definitely moved on with her life.

  A life she felt was slowly coming together for her.

  It was another fifteen minutes before the door to the examining room opened and Rob Harris came out, muttering his thanks to Shayne.

  “Put it on my account, will you, pretty lady?” Harris put on his hat, covering a head that was as bald and as round as a perfect marble. “I’ll catch up with you the first of the month.”

  The employees at the mill were paid twice a month. She’d already learned that the paycheck on the first was for bills, the one on the fifteenth for necessities and pleasure. It was then that the clientele at Salty’s doubled.

  Sydney made a careful entry in pen on Harris’s ledger as he left the clinic. Though she’d offered Shayne the use of her computer for his office, he’d staunchly refused to be dragged into the twenty-first century. She supposed there was a certain kind of charm to that. The man was a traditionalist.

  He was also stubborn as hell.

  Closing the book, she took a deep breath, picked up the letter from Ben and walked into Shayne’s office. She didn’t quite know what sort of news she was the bearer of, but given human nature, she was braced for the worst.

  Shayne was staring out the window. In the not-too-far distance he could see the forest, the one the government had strictly forbidden the loggers to touch. But he really wasn’t thinking about the generations of trees there. His mind was elsewhere. In the next room, where it had no business straying.

  The adage “physician, heal thyself,” ran through his mind. Except that in his case, he didn’t know how to go about that. How to go about stemming this all-pervading restlessness that seemed to assail him every time she walked into the room. If asked, he wouldn’t even be able to pinpoint exactly where this restlessness was coming from. Or where it was going to take him. He only knew what lay at the core. Or rather, who.

  He didn’t have to glance over his shoulder to know she was in the room. She wasn’t saying anything. That was odd. “No more patients?”

  Sydney walked in slowly, like a soldier picking her way through an area she suspected was heavily mined. “You seemed to have cured everyone, at least for now.” There was no way to gracefully segue into what she had to give him. “This came for you while you were in with Mr. Harris.” When he turned around, she held the letter out to him. “Mrs. Hatcher brought it.”

>   “She delivered it?”

  Surprise registered fleetingly in his eyes as he took the letter from her. And then he frowned when he saw the handwriting. Ben. If he was writing, that meant he wasn’t coming back in person. At least not for now.

  He raised his eyes to Sydney’s, wondering if she knew who the letter was from.

  “Yes.” She answered the unspoken question. “I know it’s from him.”

  He stared at it for a minute, debating about just tossing it on the desk and ignoring it until later. But later had a habit of becoming now and he’d never been a coward. Just some things he didn’t want to know.

  Because he wasn’t the only one involved here, Shayne slit the envelope open.

  Sydney wanted to remain in the room, to read the letter with him. It wasn’t just curiosity, she had a feeling that maybe there was something in the letter that Shayne wouldn’t want to read.

  As if he needed her to shield him or offer comfort, Sydney mocked. She should know better by now. She turned and walked toward the door. Before she reached the sill, she heard the sound of paper being crumpled.

  “He’s not coming back.”

  Sydney turned around to look at Shayne. He was sitting on the edge of his desk, the letter a wadded scrap of paper in his hand.

  “Ben’s decided to open up a practice in Seattle. Says there’re a great many more opportunities there for someone like him.” The words echoed in his head. Shayne laughed quietly to himself. “I suppose there probably are.” He looked up to see her watching him, waiting for more. For once, she wasn’t asking or probing. Maybe because she wasn’t, he volunteered, “In Seattle, Ben can specialize if he wants.” Though he doubted Ben had the tenacity to go that route. “Or choose just to be a regular general practitioner without the constant threat of life and death hanging over him. He can just refer people to other doctors if he doesn’t want to get any deeper into a treatment.”

  Doctoring in Alaska didn’t give Shayne that luxury. Here he had to make up his mind quickly, and sometimes he was the difference between life and death.

  Shayne saw that as important. Ben saw it as a heavy burden.

  Something twisted inside Sydney. She wondered if he realized just how much of himself he’d given away just then. Probably not. She crossed to him slowly, her eyes on his face. “What are you going to do?”

  He shrugged, throwing the letter into the wastepaper basket. “Same as I did when Ben was in medical school. Go on alone.”

  Her heart twisted again. “But you’re not, you know,” she said softly. He raised his eyes to hers. “You’re not alone. You have Sara and Mac. The town.” She paused, then added, “And for what it’s worth, me.”

  He stepped away from the implication. From the comfort. It was a tender trap, one he’d been in before. He had no desire to be in a position to have to gnaw off his own foot to survive. “I meant as a doctor.”

  She didn’t back off. “I meant as a person.”

  The moment hung between them, filled with meaning, meaning he wasn’t going to allow himself to explore. Because he’d been there before and, for him, there was no going back. He’d sworn that to himself, sworn that if he ever got over the pain of losing someone he loved to indifference, he would never allow himself to be in that kind of situation again. To willingly put himself there was idiotically foolhardy and he wasn’t a fool.

  He wasn’t anything, except disillusioned.

  He glanced around her, looking into the waiting room. “Any more patients out there?”

  Despite the moment, she wanted to laugh at the hopeful note in his voice. “Not a one. You know, I’ve got just the thing to pull you out of your doldrums.” His brow rose in a silent question. “How about giving me another flying lesson?”

  “I don’t have ‘doldrums,’ so there’s no need to pull me out of them.” And he hardly saw giving her flying lessons as a cure for anything, except maybe common sense. “You have a warped sense of humor, you know that?”

  Her eyes were lit with amusement. If she couldn’t offer him a shoulder to lean on or an ear to listen, she could at least give him a little diversion. And maybe, just maybe, a smile.

  “Oh, I don’t know. You have to admit, teaching me to fly puts all those other thoughts right out of your head, doesn’t it?”

  He couldn’t argue with her there. She actually had a point.

  But he wasn’t about to capitulate without at least a semblance of a fight. “Any patients signed up for the afternoon?”

  She shook her head. “Page is completely snow white.”

  He was out of excuses. With Sydney around, there wasn’t even anything to catch up on. Accounts, records, inventory…She’d done it all for him.

  Shayne sighed in resignation. He actually didn’t mind the lessons as much as he said he did, but he’d be damned if he’d let her know that. She’d probably make something of it. Something she shouldn’t. Something he didn’t want her to.

  “C’mon, then.” He took his parka from the hook. “I guess I might as well teach you.”

  She followed him into the outer office. “You sound as if you’re going to your own execution.”

  He glanced at her as he opened the door. “For all I know…”

  The makeshift runway stretched before her like a huge canvas. On the ground were tire marks, all crisscrossing each other, evidence of all the times she’d traversed the same area in the past hour.

  The cockpit felt almost claustrophobic compared to the wilderness that waited outside. Compared to the sky above, a sky she’d yet to take her virgin run in.

  Sydney tightened her hands on the wheel. “I’ve gotten fairly good at taxiing, wouldn’t you say?”

  Compliments weren’t anything he gave freely, but Shayne had to admit she was doing a smooth job of it. “Fairly good,” he allowed offhandedly.

  The man wouldn’t recognize sarcasm if it bit him on the butt. She attacked the matter head-on. “Don’t you think it’s time that I attempted to fly?”

  The words came out slowly, as if he was weighing each one separately. “You mean, with a plane?”

  What else could she have meant, flapping her arms? Sydney thought. “Yes.”

  “No.” The answer was firm, flat, leaving, he felt, no room for argument. Then to curb the disappointment he knew had to follow, he added, “I’ll let you know when it’s time.”

  She looked at him. “No, I don’t think you will. I think you’re hoping that eventually, I’ll get tired of asking you and give up.” She pressed her lips together in that determined way of hers he’d come to recognize and expect. “Well, I have news for you, I don’t intend to give up.”

  He pointed straight ahead, to get her eyes back on what she was doing. “You’re wrong.”

  Did he think he knew everything? “I should know my own mind—”

  Shayne had to stop her before she got rolling, knowing he didn’t stand a chance of getting a word in once she got under way. “No, I meant that you’re wrong that it’s news to me. I’ve already figured out that you don’t stop until you get your way.”

  He said it as if it annoyed him, Sydney thought. It was people with her kind of determination that settled this state he loved so much. “You know, some might find that an admirable quality.”

  His eyes narrowed as he looked at her profile. “And some might find it irritating.”

  Sydney could feel his eyes on her. She baited him. “Which ‘some’ are you?”

  He couldn’t lie any more than he could give voice to feelings. “Somewhere in the middle.”

  She considered that. “Well, that’s better than irritating, at any rate.” She heard him laugh. The sound was pleasing, even if it was at her expense. “What?” she coaxed. “Did I say something funny?”

  “No, not exactly.” Shayne settled back, beginning to relax. She really did have this down pat. “It’s just your attitude.”

  He had her trained so that she expected a criticism behind every comment. “What’s wrong with
my attitude?”

  “Nothing, it’s just that I’m not accustomed to anyone sounding so positive about things.” Mostly, he was privy to people grumbling. About the weather, the harsh conditions, the lack of luxuries. Ben had been one of the few who had liked it here, and even Ben was gone. “You really like it here, don’t you?”

  She smiled, her enthusiasm rising. “Yes. Oh, I miss the malls occasionally, and having a restaurant close by if I feel like ordering out. But mostly, I like it.” She spared him a glance. “I like it very much.”

  He thought of Barbara and how vehemently she’d despised everything about Hades, and Alaska. Even Anchorage hadn’t seemed civilized enough to her. Nothing short of New York City would do. “Why?”

  Did he need reinforcement, or was he really curious about how she felt? “It’s big and wide and beautiful.” She spared a hand to gesture at the view in front of her. “And everything we take for granted back home is so new out here, so precious. Like telephones and electricity,” she teased. “It makes you take a fresh look at life and appreciate everything you have.” She looked at him. “And everything you might have.”

  He was caught again, caught within the shimmer in her eyes. So much so that the very air had stopped moving for him.

  But not the plane. At the last moment he realized that she’d ceased taxing in a circle and the plane was now heading in a direct path toward the shed.

  “To the right,” he ordered. “To the right!”

  Reflexes snapped into position. She jerked the wheel as far over to the right as she could. Sydney managed to divert the plane so that it missed the structure. But just barely.

  Shayne exhaled the breath he’d been holding, grateful for the near miss. A collision would have devastated the shed, and it wouldn’t have gone all that well for his plane, either.

  He scowled at her, annoyed with himself. He should have his head examined for ever agreeing to this, much less suggesting it. When the plane came to a stop, Shayne took the keys away from her.