by Edie Claire
Ben wrapped the phone cord idly around his wrist. Lara was right, dammit. He and Haley had known each other for only three days. His feelings for her were strong, despite his getting to know her at a time when she was in crisis, with her emotions in tatters and her dirty laundry hanging out to dry. But her perspective was different. She wasn’t seeing him at his weakest. She was seeing him as a lifeline, a rescuer, even as an entertainer… at a time when she was already emotionally vulnerable. He couldn’t possibly be sure that what she felt for him was real, and neither could she.
“Ben? You still there? Jeez, I didn’t mean to drag you down,” Lara said remorsefully. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t go for it! I think you should. Look, I know you don’t want to hear this, but you don’t need one more ‘meh’ girlfriend you’re struggling to keep things going with when deep down, you know it’s no good anyway. Life’s too short and you’re too old. You get to be thirty and it’s time to go for the real thing. Even if it costs you.”
“I’m twenty-eight!” he protested.
“Whatever,” she said dismissively. “You want to know when it’s real? I’ll tell you. When you meet a woman you’re willing to give up the whales for.”
Ben went silent. It was an old criticism. One which never failed to sting. His entire family thought his lifestyle was nothing but a lark of youth, a wanderlust he would grow out of. Someday he would get tired of never having any money, and then he would settle down. He’d fall in love with a woman and his perspective would change; they’d have kids and settle down.
Settle down.
Why didn’t anyone ever settle up?
“Thanks for the advice, Lar,” he said flatly.
“Don’t give up on her, Ben,” Lara said quickly, no doubt sensing his dwindling patience. “Please don’t give up. Just be smart about it. Go slow. Get to know everything you can about her. Don’t rush things even if she begs you — and you know what I mean. If she leaves and you can’t live without her, go visit her wherever she lives. Then you’ll know.”
Ben unwound the phone cord. “I hear what you’re saying. Thanks. Goodnight, Lara.”
“Goodnight, Ben,” she returned uneasily. “And happy birthday.”
They hung up. Ben blew out a breath and crossed to a kitchen stool. It was getting late, but the sun was still shining outside his windows, clinging to the night sky with the same tenacity that defined everything about the short, glorious Alaskan summer. Grow now. Feast now. Enjoy now. Soon enough, the cold and the darkness would return.
He looked out toward Haley’s cabin. He had no idea what the future held for the two of them. But running away from her was no longer an option.
Chapter 17
Haley walked to the railing of her porch and looked down the gravel road. She saw nothing stirring.
Ben had said “late afternoon.” It was nearly 4:30 PM. Did that qualify?
She returned to the middle of her porch and jogged in place. She was itching to run, but had no intention of doing so when she could turn a corner and run smack into a bear. Especially not when she had already forgotten which kind you were supposed to play dead with.
Where was he?
She had been looking forward to their adventure all day. And all last night. Never mind how wretched the rest of her day had gone, she still had her time with Ben. Precious little of it left now, but what she was given, she intended to make the most of.
She smiled as she pictured him out on his boat with another group of excited tourists. It had been overcast and cool for much of the week, but today the sky was blue and the air was practically balmy. He would have a good time out on the water. He deserved to have some fun.
She still could not believe, no matter how often she pinched herself, that he knew about her pregnancy and still wanted to spend time with her. Even when he thought she was pregnant by some mystery man, he had been friendly and kind. If he was some weirdo with three eyes who was grateful for anyone’s company that would be one thing — but a man who looked like Ben could hang out with a girl who looked like Alexa the waitress anytime. Instead, he was hanging with Haley Olson. Pregnant, emotionally fried Haley Olson.
He was taking her out to find a grizzly.
Her smile broadened at the thought. It was a credit to Ben that she could smile at all. Considering that at this very moment, pretty much every problem in her life was coalescing into one giant, raging inferno.
Micah had further punished Tim by staying away a second night. And instead of going to find her and asking her to come back, he was throwing himself into his work and doing exactly what Micah had told him to do, which was refrain from trying to contact her at all. Micah, of course, wanted desperately for him to come after her and got more depressed each hour he did not. Michelle couldn’t believe that Tim was “so ready to let Micah go,” and in her last conversation with Haley had inquired about the legalities of child custody. In the meantime, every day took them all closer to receiving the final results of the amniocentesis, which at this point could only make things worse.
Enter Stirjon Chemicals. A fishermen’s group had brought a civil action against the company, claiming damage in the form of a fish kill that began soon after “renovations” to the outdated plant upstream. The group was asking for discovery, which meant that Stirjon would be scrambling to hide any damning internal documents penned by their scientific group. Haley’s job would be to make sure those documents stayed hidden.
Whether Stirjon’s effluent was actually causing the problem, Haley didn’t know. At least not yet. But more than likely, she eventually would know that every day she skillfully stalled the discovery process and buried the fishermen’s group in an avalanche of legal challenges and maneuvers, a little more toxin was creeping toward the orcas of Puget Sound.
Some days she did hate her job. Not that she would condone the company’s polluting — she would, in fact, bust her butt to make them stop it. It was in their own stupid interest, besides being the right thing to do.
Still, Ben’s suspicions were at least partly right. If she had the choice, she would much rather work for the fishermen’s group. She smirked as she imagined herself cobbling together an irrefutable case, soaking the reckless, irresponsible jerks at Stirjon for such a fortune that no other company would risk making the same mistake.
But she didn’t have that choice. There was no way she could jump ship now and work as a plaintiff’s attorney. She had her hands too deep in the field; she would run into constant conflicts of interest. And if she bailed on environmental law altogether she would lose four hard-fought years of expertise and professional clout. She hadn’t been named lead associate on the Stirjon case for nothing. Her acumen was widely respected. She couldn’t just give that up.
She looked down the road again, but saw only a raven fluttering in the weeds. “Come on, Ben,” she muttered out loud. “I need to see your smile.”
The Stirjon situation, irritating as it was, was not even her biggest concern. Bob had been flipping out all day over rumors that a discovery ruling was about to be issued on the Consolidated case. And although that particular minefield risked no new damage to the environment, it risked something of major importance to Haley: her time in Alaska. If the rumors were true and the ruling proved unfavorable, she would have no choice but to hop on the next plane out.
But she refused to think about that. Right now, for the rest of the afternoon and hopefully the bulk of the evening, she wanted to think about only one thing.
Having a fabulous time with Ben Parker.
To her joy, she at last heard the distant crunch of tires on gravel. She stared down the road anxiously until Kenai Marine’s dilapidated Jetta came into view. Her heart soared as she watched Ben drive up to the cabins, park, unfurl his long legs from the too-small car, and stand.
His dimples were showing. “You ready?”
“Do I need anything besides what I brought along yesterday?” she asked brightly.
“Nope.”
&
nbsp; “Then I’m ready.”
Ben closed the car door and headed towards his cabin. “Give me two minutes.”
Haley went back into her own cabin to collect her pack, debating over whether to bring her phone. With a sigh of resignation, she decided she would have to. She couldn’t afford to miss another late-day email from Bob, and it would be easier to check again on the way home than have to fetch the phone at the cabin and then drive herself back out to the highway. She double-checked to make sure the phone was off, then threw it in her bag.
She walked back outside and waited by the Jetta. Ben arrived seconds later, dressed in jeans and another of those soft, plaid button-down shirts that made him look like the world’s sexiest lumberjack. His hair was windblown and his eyes twinkled with anticipation as he approached her.
Haley sprang up from the car hood against which she was leaning. Without any critical thought whatsoever she stepped forward, threw her arms around his neck, and hugged him. The gesture was brief, friendly, and surprised her as much as it probably did him. But she didn’t regret it.
As she pulled back, he looked at her with amusement, and perhaps a trace of skepticism. “What was that for?” he asked mildly.
“You got me,” she said candidly. “Couldn’t seem to resist.” She started to apologize, but reconsidered. To hell with that. She was done hiding her feelings.
Ben said nothing as they got in the car and drove out through the woods to the main road. He didn’t seem upset. Just thoughtful.
“How were the whales today?” she asked cheerfully.
He smiled. “Frolicking. Saw one on the first tour and two on the second. No orcas today, but the porpoises were in fine form. Good day for tips, too.”
“Any kids on board? Did the otters do that somersault thing?”
Haley relaxed into her seat as he recounted the day’s adventures in colorful detail and with plenty of laughs. She loved hearing him talk about his job and about nature in general. His enthusiasm was always contagious.
“And should I ask how your day went?” he asked much later. “Or are we not thinking about that right now?”
“We are not,” she answered matter-of-factly. “But can I reserve the right to start babbling incoherently about it at some random moment in the future?”
He grinned at her. “You may.”
An unfamiliar warm and bubbly feeling welled up within Haley’s chest. It took her a moment to realize it was happiness.
“You were so right. You know that?” she blurted.
“Of course I was. About what?”
“About the cause of my… you know, the waterworks. When I left Newport Beach, I felt like I was suffocating. Like if I didn’t get away from it all, and soon, something inside me was going to break. I did need to get away, physically, but the real problem was that I was bottling everything up. Pretending it wasn’t getting to me. Pretending I didn’t need or want to talk about it.”
She let out a contented breath. “It sounds so cliché, doesn’t it? Needing to talk about something. But the evidence speaks for itself. It’s such a relief to know that you know about the baby and Micah’s flipping out and that you understand how much it weighs on me. There’s no reason I should feel as relieved as I do. Everything still sucks. In fact it’s getting worse, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. And yet, at this very moment, I am in a ridiculously good mood.”
She looked at him with a grin. “Go figure.”
His answering smile was broad. “Go figure.”
They drove along the Seward Highway beyond Moose Pass, chatting easily about everything and nothing. She learned that he had once been bitten by a mongoose (he insisted it was his own fault), and he learned that for a girl who grew up wealthy, she was woefully under-traveled, having been to both Canada and Mexico but spending no significant time anywhere east of the Mississippi besides Orlando. After a while Ben turned off onto a succession of more and more rural roads, ending their journey on a narrow gravel lane in the middle of dense woods.
“We’re here,” he announced importantly.
Haley looked around. “Here” was in the middle of nowhere. He had parked the car on a narrow bridge over a stream, as far to the side of the road as he could get, which was not very far, considering the bridge had no shoulder and no guard rail. The trees and brush were thick all around, and the stream that ran beneath them was shallow, but swift. She saw an official-looking sign posted on a tree down by the water and craned her neck to read it. Area behind this sign closed.
“Where is here, exactly?” she asked.
His smile was furtive. “A little-known hotspot for grizzlies on the Kenai Peninsula. Right about now, every year, the salmon run through here. It’s not a sure thing, but if we hang out for a while, we’ve got a good shot at seeing a coastal brown bear fishing for his dinner. You game?”
Haley looked around again. Her window was cracked open, and outside the glass she could already see a half dozen mosquitos bobbing around, surveying a likely path to entry. She slipped a hand to the armrest and rolled up the window. There was something spooky about the place. She wasn’t scared exactly, but the idea of grizzly bears hiding in the dark depths of the forest mere feet from the car did creep her out.
Still, in the right company, spooky could be fun.
“We’re staying in the car, right?” she confirmed, looking again at the ominous warning on the tree. It was a permanent metal sign. It was doubtless there for a reason.
“I said we would, didn’t I?” Ben reminded her. “I always keep my promises.”
Haley met his eyes. “I know you do. And yes, I’m game. So what do we do now?”
He adjusted his seat back and stretched out his legs. “We wait. And watch.”
Haley settled more comfortably in her own seat. “Sounds good.” She studied the edges of the stream as far as she could see — which was not very far, because the stream meandered and the brush was heavy to either side.
Ben reached into the back seat and produced a pair of binoculars. “You can use these if you want.”
Haley thanked him and gave it a shot. But rather than searching for bears, she studied the clear, rushing stream. “Oh, wow!” she exclaimed after a moment. “There’s two gigantic fish swimming down there. Red ones.”
“Sockeye, probably,” he commented. “They get the bright colors when they’re spawning.”
Haley lowered the binoculars. She didn’t care to equate the scaly free-swimming things below her with last night’s entree. Nor could her mind safely dwell on the word “spawning.”
“I like fish, but we never ate much of it growing up,” she reminisced instead. “At least not at home. My Aunt Janie thought it smelled bad. Even when we had a cat and fed it canned food, she made us give it to him outside.” Haley smiled at the memory. She and Micah had broken that rule once, and Janie had had a full-out, foot-stomping fit.
Ben turned to her, his expression curious. “Tell me more about your aunt. You haven’t mentioned her much.”
Haley’s smile turned bittersweet. She had avoided talking about Janie for the sake of her own composure. It would feel good, now, to talk about her whole family.
“Janie was my mother’s younger sister,” she began. “Much younger. She was a late-in-life surprise to my grandparents, and she was born with Down Syndrome. The doctors said she would have a low IQ and not to expect much from her, and when she surpassed their expectations they called her ‘high functioning’ and told my grandparents they were lucky. The school put her in special ed, and after years of no one even trying to teach her to read, my grandmother decided to try herself. Janie did learn to read and to do simple mathematics. If she’d had better support earlier and been pushed harder, we all suspect she could have learned a whole lot more. Janie was smart in so many ways. She was bright and energetic and hilariously funny.”
Haley paused a moment, her eyes misting. She would not cry again. After yesterday, she was officially cried out for at l
east a year. But thinking about Janie always made her emotional. “Janie’s brainpower was never a problem,” she explained. “Her problem was her heart. She was born with multiple defects, and even though she was operated on several times as a child, she never was quite right. She was limited physically, in terms of stamina, and she frequently got sick.”
Haley cast a glance at Ben. She hoped she wasn’t boring him. He hadn’t said a word. But his expression showed no boredom. Only sympathetic interest.
She took a breath. She wanted to tell him about Janie. She would have to, in order to explain what was happening with Micah and the baby. She cast another glance into the eerily dark forest surrounding them.
No bears.
“When my mother found out she was pregnant with Micah and me, she totally flipped,” Haley began. “She was terrified at the prospect of twins and wanted to hire a live-in baby nurse. My dad would have agreed, but Janie wouldn’t hear of it. She loved babies and wanted to help take care of us herself. So my grandparents moved her out of their house and into ours, and she lived with us until Micah and I were sixteen. Nobody wanted her to leave then, but my grandmother broke her hip and Janie felt they needed her more.”
Haley’s peripheral vision caught a blur of black to her right. She startled in her seat.
“It’s just a raven,” Ben said calmly. “Go on.”
She tried to slow her heartbeat. “A grizzly wouldn’t just attack the car, would it?” she asked, feeling stupid. “Could it break the windows?”
Ben gave her a sardonic look. “I’m not answering that question. Keep talking.”
Haley’s nerves calmed. “Aunt Janie was like a second mother to us. She rocked us and fed us and sang us songs. She stayed home with us when my parents were out — which was a lot. She did most of the laundry and all of the cooking. She cleaned the house, put bandages on booboos, and listened to all the usual complaints about mean girls and gross boys and crabby teachers. What seems crazy now is how much she loved it. My mother never made Janie do any of those things; she never even asked. Janie just liked taking care of people. If my mother got to the laundry before her or tried to mop the kitchen, Janie would sulk and do it over again. Eventually Mom just gave up and let her do whatever she wanted. Janie was nervous in crowds and never wanted to go out, so our home was her kingdom.”
