JENNIFER LABRECQUE - Northern Exposure

“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.”

“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.