Читать книгу Midnight Sun - Kat Martin - Страница 9

At the pounding on the door, Charity’s eyes cracked open. Her little travel alarm clock said it was only 6:00 A.M. Groaning, she tossed back the covers. She had thought it would be cold when she got up, but the pellet stove had done its job, thank God, and the house was still fairly warm. Charity pulled on her thick terry cloth robe and stumbled toward the door.

Maude Foote stood on the porch, she saw when she peeked through the grime they hadn’t yet washed off the living room windows. Charity slid back the bolt and pulled open the heavy wooden door.

“Figured you’d want to get started early,” Maude said, shoving past her into the house. “I’ll fire up the cookstove and fix us somethin’ to eat while you get dressed.”

That was the deal Charity had made. Maude had been hired as advisor, cook, and general all-around worker. Charity just hadn’t figured her employee would be so eager to get to work.

With a weary sigh, she shoved back her tangled blond hair, hooking it over one ear, and stumbled back into the bedroom. She dragged on the same jeans and sweatshirt she had worn the day before and pulled on her hiking boots for a quick trip to the outhouse.

She was shivering by the time she got back inside. The shower wasn’t working but she could at least wash her face. Pouring water from the old porcelain pitcher they had found in the closet into a matching basin, she plunged a washrag into the chilly water and began to scrub off yesterday’s dirt.

There was a mirror over the dresser, missing most of its silver but good enough that she could see her reflection. She brushed the tangles out of her hair and clipped it back and began to feel a little better.

She wasn’t used to going without makeup. Applying a little base that included sunscreen, a whisper of light brown eye shadow, and a stroke of blush to each cheek, she added a dab of lipstick and walked toward the kitchen, feeling almost her old self again.

“Thought we’d start by fixing up this here furniture a little.”

“Fix it? You mean like paint it?”

“Needs it, don’t it?”

Charity thought Maude must be the queen of the understatement. “Absolutely.” Though she had never been particularly handy, out here there really was no other choice. “Unfortunately, we didn’t buy any paint.”

“I brought some I had down to the house.”

Charity eyed her warily. “What color is it?”

“There’s a can of bright red or kind of an olive green. You can take your pick.”

Catching a whiff of coffee on the stove, Charity went over and filled her cup, giving herself time to mull the notion over. She wasn’t handy but she had always had a good sense of style and taste. “Red or olive green.” It sounded a little too much like Christmas, but hey, when in Rome …

She glanced down at the peeling white paint on the breakfast table and chairs and tried to imagine them painted bright red. She didn’t think she could handle red but maybe the green, if it actually was more of an olive. She envisioned the aging dresser in the bedroom and thought of it also painted green. If the knobs were painted red along with the ornate iron headboard of the bed … if she used bright-red accents throughout the tiny cabin, it just might look pretty.

“We’ll have to brace ’em up a little, make ’em more sturdy,” Maude said.

“Okay, but sometime today I think we should go back in to town. I want to get the workmen started on the plumbing and we’d better get something done about the roof.” So far the place hadn’t leaked but she wasn’t sure how much longer the sagging timbers would hold out. Better to be safe than sorry.

As soon as breakfast was over, they dragged what furniture they’d found in the house out onto the porch and started bracing each piece up so it wouldn’t wobble.

“We’re gonna run outta nails,” Maude grumbled. “I’ll see if I can find us some out back.” She ambled off to look through one of the wooden sheds behind the cabin while Charity continued to hammer away. She was pounding, making quite a racket, when she looked up to see a man striding down the path along the creek, headed in her direction.

He was tall, at least six-two or six-three, dressed in a pair of faded jeans that molded to long, muscular legs, and a worn denim shirt that stretched over shoulders the width of an axe handle. He was lean, no extra flesh, yet his movements spoke of power and physical strength. Whoever he was, he needed a haircut. Coffee-brown hair, several inches too long, curled over his collar, and it looked as if he hadn’t shaved for the better part of a week.

As he got closer, she noticed he was very tan, his eyes an amazing shade of blue with tiny lines fanning out at the corners. He was probably mid-thirties, and even with his unkempt hair and several days’ growth of beard, he was a very attractive man.

Charity thought of Jeremy Hauser but only fleetingly. This man and Jeremy had nothing at all in common. While Jeremy was almost ridiculously civilized, this man looked as if he had just stepped out of the pages of a Jack London novel, like a lumberjack, or maybe a trapper, home from weeks spent out in the woods.

He kept on walking, his strides long and filled with purpose, and as he approached the porch, she saw that his features were sharply defined: his nose straight, his cheeks lean, and his jaw square. There was a slight indentation in his chin. She wondered if he was a neighbor, started to smile and introduce herself when his deep voice cut through the cool morning air.

“All right, what the hell is going on?”

Ignoring the anger in his voice, Charity set her hammer on top of the dresser and climbed down from the porch.

“Good morning. I’m Charity Sinclair. I’m the new—”

“I don’t care who you are, lady, I want to know what you’re doing on this property.”

She fixed a smile on her face, though it took a good bit of effort “I’m here because I’m the owner. I bought the Lily Rose from a man named Moses Flanagan.”

He narrowed those striking blue eyes at her. “Bullshit. Old man Flanagan may not live here anymore but he’d die before he’d ever sell the Lily Rose. I don’t know who you think you’re kidding, sweetheart, but if you’re planning to squat on his property you can forget it.”

It was getting harder by the moment to hang on to her temper. “You’re wrong, Mr …?”

He made no effort to answer, just continued to glare down the length of his nicely shaped nose.

“Mr. Flanagan decided to move in with his son in Calgary. He listed the property for sale several weeks ago with Smith Real Estate in Dawson. I’m the person who bought it.”

His features looked even harder than they had before. “That’s impossible. I tried to buy this place from Mose Flanagan every other month for the last four years. He refused to even consider it.”

Her irritation inched up a notch. “Well, apparently he changed his mind. The transaction officially closed yesterday morning. I don’t know why he didn’t tell you the property was for sale.” When his black scowl deepened, she couldn’t resist adding, “Maybe he just didn’t like you.”

He opened his mouth to argue, clamped down on his jaw instead, and a muscle jumped in his cheek. Apparently her goading had hit on a portion of the truth.

“So now you’re the owner,” he said darkly.

“That’s right, I am.”

He looked her over from head to foot, taking in her Liz Claiborne jeans and the touch of makeup she hadn’t been able to resist. She bristled at his smug expression.

“And you actually intend to move in?”

“I am in, Mr …?”

“Hawkins. McCall Hawkins. I’m your next-door neighbor, so to speak. And I don’t appreciate all that hammering you’ve been doing. I like things nice and quiet. I enjoy my privacy and I don’t like being disturbed. It’ll be easier on both of us if you keep that in mind.”

“I’ll do my best,” she lied, thinking of the noisy dredging equipment she intended to use in the stream. She gave him a too-sweet smile. “I’d say it was a pleasure, Mr. Hawkins, but we both know it wasn’t. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to work.”

Turning away from him, she climbed the stairs to the porch, picked up her hammer, and started pounding on the dresser again, dismissing him as if he had never been there. For several long moments, he simply stood there glaring. Then she caught the movement of his shadow as he turned and stalked away, back down the path beside the creek.

Of all the nerve. Who the devil did he think he was?

She remembered passing his house just before she reached the Lily Rose, a newer, cedar-sided home with a large, metal-roofed garage of some sort attached to it. At the time she had wondered who lived there.

Charity bit back a curse as she thought of her irritating “next-door neighbor.” It didn’t matter. He didn’t matter.

She turned at the sound of Maude’s laughter coming up the stairs of the porch. The older woman’s gaze followed Hawkins’s retreating figure down the path. “I see you met your neighbor. Wondered when he’d show up.”

“Oh, I met him, all right, and I didn’t like him any more than he liked me.”

Maude chuckled. “Call’s all right. Long as you leave him alone. He owns a couple thousand acres on this side of the creek. Built the house he lives in when he got here four years ago. Never met a man who likes his privacy more than Call.”

“If he’s so concerned about privacy, he should have built his house somewhere back in the woods, instead of right out here on the water.”

“I guess he liked the view.”

Since she liked looking down on the wild, boulder-strewn stream herself, she didn’t argue. Besides, it didn’t matter. The property was hers to do with as she pleased.

And there wasn’t a damn thing Call Hawkins or anyone else could do about it.

Call stalked up the front steps of his house, his temper foul and his face hard. Crossing the porch, he jerked open the door and strode in, letting the screen door slam behind him.

“Sonofabitch.” He should have appreciated the quiet while he had it. Damn, he couldn’t believe his bad luck. If only he’d known the place was for sale. No doubt ol’ Mose was rubbing his hands in glee, thinking of the prissy little blonde moving in next door to him.

Of course, she wouldn’t be there long. Life this far north was hard. The rainy season had already started. For the next few weeks, there’d be too much rain and too much mud. Then summer would come and there’d be too much sun. There’d be dust and forest fires. There’d be pine beetles and hornets and flies enough to drive you crazy. If she made it till winter—which there was no way in hell she would—there’d be snow up to her pretty little ass.

He thought of the designer jeans she wore that said she was a city girl and not from around these parts, and tried not to think how good she had looked in them. He thought of her pretty face and the hint of makeup she had worn that emphasized her clear green eyes. What in the world had possessed a woman like that to come to an isolated place like Dead Horse Creek?

Of course he had also come north from the city, but that was different. Call had been born in this country. His father had been in the logging business in Prince George, a small town in the forests of British Columbia, and though his mother was American, she had loved the woods and the out-of-doors as much as her husband. Both Call and his brother, Zach, had been hunting and fishing this country for as long as either of them could remember. Both of them loved to backpack, canoe, and cross-country ski.

But Call, a year older than Zach, had been young back then, and he had been restless, curious about life in the city. The lure of his mother’s American family in San Francisco had drawn him to the States. He’d spent four years at Berkeley, where he had roomed with a boy named Richie Gill. Call and Richie had become fast friends, both of them interested in sports and the fascinating world of computers. Eventually, they’d become partners in a successful software game that had made them both rich.

Call had entered the world of business and loved it. By the time he had sold his first company and accepted the position as President and CEO of American Dynamics, he was working sixteen hours a day, so immersed in the financial empire he was building he didn’t have time for anything else.

Not even his family.

As it always did, the memory sent pain ripping through him like a ragged shard of glass. It eased as he forced the thoughts away. He never dwelled on the past anymore. He’d spent four long years trying to forget it.

“Toby!” he shouted as he crossed the polished wood floor in the living room. “Toby, are you in here?”

The younger man appeared through the doorway of the kitchen. “I’m right here, sir. I thought I’d make us a couple ham sandwiches for lunch.” Toby Jenkins had just turned nineteen, a good-looking, red-haired kid, tall and lanky, with a slender, wiry frame.

His mother lived in Dawson, ran one of the small jewelry shops in town that catered to the tourist trade. Six months ago, Toby had heard through the grapevine that Call was looking for a handyman, someone to do odd jobs for him out on Dead Horse Creek. For the first three years, Call had taken care of the place himself, but he was busier now and he needed the help. Toby lived in a small, one-bedroom cabin Call had remodeled and furnished up on the hill, far enough away so he could maintain his privacy, yet close enough so Toby could take care of the chores around the house.

“I’m not hungry,” Call said. “Wrap it up and I’ll eat it later.”

Toby frowned. “You skipped breakfast. You gotta eat something.”

Call made an unpleasant sound in his throat. The kid could be a real mother hen at times. Call figured Toby saw him as some kind of father figure, since he’d never had a dad of his own and didn’t even know who the guy was. Call had been a father once. He never intended to travel that painful road again.

“Like I said—just wrap it up. I’ll get around to it sooner or later.”

Toby ducked back into the kitchen and Call paused for a moment in front of the big rock fireplace in the living room. The house wasn’t fancy, just two bedrooms and a couple of baths, but there was a modern kitchen with the latest appliances, and the L-shaped living-dining area was nicely furnished with a comfortable, dark-brown leather sofa and chairs and accented with nineteenth-century antiques.

He’d added the metal-roofed building that housed his office and a three-car garage a little over a year ago, the first small step, as he saw it, on the road back to life.

Still, he wasn’t ready to give up his solitary world completely and he certainly didn’t want it breached by a woman, especially not one who spelled trouble like Charity Sinclair.

“Sonofabitch,” he grumbled again, and wondered just exactly what he could do to get rid of her.

It was noon by the time Charity and Maude left for town, late afternoon by the time they returned, but Charity had found a local plumbing company to deal with the bathroom, and a roofer had agreed to do the necessary roof repairs. They’d bought a few supplies, including bags of pellets for the stove.

On one of the side streets, she had spotted an antiques store that also carried used furniture. She bought a full-size mattress and box springs that appeared to be in good condition and would fit the old iron bed, and a small sofa and chair she could decorate with the olive green dust cover she had found at the general store.

All in all, it was a good day’s work, but she hadn’t gotten home till almost dark and again she went to bed exhausted, too tired even to finish the Max Mason adventure novel, Island of Doom, that she had been reading.

Tomorrow she and Maude would finish cleaning the house and the day after that, she hoped to meet Buck Johnson and begin discussing the equipment they would need to start up the dredging operation. She wondered how many more grueling trips to Dawson she would have to endure before they actually got started.

They washed windows and scrubbed bathroom cupboards the following day, then gave the furniture another coat of paint.

“We been lucky,” Maude said as she stuck the paintbrush into a can filled with thinner. “We get a lot of rain this time of year. Need to get the paint dry and this stuff back in the house before the next storm blows in.”

As Maude predicted, clouds began to gather the morning of the following day. The older woman arrived just in time to help her move the furniture back inside the house before the sky opened up like a floodgate and rain fell in sheets so thick she couldn’t see the creek.

It was Thursday. The workmen she had hired in Dawson had a couple of jobs to finish and weren’t scheduled to arrive until the first of the week. As Charity had feared, the roof began to leak. A stream of water dripped over the woodstove in the kitchen, sending up a hiss of steam as each drop sputtered against the hot black metal.

A leak sprang up over the john in the bathroom, which didn’t really matter, since it was still clogged up and totally useless anyway. The outhouse, she had discovered, was bad enough in pleasant weather. In the rain it was nearly unbearable. The roof above the little wooden building leaked even worse than the one over the house. She was soaked and freezing by the time she finished and got back inside the cabin.

Maude drove to her own house down the hill and came back with rain gear, the loan of which Charity accepted with gratitude and a mental note to buy herself some the next time she was in Dawson. It was hard to imagine putting on a heavy yellow slicker every time she had to relieve herself, but hey, stuff happened.

You wanted an adventure, she reminded herself. She thought of her favorite action hero, Max Mason, who traveled the world fighting evil, survived under the very worst conditions, and never complained. Compared to what Max went through, living up here was a stroll in the park.

Besides, next week, once the repairs were made, things were bound to get better.

Unfortunately, on Saturday, Buck Johnson showed up and she began to wonder if they ever really would.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Johnson,” she said with a welcoming smile. “I’m really looking forward to working with you.”

“I never worked for a woman,” he grumbled. “Maude didn’t tell me the new owner was a female.”

Charity straightened a little and was glad she hadn’t offered to shake his hand. She came from Manhattan, after all, a city where Johnson’s Planet-of-the-Apes attitude was mostly a thing of the past. “I can’t see why that should matter, Mr. Johnson. I’m here to work this claim. You have experience in that regard. I’d like to employ you. That is all that matters.”

Johnson grumbled something she couldn’t hear. He was a big man, mid-forties, thick through the chest and shoulders, with black hair slightly graying at the temples. His forehead was wide, his nose a little too broad, and she wondered if it had been broken.

“Well, Mr. Johnson, do you want the job or not?”

“I got a kid in city college down in Whitehorse. I need the money.”

“Is that a yes?”

He nodded as if he couldn’t quite force out the word. “You might as well call me Buck.”

“Fine … Buck.” She didn’t give him her first name as she had intended. With Buck Johnson’s attitude toward women, she needed him to accept that she was the boss. She hoped that in time they would come to a better understanding. “The first thing I’d like you to do is take a look at the equipment out in the shed. There isn’t all that much, but some of it may be useful.”

He nodded. “I’d better get to it, then.” Slamming his battered old felt hat back on his head, he turned to leave—glad, it seemed, to escape outside.

As he closed the front door, Charity watched Maude saunter out of the kitchen.

“I figured you’d best deal with Buck on your own. Better he knows who he’s workin’ for right from the giddy-up.”

“Why didn’t you tell him I was a woman?”

A droopy, gray-brown eyebrow went up. “You really gotta ask?”

Charity almost smiled. “No, I guess I don’t.”

“We might be able to find someone else, but it’ll take time and with the claim bein’ so far from town, you’d have to come up with some kind of living quarters. Buck’s awful handy, living’ just up the road. I figure he’ll come round in time.”

“I hope so.”

“He knows what he’s doin’. He’s been at it more’n twenty years.”

She sighed. “I guess that’s the most important thing.”

Buck returned a little while later. The rain had turned into a fine, cold mist that clung to his flannel shirt and beaded on his ratty brown-felt hat.

“Old Mose never really worked the Lily Rose,” he said, accepting the seat she offered at the now-green kitchen table. She had drawn a leaf pattern in red paint on the top and done the same to the backs of the chairs. She smiled to think her first handyman endeavor had turned out pretty well, considering.

“He owned a couple of other claims,” Buck continued, “one farther up Dead Horse Creek and another over on Bonanza Creek. He spent most of his time working those.”

“Paid off pretty well for him, too,” Maude put in.

“From what I read,” Charity said, “since the Lily Rose hasn’t been worked, we’ll have a better chance of finding gold.”

“Oh, we’ll find some, all right,” Buck agreed. “Can’t hardly stick a pan in the water in these parts without turning up some color. Question is, how much will we find?”

A good question. She hoped it was at least enough to return the money she had invested. “I guess we can’t know that until we get started. What exactly are we going to need?”

“Like you said, there wasn’t much out in the shed—leastwise, nothing much useful. Times have changed. Equipment’s got a lot better in the last few years. Even gold pans aren’t the same as they was when I first started. The good ones are made of plastic now and the best of those is green. Shows the color better. We’ll need a few of them to start.”

“What else?”

“That old skip loader out there still works, after a fashion. Needs a little tuning, but I can handle that. We’ll need a dredge—that’s the most important thing—one with plenty of power but still portable enough to move up and down the creek. I can build us a sluice box. We’ll need wire mesh, stuff for a riffle board, and a two-or three-horse engine for vibration.”

“All right, what else?”

“We’ll need picks and shovels. A good metal detector would sure come in handy.”

She flicked a glance at Maude. “Will we be able to get all that in Dawson?” She hoped they didn’t have to go all the way to Whitehorse or order it from somewhere even farther away.

“There’s a place on the outskirts of town,” Maude said. “D. K. Prospecting Supplies. They’ll have everything we need.”

“Mining is still big business up here,” Buck put in. “And there’s still plenty of gold. All you have to do is find it.”

She felt an inward thrill and a smile bloomed over her lips. “Then that’s what we’re going to do.”

Buck took a look at her salon-trimmed hair and the dab of makeup she couldn’t resist, and apparently wasn’t convinced.

“Monday,” she said to Maude, ignoring him, “once the workmen arrive to repair the roof and the plumbers come to fix the bathroom, Buck and I will head off to D. K. Prospecting to buy the equipment we need.”

Buck made no comment, but his jaw looked tight. Charity figured he didn’t like the idea of people in town finding out he was working for a woman.

Too bad, Bucko, she thought. Hadn’t the guy ever heard of women’s lib? Well, it was time he stopped living in the past and accepted the idea that she was the one who’d be signing his paycheck.

Monday arrived. They waited all day but the workmen never showed up. Not until late Tuesday morning. Maude said they worked on Klondike time. She said Charity might as well get used to it.

“Just the way things is done up here. Nobody hurries much. Too many other things to do.”

“You mean like go camping or fishing,” Charity grumbled, beginning to get the idea.

“Or canoein’ maybe, or packin’ back into the woods. Sun comes out, they’re bound to find somethin’ better to do than work.”

Fortunately, Tuesday was overcast and drizzly. Charity breathed a sigh of relief when the Jed’s Plumbing truck rolled up the road. An hour later, three men from Moss and Son’s roofing arrived and set to work.

The plumbing snake was grinding away, the roofers pounding shingles when Charity caught sight of a dark-haired man striding toward her down the path along the creek. This time she knew who it was and though she pretended not to notice his long, angry strides, some evil little part of her couldn’t wait for him to get there.

As he neared the cabin, Call spotted Charity Sinclair where she stood at the near end of the cabin. She was watching the men on the roof, her head tilted back, hair hanging down to the middle of her back, a few wisps framing her face. The long shiny strands were a bright yellow-gold, exactly the color of a nugget he had once found in the creek.

She turned as he got closer and pasted a phony-looking smile on her face. “Well, Mr. Hawkins. How nice of you to come over for another neighborly chat.”

“This isn’t a neighborly chat, sweetheart, and you know it. What the hell is happening over here? I thought I told you I liked peace and quiet.”

“Yes, I believe you did. Unfortunately for you, I like being able to use my bathroom for something other than a place to hang wet towels and I prefer to cook my meals without rainwater dripping into my food.”

He’d seen her walking back and forth to the outhouse in her rain slicker. He’d wondered if she’d ever even seen one before. He glanced up at the sagging cabin roof. He figured it would start leaking sooner or later.

“That bad, huh?” He tried to keep the satisfaction out of his voice, but he could see by her pinched expression she had heard it.

“Let’s just say Mr. Flanagan had good reason to move.”

“How long till they finish the repairs?”

“Since the men seem to be working on ‘Klondike time,’ I have no idea. I guess it depends on whether or not the sun comes out.”

He ignored a flicker of amusement, clamped down on his jaw instead. “Well, the sooner they get done, the better. All that hammering is driving me crazy.”

Her smile remained frozen in place. “Maude tells me you own quite a lot of property along the creek. Perhaps you should think of relocating your house someplace farther back in the woods.”

Actually, he had thought of building deeper in the forest, but he liked looking down on the water. Besides, there was a limit to solitude, even for him. At least here he’d see a car on the road once in a while. Maude Foote stopped by on occasion, and he’d had Mose to argue with.

It seemed he would have fresh battles to fight with Charity Sinclair.

“I like my house right where it is,” he said, then changed tactics and added, “How much do you want for your property?”

Surprise widened those clear green eyes. She was wearing a red cotton turtleneck and he could see she had nice breasts. Her fancy jeans were filled out as well as he remembered, better maybe. Round behind, tiny waist, legs just the right length for the rest of her. His loins began to fill. It happened so rarely he took an unconscious step backward. Jesus, he couldn’t believe it.

“My property isn’t for sale,” she said, distracting him, thank God.

“I’ll double whatever you paid for it. You can buy a bigger piece of property somewhere else.”

“I don’t want a bigger piece of property. The Lily Rose belongs to me and I intend to keep it.”

“I’ll give you three times what you paid.”

Her lips flattened out. Before, he noticed, they’d been full and very nicely curved. “I don’t think you understand, Mr. Hawkins. The Lily Rose is a mining claim. I intend to work that claim, as I have every right to do. You can offer me ten times the price I paid—a hundred. It wouldn’t make a whit of difference. I’m staying, Mr. Hawkins, whether you like it or not. If anyone’s going to move, it’ll have to be you!”

He drilled her with a glare and saw her tense a little at the forbidding look on his face. “You aren’t telling me you intend to set up a dredging operation on this property?” Anger softened his voice, making the unspoken threat all the more intimidating. Four years ago, his employees had cowered at that menacing tone but Charity didn’t back down.

“That’s exactly what I’m telling you. That’s what Mose Flanagan intended to do—he just never got around to it.”

“Sonofabitch!”

The smile she gave him looked downright evil. “Get used to it, Mr. Hawkins. I’m staying right here and working this claim. Accept it or move somewhere else.”

With that she turned and marched away. He tried not to notice that round behind, but his eyes refused to look anywhere else.

Sonofabitch, he silently repeated, thinking again of Mose and the secret laugh he must be getting out of this. Call turned and started walking. He didn’t look back all the way to the house. But even if he closed his eyes, he could still see the pretty little blonde with her nice breasts and round behind.

For months, he’d been telling himself it was time to reawaken the sexual side of his life. He wasn’t a monk, even if he had been living like one. A couple of weeks ago, he’d started seeing a divorcee in Dawson named Sally Beecham, a cocktail waitress at the Yukon Saloon he had known for a couple of years. Sally was a sexy little brunette and she had made it clear he was welcome in her bed whenever he was ready. He’d been telling himself that time would be soon.

But he’d never gotten hard looking at Sally.

Not like he was right now, just thinking of Charity Sinclair.

“I don’t believe that guy.” Charity walked over to where Maude stood on the porch. “Who the hell does he think he is?”

Maude chuckled. “Call’s got a burr under his saddle, all right. At times, he can be downright cantankerous. But folks say he’s got more money than he can count and that deal he was offerin’ sounded pretty darned good. You might shoulda taken it.”

She lifted her chin. “I’m not selling. Not now or anytime in the foreseeable future.” Not for the next six months, at any rate. That was the time she had allotted herself and she wasn’t going anywhere until that time ran out.

“All right then, if that’s the way it is, I guess you and Buck had best be headin’ into town.”

Charity nodded. “I think he’s out in the equipment shed. I’ll go get him.”

With Maude there to oversee the repair work being done to the cabin, Charity and Buck drove down to Dawson, Buck behind the wheel of the Explorer, which made the trip a little less wearing on her nerves. Still, the man was gruff and surly, and she didn’t like the way he looked at her when he thought she couldn’t see.

The good news was they succeeded in their mission even better than she had expected. To her amazement and everlasting gratitude, Charity discovered that the Internet had arrived in Dawson City. There were, in fact, two tiny Internet cafes where she could send and receive e-mail from friends and family back home. Better yet, she found out through D. K. Prospecting that cell phones existed even in a rural place like Dawson.

While Buck assembled the equipment they would need, Charity signed up for cell phone service through Horizons Unlimited, tossing the bulky phone that had more power than the smaller models she was used to onto the seat of the Ford.

They were finished by late afternoon and on their way back to the cabin as dusk began to fall, the back of the Explorer filled with shovels, picks, gold pans, and miscellaneous gear, the larger equipment scheduled for delivery in the morning.

Unless, of course, the sun came out, in which case it might take a couple more days.

Charity’s sigh turned into a grin. It was different up here. There was none of the hustle and bustle of Manhattan. Her life was new and strange and she was enjoying every minute of it. Except for her trips to the outhouse, of course.

She was even enjoying her battles with Call Hawkins.

His tall image rose in her mind, his hard jaw shadowed by the morning shave he’d missed, his hair too long but a nice, shiny nut-brown color. He reminded her a little of Max Mason—rawhide tough, whipcord lean, hard as nails. As much as she disliked the man, there was something about him that intrigued her.

Something besides his height and solid, broad-shouldered build. Besides the fact that he was so obviously male.

She didn’t know exactly what it was—and she didn’t want to find out. She had better things to do than think about a guy like McCall Hawkins.

Still, the image of him standing there in his faded jeans and denim shirt was surprisingly hard to forget.