Under Alaskan Skies (18 page)

She couldn’t move, couldn’t think, could barely breathe. He lay next to her, with her hand in his. She forced her eyes open. There was a smile of satisfaction on his face, but a second glance at his body reminded her he hadn’t been satisfied at all. She leaned over him and looked into his dark eyes.

“Are you ready?” she asked. Silly question. If she didn’t know he was ready by now, she needed a few anatomy lessons. She rolled over and straddled him, planting one knee on either side of his chest.

His eyes widened, his lips parted. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Giving you a taste of your own medicine,” she said. Taste being the operative word. She wanted to taste every bit of him. She wanted to drive him just as crazy as he had her. She wanted to hear him beg for relief. She deliberately brushed the tips of her breasts against the hair on his chest.

He drew a ragged breath. He reached for her wrists and circled them with his fingers. “Let’s get on with this.” His voice sounded strangled.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I’m just getting started.”

“Then start,” he said, his jaw clenched.

Suddenly she was shy. He’d called her bluff and now she had to show him how much she wanted him…how much she wanted him to hit the same heights she had. But what if she couldn’t? She’d had so little experience.

She ran her tongue over his lips, nibbling and tasting. Just that. But that was enough to have him groan deep in his throat.

“Come on, Carrie,” he said.

She moved on, ignoring his plea, warming to her
task. Rubbing her face over the hair on his chest, running her lips over the flat nipples. Noticing that he shuddered with ecstasy, but paying no attention to his pleas for more or less or something else entirely. When she got to his taut belly and his arousal, she looked up and met his gaze. In the darkened room, she felt rather than saw the heat, enough heat to scorch her hand as she let her fingers slide over the velvet shaft.

Before she knew what was happening, he was on top of her, and she was pinned to the bed. His hands were all over her, gently spreading her thighs, making room for him. As he entered her she heard her own voice cry out from somewhere outside her body. Before she’d had a chance to get used to him inside her, he pulled away. Then came in again. Slowly. Too slowly. Her body was on fire again. Wanting him. Now more than ever.

“Yes,” she murmured. Though he hadn’t asked a question. She was about to ask for more when he gave it to her. He came into her harder and faster, rocking her with sensations even stronger than before. When she hit the top of the arc and felt the room spin around and she heard him call her name, she knew there would never be another moment like this. She felt him lose the control he was clinging to and shudder with the same sensations that hit her. It was thunder and lightning without the fear. It was Fourth of July without the parade. It was Christmas and her birthday all rolled into one. It was the best present she’d ever gotten.

She lay there with his body on top of her, relishing the weight of him and the warmth of him. He rolled
off and pulled her into his arms. She couldn’t meet his gaze. A wave of shyness hit her. Had she been too bold? Had she come on too strong? The last few minutes—or was it hours?—had changed her forever. If it hadn’t changed him, she didn’t want to know about it.

She opened her eyes and peeked over his shoulder at the window. The storm continued. The room was dark, but every few minutes the thunder would boom and the lightning would light up the room. Not only the room but the whole world. Lying there in his arms made the storm recede into the background of the most amazing night of her life. A few hours ago it had been terrifying. Only a few hours? More than that. More like a lifetime.

Chapter Eight

“Tell me about it,” he said after a long silence.

“It was incredible,” she said, forgetting she was not going to go out on a limb until he’d said something first. What if he had sex like this all the time? Despite his busy schedule, what if he found time for sex between operations? She’d seen TV hospital dramas. She had an idea of what it was like. A quick embrace in the darkened examining room, a stolen kiss in the pharmacy or at the nurse’s station.

“That’s all?” he asked, grinning at her.

She blushed and hid her face against his chest.

“I would say it was a miracle,” he said soberly, tucking a damp curl behind her ear. “But that’s not what I meant. I want to know why you’re so afraid of storms. You must have been through them before.”

She rolled away from him and lay on her back. He pulled the sheet and her comforter up over them both.

“It’s a long story,” she said.

He propped his elbow next to her and braced his chin on the palm of his hand. His gaze was warm and steady. “I’m not going anywhere.”

She bit her tongue to keep from contradicting him.
He
was
going somewhere. Oh, not now. Maybe not even tomorrow. But he was going and she was staying here. Still she owed him an explanation. Even if she didn’t, she wanted to tell him about it. Maybe it would help. Not him, but her. Maybe she needed to go over it in her mind.

“It was a few years ago,” she said, staring at the ceiling, tracing the familiar cracks with her eyes, thinking of all the years she’d slept in this bed alone. Knowing it would never be the same again after tonight. All those years she’d wished for someone to come along and make her life complete. All the while knowing full well no one could do that for you. You had to make your own life complete, understand yourself, love yourself before you could love anyone else. Maybe that was why she had to tell him. Not because he would understand her better, but because she might understand herself better.

She took a deep breath. “It was a few years ago. I was back from college, pretty much a full partner with dad, sharing the flight schedule. I was flying from Nome to Kotzebue, which is on the Chukchi Sea, when a storm came up. I had a load of king crab for a local festival as well as some spare parts for a garage. When I left Nome it was clear, and I heard nothing about any bad weather ahead. But a half hour or so out of town, I was on the radio and heard that a storm had come up just ahead of me. The control people in Kotz directed me around it. But before I could change course I was passing between clouds that were charged with electricity.”

“What did it look like?” he asked.

“Sharp, bright zigzags.” She shuddered, remembering
how scared she’d been, how her teeth had chattered. “I thought I’d be okay as long as the clouds were above or below me, but I was wrong. The plane is metal, as you know. It makes a great conductor of electricity. I heard a loud boom that almost blew my ears out. I can’t imagine a dynamite explosion could be any louder. It was white-hot and the whole sky was brighter than the brightest light. I was instantly and completely blinded by the flash. I couldn’t see a thing. The lightning had jumped from one cloud to the plane and then hit the next cloud with me in between. All before I realized what was happening.”

“You must have been terrified.” He took her hand in his and gently stroked her fingers.

She nodded. “Terrified I was going to crash. Terrified I’d never see again even if I lived through it, because I was totally blind. All my instruments were blown out. I knew that, even though I couldn’t see. I’d lost radio contact, of course. No way to call my dad and say goodbye or tell him how much I loved him. All those thoughts go through your mind.”

Matt brought her fingers to his lips and kissed them. Just the touch of his lips on her skin made her pulse race and made her forget the past and the future. She forced herself back in time. She made herself concentrate.

“I kept thinking of what my dad used to say. ‘Stay calm. Don’t panic. You’re a good pilot. You can get out of this.’ Yes, I’d flown without instruments before. I could do that. But without my eyesight? Honestly, I didn’t think so. I knew I had to keep the plane level, but how did I know what level was when I couldn’t see the horizon?”

“How did you?” he asked, bending down to look in her eyes. His forehead was creased with worry lines, as if he didn’t know if she’d gotten out of it alive.

“I didn’t. I went into a dive, but I didn’t know it. Not until I broke out of the clouds and my vision cleared. That’s when I really started to panic. I was going down, down into the snow and the ice of the Arctic Circle.

“If I hadn’t seen a half-frozen river outside a little village I wouldn’t be here today,” she said solemnly. “There was just enough water for me to land in. I made it down by the grace of God.”

“And your skill as a pilot,” he reminded her.

“Maybe. Anyway, when I landed the whole village came out. They’d heard from the radio tower in Nome that I was lost somewhere in the vicinity. I’m afraid I burst into tears when I got out of the plane and my knees collapsed. Especially when I saw my rudder was partially blown off. I would have crashed if I’d kept flying.”

“How did you get back? Did someone come for you?”

“Oh, no. They repaired the rudder for me, and my instruments, and I flew home a few days later.”

“In clear weather, I hope.”

“Yes. It was beautiful the whole way. Of course I had to make my deliveries first.”

“Your father must have been proud of you.”

“He was, but in a way it was what he expected of me. It was what he would have done. Figured out a way to get down.”

“I hope it never happened again.”

“No, there have been other minor emergencies. But nothing like that.”

“So that’s why you’re afraid of storms.”

“Yes, I keep expecting to be blinded by the lightning and lose my way.”

“Not this time.”

“No.” This time she’d found her way. For a few moments she’d been totally and completely unaware of the storm around her. She raised her head and looked out the window. She saw no lightning or heard any more thunder. The rain had come and was dancing off the windowpanes at an almost horizontal slant. She gave a sigh of relief and slid back down next to him.

“I made it through another storm,” she said.

“
We
made it,” he said.

She closed her eyes and he kissed her eyelids. He put his arms around her and she felt his heart beating in time to hers. Slow and steady after the ride of her life. She wanted to say,
Now what?
But that would spoil everything. So she shut her eyes, and her brain mercifully shut off at the same time. She fell asleep in his arms. She hadn’t asked the question, but she knew the answer.
Now what? Now nothing
.

It was still raining the next day. This time she woke ahead of him. She noted the look on his face with satisfaction. He wore a slight smile that lifted the corners of his mouth. She didn’t want to wake him, but she couldn’t resist placing a quick kiss on his bare shoulder. Then she slid out of his arms and out of the bed.

She winced as her bare feet hit the cold wide planks of the floor. She stood in the middle of the floor, her
arms wrapped around her, shivering in the cold air and stared at him, memorizing the angle of his head, the strong line of his jaw and the way his hair fell across his forehead. She told herself she was an idiot to try to memorize him. Not when she was bound to spend the next weeks, months, maybe years, trying to forget him.

She told herself to move on, to get dressed, make breakfast, anything but stare at the man in her bed. The one who would leave her there and return to his real life very soon. Maybe even today. Would he ever think of her? Would he try to forget? What did it matter?

She got dressed quietly and went to the kitchen. She was bursting with energy. She felt as if she’d drunk a double espresso, when she hadn’t even plugged in the coffeemaker yet. She stirred up a pan of biscuits, put them in the oven, then started some bacon frying and beat some eggs to scramble.

When the doorbell rang, she hurried to the door. It was Melvin Stuart standing in the rain. She motioned him to come in.

“Hi, there, Carrie. Looks like the lightning just missed you.” He nodded at the fallen tree. “Doctor still here?”

“Yes. There’s no way he could get out, Mel. Why? You’re not sick, are you?”

“No, I just came to tell you you’ve got your power restored. Say, but what if I was sick? Who’d take care of me?”

“I know. I know. We need a nurse.”

“Why have a nurse when we could get a doctor?”

“But there’s no way we can get a doctor to come
up here to live. First, in a town our size, he couldn’t make a living. Second, most doctors, like most people, don’t want to live at the edge of the world. I do and you do and most of the rest of us love it here. But you can imagine how it looks to an outsider.”

Carrie didn’t need to use any imagination to know that. Her former fiancé had put it plainly:
I knew it would be isolated. I knew it would be primitive. But I didn’t know it would be so…so…
.

He hadn’t needed to finish his sentence. She could have finished it for him. She did finish it for him in her mind.
So isolated, so lonely, so…so boring
.

“How can a person sleep with those good smells coming up the stairs?” he asked. She spun around and gaped at Matt in his bare feet, old jeans and the T-shirt he’d worn when he came, that she’d washed for him. He was framed in the doorway of the living room, leaning against the woodwork, looking sexier than any man had a right to look first thing in the morning.

She thought she’d be prepared to see him. She thought she’d be over that throbbing, heart-palpitating excitement this morning. But it was back like a quick ride on a roller coaster.

“Hi,” she said breathlessly. “Uh, this is Melvin—he’s the one who got our power back on. Melvin, I don’t believe you’ve met Dr. Baker.”

Matt shook Melvin’s hand and told him to call him Matt. Melvin stepped into the living room leaving wet footprints on the carpet.

“Thanks for coming, Mel,” she said, hoping he’d turn around and leave without conveying his message to Matt. There was no point in asking the impossible.
She knew the answer, and now Mel knew the answer. She went back to the door, even putting her hand on the handle. Surely he’d get the hint.