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And damn it to hell, he had absolutely no business standing here daydreaming about the good doctor without clothes. Alaskan men had a reputation for being woman-desperate, but he was far from that. He hooked up occasionally with Janice, a cute diner waitress in Juneau, and outside of that, rounding up a date now and then wasn’t difficult. No, he wasn’t desperate and furthermore he wasn’t stupid. Even if he liked the idea of seeing her naked, that was the end of it. God save him from any more involvements, physical or otherwise, with ambitious women.
“That’s all of it.” Her no-nonsense tone snapped him out of his introspection.
“Good thing. If you’d tossed in the kitchen sink I’d have to circle back to pick you up later.”
“Or maybe I’d have to read the manual on how to fly your plane.”
He laughed at her not-so-subtle message that he was dispensable. “You’d be out of luck there, Doc. My plane doesn’t come with a manual.”
“How fortuitous then that I left the kitchen sink behind at the last moment.”
Dalton was about a hundred percent certain Dr. Skye Shanahan wasn’t thrilled to be here. He spent a lot of time hauling strangers from one destination point to another and he’d learned to read body language. Hers screamed that she was here under protest. “I’d say it’s a very good thing.” He glanced at the mountain of luggage and pushed the cart in the direction of his plane on the tarmac outside. “How long are you staying again?”
She bristled. “I didn’t want to leave something I might need.”
He skirted a group of guys who had obviously flown in on a hunting trip. They looked like hunters and the rifle cases were a dead giveaway. He’d take that assignment over transporting Dr. Holier Than Thou any day. But he was getting paid and that’s what mattered. And while she might be a pain in the ass, she was undisputably easier on the eyes than the hunters.
“I didn’t bring this much with me when I moved here,” he said, pretending to stagger under the weight of the bags.
“Then I guess you win the light packer award.”
He nodded. “I keep it on my mantel.”
“Good place for an award.”
“Missed diagnosis, Doc.” Her full lips tightened every time he called her Doc. “I keep my suitcase on the mantel.” It was actually a lightweight backpack but why let the truth stand in the way of a good story? Tall tales abounded in the Alaskan wilderness.
That seemed to catch her off-guard. “You keep your suitcase on your mantel? How …bohemian.”
“Yeah. It keeps me grounded—it reminds me that everything I really need can fit in there.”
She looked at him as if he’d belched in public and then cast a faintly mournful eye at the luggage cart. “I hope I’ve remembered everything I’m going to need.”
He held the exit door for her and then damn near lost one of her suitcases wrestling the cart over the threshold. “Doc, I bet when you leave, you won’t have used even half of what you brought with you.”
She shivered and tugged her wool jacket together over her sweater, whether from chill or apprehension he had no clue. Maybe a combination of both. She tilted her chin up at a stubborn angle. “But I’ll have it if I need it.”
“Yes, ma’am, that you definitely will.” He opened the door of the plane and started stowing her mountain of luggage. “Here we are.”
She stepped back and eyed his baby, aghast. “That’s a plane?”
There were some lines you didn’t cross. You could insult a man’s intelligence, his mother, his sister, the size of his private equipment, but you never, ever insulted a bush pilot’s plane. “Wings. Propeller. She’s not just a plane, she’s a damn fine plane.” He patted Belinda’s riveted metal side.
She narrowed her bewitching eyes at him. “Are you expecting me to get on that plane?”
At this point, it’d be easier if he took her luggage and let her hitch-hike her prissy ass to Good Riddance. But that wasn’t part of his contract. “That’s the general idea.”
“But it’s so …little.”
He was damn proud he managed to not roll his eyes at her. “You were expecting a 747?”
“There weren’t any details. I was just told I’d have a connecting flight out of Anchorage.” She shrugged and he almost felt sorry for her. She seemed so surprised. It occurred to him that she might be one of those really smart people who was long on brains but got the short end of the common-sense stick.
“You didn’t find it strange that the pilot was going to be waiting for you?”
Again, despite her haughtiness, there was a vulnerability about her that surprised him. “Sometimes doctors get preferential treatment. It’s not as if I expect it or demand it, but it just happens sometimes. So I really hadn’t thought too much about it. I was more concerned with the lack of information available about Good Riddance on the Internet.”
He might’ve been living the simpler life for almost a decade but he still recognized all the trappings of money and privilege. The matching designer luggage. A fine-worsted wool suit. Real gold earrings. Dr. Skye Shanahan had packed and dressed this way for her foray into the Alaskan wilderness? He reconsidered his previous opinion about preferring to take the hunting party in the terminal instead of her. Watching the good doctor get her comeuppance might prove to be fine entertainment for the next few weeks.
He bit back a smirk and offered his hand to help her aboard.
“Haven’t you heard, Doc? We’re Alaska’s best-kept secret.”
2
“YOU CAN OPEN YOUR EYES now.” Mr. Saunders’s voice came through the headset he’d given her to put on before they’d started taxiing down the runway in the tin-can he was passing off as a reputable mode of travel.
She’d worked too damn hard to get through medical school and residency to die now. If they crashed, she just hoped she had time to throttle him with her bare hands before they bit the dust.
But right now, she had a bigger problem. If she regurgitated her lunch, and it had been a distinct possibility hurtling down the runway in this rust bucket—which was why she’d squeezed her eyes shut and imagined herself in the E.R. attending a messy gunshot wound, just to ground and stabilize herself—if she threw up, she’d have to kill him from abject humiliation alone.
From his smug tone, Mr. Saunders clearly had no idea how close he was skirting death, one way or another. Still, if she went ahead and killed him she’d no longer be plagued by this attraction to him, she thought darkly. That was one way to handle it.
“Relax, Doc. I haven’t lost a passenger …yet.”
She opened her eyes and blinked at the fast-fading outlay of Anchorage and the splendor of the mountains. “Very amusing, Mr. Saunders. A competent pilot and a comic.”
“I throw the comedy in for free.” He pointed to the snow-capped slope. “That’s Mt. Hood.”
She resented him anew. It was just wrong that while barely holding on to her lunch, she was hit with an incredible awareness of Dalton Saunders. It was as if he filled all the space around her with this broad shoulders, his scent, and simply his presence. She didn’t like it or her reaction to him worth a damn.
He was just the type of man who’d get her into all types of trouble. She’d come to Good Riddance to do a job, to get her mother off her case, to try to live up to those impossibly high Shanahan expectations that had been shoved down her throat since birth. What wasn’t on the agenda was getting into trouble. So the best thing to do was ignore the man in the seat next to her.
“Very nice. I rented a National Geographic video. We’re too far west to fly past the Wrangell St. Elias Mountain Range, right?”
He shot her a quick glance and she read a mixture of admiration and surprise in his look. “Right.”
“I did as much homework as I could, Mr. Saunders. However, I have next to nothing in the way of information on Good Riddance. Can you fill me in?”
“It was founded by Merrilee Danville Weatherspoon twenty-plus years ago. In that time, the population has exploded to about seven hundred and fifty, give or take a few.”
Oh God, it was even worse than she’d imagined. There were more than seven hundred and fifty employees in the medical high-rise that housed her office back home. “I’m afraid to ask, but what kind of amenities are we talking about?”
“Pretty much everything. That’s the way it is out here. If we don’t have it, then you don’t need it. You cut through a lot of crap and clutter that way.”
She really disliked people who presumed to know how everyone should live. “One man’s clutter may well be another man’s necessity.” She ran through a quick mental checklist of everything she’d packed. Thank goodness she’d brought it all with her.
He shrugged those impossibly broad shoulders which seemed equally impossibly close in the confines of the winged go-cart he was guiding through the sky. “We have a bar/restaurant right next to Merrilee’s place. It makes it easier when the snow’s on the ground outside.”
“That’s it? Two buildings together?” What had she gotten herself into?
“Of course not.” His grin held an edge of teasing but also an edge of satisfaction at her dismayed reaction. “There’s a hunting and fishing outfitter. And a Laundromat. It’s right next to the taxidermy/barber shop/beauty salon/mortuary.”
Instinctively, she touched her hair. She suspected the taxidermist barber didn’t charge an arm and a leg, no pun intended, the way some of Atlanta’s finest salons did. “The barber shop and beauty salon are part of the taxidermy? And all this is shared with the mortuary?”
“Yeah. You can wind up waiting a week or more for a hair cut during high hunting season.”
“Oh. Dear. God.” She narrowed her eyes at his profile. There was no mistaking the amused tilt of his well-shaped mouth. Relief flooded her. He was teasing. “Okay. Fine. I get it. A little joke at the expense of the relief doctor.”
Another shrug and he nodded to his left. “That’s the Sitnusak River. Some of the finest salmon and halibut fishing in the world. Have you ever had fresh halibut, Doc?”
“Not fresh, but of course, I’ve had halibut.”
“You’re here just on the tail end of the season, but you’ll have to try it at Gus’s.”
She didn’t expect much from anything, fresh or otherwise, prepared at a place in the middle of nowhere by a man named Gus. Nonetheless she aimed for what she hoped wasn’t a thoroughly pained smile. “I’m looking forward to it.”
“You’ve got to work on the sincerity, Doc.”
She ignored his comment. “So, Mr. Saunders, how long have you lived in Good Riddance?”
“I’m working on nine years, Doc. It was the best move I ever made.”
She was seriously flummoxed. Of all the places in the world, why would someone choose to move to the middle of nowhere? It was like taking a giant step backward. “But how’d you wind up in Good Riddance?”
“I liked the town philosophy so I stayed.”
Technically, he hadn’t answered her question, but she wasn’t going to push it.
“And that philosophy is …?”
“Good Riddance is where you leave behind whatever troubles you.”
She spoke without thinking. “It sounds like a cult.”
His laughter in the headset startled her, nearly sending her jumping out of her skin. “No cult here. Just the offer of a fresh start.”
Fresh start. That had an ominous ring. Who went somewhere so remote for a fresh start except for people who didn’t want to be found? Or those wanting to adopt a hermit lifestyle. But Mr. Saunders didn’t strike her as hermit-like. While her parents were both insanely practical, pragmatic individuals, Skye had inherited her grandmother Shanahan’s active imagination and it was now in overdrive.
“Fresh start?” she echoed.
“Yeah, you know sometimes you just want to put the past and the mistakes you made behind you. Haven’t you ever felt the urge to reinvent yourself, Dr. Shanahan? To go to a place where no one knows you, a place where you can become whomever and whatever you want to be, without any expectations?”
For a few illicit seconds she indulged in the notion of simply being. She’d always been Skye Shanahan, daughter of the brilliant and esteemed Drs. Edward and Margaret Shanahan and sister of the equally brilliant Patrick Shanahan. Expectation had been her intimate acquaintance since birth. She felt as if Dalton Saunders had peered into her very soul, had connected with her in a way no one had before. And that simply wouldn’t do. She did not want to connect with him, didn’t want to feel this emotional intimacy. She rejected the notion they could share similar experiences and came up with her own interpretation of his past, one far, far removed from hers.
“Were you in prison?”
He paused for a moment as if deciding just how much to answer and she wasn’t sure she’d get an answer at all. She’d read that Alaska appealed to a whole different kind of person. And there was something of an outlaw element, at least that was her impression from articles she’d read on-line. She found herself holding her breath for his response.
“Yep. I definitely served my time and Good Riddance was exactly what I needed when I got out.” He shook his head, as if trying to forget. “If we were flying farther north, you’d see an ancient caribou migration route. That’s what you see in Alaska.”
“Interesting.” She was more interested, however, in what he’d done time for but the obvious subject change told her he’d said all he was going to. A shiver ran down her spine. Still, she reassured herself his crime couldn’t have been too bad. He was fairly young, she’d estimate early to mid-thirties based on the crinkle lines at the corners of his eyes. If he’d done something truly heinous, he’d still be sitting in the slammer. Wouldn’t he?
The plane suddenly lurched and she thought her stomach contents might find their way into her lap. “Are we going down?” she yelled, clutching the strap to her right. “I need a parachute.”
“Easy, Doc. We’re fine. That was just a little patch of turbulence. I’m sure you’ve hit stuff like this flying in the big boys before but it feels a whole lot more personal in a smaller plane.”
His smug amusement scraped along her nerve endings. She was far from proud of the way she’d behaved, yelling in panic, but her training didn’t encompass crashing in a Cracker Jack toy plane in the middle of Remoteville, her only companion a man who’d done hard time. And that was only if they didn’t die.
“How much longer until we’re there?” It felt as if they’d been flying forever.
“Maybe a quarter of an hour.”
“Oh.”
“There’s a problem?”
“Well, I don’t see anything around yet.”
“Nope.”
Her head was beginning to throb. Maybe it was an altitude thing. She scrambled in her bag, found the travel ibuprofen and swallowed two without benefit of a drink.
“Headache?” he asked.
She glanced across the space separating them. He boasted an attractive profile—rugged jaw and a nice nose with a faint hump in the middle that led her to believe it’d been broken at some point in time. The errant thought danced through her head that he’d produce lovely children. Dear God, where had that thought come from? His potential offspring had absolutely nothing to do with her. “Yes,” she said, confirming her headache, then deliberately looking away from his too-handsome profile.
Outside her window, wilderness sprawled before her. Some people might find this enthralling, exciting, but she preferred her back-to-nature experiences to be those of sitting in her cozy den watching National Geographic specials. This was not her cup of tea—Starbucks, venti, black, sweet Tazo with light ice—that was her cup of tea.
The plane suddenly banked sharply to her right. Saunders’s voice was in her ear. “Look to your right and you’ll see something very few people are privileged to see in person. That’s a grizzly salmon fishing.”
Unfortunately, her stomach banked right along with the plane. She could clamp a spewing artery. She could reattach a missing digit. She could clean a gangrenous wound, but this, she couldn’t handle this. She caught a glimpse of a huge, brown thing but all she could think was, quite inanely, that if Saunders looked to his right, he was about to see something very few people were privileged to see in person, as well.
Without further ado, Dr. Skye Shanahan promptly tossed her cookies. Or to be pathologically correct, her lunch of tuna on whole wheat.
HE’D SEEN WORSE. Much worse. He’d seen grown, macho men lose it in a small plane. He’d seen Elmer Driscoll get knee-crawling drunk and lose it behind Gus’s place last week. But he’d never seen anyone more frustrated with having lost it.
“You okay?” he asked as she stepped out of the copse of trees wearing a pair of black slacks and a coppery brown sweater that seemed to pick up the highlights in her red hair, her toothbrush and mouthwash clutched in one hand, her soiled suit and sweater in the other.
He’d radioed in an emergency landing and promptly set the plane down. There was no way in hell he was showing up at Good Riddance with a puke-covered passenger. His reputation as a pilot would suffer, and her reputation as a physician who should be made of stronger stuff, would suffer even worse. And she’d never forgive him for the humiliation, which was neither here nor there, except who knew if he might turn up sick or injured in the ensuing weeks and her Hippocratic oath might take a back seat to the memory of arriving in town covered in barf.
While she’d changed clothes and cleaned up behind the cover of fir trees and a small stream adjacent to the meadow he’d landed in, he’d taken care of the plane.
“Do you think you could manage not to roll the plane anymore? Have you ever heard of a straight and level course, Saunders?”
He silently thanked the powers that be for her haughtiness. It simply reinforced for him that, no matter how damn attractive he found her, she wasn’t the woman for him. “You could’ve told me you were feeling sick. Better yet, have you ever heard of Dramamine, Shanahan?”
“I wasn’t aware I had a problem with motion sickness …until now.”
