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“Here,” he replied, which meant she didn’t have to roll out the Arctic Cat again to follow him home, and she was grateful. She made more mugs of cocoa with Nestle’s, evaporated milk, and hot water from the kettle, but no marsh-mallows.
“My fingers hurt,” he said.
She took his left hand and looked at the tips of his fingers. They were red and felt warm to the touch. “If you keep it up, they’ll hurt worse. And then you’ll work up calluses and they won’t hurt anymore.”
Unexpectedly, he took her left hand and looked at the tips of her fingers. “You don’t have any.”
“Not anymore.”
“Because you quit playing.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I couldn’t sing anymore, so there didn’t seem to be much point.”
His eyes went to her throat, to the scar that bisected it almost from ear to ear. “Because of that?”
“Yeah.”
“How did you get it?”
“A guy had a knife. I took it away from him.”
“But he cut you before you did.”
“Yeah.”
“When you were working for Dad.”
“Yes.”
“Does it still bother you?”
“The scar, or not being able to sing?”
“Both.”
“Both,” she replied, “although not as much as they used to.” She put down the mug and picked up the guitar from where it was leaning against the coffee table. The weight of the body on her thigh felt familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, and the neck settled into her left palm with a tentative feeling. She gave the strings a few experimental strums, and without stopping to think about it, launched into “Molly Malone.” Mutt, stretched out on the bearskin in front of the woodstove, raised her head, her ears going up, and fixed Kate with a steady gaze.
Kate’s voice sounded husky to her hypercritical ears and she had to change octaves to hit the high notes. “Yesterday” was even harder to reach, but when she came to the end of the last verse, Joh
Her fingertips were tingling. She stood up and hung the guitar on its hook next to the door, making a mental note to oil the wood before Joh
“Can I learn to do that?”
“You can learn to do just about anything,” Kate said. “It takes practice, is all.”
He was about to reply, when a yawn split his face. She fetched sheets, blankets, and a pillow, and, in that u
The book Joh
She stoked the fire in the woodstove, checked the oil stove to see that the pilot light was still burning, and refilled the wood box. After brushing her teeth and washing her face with the last of the water in the kettle, she refilled the kettle and set it on the back of the stove. She climbed the ladder to the loft and lit the lamp that hung next to the bed, undressing by its light, pulling on a nightshirt, and sliding beneath the thick down comforter. She was rereading My Family and Other Animals for what was probably the twenty-seventh time, but she had only lately gone back to full-time reading, and for the present, her preference was for books she had already read and enjoyed, ones with no surprises in them.
But even ten-year-old Gerry Durrell and his scorpions in matchboxes couldn’t keep her attention this night. She put the book down and turned off the light to stare at the ceiling.
Jack Morgan had been dead for over a year now. She missed him, missed having him in her life. She missed his voice, she realized suddenly, that slow, deep bass voice that had made every feminine nerve she had stand up and salute every time she’d heard it.
Ethan’s voice wasn’t as deep, but that wasn’t necessarily enough to deny the man her bed.
Jack had been brawny, a bruiser with the muscles of a prizefighter and a face that could most kindly have been described as interesting.
Ethan could have made a living modeling clothes for Brooks Brothers.
Only now did she realize how patient Jack had been, how long-suffering, how much he had put up with. When she had left Anchorage six years before, fresh out of the hospital, unable to form words clearly for four months-never mind sing-she had left the job and the man at one and the same time, vowing never to return to either. Eighteen months later, Jack had showed up in the Park with an FBI agent in tow and a missing person’s case in hand. Eighteen months, during which she had tried to find his substitute in two other men, to no avail, both of whom she had made sure Jack knew about. If it had bothered him, he had never shown it. Much. He had waited for her-waited for her to heal, waited for her to come back to him-like he’d taken a vow to the Church of Kate Shugak and would not allow himself to become apostate.
He’d irritated her, bewildered her, astounded her, and charmed her. He had wooed her with Jimmy Buffett and seduced her with chocolate chip cookies, and in the end, he had saved her life at the expense of his own. “I love you, Shugak” had very nearly been his last words to her, and it was only after his death that she realized what they had meant.
She ached for him, suddenly, fiercely. They had been well matched sexually, coming together like thunder and lightning. She ran her hands down her body, remembering.
No. There was a perfectly good man not ten miles away. Why was she hesitating? Jack was dead, she was needy, and Ethan was eager. Love would never come again unless she gave it a chance. Wasn’t that the way it worked? What was the matter with her?
She gave up on sleep, got up and dressed again, and crept down the ladder. Joh
The trail around the cabin led to the A-shaped stack of six fuel drums. A fainter trail branched off from it and led through the trees, emerging at a cliffs edge. The boulder at the edge was as high as her waist, with a cleared spot on it worn smooth, just the size of someone’s butt. Mutt sat at its foot, her shoulder at Kate’s knee.
Below the snow-covered landscape was a crystalline palace, and above the stars seemed even brighter than they had before. The moon had a big smudged white ring around it that filled up half the sky. The northern lights were out, though only faintly and without much movement or color to them, long pale streaks across the northern horizon.
She’d turned thirty-five in October, and had been a sovereign nation unto herself pretty much from the age of six. It wasn’t like she needed a man in her life. It was a matter of simple biology. And after all, she was Kate Shugak-she recognized no rules but her own. She could be chaste. Chaste by choice, by god, even Chaste by Choice-she could start a movement. Everything she wanted, everything she needed, it was all right here on this homestead. She had even, she reminded herself with awful sarcasm, managed to have a child without ever having given birth or having changed a single diaper. Now there was a miracle of modern parenting for you.
She could still feel the imprint of Ethan’s mouth, hand, body. She could still taste him. How long had it been?