spinning out her time with him.
‘And we’ve got too much going on—’
‘No, you don’t.’
Marcella barely painted, never went out if she could avoid it; she lurked around their property alternating between long bouts of flat melancholy and excited bursts of energy. Meanwhile, Will trained every day but he had a comfortable routine that didn’t wear the dogs out. And only two emergency calls in the ten days she’d been here.
His lips thinned as he stared at her. The first time he’d made actual eye contact.
‘Kitty—’
‘I pick up after myself. I went to the market on Monday to save Marcella the trouble.’ And—PS—paid for a carload of supplies. ‘So what’s the real issue?’
Of course, a dignified person wouldn’t ask. A dignified person would just accept that things had changed and head off to start packing. Smiling, thanking them and giving her hosts a modest gift when she went. But there was nothing dignified about the panic that Kitty was starting to feel at Will’s decree, and not just because of the humiliation. Sometime between arriving and now, she’d realised that she was the happiest she’d ever been in Pokhara. Having that taken away was terrifying.
And the thought of never seeing Will again only compounded it.
‘You can’t really want to stay,’ he urged. ‘Knowing we don’t want you here.’
Something told her that ‘we’ was actually ‘I’, because his wife had clung to her since the day she’d arrived, and Marcella was too Southern and too well brought up to renege on a promise.
‘No,’ she snorted. ‘I don’t. But I’m not leaving without knowing what I did to get myself banished.’
She had a sneaking suspicion, actually, and a whole new flood of shame went on standby, ready for his answer.
For the first time, he softened, and it was so much worse than the hardened exterior he’d presented up until now. Because it was Will, not this icy doppelgänger.
‘You must know, Kit. You’re doing it right now.’
She lost her grip on the humiliation and it flooded her face. For ten days she’d worked so hard to keep a lid on her inappropriate feelings. To pretend the emotions didn’t exist. But they had a habit of leaking out when she was with him. Any time she wasn’t totally vigilant. Talking, laughing.
Or just standing very close, like this… Peering up at him.
‘I…’
Really, what could she say? She knew she was feeling it, and she knew what she was feeling. She would be naïve to imagine she wasn’t showing that at all, but Will hadn’t let on before, or objected to the conversations, the shared space, the accidental body contact passing on the stairs.
She’d even begun to think he might have enjoyed it. Just a little bit.
Obviously not.
‘It’s okay, Kitty, I get it. We’ve been spending a lot of time together—’
Her heart hammered.
She wasn’t about to be condescended to like a teenager. If he’d picked up on her feelings, why had he indulged them? Why not just shut them right down?
Shame ached through her whole body.
This was him shutting them down.
‘I just think it would be better for everyone if you headed off to do your own thing,’ he said.
Get the heck off his mountain, he meant.
‘We were friends,’ she said, numb and flat. Too hurt and too confused to even put any energy behind the accusation.
His eyes darkened and swung away from her. ‘You must want to see the rest of Nepal.’
No, not really. She’d been happy here, happier than any other time in her life. It was this mountain she loved, not just any Nepalese mountain. This town. This man.
That was why she had to go.
She could not love Will Margrave, and he certainly couldn’t love her, even if he wanted to, which—judging by the enormous tension in his body—he did not.
‘I’m married, Kitty.’
Yes, to the woman who’d invited her into their home. Was this how she’d repaid Marcella’s kindness? By making her husband uncomfortable enough to ask her to leave?
She dropped her eyes to the dark, rich earth. She’d caused this. She had to be the one to fix it.
‘Okay,’ she murmured. ‘I’ll go.’
She stumbled away from Will without raising her eyes again. And she didn’t look at him as she wrestled her stuffed backpack down the stairs, or as she hugged a weeping Marcella, or as she closed the door of the aging taxi behind her.
In fact, she didn’t raise her gaze until she was safely away from that Pokhara hillside, just in case he saw something there she would never recover from. Something worse than love.
Shame.
Which made that pitying gaze out by the dogs’ yard the last of Will Margrave she would ever see. And pity the last thing he would ever feel for her.
And she promised herself, in that moment, never to drop her eyes again.
Present day, Churchill, Canada.
‘YOU MUST BE KIDDING!’
Kitty Callaghan bundled herself tighter in her complimentary blanket and swapped her hand luggage into her right hand to give her left a break.
‘Sorry, ma’am,’ the polite woman said, widening her arms to usher her towards the exit. ‘Canadian federal law. No one can stay inside the airport after shutdown.’
‘But I have nowhere to go,’ she pointed out, though it was hardly necessary since this was the same official who’d been working for hours to find beds—or even sofas—for the one hundred and sixty-four passengers who’d found themselves stranded in their remote dot-on-a-map after smoke started billowing from their aircraft’s cargo hold thirty-five thousand feet over Greenland.
‘We’ve done everything we can to find accommodation for the final six of you. Three will be bunking down in the medical centre and two will be guests of the Mounties tonight in their holding cells. That’s every bed we have in town.’
Which left her sitting up all night in some waiting room.
This was the price she paid for being good at her job. Or maybe for simply doing it. Airlines had a way of not appreciating it when you captured their stuff-ups for posterity. She’d been way too busy filming the whole emergency response that had followed the pilot’s spectacular touchdown of the massive airliner on the remote, ice-patched runway to get herself higher up the queue for overnight accommodation. By the time she’d started paying attention to where she was going to spend the rest of the night, there had been no more room at the inn.
‘You don’t have a hotel here? Or even a B & B?’
The woman’s compassion wasn’t making her feel any better. ‘Actually we have nearly as many hotel rooms as residents but they’re all booked up because of bear season. And we’re out of volunteers with sofas.’
‘Bear season?’ Kitty blinked her confusion, glancing around. ‘Where are we exactly?’
Other than someplace snowy somewhere on a high arc between Zurich and Los Angeles up over the top of the planet. She’d been sleeping comfortably when the captain had made his emergency announcement and the chaos