Debra Brown - Northern Exposure

He’d never had an overnight guest at the station before. He grabbed a set of sheets, a couple of blankets, and was ready to switch the light off when he spied a stack of tabloids he’d meant to burn.

Barb brought him all kinds of reading material on her once-a-week trips to the station. He’d told her to stop buying him these trashy newspapers, but she just kept on. Might as well read something fun once in a while, she’d say.

He grabbed the stack to take them out to the fire, and did a double take.

The edition on top was dated three weeks ago. He stared at the photo on the cover. Two men and a woman. The shot barely disguised the fact that they were naked.

He remembered now. He’d read the tabloid article because he recognized the name of one of the men in the picture. Cat had known him, had talked about him. But it wasn’t the man who concerned him, it was the woman.

That’s why she looked so damned familiar!

Joe committed the tabloid headline to memory before carrying the blankets and sheets back down the hall. He paused in the doorway to the front room. His guest was looking at Cat’s photo again. He glared at her back, the headline playing in his mind like a bad record—

New York Fashion Photographer Willa Walters Overexposed in Deadly Sex/Drug scandal.

If he was cool to her before, he was downright icy now.

Wendy stepped barefoot onto the wet wood deck and closed the French doors behind her. Joe stood with his back to her, gazing out at a late-night sunset whose colors looked as if they’d jumped off an artist’s palette. She was tempted to go back inside and get her camera.

The rain had stopped and the sky was clearing. Dark clouds still thrashed above them but eased into violet tipped with brilliant orange near the horizon. The snowcapped peaks in the distance looked like pink snow cones from a county fair. Wendy had never seen a more beautiful sky in her life.

Or a more tightly wound man.

Aware of her approach, Joe began to pace back and forth along the length of the deck, his hand skimming the railing. He reminded her of a caged predator. A very irritated caged predator. The question on her mind was Why?

He’d dumped the sheets and blankets on the sofa bed, mumbled a good-night, then had retreated outside to the deck, seemingly to watch the sunset. She knew that wasn’t the reason he was out there. He didn’t know her well enough for her to have made him so angry, but apparently she had. Or something had.

At this point she didn’t care. She had her own problems. She had three weeks to get those caribou photographs to the magazine. Three short weeks.

When the senior editor at Wilderness Unlimited, a sorority sister from college, had agreed to Wendy’s proposal, she’d been ecstatic. It was the first break she’d gotten since the incident, since life, as she’d known it, had blown up in her face. She knew it was the only break she was likely to get, and she was determined not to waste it.

A cleansing breath of cool air laced with wet spruce cleared her head. Supper, and the nap, had bolstered her strength. She was still a bit jet-lagged from the long flight west. That, and the fact that there were about sixteen hours of daylight at this latitude this time of year, played havoc with her internal clock.

“Warden,” she said as she moved toward him across the wet deck, thinking it best to keep their communications formal.

He stopped pacing, his back to her, but didn’t respond.

Unfolding a map she’d retrieved from her knapsack, she said, “There’s something I want to ask you.”

He didn’t even acknowledge her with a look when she joined him at the railing. “That buck today, the woodland caribou…”

“Bull,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“Caribou males are called bulls in Alaska, not bucks. I thought you would have known that, being a wildlife photographer.”

“I, uh…” He had a way of flustering her with his offhand comments. She was determined not to let him back her down. “The point is…I need to find him again.”

“Why?”

“I told you. For the magazine. My assignment.”

He turned to look at her, crossing his arms over his chest and hiking a hip onto the railing, as if settling in for a friendly chat. His eyes, however, were anything but friendly. “Wilderness Unlimited. So you said.”

She moved closer, spun the map around and spread it across the railing so he could see it. “I left my car here.” She pointed to a spot on the highway, then traced her finger along the route she’d taken into the reserve. “I first saw the bull here, where you—”

“How much experience do you have?”

“What?” She looked up at him.

“With wildlife photography. What other animals have you photographed?”

Besides the menagerie of pets she’d had growing up and her college’s mascot, a Clydesdale, the answer was none. Well, except for some small animals she’d seen earlier today. But she wasn’t about to tell him that. His smug expression and arched brow told her he couldn’t wait to point out her shortcomings.

Blake had been like that. Always making sure she knew she wasn’t good enough, wasn’t experienced enough. At every opportunity, hammering it home that she was nothing without him.

Well, here’s a news flash: Blake was wrong.

It had taken her a long time to see it. Weeks of getting over the shock of what had happened in New York, lying in the dark on the twin bed in her old room in her parents’ house, thinking about her life—what she wanted, what she was, what she could be.

Her new life started now. And she wasn’t going to let any man, particularly one who didn’t even know her, tell her she wasn’t capable of handling it.

“Moose,” she said. The lie came easy. “Deer, wolves, humpback whales, penguins. You name it, I’ve photographed it.”

“Really?” He perked right up, seeming to believe her. She felt good all of a sudden. Better than she had all evening. “Where’d you shoot the penguins? Antarctica?”

She supposed she shouldn’t make up anything that seemed too farfetched. If you’re going to lie, stick as close to the truth as possible. She’d read that once in a detective novel.

“No,” she said. “Right here in Alaska. In the, uh, arctic.”

“No kidding?” Joe smiled, his eyes glittering appreciatively in the last of the light. It was the first smile she’d seen from him, and a little shiver raced through her. Things were back on track.

“Anyway, about that bull…” She pushed the map toward him again.

“You must be pretty famous, then.”

“Who, me? No, not at all. I’m just another photographer.” She pointed to the spot on the map where they’d last seen the bull, but Joe Peterson wasn’t looking at the map. He was looking at her.

“I’ll have to disagree with you, Wendy.” He said her name as if it were a foreign word. “It would take one hell of a photographer, wildlife or otherwise, to shoot pictures of penguins in Alaska.”

Why was he so antagonistic? What did he care if she had or hadn’t photographed—

“Because, Wendy—” there it was again “—there aren’t any penguins in Alaska.”

“There…aren’t?”

“They’re a southern hemisphere species. Any wildlife photographer would know that.” He pushed away from the deck and started back inside.

She followed him. “All right, I lied. So what? I still need to get those photos for the magazine, and to do that I’ll need to find that buck or bull or whatever it is again, or another one like it.”

He marched into the kitchen and started washing their supper dishes as if she wasn’t even there, banging plates around, sloshing water out of the sink.