Northern Exposure. Debra Lee Brown
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It was hard to pretend she hadn’t gotten under his skin, but he forced himself.
Joe poured Willa Walters a cup of black coffee, and while she sat at the kitchen table and drank it, he fixed them a quick breakfast.
“It’s not my real name,” she said after the silence between them stretched to a breaking point.
“Wendy?”
“No, Willa.” She shot him an irritated look. “It was made up for me.”
“By who?”
She shrugged. “A man I used to know.”
“One of the guys in that picture?”
The shock that registered on her face turned instantly to annoyance. “I didn’t know game wardens read those kinds of newspapers.”
He flashed her a look, but didn’t respond. He divided a panful of scrambled eggs between two plates, topped them with buttered toast and handed her one.
He expected her to refuse it, but she didn’t. Silently she accepted the food and began to eat. That was another thing that surprised him about her—she had one hell of an appetite for someone so petite.
“That picture isn’t what you think.” She glanced up at him as he joined her at the table. “We weren’t…you know.”
“Buck naked?”
She speared him with a nasty smirk. “The male models were wearing Speedos. I was in a strapless tank suit. The tabloid cropped the photo to make the situation seem like something it wasn’t. The whole thing was completely innocent. I was on a shoot—at a public beach, for God’s sake. Besides, that photo had nothing to do with the incident.”
He let that bit of information sink in while he watched her viciously jab a forkful of scrambled egg.
This morning she had dressed in her own clothes again, and had left Cat’s sweatshirt and jeans in a neatly folded pile on the made-up sofa bed. Her feet were bare, except for the squares of moleskin she’d applied to her blisters. She sat sideways on her chair, her legs crossed, affording him a good view of her slender ankles. Her toenails were polished, too, he noticed.
“New boots?” He nodded at her bandaged feet.
“New everything. My luggage was stolen at the airport, so I had to buy all new stuff.”
“Fairbanks or Anchorage?” That kind of thing didn’t happen too often in Alaska.
“Anchorage, when I first arrived. A guy nabbed my suitcase off the conveyor and took off with it. Thank God I had my camera bag on me. I’d never be able to afford to replace my Nikon.”
He watched her as she finished her toast. A dab of butter clung to the edge of her lip, and he caught himself wondering what it would feel like, what she would taste like, if he flicked it away with his tongue.
His attraction to her disgusted him.
He adjusted his position on the hard kitchen chair and croaked, “Tough break,” not really meaning it. Someone like her deserved what she got.
“Yeah, well…” She waved her fork in the air in a dismissive gesture. “That’s the least of my worries at this point.”
“I’ll bet.”
She shot him a cool look and continued eating.
With his back to her, as he rinsed out the coffee carafe and ground beans for another pot, he asked her about some of the things he’d read about her in the tabloid article. She immediately changed the subject.
“The only other road into the reserve is this one.” She whipped the folded map—the one she’d tried to get him to look at last night—out of her pants pocket and spread it on the table. “If I leave my car here—” she pointed to a remote spot on a little-used Jeep trail “—and walk in from the east…”
“You’re likely to get yourself killed.”
She glared up at him.
“Besides, the caribou won’t be there. They’ll be here.” He leaned over the table and jabbed a finger at another spot, more than forty miles from where she was planning on leaving her car.
“Oh.” Her expression darkened as she considered exactly what a forty-mile hike in a remote Alaskan wilderness area meant.
He felt the beginnings of a smile edge his lips. It vanished as she cleared her throat, sat up tall in her chair—those ridiculously perky breasts of hers jutting forward—and in a bright voice said, “Fine.”
He snorted. “You’re a piece of work.”
And that was the straw that finally broke the camel’s back. Her blue eyes glittered with anger. She pressed her lips tightly together and waited, as if counting to ten, then she let him have it.
“What is it with you? You’ve been rude to me from the moment we met. You read a bunch of twisted half-truths in some supermarket tabloid and you think you know everything about me. Which you don’t,” she emphasized.
“Even if all of it were true—which it isn’t—what do you care? What business is it of yours? That badge—” she flashed her eyes at the Department of Fish and Game emblem on his shirt “—doesn’t give you license to be a jerk.”
He enjoyed watching her while she ranted at him. Her cheeks blazed with color, her eyes turned the warmest shade of blue he’d ever seen. Abruptly she stood and came around the table at him. He didn’t know whether he wanted to toss her out the door onto her very shapely ass or back her up against the refrigerator and lay one on her.
A snappy retort died on his lips as the sound of an approaching vehicle interrupted their conversation.
“What’s that?” she said, turning toward the window.
“Your ride outta here.”
“About time.”
She followed him into the front room as the sounds of a car door slamming and footfalls scrunching across gravel drew their attention to the front door.
It opened, and Barb Maguire, dressed in a neatly pressed department-issue uniform, breezed into the room. “Hi-ya, Joe!” She saw Wendy and did a double take. “Oh.” Her gaze washed over first Wendy, then him. When she recovered from her obvious shock, a smile bloomed on her face. “Hi, I’m Barb, Joe’s delivery girl, so to speak.”
She handed him a stack of mail and what looked like a month’s worth of department paperwork. “Thanks,” he said.
The two women shook hands. Wendy introduced herself and made some polite small talk as Barb assessed the situation: Cat’s clothes on the sofa bed next to the pile of neatly folded blankets and bed sheets, two empty tea cups on the coffee table and a heap of dead ashes in the hearth.
She flashed him a conspiratorial look, grinning like the cat who ate the canary, when Wendy turned to grab her knapsack off a chair. He put on his best it’s-not-what-you-think expression, but it didn’t deter her.
Barb Maguire, a DF&G technician who was married to the department’s local wildlife biologist, had been trying to play matchmaker for him for the past year. Her goal was to get him into town so she could fix him up with one of her girlfriends. Joe wasn’t interested, but Barb was relentless.
“So, you’re a wildlife photographer. That’s…well, perfect!” She winked at Joe.
“Uh, yeah. I’m here to photograph woodland caribou.”
“Whoa. Tough assignment.” Barb nodded in admiration.
Joe had had enough. “I told her she’d be a damned fool to go looking for them on her own.”
“Do you think everyone is a helpless idiot, or is it just me?”
He