“So here I am, wanting more details and to see how I can help.”
“That’s the thing, Will. I’m a big girl now. I don’t need your help.” She sighed and softened her tone. “It’s nice of you to care.”
“Of course I care. You and Luke have always been like family to me.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw her flinch.
“At least tell me about it. Luke didn’t give details.”
She kept pouring pancakes onto the griddle, not acknowledging him for a minute, then finally nodded, then exhaled. “Okay. I got here less than a week ago. Yesterday was my first day working and I received an anonymous tip about illegal hunting going on south of here. I had Chris—he’s the pilot who’s supposed to fly me around when I need it—take me to where the caller had described. We hiked quite a bit, searching for signs that people had been there. We eventually found some, followed the trail, and...”
Will watched her swallow hard, saw the way her face paled to an unnatural shade of green. She was tough, but crimes like these weren’t supposed to be part of her job description.
“And then last night someone broke into your house? Do you think the two incidents are connected?”
She set a plate full of pancakes down on the table in front of him and laughed, a laugh that was entirely without humor. “I’m sure they’re connected.”
“How?”
She slid a piece of paper across the table to him, and as he read the overtly threatening words, his stomach clenched.
No question, McKenna needed his help. And she was going to get it. Like it or not.
* * *
“You’re thinking something.” McKenna pointed out the painfully obvious after several minutes of watching Will’s thoughts work out in the expressions on his face.
“I am,” he admitted between bites of pancake.
“So... Out with it.”
“You’re going to hate it.”
“You don’t know what I’ll hate and won’t.” McKenna folded her arms across her chest.
“No, I’m pretty sure you’re going to hate this.”
“Are you going to let me figure that out for myself or not?”
He paused. “Let me fly you around.”
“Fly...me...around... Wait, wait, on a plane?”
Will laughed and it lit up his face. She tried to ignore that and focus on the fact that he was plotting to take the little independence she’d gained by stepping into her life and taking over. He could call it “caring” or whatever else he wanted to, but she knew what he was doing. Exactly the same thing Luke would be doing if he was there. Would the two of them never let her be in charge of her own life?
“Yeah, on a plane. I’m a pilot. Luke didn’t tell you?”
“We don’t really talk about you.” McKenna shrugged, unwilling to admit the various reasons she didn’t ask her brother for updates on him. As a brother, Luke was as good as they came, but she’d rather crawl under a rock and never come out than have him find out about the crush she’d had on his best friend.
“I’ll try not to be too hurt.” There he went with the teasing again. “Piloting is what I do up here. I work for a guide service, shuttling people around on big-game hunts.”
She raised her eyebrows. “So I’m here to save the wildlife and you’re up here to shoot it?”
He bristled. “You know me better than that. I care about protecting the wildlife, too. But as long as the laws are followed, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with hunting, especially for someone who’s planning to eat what he gets.”
And Will did that, too. McKenna respected that about him.
“Fine,” she conceded. “And about your offer, thanks, but no. I have a pilot assigned to shuttle me around. I don’t need the help.” Although she did feel a sinking in the pit of her stomach, something like a large block of glacier ice, when she thought about being alone with Chris again. Something about the way he studied her every move...She shivered.
“I’m not talking about just being your pilot. Officially, sure. But I can be an extra set of eyes for you. You can fill me in about the other details of the case as you learn about them and I can help you solve this thing so you can move on with your life and get out of this town.”
She jerked her gaze up to meet his. “Get out of this town?” Had Luke told him how much she’d dreaded this “promotion” and all it meant? She was going to have to rethink her choice of confidant pretty soon.
“You always planned to get out of Seward and to the city as quick as you could. I’m guessing that hasn’t changed?”
Was it her imagination, or was that hope in his voice? McKenna shrugged. “I do prefer Anchorage to small towns.” Prefer was an understatement. Kind of like saying a polar bear was large.
“What do you think?”
“About you flying me around? I already told you no.”
He raked a hand through his curls and shook his head. “You’re too stubborn for your own good, do you know that? You have to learn when something is too much for you and let people help.”
“What if I don’t think it’s too much for me?”
“People are dead, McKenna. And there’s a good chance the guy who killed them, shot them in cold blood, was in your house last night. You’re on your own out here. You have no backup. Let me help.”
Several beats of silence passed as the truth of his words sunk in. She felt her shoulders sag slightly. “You can’t just go around demanding things of people. I have a right to make my choices.”
“So you want me to offer you something and then say please?”
She sighed. “No, but you know what I mean.”
And then Will’s hand was covering hers, setting her pulse racing twice as fast as it had during the scare the night before and making her hand tingle as though a thousand tiny fireworks had exploded inside. She gulped and tried to remind herself that they were just friends. And that they’d never be anything more.
“So. How about it. Let me help?”
He had the decency to phrase the last bit as a question, though she suspected he was just humoring her. Still, a look at his eyes showed that as he’d said, he did care.
“And how much are you charging?”
He looked insulted that she would ask. “I won’t charge you anything to fly you around. I’d like to be reimbursed for gas, if the troopers have the budget for that, which I’m assuming they do. But for the flying time? There’s no need.”
“Don’t you need your boss’s permission to use the plane?”
Will smiled. “It’s mine.”
“Okay, but this can’t be full-time for you—you need to work.”
“Yes,” he agreed quickly, and she thought she might have found her way out of this situation until he spoke up again. “But the next few weeks are pretty easy for me. I can fly for you around the schedule I already have set up at work. There’s plenty of time.”
McKenna was running out of logical arguments.
His offer made sense. But she wanted to refuse him. Had to.
Then she thought about the man who’d broken into her house, the quick glimpse she’d caught of the back of him. He was tall; she knew that. So was the pilot she’d been using to fly her around the North Slope Bureau. If she turned Will down, she’d have no choice but to continue using Chris for transportation and that was just about the last thing she wanted to do.
While Chris had been working on a contract basis with the troopers, he was paid by assignment. McKenna didn’t think there would be a problem calling Captain Wilkins and requesting permission to give the contract job to Will instead. He’d have to pass a basic background check of course, but since he wouldn’t be doing any on-the-books investigating, just serving as a chauffeur, that was all that would be nec
essary.
She felt chilled through when she thought about boarding a plane with Chris again. Hadn’t she felt uneasy around him yesterday, felt as if he was watching her reactions more than he needed to? One thing she was sure of—law enforcement officers of any kind were supposed to trust their gut instincts. And hers said that there was more to that pilot than met the eye.
That could spell disaster for her.
On the other hand, the extra time with Will might be difficult. The last thing she wanted was to fall into some childish attraction to him again and embarrass herself. Surely she was past all that, though. As adults, their personalities were far from compatible. Will’s being comfortable with changing plans last minute and flying her around proved that. He’d always been easygoing, ready to take life as it came. And McKenna liked to have a plan. A relationship between them wouldn’t work, so surely she could remember that and keep from humiliating herself in front of him. And if nothing else, accepting his offer would give her a chance to prove to him once and for all that she was a strong woman, capable of taking care of herself. If he got the message, he might even convince her brother to knock off the overprotectiveness. Okay, that wasn’t very likely—but she could still hope. There was a lot she didn’t like about this promotion, but maybe it would give her that longed-for chance to show the people in her life what she was capable of. It was worth a shot.
McKenna took a deep breath. Nodded. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
And as another brilliant grin split Will’s face, her stomach simultaneously danced and churned as she wondered what she’d gotten herself into.
THREE
McKenna eyed the plane in front of her and then looked back at Will. “You seriously know how to fly this thing?”
He just laughed and continued his preflight checklist. “Would I have offered to help if I didn’t?”
She shrugged.
Will brushed off his hands and stood from where he’d been bent looking under the plane. “All set, I think.”
“You think?”
He laughed again. “We’re all set. I’m sure of it. I always check everything before I go.” His face sobered. “Better to be safe than sorry and all that. I’m extra careful because a buddy I took lessons with crashed his plane a year or so ago and didn’t make it. Neither did his passenger.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.... Especially right before I climb into that thing with you.”
“I’m always careful, that’s what I’m telling you. Besides, I’d never let anything hurt you, McKenna.”
Years ago, in the throes of her ridiculous crush, she’d have seen those words as some sweeping romantic promise. Now she knew better—it was just more evidence that he saw her as someone to be protected. She bit back the urge to remind him that she was the one with training and an actual mandate to serve and protect and she didn’t need him to treat her like a fragile, sheltered princess. But there was no need to start the day with an argument, no matter how frustrated his attitude made her.
They climbed into the plane and Will taxied down the runway, easing the nose of the small aircraft into the air seamlessly. McKenna let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.
“All right. So we’re headed south.”
“Yeah, southeast.” She gave him the coordinates for where they’d found the bodies.
“And all that’s your territory? That’s a pretty far range for one person to cover.”
McKenna nodded. “Yeah. I guess that’s why this was technically a promotion, because it’s more responsibility.”
“Where’s the closest trooper besides you?”
“Kotzebue.” She named a town on the western coast of Alaska, hundreds of miles away and not connected to Barrow by anything resembling a road.
“Not exactly close.”
She shook her head. “Not at all.”
“What if this situation escalates?”
McKenna shrugged. “I work harder, I guess.”
“So you’re on your own then.”
“I can handle it.”
“I never meant to say you couldn’t.”
Conversation lulled then. Not a comfortable pause, but an awkward silence where McKenna could feel Will weighing his words and deciding what was safe to say. So maybe she’d overreacted, but it had seemed as if he was implying she couldn’t handle things on her own.
The bodies she’d seen the day before flashed before her eyes, and terror rose for a brief moment in her throat, but she shoved it down. She could handle this. She could.
“What are we looking for when we get there?” Will had apparently decided to go with a change of subject, which McKenna thought was smart of him. He’d apparently learned something about women in the years he’d been married.
“I...I don’t know,” she admitted. “I talked to Captain Wilkins yesterday and he told me he’d sent in paramedics to handle the scene. There’s no medical examiner in Barrow, so paramedics take care of it.”
“You didn’t have to stay until they got there or anything? Make sure the crime scene wasn’t tampered with or corrupted?”
Wilkins had asked the same thing of her yesterday—why she didn’t stay. She’d stuttered out an explanation for him, telling him how shocked she’d been and how she hadn’t known what to do, but it had only sort of satisfied him.
“You were supposed to,” Will said with understanding after reading her silence. How could he do that? Was she that transparent, or could he still read her thoughts well after all those years? They’d been close the summer after his senior year, had spent long hours talking by the water as the midnight sun shone down on them. Then he’d left, taking McKenna’s heart with him. No, scratch that. She’d tried to offer him her heart, attempted to awkwardly confess her crush to him, but either he hadn’t understood what she’d been trying to say or he hadn’t felt the same. When he left, he left her, her bruised ego and her heart behind.
“Yeah.” She exhaled. “I was supposed to.”
“It’s not normal for your job, though, having to deal with all this.”
She didn’t like the fact that he was now privy to one of her failures. “It doesn’t matter. I should have known. I’ve had the training.”
He said nothing in reply, just kept piloting them across the vast wilderness. It was beautiful out there, down below their tiny airplane. Braided rivers rushed across the green and gold of the tall tundra grass, and the fireweed, which had bloomed almost all the way up, indicating that summer was over and winter would arrive soon, provided a stunning dark pink contrast. Taking her cue from Will, McKenna sat in silence, enjoying the view and sorting through case details in her head.
“Is this it?”
McKenna confirmed the coordinates with him and noticed details of the landscape that looked familiar from yesterday.
Will landed the plane smoothly, allaying her fears about his flying abilities, at least for today. After he’d finished his post-flight duties, McKenna led the way. “It’s about...probably half a mile this way,” she told him as they started to walk.
“Why didn’t we land there?”
She stopped in her tracks. “You know what? I don’t know why I didn’t think of that.”
“This really isn’t what you’re used to, is it, city girl?”
Maybe it was the “city girl” comment. Or maybe it was the compassion in his tone. McKenna wasn’t sure. All she knew was that she’d messed up again, in front of one of the people she’d most like to prove her competency to. “I can handle it fine, Will,” she ground out between clenched teeth. “I messed up a couple of times. But I won’t again.” She prayed it would be true and silently begged Will not to contact any of the people he must know to tell them she wasn’t up to this job. People’s recommendations went a long way up here in the middle of nowhere.
&nbs
p; Her job was on the line if she didn’t get it together. And even if the location was less than ideal, this job was the only one she’d ever really wanted.
“I can handle it fine,” she repeated again with more firmness, not sure who she was convincing.
Will threw up his hands in surrender. “What is with you? It was just a comment—I didn’t mean anything by it. Do you want me to take you back to Barrow and forget my offer ever existed?”
Yeah. That was exactly what she wanted. Except when the wind crept across the tundra, whispering through the grass and taunting her with the fact that it knew and had seen what had happened here yesterday, chills invaded her entire body. She couldn’t come back here with Chris.
She might not relish giving Will a front-row seat to her fumbling attempts to handle the case, but she trusted him. With her life, if necessary.
And for now that would have to be enough.
* * *
What was it she thought she had to prove? Will wondered as he walked behind her, scanning their surroundings for possible threats, human or animal. He’d spent enough time in this wilderness to know it was as treacherous as it was beautiful. But even as he tried to remain alert to his surroundings, his eyes kept returning to the woman beside him.
McKenna hiked along without another word to him, which left him time alone with his thoughts. More time with them than he wanted, if he were honest.
Thankfully, she stopped soon, pointing to an unmistakable red stain on the brown earth that he couldn’t have missed even if he’d tried.
“The paramedics took the bodies to Anchorage this morning.”
Will didn’t consider himself to have a weak stomach—look at what he did for a living. But something about knowing the blood had come from someone instead of something, like the animal blood he was accustomed to seeing, churned his stomach.
But not as much as the thought that it could have been McKenna’s. What were the chances that whoever had committed the crimes had still been around yesterday, watching the investigation of his crime scene? Was it just arson where people did that, or was it all crimes?
Tundra Threat Page 3
