Chapter 7
7
Gunnar grinned smugly as the TrailMaster two-seater hit a bump and soared through the air without missing a beat. He’d gotten this baby running so sweetly. Martha would be thrilled. This particular ATV model was the only one that didn’t freak out her sheep. He’d put it at the top of his repair list, and done a spectacular job on it, if he did say so himself.
Now he was just taking the thing for a test drive—okay, joy ride slash test drive. He had to make sure it functioned in all kinds of terrain, after all, as an all-terrain vehicle should.
He almost missed the sound of a woman calling, “Help! Stop! Help.” Somewhere up the creek, someone was in trouble. He turned the ATV that direction and mentally apologized to Martha for the delay. This was Alaska, and when someone was in danger, that took priority over everything else.
Danger, he’d expected…but the sight that greeted him when he reached the creek made him wonder if he was hallucinating. Ruth was standing over another girl, who was hunched over in pain. Also, Ruth’s shirt was wrapped around the girl’s foot, which meant that Ruth…wasn’t wearing a shirt. Or a bra.
She was wearing a kind of camisole type of undergarment, but it didn’t cover much, and the sight of her bare skin, pale in the dimness of the woods, made him slightly dizzy.
He snapped out of it as he made sense of the situation. The other girl—Sarah, he now saw—had hurt her foot, and Ruth had used her own shirt to stop the bleeding. An aluminum snare, its teeth bloodied, sat off to the side.
“Gunnar!” The relief in Ruth’s voice made him startle. “It’s you. Thank goodness. Sarah stepped in a trap and I managed to get it off her foot, but we didn’t have any bandages because we used them all on the potat—never mind that.” An elbow from her sister made her change gears.
“Got it.” He brought the ATV to a halt and jumped off. It would be hard fitting the three of them onboard, but he’d manage. “Can you hold her on your lap? It’s not too far back to the property.”
Ruth shook her head almost violently. “No. We’re not going there. Take us somewhere else. Maybe that doctor can help. Ani Devi.”
That was a surprise. The Chilkoots rarely trusted doctors. They preferred their own cures and treatments. “Ani and Gil are out of town. They’re honeymooning in Italy.”
Ruth’s face fell. Focus on her face, not the fact that you can see her nipples. “ I have an idea. This is Martha’s rig, I was planning to take it to her as soon as I gave it a test drive. Sometimes her sheep get caught in traps. She can probably help.”
“I’m not a sheep,” Sarah hissed through gritted teeth. Tears streaked her grimy face. They both looked a mess, he realized. Something was going on here. He scanned the scene more carefully. Backpacks. Hiking boots.
Holy shit, they were running away.
He caught Ruth’s eye and saw confirmation in those gray depths.
“Come on, no time to get picky.” He crouched down and lifted Sarah in his arms. Ruth turned to grab their backpacks and that was when he saw the marks on her back. Jesus. Someone had struck her with a lash. Inside, he quaked with anger, but he focused on getting Sarah over to the ATV without jostling her foot.
Once Ruth was settled on the passenger side, he carefully set Sarah on her lap, arranged so her foot dangled just under the safety rail.
He took off the hoodie he was wearing and handed it to Ruth. “You might get cold,” he said gruffly. He didn’t want to embarrass her by revealing that he’d noticed the lash marks on her back. But she figured it out anyway, and her cheeks turned pink.
“Don’t worry, it’s freshly washed,” he told her, going for cheerful as an antidote to the heavy situation he’d walked into. “It might be a little big on you, that’s all.”
Sarah adjusted herself so Ruth could put on the hoodie, while Gunnar got back behind the wheel.
“How far is it to Martha’s?” Ruth asked anxiously as she glanced behind her, up the creek. Was she worried about her family coming after them?
“Not too far. Just hold on. I’ll get you there as quick as I can. Do either of you get motion sickness?”
Ruth said through gritted teeth. “We’ll be fine.”
“Okay, just no throwing up on Martha’s rig. A little blood, that’s one thing. Puke?—”
“Do you have to be such an idiot?” Ruth snapped. “Just go.”
Hiding his smile, he gunned the ATV and spun it around in a tight circle. He didn’t mind her being irritated with him, if that would ease her stress.
Martha Valhalla owned fifty acres of pasture and woodland and a herd of over a hundred sheep. Although she’d fenced in much of it over the years, the sheep were always getting out. It was impossible to maintain that much fence line in the Alaskan wilderness.
As the ATV zoomed down her drive, Gunnar caught sight of her at the far eastern edge of the property, fixing a fencepost that had gotten knocked over in the last windstorm. He shouted and waved at her, catching her squint as she tried to make sense of the overloaded ATV coming her way.
Then she ran toward them, a reassuring sight in her mud boots and corduroy trousers, her silver-streaked brown braids tucked under a duck-hunting cap. Martha was the kind of person who knew how to handle almost any situation. If you looked up “capable” in the dictionary, her kind, weathered face would appear.
In fact, after his father had disappeared, she’d stopped by the garage every other day to check on Gunnar and drop off some eggs or a pile of beet greens or whatever else she had handy. Gunnar didn’t know much about her history, except that she was divorced and came from Vermont, but he loved and trusted her.
“Snare,” he explained when she got close enough. He didn’t need to say more than that. He jumped off the ATV and scooped Sarah into his arms, and they all followed Martha toward the single-story, cedar-sided structure that she’d built from a kit.
Martha directed them to the kitchen, which was large and sunny, with herbs in pots on every windowsill. Gunnar set Sarah onto the chair that Martha pointed to, then stepped back while the farmer crouched before the girl.
“What’s your pain level like?” she asked as she gently unwrapped the bloody shirt.
“It was really bad, but now I think I’m just numb.” Sarah shivered violently.
“Shock. Get a blanket, Gunnar.”
Gunnar strode into the living room and gathered up every hand-woven throw and blanket he could find.
“Just one would have done fine,” Martha said dryly when he returned. Ruth took the blanket on top and wrapped it around her sister. “You can take the rest back. Then I’ll need warm water and antiseptic soap. I got some stuff for the sheep out in the barn. Ruth, go help him. Grab some clean rags, too.”
They spent the next stretch of time scurrying around, following Martha’s orders, until Sarah was bandaged up and falling asleep from the valerian tea Martha had given her. The girl insisted on walking on her own two feet, even though she was limping, as Martha escorted her to a bedroom.
Alone in the kitchen, Gunnar and Ruth both let out a long breath at the same moment. Ruth smiled a little, the first time her expression had eased this whole time. “Are you okay?” he asked her gently.
“Yes.” Then she shook her head. “I don’t know. Do you think Sarah will be okay? If she gets an infection…”
“Did you see how clean Martha got it? That stuff she uses, it really works. I got my hand stuck in a gear shaft once and she healed me up.” He showed her the scar on his hand. She peered at it for a long moment, then lifted her eyes to his. Her look of utter exhaustion tugged at his heart.
“In case you haven’t figured it out, we left home,” she said softly.
He nodded, letting her continue before he said anything else. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I’m worried for Sarah, because Luke does have the right to make her go back. I’m worried for the other kids because I’m not there to protect them. I don’t know exactly what to do next, or where to go, or…”
“You can stay with me.” The words came out before he’d even realized that his mouth was open. He felt his face heat. “Both of you. You can stay in my father’s old room.”
She was shaking her head. “That won’t work. If there’s one place my family can’t avoid completely, it’s the gas station. They still need fuel. And you’re right in the middle of town.”
Embarrassed that he’d even suggested it, he nodded and looked at the floor. Her hand came onto his arm, a soft touch that sent a little electric shock up his arm. “But it’s really sweet of you to offer. I didn’t even thank you for rescuing us. I was so relieved when I saw it was you, not anyone from home…” Tears filled her eyes, but she stubbornly blinked them away. “You were like our angel in the forest.”
I’m no fucking angel , he wanted to say. But her sweetness stopped the words and a goofy smile took their place. “Cool,” he said. Whatever that meant.