Kitabı oxu: «Untouched»

CHAPTER ONE

JENESSA REED swung her four-wheel-drive Toyota into Ryan’s driveway and turned off the ignition. What she needed was a hot shower, a home-cooked meal and ten hours of sleep. In that order. Picking up her haversack from the passenger seat, she climbed out of the van and for a moment surveyed Ryan’s house with rueful affection.

The architecture, she had long ago decided, could only be labelled Newfoundland Eccentric. The core of the house was square, two-storey and altogether unremarkable, but over the years Ryan had added two porches, a sunroom, a root cellar, a studio where he did folk art that sold like hotcakes to the tourists, and a couple of balconies from which to survey a view that was far from inspiring. Some of these additions had been painted, some not. Two were askew. The overall effect expressed perfectly Ryan’s innate exuberance and his total lack of interest in what his neighbours might think.

‘I’m home,’ Jenessa called, heading for the back porch.

The door opened. ‘About time,’ Ryan grumbled, taking her haversack and urging her indoors. ‘And me with a new job all lined up for you.’

‘Oh, no,’ Jenessa groaned, ‘I’ve got to recover from the last one first.’

He poured two mugs of ink-black tea from the pot that sat all day long on the stove and said unsympathetically, ‘A wild-goose chase makes more sense than tryin’ to sight whales in late August.’

She had been guiding a small group of German tourists, who under her tutelage had bagged their limit of Atlantic salmon and had then requested to be shown whales. ‘I drove the entire length of the northern peninsula, just about froze to death out on the ocean and was seasick twice.’ Jenessa grinned. ‘But we saw fin whales, humpbacks and porpoises—so my clients were happy.’

‘Hope they tipped good.’

‘Enough so I don’t need another job right away.’

‘You’re to meet some guy by the name of Finn Marston tomorrow night on the late flight. Said he’d explain what he wanted when he got here.’

‘How long does he want me for?’ she said in a resigned voice.

‘Didn’t say. Forceful kind of guy—didn’t give me much chance to get a word in edgeways. Plus it was a lousy connection—he was callin’ from some place in Indonesia.’

Anyone who could prevent Ryan from taking his fair share of the conversation had her instant respect. ‘Indonesia...did he speak good English?’ she asked. She had spent ten days in July trying to teach the intricacies of fly-fishing to three admittedly very handsome but unilingual Spaniards.

‘Yeah... he’s Canadian, by the sound of him.’

‘I wonder why he’s coming?’ Jenessa said. ‘I suppose he wants to catch the last of the fishing season ... I’ll tell you one thing—he’d better not have ocean-going mammals on his list.’

She levered the lid off the can sitting on the table and helped herself to one of Ryan’s molasses cookies. ‘You made these because you knew I’d be back today, didn’t you?’ she added, smiling across at Ryan. He never hugged her when she came home, but he would make sure she had all her favourite things to eat.

‘Gotta put some flesh on your bones,’ Ryan muttered. He was a small man, no taller than her five feet eight, and wiry as a fox, his beard and hair still showing vestiges of their former fiery red, his eyes a snapping brown. He was her one tie to a life that had fallen apart when she was thirteen; Jenessa valued him both for that and for himself. Father-surrogate and true friend—not a bad combination, and one she knew she was fortunate to have.

Taking another cookie, she said with a caution that in the past had often been justified, ‘You did tell this Finn Marston that I’m a woman, right?’

Ryan dunked his cookie in his tea. ‘Well, now, not sure I did. Like I said, I didn’t get much chance to talk. This guy’s more used to givin’ orders than listenin’ to other people, I’d say.’

‘Ryan, I wish you wouldn’t do that to me,’ Jenessa complained. ‘I hate turning up at the airport when someone’s expecting a six-foot hunk of brawn in a red flannel shirt and what they get is me instead. All you have to do when you’re talking to them is use the correct pronoun—she. One short word and that does it.’

Ryan and she had had this discussion before. ‘And lots of them wouldn’t hire you then; you know that as well as I do, Jenny. I keeps my mouth shut, they get the best guide this side of Gander airport—and we’re all happy.’

Jenessa rolled her eyes. ‘You’re the best guide this side of anywhere—maybe you should go to the airport to meet the forceful Mr Marston.’

‘I taught you everythin’ I know and I’m too old to go crashin’ around in the woods.’ He leered at her. ‘More interestin’ things to do round home.’

Not all his interests lay in the areas of folk art and home improvements. Another of them was the widowed Mrs McCarthy, whose lemon meringue pie could have graced any restaurant in Toronto. ‘How’s Grace?’ Jenessa said on cue.

‘She’s fine,’ he answered airily. ‘Want some more tea?’

Ryan’s tea, taken in any quantity, would corrode a moose hide. ‘I’m going to clean up,’ Jenessa said. ‘Any messages for me?’

‘Ruth called. She wants you to go over and see the baby after supper. It’s got a tooth, she said. Can’t see what’s so special about that; we all got teeth.’

‘It’s their first baby, Ryan; of course they think he’s special.’

‘Not so special I see you makin’ any moves to get one.’

Surprised, Jenessa stopped midway across the kitchen. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re pushin’ twenty-six and I don’t see no signs of you gettin’ yourself hitched.’

She felt a pang of mingled hurt and dismay. ‘Don’t you want me living here any more, Ryan?’ Her eyes widened. ‘Are you and Grace planning to get married?’

‘Course not! She’d have me paintin’ the balcony and mowin’ the grass; she likes things all shipshape, does Grace. And I’m not about to change my ways.’ His brow wrinkled in one of the formidable frowns that signified deep thought. ‘In the last five years you’ve met more men than a stag has cows. So how come you haven’t married any of ’em?’

She said flippantly, ‘None of them asked me.’

‘You don’t even date ’em!’

‘They’re my clients, Ryan; there’s such a thing as professional ethics.’

Ryan’s opinion of professional ethics was both brief and perilously close to obscene. Jenessa added suspiciously, ‘Are you sure you don’t want Grace to move in here?’

He opened the oven door. ‘As sure as I am that if you don’t hustle my roast’ll be ruined.’

Jenessa left the room, trailing upstairs to her bedroom, whose balcony overlooked a clump of wind-scoured spruce trees. Ryan had never before implied that he even noticed her single state, let alone that he thought she should end it. Maybe—she blinked at herself in the mirror—he wanted to dandle her own baby on his lap. It was the nearest he would get to being a grandfather, after all.

Ryan? Interested in babies? She had to be joking.

Oddly unsettled, she gathered up some clean clothes and headed for the shower. But three hours later, when she was sitting in Ruth and Stevie’s kitchen with baby Stephen regarding her unwinkingly from solemn, navy blue eyes, Ryan’s remark was still on her mind.

‘You look very thoughtful,’ Ruth commented.

Ruth’s husband Stevie was a wilderness guide, like Jenessa, and Jenessa had met Ruth through him. The two women had liked each other right away, and if Jenessa had a confidante it was the tall, black-haired Ruth, whose practicality was leavened with a lively dash of romanticism. Jenessa tickled Stephen under the chin, trying to get him to reveal the new tooth, and blurted, ‘Ryan thinks it’s time I got married and had a baby myself.’

‘That’s natural enough, I suppose. You are nearly twenty-six.’

‘I’m not in my coffin yet,’ Jenessa retorted. ‘Anyway, I’m not like you. I really have no desire to get married—I never have had.’

‘You spent a week with Luis, Sanchos and Miguel and didn’t even fantasize about weddings?’ Ruth had invited the three Spanish fishermen to a lobster boil in her backyard, including Jenessa in the invitation as a matter of course. Now as she folded a towel with a decisive snap she went on, ‘They were awfully sweet, Jenessa, you’ve got to admit that.’

‘I liked them. But I didn’t want to marry them.’ Jenessa managed a smile. ‘Individually or collectively.’

‘You didn’t lust after them—any of them—even the tiniest bit?’

Jenessa shook her head. ‘Nope.’

‘You could be so pretty if you just paid a bit of attention to yourself,’ Ruth mourned.

‘When you’re guiding a fisherman through a bog, mascara isn’t a top priority.’

‘You’re not in a bog now,’ Ruth snorted, giving Jenessa’s jeans and T-shirt a disparaging look. ‘Your clothes are clean, I’ll give you that. But they’re not what you’d call sexy. And I’d be willing to bet you cut your hair yourself last time.’

‘With my Swiss army knife,’ Jenessa admitted. ‘I have another client flying in tomorrow, so I won’t have time to get it cut before then, either. Anyway, Ruth, when you’re stuck in a lodge miles from anywhere with a bunch of men, which I am a fair bit of the time, it doesn’t seem appropriate or sensible to go around flaunting your sexuality. A sure way to get in trouble, thank you very much.’

‘I don’t think you know how to flaunt your sexuality,’ Ruth replied vigorously. ‘I just wish you’d go to St John’s one of these days and spend the day in a beauty salon. You wouldn’t even have to go to St John’s—Marylou, next door, has just come back from a seminar there, so she knows how to do all kinds of neat new haircuts. Your hair is such a gorgeous colour ... you know that cherrywood paddle of yours, how it shines when the sun hits it? That’s what your hair’s like—and you’re the only person I know with green eyes.’ Ruth paused, her head to one side. ‘Maybe you just haven’t met the right man.’

Jenessa didn’t think it was that simple. Touched by Ruth’s description, she said hesitantly, ‘I know I don’t fit ... I never have, really. All those women’s magazines with their advice on make-up and lovers and clothes—I can’t relate to them at all. If you want the truth, they scare me to death. I suppose it’s got something to do with never knowing my mother and growing up with my dad at Spruce Pond—no other women there. No other people, come to that.’

‘I’m not meaning to be critical,’ Ruth said hastily. ‘I like you just as you are.’

‘That’s good,’ Jenessa said with an impish grin. ‘Because I’m likely to stay this way. I’m not at all unhappy as I am, Ruth. I don’t know how to flirt, that’s true, and I’m not out plaguing some man to marry me—but I really like my life the way it is. I love my job... how could I ever give that up? Marriage and babies kind of crimp your style.’

‘They’re worth it,’ Ruth said placidly. ‘Stephen, my duckie, smile at Jenessa.’

Stephen gave a huge yawn, exposing one tiny pearlwhite tooth, and let his head plop against Jenessa’s shirt. She held him close, liking his baby-powder smell and his warm weight, yet knowing that in a few minutes she could hand him back to his mother without the slightest twinge of regret. She didn’t have any impulsion to have a baby of her own. Or to attract the man whom one required in order to produce the baby. But it was one thing to acknowledge to herself that she didn’t fit the normal societal expectations of what a woman should be like, and quite another to have both Ryan and Ruth, in one day, suggesting that she should change her ways.

She was fine as she was. Besides, the man wasn’t born for whom she would give up her job.

So why should she change?

Jenessa spent the next day washing and ironing the clothes in her backpack and helping Ryan varnish a pine bench for a customer from Massachusetts. She could have used the time to go to Marylou’s and get her hair cut, but some unacknowledged streak of stubbornness kept her from doing so.

That evening she presented herself at the airport just as the propellor-driven plane was coasting toward the terminal. The same stubbornness had caused her to dress in stone-washed jeans and a forest-green shirt with a businesslike leather belt around her waist. She knew most of the small crowd of people waiting at the gate; she was chatting to Ruth’s mother and father, who were meeting their youngest son, when the first passenger pushed open the door. While she’d been waiting, Jenessa had conjured up a mental image of the forceful Mr Marston: he’d be short—short men, in her experience, were often aggressive—greying, and would light up a very expensive cigar as soon as he entered the terminal.

She had often played this game; her record of success was interestingly high.

Ten people got off the flight from Halifax. The short ones were women, the sole man with grey hair was Tommy MacPherson from Norris Arm, and the only one smoking was Ruth’s youngest brother, a fact that would annoy Ruth considerably: Ruth was a reformed smoker and dead set against cigarettes.

A tall man with a thatch of untidy dark brown hair had halted just inside the doorway, surveying the small crowd with visible impatience. He was wearing a blue wool shirt, a well-worn pair of jeans and leather hiking boots; a haversack was slung over one broad shoulder. The only thing she had got right, Jenessa thought ruefully, was the aggression.

Quickly she walked over to him. ‘Mr Marston?’ she said with a pleasant smile.

He did not smile back. ‘I’m Finn Marston, yes.’ His voice was deep, gravelly with tiredness.

‘I’m Jenessa Reed,’ she said. ‘The guide you hired.’

His lashes flickered. ‘I’m not in the mood for jokes.’

‘Neither am I,’ she said crisply, wishing that just for once she could be taken at face value rather than having to justify her existence to her male clients. ‘I’m the person Ryan recommended to you.’

‘You’ve got that wrong. Ryan said nothing about a woman—because if he had I wouldn’t have hired you.’

‘Well, you did hire me,’ she said with another pleasant smile, although this one took more effort. ‘And I’m very good at my job. Ryan booked a room for you in the best motel in town; I’ll take you there now, if you like. Or do you have other luggage?’

He looked her up and down with an insolence that could only be deliberate, from her jagged crop of toffeecolored hair to the shiny toes of her leather loafers. ‘If I hired you, I can unhire you,’ he said. ‘I’ll get a cab to the motel—what name does it go by?’

His hair was as badly in need of cutting as her own, she thought inconsequentially; his eyes were a very dark blue, reminding her in colour, if not in expression, of Stephen’s. The stubble of beard on his chin was also dark, and there were dark shadows under his eyes. He looked, she thought with a faint stirring of compassion, truly exhausted: it was a long way from Indonesia. ‘A cab won’t be necessary; I’ll take you. Luggage?’

‘Miss Reed, I don’t think you heard me—you’ve just been fired.’

‘Mr Marston,’ she replied with rather overdone patience, ‘this is at least the fiftieth time I’ve played this little scene. Canadians, Americans, Swedes, Spaniards ... hunters, fishermen, photographers ... they all think I should be a man or they think it’s extremely funny that I’m a woman. But I can give you references from every one of them as to my competence. I do agree with you that Ryan should have told you I’m a woman. I disagree that that should make any difference to you whatsoever.’ She smiled at him again. ‘The luggage carousel’s just started up; we shouldn’t have long to wait. That’s one advantage of these short hops—the stops are brief. Have you flown far today?’

His mouth tightened. ‘Too far to get any enjoyment out of playing verbal games. The name of the motel, Miss Reed.’

She jammed her hands in the pockets of her jeans. ‘Are you Canadian, Mr Marston?’ As he nodded, she went on, ‘Then you surely must be aware that in this country you can’t fire someone because of his or her sex.’

‘So sue me. There’s my bag, and I’m sure the cabbie will know the name of the best motel in town—in a place this size there can’t be that many to choose from. Goodbye, Miss Reed.’

She said clearly, ‘I wish you luck finding a replacement. Ryan tried four other outfitters because he knew I was just coming off a job, and no go with any of them.’ With a tinge of malice she added, ‘To further enlighten you as to the law, as a non-resident you can’t go further into the woods than eight hundred meters from the highway without a guide. Good luck, Mr Marston.’

Her cheeks were pink with temper and her shirt made her irises look very green. Something flared to life in his somber blue eyes and just as quickly was smothered. ‘Thank you for your help,’ he said sardonically. Turning away from her, he heaved a battered duffle bag off the carousel and strode toward the exit. She watched as he climbed in the back seat of a taxi and drove off; he did not look back.

From behind her Ruth’s mother said, ‘My, what a handsome man ... I do love those big, rough-hewn men, don’t you, dearie? Client of yours, Jenessa?’

Ruth’s mother Alice, for all her many good points, was the most avid gossip in town, and her question was a blatant appeal for information. ‘Ex-client,’ Jenessa said, trying hard to sound as though it didn’t matter in the least that she had been unceremoniously fired in full view of several friends and acquaintances. ‘He’s done me a favor, actually—I could do with a few days off.’ She smiled at Ruth’s brother. ‘How are you, Dougie? Job going well?’

Ten minutes later she stalked into Ryan’s kitchen. Her temper, far from subsiding on the drive home, seemed to have gathered momentum. Handsome, she fumed inwardly, throwing the keys to her van on the table. Rough-hewn. Huh! Rude, chauvinistic and ignorant would be a more accurate description of Mr Finn Marston.

Ryan was sitting at the table painting a duck decoy. Matters weren’t improved when he said, after scanning her features, ‘Well, well... looks like this Marston fella woke you up a bit—haven’t seen so much colour in your cheeks since you were a kid with sunburn. What’s up, Jenny?’

‘Ryan,’ she said, ‘don’t you ever again neglect to warn a client that he’s getting a female guide. A woman. One of the so-called weaker sex. Do you hear me?’

As she yanked a chair back and sat down, kicking off her loafers, Ryan daubed jade-green on the teal’s wing feathers. ‘Wanted a man, did he?’

‘However did you guess? Did he wait to see my references? Was he interested enough to ask if I knew the area he wants to go? Can a caribou outrun a black bear?’

‘Never knew one that could,’ Ryan said, his mouth twitching. ‘It don’t sound like the two of you hit it off.’

‘I hope he ends up with the worst guide in the entire province. Someone like Larry, who’ll drop him off in the woods and then go and get drunk. I hope the mosquitoes carry him away. I hope he gets treed by a moose. I hope he falls in a bog in his nice leather hiking boots.’

‘So what did he look like?’

She mimicked Ruth’s mother, batting her lashes and simpering, ‘Tall, dark and handsome. Rough-hewn. That duck decoy’s handsomer than he was.’

Ryan gave the decoy a complacent appraisal. ‘He sure got under your skin.’

Ryan, she realized belatedly, was thoroughly enjoying her show of temper; she was normally a very tolerant woman, a trait that stood her in good stead in the woods. The last thing she needed was Ryan speculating why one man had disrupted her composure, especially in view of yesterday’s conversation. ‘I needed a few days off anyway,’ she said, trying to modulate her voice. ‘We could finish papering the kitchen.’

One wall had been papered in the spring, before fishing season started. ‘Good idea... in the meantime, seein’ as how you’re unemployed, you could make me a coffee. And don’t skimp on the sugar.’

‘No coffee unless you promise you’ll tell everyone who phones for a guide that my name is Jenessa and that I’m not a man!’

‘Guess I’ll git my own coffee,’ Ryan drawled.

Raising her brows—for when had she ever been able to make Ryan do something he didn’t want to do?—Jenessa got up and reached for the coffee in the cupboard.