He cleared his throat. “Kerry, about last night. It was—”
“An exception,” she said briskly. “Don’t worry. It won’t happen again.”
That wasn’t what he had started to say. His word of choice would have been wonderful.
He felt surprised, flattened, hurt by this dismissal. He spared her a curt nod. Then he went out into the cold damp morning.
AS SOON AS SAM left, Kerry sank down on the hard unpadded boards of the bunk and buried her face in her hands. If Sam had said anything negative about last night, she didn’t think she could have borne it, and that was why she hadn’t given him a chance. She’d spoken first. She’d wanted to let him believe that their lovemaking had been no big deal. She wanted him to think of her as a sophisticated woman of the world who could take his attentions in stride. Sam had told her about the women who had tried to make a claim on him where none existed, and the last thing she wanted was for him to think she was like them.
Sam couldn’t possibly know that her experience in matters of love and sex had been confined to only one other man—Doug, her late husband. He was the only man she’d ever cared about, the only man she’d ever known in an intimate way.
But last night had been exceptional. Sam was an attentive lover, careful to make sure that she found pleasure in the act. He was strong, tender, caring and—well, he was perfect. And she didn’t want him to be perfect. She needed Sam Harbeck to be the kind of man she could walk away from once this experience was over. She needed the kind of man who could be there for her now and who would leave her alone later.
Alone to have her baby.
She dressed quickly, went to the window and gazed out toward the creek. She saw the bright blue of Sam’s parka through the trees and she wished he’d come back. Soon she would need to go out and she’d promised him last night that she’d never go without him, and the whole thing was so embarrassing, but there was nothing she could do about it.
He came back in carrying a bucket of water, which he placed atop the stove. While the water heated, she went outside and tended to business while Sam stood on the other side of a brush pile and rocked back and forth on his heels. As embarrassing as this procedure was, at least he didn’t make any comments.
When they went back in the hut, Sam washed first, shaving quickly. They didn’t talk much. While Kerry combed and bundled her hair into a scrunchy, Sam dealt a game of solitaire, not paying a whole lot of attention to her, and she was glad because she felt as if his presence while she bathed and smoothed her hair into submission was an invasion of privacy. Then she snickered out loud at the thought—how could she be embarrassed in front of Sam after last night?
“What’s so funny?” Sam wanted to know.
She told him, and he made a noise that didn’t communicate anything more than acknowledgment. She was at a loss to deal with the kind of tense watchfulness that seemed to direct what he said and did this morning. She wanted things to be like they were before, but last night had apparently made it impossible. All right, so she shouldn’t have slept with him. She’d known it might not be a good idea. Was she sorry? No, not at all. But it wouldn’t happen again.
They ate oatmeal with raisins and drank the coffee that Sam had brewed woodsman-style. Then, grateful because the sky cover seemed to lift, they struck out on the trail again, Kerry dutifully following close behind Sam. Their conversation was stilted now, and neither of them mentioned her pregnancy. Kerry found herself longing to talk about it, about the baby and her plans for it, but one look at Sam’s mouth riveted into a tight line made her think better of it. As the day progressed, she was glad not to feel any pressure to converse because she knew silence would conserve energy, and she would need it. Today’s trek was slightly longer than the one the day before.
They passed through an old ghost town, the remains of two log cabins and the sites of several other cabins, now torn down because their lumber was a coveted item in this land where such things had to be freighted in at great expense.
“This was a thriving place back in the old gold-rush days,” Sam said. Kerry found it hard to imagine even though the old concrete vault, once surrounded by a bank building, still stood. They stopped and ate lunch shortly after leaving the ghost town behind, shivering in the cold and eager to be on their way again.
It was getting on into the afternoon, around two o’clock or so, when they heard a faraway whine. High in the sky they spotted a blue-and-white speck floating toward them. They exchanged a look of incredulity and then hope as the whine became the drone of an engine and the speck became a plane. They couldn’t believe it could really be a plane; the old dog-sled trail was not located below any established flight path.
“We’d better hurry to the top of that ridge!” Sam shouted, and they began to traverse the rise. Kerry lagged behind, but Sam was there as the plane passed slightly to the north and he started waving his arms and shouting.
“Damn Vic Parnell, he should have kept emergency flares in his plane,” Sam said as Kerry reached him.
Kerry jumped up and down and waved, too, and Sam used the mirror in his survival kit, hoping that its reflection would catch the pilot’s eye. But as they watched in dismay, the plane circled slowly and gained altitude without any answering waggle of wings.
Kerry, worn out from her mad dash up the ridge, sank to the ground. “Do you think they were specifically searching for us?”
“I couldn’t read the identification number—the sun was glaring on it. But that sure wasn’t a Search-and-Rescue plane. It wasn’t a plane from Harbeck Air, either. I don’t know if the pilot was looking for us. Probably not. No one knows we’re out here.”
Sam looked almost as disappointed as she felt. Impassively she handed him a bag of gorp, and they each ate several handfuls for energy before resuming their hike.
“How much farther is it?” she asked after a while.
“See those trees down there?” Her gaze followed the line of his forefinger, and she nodded. “The cabin where we’re going to stay is on the other side.”
It wasn’t so far. And suddenly she couldn’t wait to be there, to be warm and snug inside. “Race you down the hill,” she hollered, and she would have done it, too, except that Sam grabbed her arm and insisted on a more sedate pace.
He dropped her arm as soon as she agreed not to race, but Kerry felt a sharp pang of regret as his hand fell away. She wished he hadn’t let go. It was the first time he had touched her all day.
CHAPTER NINE
The only available bed in their new lodgings was a double bed. They both saw it as soon as they entered the door; it was the biggest piece of furniture in the sparsely furnished cabin. After the first glance, they both self-consciously avoided looking at the bed as if to do so would bring up the subject of where they were going to sleep. Neither of them felt ready to tackle that, at least for the time being.
Aside from there being only one bed, the accommodation was excellent, and the owners had extended hospitality in absentia, as Alaskans were wont to do for strangers. Kerry found a penciled note on the brightly painted table in the middle of the cabin.
Use what you need and leave the cabin as you found it.
“Who owns this place?” she wanted to know.
Sam heaved his pack off and onto the floor. “A couple named Stanchik. They live in Fairbanks, come here once a year. Both husband and wife like to hunt moose.”
“Do you know them?”
“No, but it’s okay. I’ll have some food delivered to replace what we use.”
At least this cabin was clean. It was built of yellow cedar logs, pleasingly fragrant, and the owners had left an ample supply of split cedar kindling. Sam started a fire, and soon the cabin was warm.
They ate well that night. They found frozen moose meat in the outside cache, which was built up high on sturdy legs to protect it from predators, and they thawed moose steaks hastily over the fire in the cook stove, which was the sole way of heating the cabin. Sam cooked, and
they ate the steaks with rice from the Stanchiks’ store.
Afterward they played cards again, another lackadaisical game. The cabin never heated up, and Kerry wrapped her down sleeping bag around her legs to keep them warm. As the game wore on, it was apparent that they were avoiding looking at each other. The bed sat unmade in the corner, a silent sentinel to their denial of its presence. Finally, when the tension had grown so thick that Sam could have cut it with a slash of his hunting knife, he slapped his cards down on the table and stood up.
“Look, Kerry, I know what you’re thinking.”
She gathered up the cards, straightened and stacked them. She pretended she didn’t understand. “Oh?”
“We don’t have to sleep in that bed.” He gestured with his head toward the offending piece of furniture.
“No, of course not,” she replied.
He stalked to the table, leaned forward on his fists. “But I want to.”
“Sam—”
He straightened. Agitated, she stood up and faced him over the expanse of the table.
“Sam, it’s okay. We can both sleep in the bed. We don’t have to—well, do anything we don’t both want to do.”
He looked deflated. “Of course we don’t. Absolutely not.”
“In fact, we should simply accept that we need to sleep in it for warmth and forget about it.”
“For warmth,” he affirmed.
She walked toward the bed. “So why don’t we just make up this bed with the sheets we saw in the cupboard and get in it?”
“Good idea.” He went to the cupboard and tossed a top and a bottom sheet on the bed, also two pillow cases.
Kerry unfolded the sheets, which smelled slightly musty but not unbearably so. She fluttered the bottom sheet up over the lumpy mattress, and Sam caught the corner of it as it floated past. They busied themselves with making the bed. Kerry leaned across the mattress to tuck in the far corner, and when Sam brushed past her and she felt his hip bump against hers, she lost her balance and fell against the mattress.
Sam made a wild grab in her direction, missed, and she fell against the headboard, whereupon one corner of the bed frame separated and the mattress crashed to the floor, taking Kerry with it.
She fought her way out of a welter of sheets to find Sam reaching for her.
“Are you okay? Here, I’ll help you up.”
She held out her hand, he took it. And as she started to wedge herself upward, a second corner of the bed frame parted and the mattress lurched downward. So did Sam. He landed on top of her.
He knocked the wind out of Kerry.
Almost as soon as the dust settled, Sam was rolling sideways, kicking away the entangling sheets and swearing under his breath. Kerry couldn’t speak. She merely looked up at Sam, who was leaning over her, the roughness of his palm against her arm, one leg thrown across one of hers. If she angled her head oh so slightly, it would be in perfect line for him to kiss her on the lips. Or she could slide a hand up the rough wool of his sweater to the place where his collar ended and hook her hand around his neck and pull him down, down…
“Kerry?”
“I’m okay,” she said, which wasn’t entirely truthful if she considered that she wasn’t breathing right, her heart was thumping and all the muscles in her body seemed to have gone limp.
Something in his eyes, those glacier-blue eyes, shaded from concerned to intense, and his head cocked slightly, quizzically. “Are you sure?”
“I—I—” There was something so disarming about Sam’s concern and caring that she could hardly speak. But she didn’t want him to care about her. It was ridiculous to think he could, anyway.
She struggled to pull herself upright, bracing herself against Sam on one side and the upraised side of the mattress on the other.
“Not so fast,” he said, his eyes burning into her. His arm snaked around and pulled her close.
“We have to get up,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because we have to fix the bed.”
“Why do we have to do that?”
“So we can get in it.”
“Seems to me we’re already in it,” Sam said in that laconic way of his that she’d always found so infuriating.
“You know what I mean, Sam. Now either get up or help me.”
“Oh, I’ll help you up in a while. But for now—” and to her dismay she felt his lips grazing her temple “—we might as well enjoy this.”
This totally unnerved her. “I thought we were going to—no, I mean I thought we weren’t going to…”
“Well, we weren’t. I’m not so sure how I feel about it now.”
This was dangerous. It was dangerous because she didn’t want to think about last night and how good it had felt to surrender to the powerful feelings that had so overwhelmed her. She wanted to be angry with him the way she had been in the old days. She wanted to rage at him for tempting her, for making her forget that she was almost a mother. No, she was a mother already. The mother of her child and Doug’s, and Sam was an interloper, someone with whom she’d dallied away a cold night during which she’d been miserable and unsure about a lot of things. Not the least of which was Sam himself.
Sam was running his finger down the slope of her neck, nibbling on her earlobe, threading his other hand through her hair. His breath was hot upon her skin, his beard stubble rough upon her cheek. She couldn’t think while he did these things.
And then his mouth was on hers, and the bed was still tip-tilted and might thud the rest of the way onto the floor at any moment. But his kisses were so adept, so smooth, silky and altogether delicious. She opened her mouth to his, wanting to taste him, to devour him the way he was devouring her, and she wanted to slide her hands up under his T-shirt against his bare skin. She not only wanted to, she was actually doing it. And she didn’t want to stop.
“I thought you were tired,” she breathed against his neck, and he laughed low in his throat.
“I was. Not now.”
“This is not a comfortable position,” she said with as much dignity as she could.
He kissed the tip of her chin. “You might be right about that. But you gotta admit it’s warmer this way.”
“Sam, let’s get up. Help me.”
“Ah, Kerry, why can’t you enjoy this? Give in to it.”
She blinked at him. “It doesn’t feel right.”
“On the contrary, it feels wonderful.”
“Well, not tied in knots like this. Not on a topsy-turvy mattress all tangled up in bedclothes.” She pushed him away and managed to sit up. She braced one hand against the bedstead, one hand against Sam’s knee, and heaved herself upright. She stood looking at Sam, who was lounging amid the tumbled sheets, smiling up at her with that old impudent grin of his.
“I’ll repair the bed. You can get ready to get in it.”
“I can? Well, thanks.” She tried to sound miffed, but failed.
Sam started to wrench and jerk the mattress around, and she turned her back on him. She tugged things out of her pack: clean long johns, her toothbrush. By the time she turned back around, Sam was putting the finishing touches on making the bed. The sheets were smooth and white, and the pillowcases still bore creases from being folded. After today’s long hike, it looked immensely appealing.
“Do you want the side next to the wall or the outside?” Sam asked.
“Oh, um, the inside. I guess. Unless you do.” She was back to being over-polite again.
“I’m going outside for a few minutes. While you—” and he angled a thumb toward her neatly folded long johns “—get ready for bed.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t sleep in the same bed,” Kerry said on a wave of doubt.
“Maybe we shouldn’t. It’s your call.” He lifted an eyebrow and walked to the door, opened it and went out.
Kerry stared after him. Sam made this so difficult. She didn’t want to want him. She didn’t even want to think about wanting him. And that was all she seemed to be thinking
about.
When he came back in, Kerry was already in bed with the covers pulled up to her neck. Her eyes, big in her face, were solemn, wide.
He went to the bed and stood there, still wearing his parka. “Kerry, I just want to say one thing. And that is that I want everything to be all right for you. And for the baby.”
“I thought you disapproved of the baby.”
He felt weighed down beneath the gravity of all he could not tell her. “It’s not that. Believe me, it’s not that. I know you want a baby. I was surprised that you’re pregnant now, that’s all. Now that Doug is gone, I mean.”
“Maybe that’s why I pursued it,” Kerry said.
Her earnestness, her sincerity and above all her innocence frustrated him. He felt a surge of anger against Doug for getting him into this mess, but it faded immediately as he admitted that he was equally to blame for the scheme. He had volunteered. Doug hadn’t exactly dragged him kicking and screaming to the sperm bank. He had been glad to do it. It was a favor for a friend, nothing more, until he’d been confronted with Kerry and all the feelings he had for her.
“You haven’t taken off your parka,” Kerry reminded him gently.
He took off his parka and draped it over a chair before turning down the wick in the wall sconce.
“Sam? Could you leave the light on? Just a little?”
“Sure,” he said, but the light was so dim that his eyes didn’t adjust right away. He started to undress, almost removing his long johns before he remembered that he’d better leave them on. On the way to the bed he tripped over something in the half dark—Kerry’s boots.
“Are you all right, Sam?” Kerry’s voice was drowsy, muffled.
“Yep,” he said, little more than a growl.
He sat on the edge of the bed, enduring the protest of the temperamental bedsprings as he slid the rest of the way under the covers. Beside him, Kerry breathed quietly. He had the idea that she was alert and waiting to see what he would do.
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