Emergency in Alaska
She wrapped her arms around his waist and laid her cheek on his back—on the cold fur of his parka. In spite of the cool temperature, she felt a spark of heat.
His or hers? She didn’t know, but the instant her arms reached around him she felt it, and it was enough to keep her warm. It wasn’t so much for staying away from the cold, as it was for the closeness to Michael.
“Now, hold on tight because I don’t go back for anyone that bumps off.”
He didn’t have to ask her twice to hold on tight. She’d been down this route before and knew all the bumps intimately. Of course, there was a new bump tonight—the one beating double speed in her chest. And she knew it wasn’t because of the impending ride. Not in the least.
Dear Reader,
If you knew me, you’d know how odd it was for me to write a book dealing with cold weather and snow. To me, anything under 70°F is cold. I had to put on my long johns and wool slippers just writing about the cold climate of Alaska. Still, I couldn’t resist the allure of Alaska for this book. I was there once, just in the southernmost area, and it was such a beautiful state. So much variety and such wonderful people. I always swore I’d go back, much farther north and see the real Alaskan wilderness, and that’s still a goal of mine. Being a dog lover, with enough mutts to make up my own mini dogsled team, I can’t wait to do a little mushing through the snow.
Years ago I worked with a doctor who couldn’t resist the lure of the wide-open spaces of Alaska. His journey north was to last six months, and the purpose was to work in a small clinic. But he never came back to the lower forty-eight states. We did get letters from time to time, and he met his true love in Alaska. They married, and while I don’t think they’re cuddling up in an igloo, they are living happily ever after. True love prevailing wherever it is found—that’s the way any good romance is supposed to be, isn’t it?
Whether it’s in the coldest regions of an Alaskan winter, or on the warmest sunny beaches of a Florida summer, it’s my wish for you that true love will always win through.
Wishing you health and happiness,
Dianne Drake
Emergency in Alaska
Dianne Drake
To my old pal Gary, a great doctor who found his true love in the wilds of Alaska.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER ONE
“SO THIS is where nowhere begins,” Michael Morse grumbled, turning the map over a couple of times, looking for something on it that would tell him which way to go, then finally giving up. Impatiently, he wadded it into a ball then chucked it into the rear of his Jeep, and leaned forward against the steering wheel, looking up at the sky. “Like charting the clouds is going to get me somewhere,” he muttered, spotting the ominously dark one hanging directly over him. He’d been lost a good two hours now, not sure if he was going round in circles, advancing in any particular direction or even backtracking over terrain he’d previously traveled. “She’s out of her mind,” he muttered. “Totally out of her mind.”
Sighing, he took a look at the desolate white road stretching out to eternity ahead of him, then twisted around and looked at the exact same road behind him. “How the hell did you even find a place like this, let alone decide to stay here?” A little holiday to Alaska was what she’d told him.
Brilliant idea, he’d thought. She’d been so lonely this past year since his dad had died, and she deserved a new life. But in Alaska? Specifically, Elkhorn, Alaska, population fluctuating somewhere near the five-hundred mark. “You have more people living in your condominium complex. I have more people than that come through my emergency-room door every week. Totally, unequivocally ridiculous,” he grunted, glancing around again.
And here he was, at this particular crossroads, coming from nowhere, going to nowhere, doubting not only her sanity at this juncture but his own for chasing after his mother in this godforsaken sweep of nowhere. “She is a grown woman, after all. Respected surgeon, traveled, capable of taking care of herself.” But she was his mother, and that was that. He had to look after her. “Even when you do something this…this…crazy, Maggie!”
Michael assessed his choices again, hoping that somehow he’d missed one—the best one, whatever that might be. Still, every which way he looked, the only things looming ahead, behind or to the sides were endless strips of narrow, rutted, icy roads lined by snow-capped trees. Lots of them. And not one of them with a road sign tacked to it telling him which icy road to take or, for that matter, which icy road not to take.
Which meant that he was lost. Or, if not lost, so vastly confused that no matter which way he chose, he would soon be lost. Even worse, soon to be without petrol if he wasn’t careful about this.
Alone, in the Alaskan wilds, without gasoline. Not a good spot in which to be, since there was no way of knowing when the next human being might come along, or where the next tiny dot calling itself a town would be located and if that dot would even have a gasoline pump. “She can’t be up here,” he grunted. “Can’t be, wouldn’t be. She’s got better sense than that.” But the e-mail he’d received just over a week ago had specifically stated she was staying in Elkhorn, which was somewhere near Moosejaw, and up the road from Bear Creek. Not only that, she was living with a man named Dimitri.
Michael wasn’t sure which was worse, that his mother was living in Alaska, or that she was living with a man…in Alaska.
Dimitri—a name that conjured up some definite images. Big, burly… “This isn’t the way I wanted to spend my holiday, Mom,” he shouted at the top of his lungs, immediately feeling a little silly about sitting out there in the middle of nowhere shouting at nothing but open space and trees. But time off from the hospital was precious. He didn’t get much of it, and when he did manage to put together a few days away, he preferred a nice beach somewhere. And not on the Alaskan coast.
But she was so vulnerable now. And who wouldn’t be, after losing a spouse of forty years? “Except most people don’t take their vulnerability to Alaska,” he grunted, looking up at the hawk circling overhead. “Right into the arms of someone called Dimitri Romonov,” he shouted at the bird, who squawked a protest over having his peace disturbed, then flew off, leaving Michael feeling even more alone than before.
“Dr. Dimitri Romonov.” His lip nearly curled as he spoke the name. The man was simply taking advantage of a woman at a loose end. “That’s all it could be,” he said aloud as he pulled out the crumpled map, took another look at it, then re-crumpled it and fixed his attention on a rabbit darting out of the bushes. “Okay, if I were a town called Elkhorn, where would I be?” he asked it, only to watch it duck right back into the bushes when he spoke. “Or even Moosejaw,” he called after it. “Right now I’d be elated with Moosejaw.” As the last of the rabbit’s white undertail disappeared, Michael stepped out of the Jeep and looked around, not that it would do him any good. But doing something sure beat sitting there doing nothing. At least this way he got in a good stretch, and at six feet four inches, his long legs needed that. That, and a brisk walk straight up to the front door of a man named Dimitri.
“Okay, I’ll admit it. I’m lost. Lost!” he shouted, as he wandered into the middle of the four-way ice-slick that passed for an intersection. He took a good look in every direction, trying to see if there was one of the intersecting roads that appeared more traveled than another. Deeper ruts in the ice, maybe. Less of a snow pack off to the side. Things he taught his wilderness students to
look for. “Looks like the teacher fails the course,” he muttered, when he couldn’t find a discernible difference anywhere around him. “Hundreds of doctors certified, and the teacher can’t practice what he preaches.”
In the middle of the intersection, Michael turned in a complete circle, little by little, looking for anything that might point him to civilization. While his back was turned toward his Jeep, and his attention fixed on the road straight ahead, another Jeep came crashing onto the road, apparently from a fire trail or access road, and whooshed right into the intersection. “What the…?” he started as he felt the rush of cold air hit his face when the Jeep skidded within a few meters of him, then slid in a complete circle on a thin snowy patch, trying to come to a stop. Anyway, it looked like it was trying to stop because it did two more pirouettes before it landed front end down in a shallow, snowy ditch right across from his own Jeep.
“What do you think you’re doing?” the driver screamed at him as she scrambled out to assess her situation. “Trying to get yourself killed? And me? I could have been killed here, you know!” She ran to the front of her Jeep, bent down to one knee and took a look underneath. Then she stood, looked up the incline at him, opened her mouth to say something, stared for several seconds and shut her mouth.
“You’re not hurt, are you?” he asked, although he doubted she was, not with the way she was acting.
“No, I’m not…” she began rather hesitantly, then shook her head and sucked in a deep breath. “So what are you doing still standing there? Waiting for someone else to come along and run over you? Which they will if you don’t move, and which you’ll deserve if they do! And don’t expect me to stay around here to pick up the pieces, because I don’t have time!”
Instinctively, Michael stepped back instead of forward. “Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked, wondering if he should assess her for a head injury. A good slosh to the brain could cause a violent reaction like she was having. He saw it all the time. One bonk and instant personality change. “Didn’t hit your head or anything?” He thought her pupils looked equal and reactive but he wasn’t close enough to tell, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to get close enough. Out here, in the middle of nowhere with a madwoman…
“You think I have a concussion?”
“If you hit your head…”
“I’m fine, no thanks to you, standing in the middle of the road like an idiot. So, are you going to diagnose me, or push me out of the ditch?”
“Push you out? You expect me to push you out? If you hadn’t been driving like a crazy woman you wouldn’t have ended up down there in the first place, so don’t go blaming me for your bad driving, lady, because I’m the innocent by-stander here.” He took another step backward. “And it’s your fault you’re in a ditch. Not mine.”
“And it’s going to be your fault, not mine, when I take your Jeep and leave you stranded out here. And I will take your Jeep. So here’s your choice. You push, I drive, or I drive and you stay. Take your pick.” She shoved back her fur Cossack hat, and looked up at him. “So what’s it going to be?”
From what he could tell looking down at her, she was tall. Maybe five eight or five nine. And under all her bulk—the red plaid jacket, the fur hat—she might have been curvy, but he couldn’t see for sure, and he wasn’t going in for a closer look. “Okay, I’ll push, but I don’t owe you a damn thing,” he snorted. “The way you were driving, you’re lucky it’s only a ditch you ended up in and not an emergency room.” As director of an emergency department, he saw the sad results of reckless driving like hers every day. Devastating injuries, permanent disabilities, death. Somehow, though, he associated that kind of driving with the city. Apparently careless and foolhardy driving was the same everywhere, including somewhere in the far or, he hoped, near vicinity of Elkhorn.
“You’re lucky it’s only a ditch I ended up in, too. Because if it was anything more…”
“Yeah, I know. You’d have already taken my Jeep and left me out here alone.” She was a pushy thing, too. Cheeky and pushy, and he was betting that if he could make out her features under that big hat she was wearing, which he could not, he’d see pure fire there. “But I am curious why you think you could get my Jeep away from me.”
“Because I’m on an emergency and you’re not. And I have police powers when I need to use them.” To emphasize her point, she hiked up her coat, pulled a wallet from her pocket and showed him her badge.
“Got handcuffs?” he asked, trying to fight back a smile. For all her put-on fierceness, it simply wasn’t in her eyes. Fire, yes. Anger, absolutely. But she wasn’t a bully. Just someone pretending to be, and he wasn’t falling for that. Except it was cute, in an odd sort of way. Not his type in a woman, though, but out here the only type he really wanted to see was one with directions to the Romonov Clinic where his mother had said she was taking up medical practice. “So I’ll push. And in return, you’ll tell me how to get to Elkhorn.”
“I’ll put it in Reverse,” she hissed, swinging herself up into her Jeep. “You get down here and push when I tell you to. But stay off to the side because I don’t want to—”
“I know. You don’t want to pick up the pieces because you don’t have time.” Amazingly, he liked that little bit of impatience in her. It was real. She wasn’t trying to make a good impression. Good thing, because she wasn’t.
Instead of answering, she gunned her engine impatiently as Michael took his place at the front and side of her Jeep. The first two attempts to rock her backward were futile because she was nosed down pretty steep into the ditch and he didn’t have a good foothold in the snow. But the third attempt, after he’d dug his foot in all the way to the frozen earth, tilted her back sufficiently that she made it out of the ditch and straight back into the road, spinning almost out of control then sliding in reverse on the ice so fast she nearly smashed straight into the side of his Jeep. By the time she’d slammed on her brakes and spun around in a full circle, twice, she was less than a meter away from ramming right into the driver’s side door of his rental, where she finally slid to a stop. “Really stupid place to park your car,” she yelled, instead of, Thank you for the help.
Somehow, though, that’s exactly what he’d expected from her. “I don’t know what kind of police powers you pack, lady, but someone ought to take away your driver’s license because if you don’t kill yourself, you’re going to kill someone else. And I sure as hell hope it isn’t me.”
“Won’t be you if you don’t stand in the middle of the intersection,” she retorted, pulling forward, then turning her vehicle to head in the original direction in which she’d been traveling.
“So where’s Elkhorn?” he called, climbing his way from the ditch up onto the road. “Or any other reasonable facsimile of civilization, or even a gas pump?”
She peered out from under her hat at him again. “What do you want in Elkhorn?” she asked, tilting her head enough that he finally got his first good look at her face.
Surprisingly cute. Not so surprisingly angry. And definitely ready to run over him if she had to. To think that his mother had said the people out here were friendly. Apparently she’d never met this spitfire, who was already gunning her engine for the takeoff. Heaven help the people down the road if they didn’t get out of her way. “Elkhorn. Simple directions to the clinic in Elkhorn. That’s all I want.”
“You’ve got to be kidding!” she sputtered, looking up at him, then shaking her head adamantly. “And I thought he had better sense than that. When he told me he was thinking about…No. He wouldn’t. He…” She drew in a discomposed breath, then blew it out in a puff of white vapor into the crisp Arctic air. “Look, I don’t have time to waste sitting here like this, talking to you. And you’ve already cost me five minutes I didn’t have in the first place.”
“I wasn’t aware that’s what we were doing,” he said, not sure whether to be amused by her or to run for his life. “Sitting here, talking. It’s more like I’m standing in the middle of the
road begging for simple directions, and you’re sitting in the Jeep yelling at me or, in the worst-case scenario, threatening to steal my vehicle. And muttering to yourself. Where I come from we avoid people like that.” But she did have a nice voice. A little bit low, reasonably throaty. The kind of voice he liked to hear in the bedroom, on the brink of sex, when it got all husky and full of excitement. Except her voice was definitely not excited.
“Well, avoid me next time you see me. Okay?”
“I’ll be happy to avoid you right now if you’ll tell me where I can find Elkhorn.”
“That way,” she said, pointing so quickly in a direction that he didn’t catch on. “Left, then first right, take another right at the red barn, and another at the rusty pickup truck, go ten more kilometers and veer to the left when you see Dowiak’s pond, which does have a sign. Stay on that road until you come to the three-way, take the road to the left, and another left at the boulder—you can’t miss it since it’s in the middle of the road, and that road will take you straight into Elkhorn.”
“Could you write that down?” he asked, reasonably sure she would not. “Starting with the red barn?”
Instead of answering, she huffed out another exasperated breath, took a firm grip on the steering wheel with her gloved hands and shook her head impatiently. “Don’t have time for this, don’t have time for you. Milt Furman usually makes a run through here later in the day with the mail. I’ll send a relay out to have him lead you on in. If he doesn’t, I’ll be back by here later tonight.” She glanced up at the forbidding sky, and frowned. “Or you can follow me to Beaver Dam right now and get to Elkhorn when I go there later on.” Without another word, she put her Jeep into gear and shot off down the icy road that went to the right.
Michael stood in the intersection for another second debating his options, which were precious few—stay there lost until Milt whatever-his-name-was happened by, wait until the road demon came back, or follow her now and hope for the best. “Why not?” he muttered, then ran back to his own Jeep, hopped in and sped down the same road. “Why the hell not?” At least she had a known destination. That was better than his having only a town name without directions to it and a sure knowledge that he didn’t want to spend any more time lost on an isolated road in the cold.