Jack scrambled out of the plane, tripping over Wavey’s empty kitty carrier and stumbling to his knees with a curse. “I know how to hire good help!” he bellowed after her as he struggled to his feet, but she never acknowledged him. He stood watching her stalk up the ramp, her back rigid with anger.
What the hell did she have against Wavey? She hadn’t even met the girl yet. Damn, but that woman made him mad!
CHAPTER EIGHT
SENNA WAS FUMING AS SHE CHARGED up the ramp. Did he think she was blind? She knew the real reason Wavey was here.
By the time she reached the lodge she was convinced that the only thing for her to do was throw this whole sorry mess of an estate into Granville’s lap and return to Maine. She entered the living room and looked around, boiling with frustration that nothing had changed. Foolishly, on the flight in, she’d imagined that all the stickers would have been scraped from the windows, the glass would be sparkling, the heaps of boxes and crates would have been unpacked, the sawdust and cobwebs swept up and dusted away, the floors scrubbed and buffed. Instead, she was upset to see that everything looked exactly the same as when they’d left yesterday afternoon. Jack’s two new hires had been given three whole hours to get a jump on the work, yet nothing whatsoever had been done. Not one thing.
Why was she so surprised? Wavey was nothing more than a very young sex kitten with a crush on Jack, and Gordina was a complete unknown, though it stood to reason that she was probably just as young and gorgeous as Granville’s granddaughter. The two of them had no doubt been purring and slinking about while all this work remained to be done. And where was Charlie, the chore boy?
“Wavey! Gordina?”
She got no answer. Then Jack burst into the room, out of breath from having chased her up the ramp. He skidded to a stop and looked around the untouched room the same way she had. “Looks like both of your new hires have been kidnapped,” Senna said, planting her hands on her hips.
Before Jack could respond Chilkat uttered a growl deep in his chest and lunged toward a stack of boxes in the center of the room, hitting them squarely with his shoulder and sending them toppling as a very small kitten leapt from the midst of the chaos, let out a terrified yowl, and in one frantic bound managed to ascend the tallest pinnacle in the room, which just happened to be Jack. Senna stared wide-eyed as he reached up and deliberately pried the terrified kitten off his head, dangling it high above a transfixed Chilkat.
“Wavey!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs as several deep scratches on his forehead began to ooze blood.
There was a sound from the direction of the kitchen, and then Wavey rushed out, her hands raised to the sides of her pretty face at the sight of her kitten squirming in Jack’s grasp above Chilkat’s slavering jaws. “My kitten!” she cried out.
“Where’s Gordina?” Jack said, lifting the kitten higher as both Wavey and Chilkat lunged for it.
“Give me my kitten!” Wavey wailed. “You’re hurting her!”
“What have the two of you accomplished while I was gone?” Jack thundered.
“We were hungry. We didn’t have breakfast, so me and Gordina fixed something to eat….”
“It shouldn’t take three hours to eat breakfast.”
Senna stepped between them, her fingers curling through Chilkat’s collar. “Wavey, take the kitten to your cabin and then come back immediately. There’s a lot of work to be done around here and little time left to do it.”
Wavey focused on Senna for the first time and blinked startled eyes. “You must be the wedding planner,” she said.
“I’m Senna McCallum, the admiral’s granddaughter,” Senna snapped, sick to death of being referred to as the wedding planner. “Go on and lock that kitten up in a safe place before Chilkat has an early lunch.”
After Wavey had departed with the kitten Senna looked at Jack, who was dabbing the blood off his forehead, and shook her head with a short laugh. “I have to hand it to you, Jack. You sure know how to pick ’em.”
“If you think you can do better, be my guest,” he said, turning on his heel and departing the lodge.
By noon Charlie and Ula had predictably gone missing. Wavey was washing windows in the living room, her every movement the embodiment of graceful lethargy. Had any living human being ever moved so slowly? Jack was down on the dock, still unloading the plane, while Gordina prepared lunch for them. Senna was scraping the dreaded decals off the living-room windows with a razor blade and counting down the moments until she could escape this awful predicament and return to Maine. Chilkat had planted himself in the open doorway, apparently sleeping but not really, for every time Senna glanced at her grandfather’s old dog, he was looking right back at her with that steady, fixed gaze as if he was waiting for her to do something.
But what?
Well, she could scream in frustration. A long, loud horrible scream would give Chilkat something to sit up and take notice of, and it just might make Senna feel better. She could scream at Wavey to hurry up because at the rate that girl was washing windows, it would take her two weeks just to finish the living room. And then there was Gordina, a woman who could quite easily have wed Count Dracula. A fifty-four-year-old bloodless, gaunt and unsmiling woman with a close-fitting cap of straight, slate-gray hair. Definitely not another sex goddess for Jack to toy with, for which Senna was grateful, but the woman smoked, and when Senna had laid down the law about smoking inside the building, Gordina had given her a malevolent look that made Senna’s skin crawl. The woman was definitely frightening, but if she could cook, all would be forgiven…except smoking inside.
Senna paused, eyes narrowing. Even with the windows and doors open in the living room, she was sure she’d just caught a whiff of cigarette smoke. She laid down the razor blade and walked quietly toward the kitchen. She peeked just to make sure, and yes, there Gordina was, standing at the work island, lit cigarette clenched between pursed lips, shredding a head of cabbage as if it had done her severe bodily harm in the past but never would again.
“Gordina.” Senna stepped into the kitchen. “I asked you not to smoke inside the building.”
Gordina paused, still clutching the big knife and the remains of the head of cabbage. Her eyes narrowed defiantly. Even as Senna stared in anger, a long section of ash fell from the end of her cigarette and landed in the mound of shredded cabbage. Senna spun around and stalked back into the living room and out the front door. She could see Jack down by the plane, going through a tool box on the dock. She was so furious she didn’t recall her feet touching the ramp on her way down. “Gordina has got to go,” she snapped as she drew up in front of him. “Right now!”
Jack had straightened at the sound of her approach. He was wearing a baseball cap with some flying logo on it and he tugged the brim down over a gathering frown. “You mean, before lunch?”
“Right now,” Senna repeated. “I told her not to smoke inside and she’s smoking in the kitchen. She’s not only smoking while she fixes lunch, but the ashes of her cigarette are falling into the food.”
“Queasy.”
“Fire her. I’d have done it myself but she was holding a very big knife. Fire her, and fly her back to Goose Bay. Right now.”
Jack dropped a brass fitting back into the tool box. “Okay.” He took off his hat, whipped it against his pant leg a couple of times, pulled it back on and started up the ramp. He paused a few steps beyond her and turned around. “Are you sure about this? What if I can’t find us another cook?”
Senna put her hands on her hips and glared. Jack sighed and continued on his mission while Senna returned to the living room and went back to scraping windows that faced the dock so she could have the pleasure of watching Gordina leave. Minutes passed, and there was still no sign of them descending to the plane. Half an hour later Jack walked into the living room. “Wavey, better go check on your kitten,” he said to the girl, who was gazing out the window with a rag in her hand as she daydreamed her way slowly through the afternoon.
Senna waited until Wavey had disappeared before challenging Jack. “Well? What’s the hold up?”
Jack shoved his hands into his jeans pockets and drew a deep breath, blowing it out with a grimace of pain. “The thing is, yesterday I begged Gordina to quit her job and come to work for us because we needed her desperately. She says her boss won’t take her back, and she has this sister who went bonkers when her husband ran out on her, and her sister lives in this special home now because she needs care and is on several medications, all of which costs Gordina a lot of money, and—”
“Did you fire her?” Senna interrupted.
He straightened and squared his shoulders. “She promised she wouldn’t smoke inside again.”
“Jack!”
“She promised.” He shrugged helplessly. “Besides, where the hell are we going to find another cook at this late stage of the game?”
SENNA OPENED HER EYES with a moan and lay motionless on the bed, hoping she was wrong, hoping the murky gray light infusing the room didn’t really signify the coming of yet another dawn. Hoping the gray mane of the Labrador morning was still hours away because she’d never been quite so sore in all her life. Any movement at all was sheer torture. Even her hair hurt. She counted on her fingers the days that she’d been here. Time had passed so swiftly that she had to count twice to be sure. Seven. Seven days of non-stop work had just about done her in, and she had one more week to go. One more week before the lodge opened and she could head home. Seven more days ’til she could immerse herself in a big bathtub full of hot water for at least twenty-four hours.
The burning question was, would she survive them? Maybe, if she took them one moment at a time. One catastrophe, one set-back, one contingency at a time. Hope for the best and prepare for the worst….
She heard the faint howling of the sled dogs from behind the guides’ cabin. Normally she would have thrilled to the sound, so like a pack of wolves, but today she closed her eyes and moaned again. If the dogs were howling, it really was morning.
A laugh came from out of nowhere and cramped her aching stomach muscles as she remembered the trip to fetch the huskies in Jack’s plane. It was funny now, but it hadn’t been then. To keep to his original plan of making only two trips, he’d crammed ten dogs into the passenger compartment, stuffing them in one after the other, loose. Senna had watched this loading procedure with a dubious frown. “Is it really wise, taking so many all at once?”
“They carry this many dogs all the time in smaller planes during the Iditarod,” he’d reassured her. “I’ve seen pictures.”
“Maybe so, but those sled dogs were probably tired after running a thousand miles,” Senna pointed out, “whereas your dogs are pretty rested up and lively.”
“These guys’ll be fine. They’re trained to behave, and besides, they’ve already sorted out their pecking order. There’s no reason for them to fight, and if there’s so much as a growl I’ll push the yoke over and give them a couple of seconds of weightlessness. Guaranteed, that’ll settle them down. Quit worrying.” Half an hour later they were airborne with ten dogs in back, heading for the lodge. The flight went smoothly for about twenty minutes, when, without any advance warning, all hell broke loose. One moment it was just the throaty roar of the plane’s engine droning steadily along, and the next it was combined with the horrific bedlam of ten big sled dogs all at each other’s throats.
Senna cast one look over her shoulder and knew they were in deep trouble. All she could see were slashing fangs and flying fur. “Take the yoke!” Jack bellowed after two seconds of weightless flight only served to intensify the fight. He unbuckled his safety harness and hurled himself into the maelstrom. Senna didn’t even have a chance to refuse the task of flying the plane because quite suddenly she was the pilot. Fortunately there were no tall mountains in the area because it seemed to take a very long time for Jack to beat the dogs apart, and even then half of them were still going at it when he wormed back into the pilot’s seat, reached for the controls and aimed for the nearest landing place, which happened to be a little blip of a pond dead ahead, barely big enough to handle the plane.
The landing was rough, the engine cut out, and the plane drifted of its own momentum toward the shore. Jack jumped out onto the pontoon, hauling dog after dog out of plane and hurling each, one at a time, into the water. “Get out, grab those tethers, wade ashore and tie the bastards up to trees as you catch ’em!” he shouted as he grabbed another dog and tossed it overboard. “If they start to fight again, let ’em kill each other. Don’t get between them.”
Fifteen minutes later, wet, muddy and covered with blood and gore, mostly belonging to the dogs, she was helping Jack tend his lacerated hand using the plane’s first aid kit. His temper was still up and he was swearing like a lumberjack, especially when Senna doused the wounds with hydrogen peroxide. “Goddammit, woman, are you trying to kill me?”
He held up his hand when she was finished and examined the bloodstained bandaging, then glared at the equally bloodied sled dogs tied far apart to spindly black spruce trees along the pond’s edge. They stared back, pieces of ear missing here and there, cuts on muzzles oozing, clumps of fur hanging off in saliva-soaked tatters. Their tongues were lolling and they looked absolutely content.
“Well, you were right about those dogs,” Senna couldn’t resist saying. “They’re all fur and fangs.” And then she couldn’t help but add, “Did any of those Iditarod pictures you saw look like this?”
After the emergency landing they’d divided the dogs into two groups, this time tethering them inside the plane and flying five at a time to the lodge. It took the remainder of the day to transport the rest of the team from the lake house, but there were no more fights. Jack’s hand had swelled to twice its normal size by the end of the day but for the past few days he’d functioned at full capacity, stubbornly refusing to go to the hospital in Goose Bay for X-rays and antibiotics, dulling the pain with handfuls of aspirin.
“You could lose that hand if you don’t get it cared for,” Senna warned, “and how, exactly, does a devout fly-fisherman fly-fish one handed?”
But the swelling was gradually going down, and in time all that would remain would be the scars. As for the sled dogs, they were hardly the worse for the experience. Two of them required stitching up, and Senna did the honors using dental floss, a curved needle and a pair of forceps, following Jack’s instructions as he steadied each dog, one at a time, in his arms. They were surprisingly compliant for such tough, grizzled creatures. “They know you’re trying to help them,” Jack explained.
“I honestly don’t see why you’d want to keep such a savage pack of beasts,” Senna said, tying off a knot.
Jack had stroked the head of the dog he held with his bandaged hand, holding no grudge whatsoever. “They’re great dogs,” he said. “Wait ’til this winter. You’ll see what I mean.”
There was an awkward silence after that slip of words, Senna holding the forceps, Jack holding the dog, both acutely aware that there would be no sharing of a winter experience. There would be no winter in Labrador, no sled dogs traveling down snowy trails. In fact, in a few more days, there would be no more Labrador at all for Senna. She’d be back in Maine, running the sales department at the Inn on Christmas Cove…
Planning weddings.
Senna shifted tentatively in bed and sighed. So much could happen in the next seven days. So much had happened in the first seven. So much that she hadn’t even thought about her job back in Maine for several days. Hadn’t even wondered how things were going without her. She’d been too worried about Jack’s hand and the multitude of tasks that faced them before opening day. Senna tried another whole-body stretch and then lay still again, analyzing the results.
Seven more days…
JACK KINDLED A FIRE in the guide cabin’s woodstove and put the coffee water on to boil. He flexed his injured hand. It still hurt like hell but the swelling had gone down considerably and he was pleased with how quickly it h
ad healed. Everything healed quicker in the clean outdoors. He drank his first cup of coffee sitting at the little table, jotting down the day’s duty list; things that must be accomplished come hell or high water. “Charlie, time to get up,” he said, pushing to his feet and carrying the mug with him to the door, where he stood in the doorway and looked out on the morning. The dogs saw him and howled again, raising their voices together like a pack of wolves. He wondered if Senna was up yet, and if Gordina and Wavey had survived another night in the “awful scary cabin,” which was how Wavey described the remoteness of the entire place: “awful scary.”
Senna was right about Wavey. The girl was basically useless. No matter how many times she was shown how to do something, she reverted back to her own techniques the moment she was left alone, and her own techniques involved moving as slowly as she could while looking dreamily beautiful. Senna was right about Gordina, too. She was an awful cook. She might make a killer runny omelet when devastated by a bad hangover, but unfortunately the killer part of that description had been literal. She hadn’t yet smoked another cigarette inside the building, but Jack was almost hoping that she would so he could fire her, which he should have done in the first place when Senna had asked him to.
Jack threw the dregs of his coffee onto the ground and reached for his jacket on the wall peg behind him. Time to feed the dogs. “Charlie. Get up. We have a long row to hoe today.” He banged the door shut behind him, hoping the noise would roust the boy. Charlie didn’t have all that much ambition, but what twelve-year-old did? Truth is, Senna’d been right about him, too. Jack had spent the better part of the past two days cutting wood, and right after breakfast he was going to have to get right back at it. Once the guests arrived he wouldn’t have time to be doing chores like that. He’d be on the river, guiding dawn ’til dark, and Senna would be gone, back to her wedding planner job in Maine. Back to Tim Cromwell, the insurance salesman.
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