“What do you mean? How did they meet there?”
“She applied to work on his boat as a deckhand, which she did for quite a while—until they got married and she got pregnant with Janie. She claims she was the best deckhand he ever had. She didn’t want her memories of the Bering Sea to be filled with only sadness because it had brought her so much joy, too.”
He smiled at that, and even though it had been long ago, Emily thought she saw sorrow there, too. She smiled warmly in return, not wanting to be the cause of dredging up painful memories.
He looked away briefly before meeting her eyes again. “My entire life I could only imagine how difficult it was for my mom because I wasn’t even born yet. But I have a much better idea now because my sister, Janie, lost her husband six months ago—and she’s pregnant. With twins—that will make four for her.”
“Oh, my...but how will she manage—”
It was as if Emily’s words flipped a switch in him—from warm and open to solemn and stony in an instant.
“The same way our mom did—with the help of her family and friends. That’s how we do things around here, Emily. We stick together in good times, we offer support in bad and we’re there for all the challenges in between.”
The message was blatant, but he said it with such a tone of confidence that it almost made Emily envious. It must be nice to have that kind of support system, she thought bitterly—personally or professionally. She was suddenly aware of both his intense stare and the personal turn her thoughts had taken. What was wrong with her? She couldn’t let him play on her emotions and turn the tables like this.
“That must be really great,” she said. “But look, Bering, I invited you in because I feel like I should apologize for the circumstances of our first meeting and I really do want to thank you for...everything.”
He shrugged. “No problem.”
“Actually, it is kind of a problem.”
“How so?”
She smiled thinly. “I don’t think there’s any point in dancing around the issue of why you’re here or why we met in the first place, however unfortunate it turned out to be.”
“I don’t know that I’d call it unfortunate.” His voice was smooth, but his brown eyes danced with some kind of emotion that Emily felt it best to ignore.
“I would, because now I’m in the awkward position of being indebted to you while knowing that we’re at odds. And we both know that I’m here to change your town irrevocably. I plan to improve it, build on it, make it better, but I know very well that you don’t see it that way and that it’s your intention to try to stop me.”
“That it is,” he acknowledged quietly.
“But you can’t.”
“We’ll see about that.” His tone was almost careless as he picked up a biscuit and began to butter it methodically. He added a generous dollop of jam.
“We will indeed, and I’m afraid you’re not going to like the outcome. But if you would be willing to open your mind a little, you would find that Cam-Field is going to do some really good things here—”
“Not nearly enough to outweigh the bad.”
“But how do you know that? You haven’t even heard our plans—”
“I know,” he interrupted firmly.
“I understand that you’re scared—”
“Scared?” His brows danced up on his forehead.
“Yes, why else would you be here? You are here to try to get a feel for what I have in store for my, um...campaign so you can try to stop me in my tracks.”
His lips twitched but Emily couldn’t tell if it was from anger or amusement. She guessed it was the latter. She didn’t think he was taking her seriously quite yet. And who could blame him given their awkward introduction?
He took a bite of his biscuit and swallowed it. “Maybe I stopped by to see how you’re doing.”
She scoffed at that. “You’re not my mother—a simple phone call could have accomplished that.”
His grin made her uneasy. “That reminds me,” he said, “my mother is a schoolteacher. She decided she should stick to dry land after she had Janie, so she got her teaching degree.” He devoured half his biscuit in one bite.
“Oh? That’s nice. I’m sure it must be a very rewarding profession.” She smiled politely and took another healthy bite of her own biscuit.
“Not a ship captain.”
“Huh?” she said, even as the biscuit slowly turned to sand in her mouth.
Bering smirked. “Yeah, and just for the record, she has perfect twenty-twenty vision—in both eyes—and I’ve never heard her so much as mutter a curse word.”
Emily bent her head. “Oh. No. You heard that?”
“I did,” he said. “You have quite an imagination.”
“Of course you did—that stupid intercom. Nothing in that junk heap of an office works properly. Bering, I’m so, so sorry. I can’t believe I insulted your mother. That’s not... And I’m not... And she made those delicious scones...”
Bering chuckled. “I think you can be safely excused under the circumstances. But what do you mean nothing works properly?”
“Just one of the many problems we’ve had since we arrived in this town. We thought we were all set up with an office but when we got here nothing was like the property manager claimed. The place is a complete joke. The computers are ancient—seriously, they look like some kind of practical joke—the printer doesn’t work, the phones are outdated. And we really need the phones—our cell phones work only intermittently. Of course you know how spotty cell-phone service is, since you live here. Even the copy machine is a piece of junk. And to make matters worse, my laptop came down with a virus the first day we were here, so all my software and work files are inaccessible. I have to use that dinosaur to even get my email. And I can’t find anyone in town who can work on it or my laptop. We can’t find anyone to fix anything, actually. But it’s the heating system that’s killing us. There are exactly two settings—iced-over or sauna. And I really can’t tolerate iced-over, so...”
Bering rubbed a hand over his chin. “Hmm. Buster Bradbury owns that building, right?”
“That’s what we’ve been told. But we’ve never spoken with him. He is, apparently, somewhere in Florida this time of year. We’ve dealt with his property manager, a guy named Oden Franks. He’s based out of Anchorage, so there’s not much he can do, either, supposedly. He claims he’s been making calls and he can’t figure out what’s going on. The place was supposed to be state-of-the-art. He claims it is—that he personally had it set up for us. But obviously standards are a bit different here.”
Bering nodded, his face an unreadable mask.
“If I was a paranoid sort, I’d say we were victims of sabotage.”
“Hey, that’s my hometown you’re running down here, you know.”
“I do, and it’s unfortunate if you take it personally. But Rankins isn’t special....”
Emily saw the narrowing of his eyes, the subtle clench of his jaw, and was reminded once again of the irritable mountain man she’d encountered in her office a few days ago.
She rushed to explain, “I’m not saying that your little town isn’t special. I’m sure it is—to you and to others who live here. What