Out of nowhere, a massive flash of grey bounded towards her out of the darkness. She hadn’t even seen it lurking! But before she could do more than suck in enough breath for a scream, Dexter’s tail lifted from its low, stiff position to a higher wave. Less like an accusing finger and more like a parade flag.
‘Jango!’ Will stepped out of the shadows behind his dog.
A sawn-off log made for a convenient place to slowly sink down in lieu of collapse. Jango sneezed and bounded off with Dexter to explore, leaving Kitty with only Will to defend her. Even without the firearm he’d slung over his shoulder, she trusted he could do just that. Probably with his bare hands.
He was just that kind of man.
Maybe that was why she’d fallen so hard for him back in Nepal.
‘Did I wander too far?’ she asked, immediately contrite.
‘I needed to give Jango a run to see how her leg is doing, thought I might as well come this way.’
Pfff... ‘Worried about the tourist getting lost in your forest?’
‘Just worried for my dog,’ he corrected carefully.
That brought her eyes around to the hound snuffling around a distant tree. ‘What happened to her?’
‘She lost a pad to frostbite,’ he said. ‘Standing guard over an injured hiker last winter.’
Concern stained her voice. ‘And she’s still healing?’
‘She wore a mediboot all summer. It’s just come off.’
Kitty couldn’t shake the feeling that it was an excuse. Maybe he didn’t trust her outside alone. Once a rescuer, always a rescuer.
‘It’s stunning out here,’ she breathed, turning back to the open stretch where Boreal eased out into more open wetlands. ‘Is it all like this?’
‘Where it’s not tundra,’ he grunted. ‘Or Hudson Bay.’
He extended his hand to help her to her feet. It took two deep breaths before she could bring herself to slide her fingers into his. But two layers of arctic gloves muted the old zing and she only had to contend with the gentle pressure of his strong hand around hers until he released her.
‘Listen, Will...’
His back tightened immediately and he turned away from what was coming. She caught his elbow before he could spin away fully.
‘I wanted to...’ Lord, how did you start a conversation like this one? Thank you for telling me your wife died. ‘When Marcella—’
‘Sorry it was such a group announcement,’ he interrupted.
It was part of what had first drawn her to him, Will’s ability to just know what she was thinking. ‘Don’t apologise. I was so grateful to have heard after everything we’d seen on the news feeds. The quakes... I messaged you. Twice.’
She’d tried to convince her network to let her go to Nepal, to report on the recovery—desperate to see Will still breathing with her own eyes—but in the end the vast numbers of media streaming into the city had only been putting more pressure on Kathmandu’s limited resources. Instead, she’d kept herself glued to the feeds coming into her network, looking for the slightest glimpse of Will working with his rescue dogs in the capital. Even as she’d reminded herself why she shouldn’t even care. It hadn’t occurred to her that either of them faced such risk staying to help out after the first quake.
He winced, but then his gaze lifted and locked onto hers. ‘I wasn’t really in a position to chat.’
No. He’d just buried his wife.
Metaphorically.
He tugged his arm free and turned to stride away from her along the squishy Boreal floor.
Will’s eventual message had shattered her and, as she’d quietly wept, she’d known a deep kind of shame that she was crying not just out of sadness that her friend had died, but also for relief that Will had not.
‘How are you doing now?’ she risked, catching up with him.
He shrugged, and she supposed it was meant to appear easy. ‘That was two years ago.’
‘You don’t set a watch on losing someone you love. Or on a traumatic event like that.’
He stomped on in silence but finally had no real choice but to answer. ‘I’m doing okay.’
‘Long way from Nepal,’ she prompted, stumbling over a particularly thick thatch of sod grass.
He slowed a little so that she didn’t have to scamper after him like an arctic hare. ‘I was a bit over mountains. So I looked for the widest, flattest, most open space I could find where I could also work rescue.’
She could well imagine his desire to come home to Canada, too. Back to what he knew. To regroup.
Kitty scanned the distant horizon and the miles and miles of squat flat Boreal stretching all the way to it. ‘You sure found flat.’
Dexter and Jango continued to frolic, dashing around and sticking their noses into any space big enough to accommodate one. Given they spent much of their day tethered to their kennels or to a sled, working, this kind of freedom was probably a rare luxury. And sneezing seemed to be Jango’s way of celebrating.
‘What happened to your dogs in Nepal?’ she risked.
His silence was almost answer enough, but then he finally spoke. ‘I had four dogs with me in Kathmandu when the second quake hit, so they survived. I left them behind with Roshan when I left. There was still a lot of recovery work for them to do there without me.’
Only four survivors...
She’d had the privilege of filming most of Will’s sixteen dogs out hunting for lost climbers on the Annapurna Mountains, or a pair of hikers caught down in the valleys, or just training out in the field. He’d probably never imagined the horrific circumstances they’d be working in just a few years later. Or that he would lose so many of them in a single event.
‘Hard, leaving the four behind...’ she probed.
In the silent forest, his voice had no trouble drifting back to her. And when it did it was raw and thick and honest—the Will she remembered from Nepal.
‘Harder staying.’
He had suffered immeasurably. Losing his wife, the place he called home, the dogs he trained and loved. Facing death and despair every single day for weeks.
And she was asking him to relive it now.
Heat rushed up from under the collar of her parka. ‘Sorry, Will. Blame my enquiring mind...’
It took her a moment to notice that he’d fallen behind her as she picked her way through the moss. She turned. Regret stained his ice-blue eyes, then changed into something more like dark grief.
‘No. I’m sorry, Kitty. Your questions are perfectly reasonable. Under the circumstances.’
For the first time since she’d arrived in Churchill he was normal with her. Human. The old Will. The man who had made her breathless with just one look. Faint with the accidental touch of his callused fingers. It was absolutely the right time to go deeper, to wiggle her way in under his protective barriers and hunt for more of the old Will.
Except that Old Will had as little place in New Kitty’s life as he did in his own.
The past belonged in the past.
‘So, how are you settling in in Churchill?’ she asked, to give him a break.
He