by JoAnn Ross
“They can also grow things. Like a new life.”
“Sounds as if you’re staying,” she said.
He smiled, but his eyes were thoughtful. “Like I said, ask me again midwinter… Meanwhile, how about a late dinner at the café?”
“It’ll probably be packed with all the tourists come to town. Why don’t I cook you a salmon dinner? I still have another recipe I need to have perfect for Barbara Ann.”
“Does it come with you for dessert?” he asked as he pulled up in front of the cabin.
She shot him a sassy look. “It could. If you play your cards right.”
“You’re on.” He cut the engine, leaned over, cupped the back of her head, and kissed her. It wasn’t long. Or deep. But it still carried a dynamite punch. “I’ll call you when I look at my schedule, and we’ll nail down a time.”
“You’re on.”
* * *
After leaving the cabin, Finn pulled off the road into a turnout and, scrolling through the phone menu, called Knox, who’d settled down with his yoga girl in a small town on the Central California coast.
“Hey, dude,” Knox answered right away with the surf lingo it turned out he’d used to conceal the successful entrepreneur hiding beneath his surfer/bartender exterior. “What’s the problem?”
“Why should I have a problem? Can’t a guy call his brother just to talk? Did I interrupt you saluting the sun or something?”
“That was earlier this morning. Which, FYI, can be done without leaving the bed.”
“TMI, dude,” Finn shot back. Along with having taught him how to surf, Knox could’ve given graduate-level classes in cruising through a life of hit-and-run relationships. Now, from that phone call Finn had gotten awhile back, it was clear he’d become a one-woman guy.
“You called to chat?” Finn could hear Knox’s eyebrow arch. “You never even respond to the Brannigan email chain.”
“Maybe because no one ever sends any emails. And can you be serious for just one damn minute?”
There was a pause. “O-kay,” the brother closest in age to him, the former world champion of pickup lines, said slowly. “Shoot.”
“I need to know how you knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That of all the women you went through, Erin was the one.”
There was another longer pause. Then, Knox burst into a loud, boisterous laugh that Finn probably could’ve heard all the way up here in Alaska without the phone.
“I’m so pleased to have amused you,” he said between gritted teeth. Damn, he should’ve called Luke.
“Sorry.” He could hear his brother nearly choking as he tried to cut the laugh off. “It’s just that when I found myself falling into quicksand, I called Luke to ask him the same thing.”
Yeah. He could’ve shortcut this conversation with a call to Luke and gotten the advice firsthand. “What did he say?”
“That I should grab love where I found it. And trust my instincts…
“Look,” he said into the silence as Finn tried to deal with the idea that what he was feeling for Tori, had felt from that first night at the Del, might actually be love. “The Navy wouldn’t have given you those multimillion-dollar jets to play with if the brass hadn’t believed in your judgment.”
“I wasn’t exactly playing.” Finn reminded himself that only James knew about his near-death incidents, so he couldn’t exactly blame Knox, who probably still thought of him as the reckless fifteen-year-old kid who’d buzzed the tree house in a rented Cessna.
“Point taken. But you need to give yourself the same credit for good judgement as the U.S. Navy did.”
“I’ll think about it,” Finn said.
“You do that. And hey, what’s her name?”
“Tori.” Just saying her name had him smiling.
“Nice.” Finn heard a woman’s voice talking in the background. “Erin wants to know what she does.”
“She sings.”
“Like Mom did.”
“Yeah. But professionally.”
“Cool.” More murmurs. “So…” He could hear the growing distraction in Knox’s voice. “Ah, you okay now?”
Finn wasn’t jealous that his brothers were all having regular and probably frequent sex. The hell he wasn’t.
“Yeah. I’m cool. And tell your yoga girl hi for me.”
“I’ll do that.”
The call ended abruptly. Slamming his mind shut against any images of Knox and his woman all twisted up together like a pretzel, Finn pushed the Jeep’s ignition button and continued on to the airfield.
23
The salmon had turned out as well as Tori had imagined when she’d come up with the dish. As good as it had been, the lovemaking afterwards had been even better.
The following day, she was holding her breath while Barbara Ann was sampling the dishes in the kitchen before service. Although they’d hopefully be on the menu, tonight they were being used as the “family meal” before the restaurant opened, which allowed not only the café owner but the two line cooks, the bartender from the Gold Gulch, the servers and waitresses—dressed in saloon girl outfits from the tavern—and even the dishwasher to weigh in.
“You’ve nailed it, darlin’,” Barbara Ann declared as she glanced around at the empty plates. “These are going to sell like hotcakes. And might even get us a food critic from down in Anchorage or even the lower forty-eight to write us up.”
As if having waited for her to weigh in, the others actually applauded.
She hadn’t planned to combine cooking with singing. But Tori found that she enjoyed the camaraderie of the kitchen. She’d incorporated her two meals into the Caribou’s menu, and, with the owner’s permission, made a few changes in others. Like adding a red wine/balsamic reduction sauce to the plate-sized rib eyes, stuffing the fresh trout with lump crab before grilling, and adding a smoked salmon/goat cheese/capers pizza that proved so popular Barbara Ann added it to the Gold Gulch’s bar menu.
Even better than the compliments her food received was having Finn drop in at the end of a long day’s flying, or during a break, for dinner. It was almost as if she were cooking solely for him.
She’d been nervous the first time she’d sung for him in the tavern. Although he’d told her he’d listened to her songs while deployed, it was different having him sit on that barstool, his golden eyes not leaving her for a moment. When he looked at her that way, everything and everyone seemed to fade away, like ghosts into the mist, and they could have been the only two people in the room. Afterwards, she could tell others had noticed from the knowing smiles when they’d leave together.
“We’ve cost Mary some bucks,” he said on her one-week anniversary in Caribou. During that time, along with cooking and her gigs at the Gulch, she’d been writing more in the past days than she’d managed in months. While the wide-open spaces of the Alaskan wilderness had expanded her creativity, the real inspiration had come from making love with Finn. Tori had thought that if she could only keep him tied to her bed, she’d probably finish an entire album before her cabin rental ran out.
“How? Am I taking too much time away from your flying?”
“No. During these months we tend to push against the FAA rules, so as much as I’d love to spend all my time in bed, I’m only taking as many hours as the government requires. Some airlines ignore those limits during the season, thinking we’re so far away no one’s going to care.”
“People who might be on a plane that crashes due to an exhausted pilot’s error would undoubtedly feel a great deal different,” she said.
“True. There are times, in war, when you don’t have any choice but to stretch human limitations. But giving visitors memories they’ll never forget, or even flying someone to go shopping for school supplies in Anchorage, isn’t anywhere like war.
“But getting back to Mary, we cost her winning the dating pool.”
“There was a dating pool? On us?”
“Technically on me. I didn’t know
it until recently. Mary had me hooking up with Casey Doyle.”
“The redhead from Midnight Sun Manicures?” Tori held out a hand, taking in the nails that had been recently repainted at the shop in a summery turquoise. “Were you going out with her?”
“No. Although she’s a nice woman, I wasn’t involved with anyone until you came to town. Thus the size of the jackpot in the pool.”
“Oh.” She thought about that for a moment. “Is that what we’re doing? Hooking up?”
“Maybe that’s what it started out as in San Diego,” he allowed, “but I think we both know that we’ve gone beyond that.”
They had. But later, as she lay wrapped in his arms in bed, after he’d proven yet again that it was, indeed, possible to fly without a plane, Tori wondered where, exactly, they went from here.
Nothing stayed the same, she reminded herself. Which was why she could be rapidly approaching the time for her to leave love. Before it left her.
* * *
And yet she stayed, spending every free moment she could with Finn. After he’d stretched out her new boots, they’d gone hiking on the mountain trails, through meadows of wildflowers, along rushing water, and one day she’d stood on a glacier while he’d taken her picture, her hands outstretched, as if saluting the sun that continued to shine overhead. Even as she’d added it to her phone album, Tori knew she’d never need the photo to remind her of that perfect moment.
She’d sat on a rock, watched bald eagles soaring overhead, caught a salmon, and paddled a wooden canoe past a pair of swans being followed by their fuzzy cygnets on the lake. On a midnight sunset flight with Finn in one of Osprey’s Cessnas, she’d been awed as the alpenglow gleamed a fiery red on the horizon, turning the snow-capped mountains and clouds from a dark rose to pink and, finally, a brilliant gold before fading away ten minutes after it had appeared.
She’d turned to him. “That’s the most stunningly beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” she said. “Thank you for sharing it with me.”
“I’ve been waiting to show it to you since that first night,” he admitted.
“The night of the cake.” Tori thought it said something about Finn that she could smile at that night she could still not entirely remember. “When I tried to seduce you and you turned me down.”
“And have been working to make up for ever since.”
“You definitely have done that,” she agreed.
The next morning, on a double-dog dare, Tori dove off the end of the dock into the purest blue water she’d ever seen. The initial shock of hitting the sixty-degree water made her scream, but Finn, who dove in after her, held her close and definitely warmed her up as they treaded water. Afterwards she’d heated up even more as they’d tangled the sheets of the log-framed bed.
And every day she sang, joining the chorus of songbirds filling the summer air. There were times, when everything seemed so perfect, so idyllic, that she allowed herself to wonder if this could really be her life. When she dared to think that just possibly this time with Finn could be different. That it could actually last.
On her tenth day in Caribou, she made a bowl of tortellini salad to take to a tree house building party at the sprawling log-and-stone home of Mary Muldoon, the owner of Osprey Air. Mary, who Finn had told her was also Barbara Ann’s longtime best friend, was a short, sturdily built woman with long, silver-streaked black hair and dark brown eyes. Like Barbara Ann had that first day at the Caribou, she greeted Tori with a hug.
“I’ve been meaning to get down to the Gulch to hear you sing,” she said. “But business has kept me busier than a one-armed pole jumper.”
She gave Finn an odd, hard look before taking hold of Tori’s arm and leading her through the crowd of children chasing each other around the lawn, past some barbeques, where older men were drinking beer while grilling a mix of meats and huge Gulf shrimp, to a long wooden table where a group of women were seated at the end, sipping on lemonade and iced tea. If the women had been wearing flowered dresses instead of khaki shorts, jeans, and a variety of bright tops, she could have been at a summer barbecue in Savannah or Charleston.
Mary introduced everyone, many of whom turned out to be relations in some way, finishing up with a young woman with rain-straight black hair and melted-chocolate-brown eyes, who looked to be about six months pregnant.
“This is Meggie Greenlaw, my middle daughter,” Mary said. “It’s her boy, my grandson Ty, the guys are building the tree house for. Tomorrow’s his sixth birthday. He’s off at my sister Molly’s place over in Healy for the night so we can surprise him in the morning.”
“That’s very sweet,” Tori said, feeling an all-too-familiar tug of loss. She might have been an only child, so the odds of her having as big a family as this, or Finn’s, could have been slim. But she wished that her parents had stayed alive to see her married. And wouldn’t they have loved being grandparents?
“My husband and I were at the Gulch the other night when you sang,” Meggie said. Her warm smile was a replica of her mother’s. “You’re very good.”
“Thank you.”
“Are you working on anything new?” another woman—who’d been introduced as a second cousin on Mary’s late husband Mike’s side—asked.
“A few things,” Tori said. She’d stalled on the song she’d started when she’d first arrived, but others had been flowing well.
“It’s not as if you don’t have any inspiration,” an older woman, who looked to be somewhere between eighty and a hundred, said. Tori couldn’t remember exactly her relation to Mary, but from the way she sat like a queen at the end of the table, her snow-white hair braided in a coronet around the top of her head, it was obvious that she was the family matriarch.
Her still-bright gaze moved to the far side of the lawn, where the men were busy with saws, hammers, and drills. Finn was on the top of the tree house, straddling the top ridge as he wielded a drill setting screws into the metal roof panels.
“Nothing quite like a man in a tool belt,” Meggie said with a sigh. “My Dennis can catch fish like there’s no tomorrow, but he’s all thumbs when it comes to being a handyman.”
“Looks like he’s handy enough,” a fifty-something woman said. “Given this is going to be your fourth in ten years.”
The blush rose all the way to the roots of Meggie’s dark hair. “I’m not going to deny that,” she said. “But I’ve told him, this is the last one. After she’s born, he’s getting snipped.”
“I’ll bet that conversation went over like a lead pontoon,” Mary suggested.
“It wasn’t the easiest,” Meggie allowed. “But he eventually saw the light.”
“That Finn reminds me a lot of Mike,” the oldest of the group, who’d pointed him out, mused.
“Mike was real handy with his tools,” Mary agreed. “So, Tori, is this bowl of salad something you’re thinking of adding to the Caribou’s menu?”
The conversation shifted to food, which in turn led to memories of past gatherings, which led to conversations and stories of family members lost over the years. Once the tree house was done, the men joined the group, changing the topics to tall fish tales, sports, and whether or not the Alaska Aces hockey team would win the champion Kelly Cup for the fourth time in franchise history.
Finn was a cheechako, which Tori had learned was native for newcomer, but it was obvious that he’d already fit into this community. Watching him flatter the women, talk good-natured smack with the men, and be patient and easy with all the children, Tori could see that he was a good man. Hardworking, honest, the type of man she could possibly build a life with. And wasn’t that too, too tempting?
24
A summer storm came barreling though the mountains that night, bringing with it rumbling thunder, flashing bolts of lightning, and torrential rain that lashed at the windows.
“I’m glad we’re not camping out in that,” Tori said as she snuggled close with Finn beneath the covers. Since storms had always made her edgy, she knew bett
er than to try to sleep, so she’d opened the blackout drapes and watched the clouds, which had darkened the usually bright sky. A deafening crash of thunder had her moving even closer and holding on tight.
“They say everything’s bigger in Alaska,” he said, running his hand down her hair, to soothe rather than seduce. Which wasn’t necessary since she’d jumped him the moment they’d arrived back at the cabin. Once she’d started singing at the Gulch and their relationship had become public, he’d begun spending the nights at the cabin.
“So I’ve found,” she agreed, placing her hand on the body part she was specifically referring to, which had the sheets tenting in response. They fit together, she thought. Not just their bodies but their minds. And hearts.
“About the he-who-shall-no-longer-be-named fiancé,” she said. “I broke up with him because I found him cheating.”
“I’m not surprised,” Finn responded.
“Why not?”
He paused for a long moment, linked their fingers together, and lifted their joined hands up to his mouth. “Because you’re not the type of woman who’d break a promise, even an engagement one, for a frivolous reason. Even if you didn’t love the guy.”
“That really sounds so cold-blooded,” she muttered.
“More self-protective. Which I get. People have married for far less reasons than wanting a family.”
“It was more than cheating,” she said. “I probably, somewhere deep down, expected that since we’d never had any chemistry.”
“Okay. I’m sorry you had to go through a rough break-up, but that’s the best news I’ve heard all day.”
She laughed, as he could always make her do. “I’m just going to tell this once. Then we’re never going to discuss him or the topic again.”
“Suits me fine.” He began nibbling on her fingertips, as if she could have told him anything and it wouldn’t matter. Because, although neither one of them had said the words out loud, she knew he loved her. As she’d come to love him.
“Short version, there was this woman he’d known all our lives. She was beautiful—”
