Finn

by JoAnn Ross

  As her hands took hold of his belt again, he grabbed hold of them and held her arms out to her sides. Even as he was scrambling to figure out how to bail from this situation, he couldn’t help noticing that she still had great arms. Which made sense. It probably took strength to carry that guitar around.

  “You need to go to bed.”

  “I believe that’s what I’ve been saying.”

  When the tip of her tongue came out to lick her lower lip, the blood started rushing from his brain down below that belt again. It was a good thing he hadn’t planned to get married like all his brothers and have kids, because if his jeans heated up any more, they’d burst into flames, thus putting an end to any chance of him adding to the Brannigan genealogy.

  “That’s it.” He scooped her up and threw her over his shoulder. “You are going to bed. Alone.”

  “That’s no fun.” She was upside down, her roving hands dangerously close to the back of his belt as she tugged up his shirt. “Besides, I tried sleeping. It didn’t work. My mind just kept buzzing.”

  “You’ve had a long day. Plus, all this light can be a shock to the system when people first get up here,” he said. “Your body gets out of sync and disrupts your circadian rhythms, especially if you’ve been traveling. And, although it’s a little late for me to be telling you this, alcohol makes it worse.”

  “It’s definitely too late for that,” she surprised him by agreeing. “Unless this floor has taken to spinning.”

  “It’s steady as a rock.”

  “I was afraid of that.” She sighed as he put her down onto the bed. “I’m going to have a hangover in the morning, aren’t I?”

  “Probably.”

  How about the mother of all hangovers? At her weight, the amount of alcohol she’d ingested would have been multiplied. Concerned, Finn had decided to spend the night on the couch, to keep track of her, when her skin turned an unhealthy shade of green.

  “Oh, no!”

  He’d been there, done that enough times to know what was about to happen. Scooping her up again, he carried her into the bathroom, just in time.

  10

  Feeling both sick as a dog and horribly embarrassed, Tori knelt over the commode and barfed up the worst-looking blue and purple mess she’d ever seen. That’s what she got for eating a mountain then tossing champagne on top of it. She was wondering why the hell she hadn’t just decided to take up flame eating while she was at it when she realized that Finn was not only still in the bathroom but—oh, God—he was crouched on the tile floor beside her, holding her hair back with one hand while rubbing the nape of her neck with the other.

  Could her life get any worse? Adding to the adulterous, scheming fiancé, no home and no money to pay for one thanks to the cratering of her bank account, running into the one man she’d never been able to forget, only to hurl up her guts after sexually attacking him. And, adding insult to injury, being turned down.

  Did he have to be so nice?

  She flushed the toilet and started to get up again, his hand moving from the back of her neck to her elbow to steady her, when the second wave came.

  Her moan was like a wounded animal as she waved him away, dropped back down, and humiliated herself even more until there was nothing left but dry heaves.

  Wishing she could just flush herself away, or hey, maybe an earthquake would suddenly open up and swallow her—hadn’t she read about some major faults up here?—she collapsed into a puddle on the floor.

  “Wait here,” he said.

  No problem. Tori wasn’t certain she’d ever be able to move again.

  She closed her eyes, which only encouraged more spinning, and opened them to see him at the sink, wetting a small hand towel. Then he was back, helping her into a sitting position, her back against the wall, as he gently washed her face with the cool, wet cloth.

  “I think I’m going to die,” she moaned.

  “No.” He stroked the cloth over her forehead. Her cheeks. Beneath her eyes, which were still having a problem focusing. “Though you may wish you had in the morning.”

  “You’ll probably never believe this, but I’ve never gotten drunk enough to throw up before.”

  “You’ve probably never had a marriage breakup before it started, either.”

  “No. That was a first.”

  He dampened her lips, which felt as dry as the Sahara. “Like going up to a certain flyboy’s suite was a first?”

  “I was just going to thank you for being a gentleman. Until you brought that up,” she muttered.

  “Sorry.” He rubbed her shoulders, soothing the muscles that had gone from lax to stiff as boards at the reminder of that other night she’d allowed herself a freedom she’d learned to keep tightly reined in. “But it’s good you got a lot of that out of your system. Ready to go back to bed?”

  She nodded, then wished she hadn’t when a lightning bolt hit behind her eye. “Alone,” she accepted his earlier dictate. Not that it would probably matter. After this gross incidence, she doubted he’d ever want to have sex with her again.

  Which was what she wanted.

  And wasn’t this a fine mess she’d gotten herself into? Now she was not only a wretchedly ugly drunk. She was also a liar.

  * * *

  Since arriving in Caribou, Finn had gotten used to the constant sunshine, but after that episode with Tori, he was too wired to go home. Even if he could sleep, with his luck, he’d have nightmares of being back in the skies trying to dodge that SAM or skidding off the carrier. Or dreaming of having sex with Tori. Which wouldn’t count as a nightmare since it had been great, but as much as he still wanted her, he didn’t want it to be a rebound situation.

  So, where did that leave him?

  Not having an answer to that, he drove to the Caribou Café, which had started out a hundred years ago as a small diner that served the most basic meals to miners and dog sled mushers. It had grown since then, especially after Barbara Ann had bought the rest of the connected buildings on the block, adding a tavern/pool hall, a music venue with a dance floor, and the Trading Post, which served as a grocery store and post office.

  Never one to rest on her laurels, she’d then bought a vacant working man’s hotel across the street and fixed it up into a bed-and-breakfast that offered dinner delivery from the café. In one way she reminded Finn of his father. The woman simply didn’t stop, running at full tilt all the time.

  Yet she always took time to ask people how they were doing and actually cared about the answer. He’d heard it said that the reason she’d found her true home in Alaska was because there wasn’t anywhere else in the country big enough to hold her large, generous heart. Which, of course, explained the explosion of pink that had resulted in Tori’s meltdown.

  The café wasn’t that fancy. The rustic wooden tables were two, four, and six tops, the few booths were covered in scratched brown leather, and the floor was a vintage rough-scraped yellow cedar locally milled of the kind builders down in the lower forty-nine were paying big bucks to reclaim from barns, mills, and other old buildings. In a bit of what Finn took to be theme restaurant chic, old mining equipment hung down from the rafters, and painted totems brightened the log walls.

  One of the place’s design functions was that, while the café and Gold Gulch Saloon flowed into each other in one long, open space, each had its own exterior entry to the sidewalk. Finn chose the one to the tavern, wove through the tables and past the two pool tables, and slid onto a stool next to Yazz at the long, scarred wooden bar.

  “Why aren’t you home with Hannah?” he asked the pilot who’d gotten married last New Year’s and was still in that starry-eyed honeymoon stage.

  “She’s out of town.” Yazz, a native Alaskan who wore his hair in two long black braids, tipped back his beer. “At a medical convention in Seattle. She’s determined to bring back a partner. Preferably a board certified ob-gyn.”

  Being that Hannah Yazzie was Caribou’s sole family practitioner, Finn knew from talking wi
th the pilot that her job was often twenty-four seven. Finn figured she could’ve made big bucks staying in Seattle after graduating from University of Washington Medical School. Yet she’d chosen UW because it was tops in the nation in primary and rural care, which was where her heart lay. A heart that had led her here to Caribou, and Yazz.

  “My money’s on her.” He glanced over at a group of sport fisherman at a nearby table lying about today’s catch. From the spread of one guy’s arms, he must’ve landed Moby Dick. “Business is good,” he said to the bartender who’d returned to behind the taps after delivering a tray of tequila shots to another group across the room.

  “Booming,” the bartender, Cody Waggoner, whom Finn had discovered had a PhD in physics from MIT, agreed. “Which gives true meaning to making hay while the sun shines. The usual?”

  Finn glanced over at Yazz’s golden Alaskan Summer Ale, considered it, and decided he’d had enough changes in routine for one day. “Yeah. Thanks.”

  “You’ve got it.” He popped the top, then put a bottle of amber in front of Finn, along with a bowl of bar nuts. “I heard you brought in a runaway bride today.”

  “Word gets around.” Finn took a long swallow, then scooped up a handful of nuts.

  “Small towns,” Yazz said. “Barbara Ann’s feathers are definitely ruffled. She wanted to go out there and personally apologize, but Mary talked her out of it.”

  “Yeah. That wouldn’t have been the best idea,” Finn agreed.

  Tori’s appearance in town had already landed her on the gossip line. The last thing she needed was to have anyone show up as she was in the process of killing the mountain cake. Or worse yet, barfing it up.

  “So, how’s she doing?” Cody asked.

  “When I left, she’d gone to bed.”

  “Must be a bummer to be alone on what was supposed to be her wedding night,” Yazz said, a gleam of satisfied memory in his dark eyes that neared the point of TMI as far as Finn was concerned.

  Finn merely shrugged and took another drag on the beer.

  “I heard she’s famous,” another patron, seated on the other side of Yazz, broke into the conversation. “Barbara Ann’s put her on the juke.”

  “Seriously?”

  The typical genre played in the Gold Gulch was country. The old kind, like Cash and Waylon, with a few of the more pop stuff tossed into the mix for the women who liked to dance to it. Which, Finn heard, helped up the bar tabs since there probably wasn’t a guy on the planet who’d object to women shaking their badonkadonks.

  “Yep.” Yazz’s eyes narrowed, daring Finn to offer a word of objection. “Hannah likes her songs.”

  “She’s got a great voice.” Finn’s body started heating up at the memory of that silky soprano singing in his ear.

  “You listen to folk music?” Cody asked.

  “Something wrong with that?” Finn countered.

  “Not at all.” It must have come out harsher than he’d intended because the bartender raised his hands. “I just figured you more for a head banger rocker.”

  “You’ve been watching too many war flicks,” Finn said. “In reality pilots have too much to do while we’re in the cockpit to rock out to Van Halen.”

  “Well, fuck. Guess that screws up me having any Navy career,” the guy sitting next to Yazz said. “Since that and using the uniform to get all the chicks I want would be the only reasons to join up.”

  Finn didn’t bother to point out that with a probable body mass index equal to a walrus, the guy couldn’t fit in a cockpit.

  “How long is she staying?” Cody asked as he washed some glasses in the sink behind the bar.

  “Beats me. She didn’t share her plans.” Which wasn’t the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but if tonight’s behavior was any indication, she probably wasn’t settling into Caribou.

  “Her fiancé booked the cabin for two weeks.”

  “Then I guess that’s how long she’ll stay.”

  “Should give you time to close the deal,” a guy two stools down from Finn piped up.

  “That’s not in my plans.”

  “She came here thinking about having two weeks of nonstop honeymoon monkey sex,” walrus guy said with a leer. “You’ve already got the inside track, having met her first, but if you don’t do her, there are lots of guys in town who’d be glad to take on the assignment.”

  Feeling his teeth grind to dust, Finn took another long drink to cool his temper, which was beginning to heat up. “She’s a nice woman.”

  “Didn’t say she wasn’t. But whatever the hell happened to have her up here alone, she’s likely in the market for some revenge sex.”

  “How about we drop the damn topic and watch some hockey?” Cody said, putting an end to the conversation by turning the TV to a rerun of this year’s Stanley Cup final.

  “Just sayin’,” the guy muttered.

  “Anyone ever tell you that you’re a real piece of work?” Finn asked.

  “My wife. All the time. Why do you think I spend so much damn time here, increasing Barbara Ann’s bank account?”

  Finn polished off his beer, watched a replay of the Pittsburg Penguins beat the San Jose Sharks (who, to his mind, should’ve been called Land Sharks, and why would you play hockey in California, anyway?), and reminded himself that despite not having been able to get her out of his mind, Tori Cassidy was trouble. He’d be wise to keep his distance.

  Which would, if she went ahead and stayed in Caribou for the entire two weeks, be easier said than done.

  Meaning, he thought glumly, that he’d landed himself in a whole wide world of hurt.

  11

  The knock at the door sounded like a jackhammer. Rolling over onto her stomach with a moan, Tori covered her head with the pillow.

  It continued.

  She ignored it. Just as she tried to ignore her head, where a crew of lumberjacks had taken up residence and were attacking her with chainsaws.

  When she finally realized whoever it was was going to keep adding to the cacophony, she stumbled out of bed, and, trying to blink a desert’s worth of sand out of her gritty eyes, she dragged her sorry butt to the door.

  And was immediately blinded by the bright rays of a sun that hit like a fireball. But not so blinded she couldn’t see Finn standing on the front porch.

  “I was running along the lakefront and thought I’d drop by to make sure you’re still alive,” he said.

  “Depends on what your definition of alive is,” she countered. When his glance moved to her hair, she realized she undoubtedly had the worst bedhead ever. Her hair on a good morning made her look like a wild woman. This morning was a very long way from a good one.

  “Given how hammered you were last night, I figured you could use some hangover juju.”

  “I wasn’t that hammered.”

  At least she hoped she hadn’t been as she glanced around the room. The balloons had drifted down from the rafters and were lying, half-deflated, on the floor, looking about as bad as she felt. Gilt confetti was everywhere, even in her hair as she ran her fingers through it, and cake crumbs were scattered with it all over the floor. And speaking of the cake… It looked as if it had been attacked by a pack of wolves. Or Bigfoot.

  “You were three sheets to the wind when you coerced me into dancing with you,” he corrected easily as he slipped by her into the house.

  Dancing? “I don’t remember inviting you in.”

  “Ah, but I come bearing gifts.” He held up a paper bag. “The world’s best hangover cure.”

  “I don’t have a hangover.”

  “Yeah, you do. But don’t worry, in no time, you’ll feel great.” As if he had every right to make himself right at home, Finn walked into the kitchen, pulled a glass from the open shelves, and poured some purple-blue liquid from a plastic bottle in his bag into it.

  “A magic elixir,” he said, digging another, smaller white bottle out of the bag. Then a brown one. “Unlike some of those hangover recipes that
make you gag—”

  “Please.” She held up a hand as her stomach turned. “I’d appreciate you not using that word.”

  He tilted his head, gave her face, which she knew had gone pale as she’d felt the blood leave it, a judicious look. “Point taken. Anyway, you need to hydrate, and this not only tastes like a glacial waterfall, it’ll replace those electrolytes you lost even better than water can.”

  He shook two pills out of the white bottle and another from the brown. “Ibuprofen for the buzz saw in your head and a B-vitamin complex to replace minerals and vitamins. Sit down, take those, and I’ll make some coffee.”

  “Are you always this bossy?” She stayed standing.

  “Actually, you’re talking about my brother, Perfect James the Elder,” he said. “I’m probably one of the most easygoing of the seven of us. Except for maybe Knox, who everyone thought was just a surfer dude-slash-bartender but surprised the hell of us when he turned out to be this entrepreneur.” He shrugged. “Shows you never know.”

  He took hold of her hand, turned it over, and dropped the pills into her palm. “This will be a good start. Then you can take a long, hot shower to sweat some more of the alcohol out, and I’ll take you into town for a big breakfast of steak and eggs.”

  “I don’t eat breakfast.” Just the thought of any food, let alone such heavy ones, caused her stomach to start doing flips.

  “All you’ve had since lunch yesterday is cake. Which, no offense to Kendra Graham, who owns Mountain Munchies and created a really cool dessert, but you probably managed to down close to a five-pound bag of sugar. Especially when you factor in the additional sugar in nearly a bottle of champagne. So, you need some protein, fat, and carbs in your stomach. And getting out in the fresh air will clear your head, raise your endorphins, and generally make you feel better.”

  Getting out in the fresh air and all that sunshine could probably kill her. What she needed was to get back to bed. Fortunately, she hadn’t killed off all her brain cells, because she managed to avoid sharing that thought.

  “You sound as if you have some experience,” she said instead.