That's Our Baby!. Pamela Browning

people. She’d never liked him, had considered him a bad influence. That alone was enough to spur him on across rugged terrain and through the blinding, blowing snow.

      At Silverthorne

      KERRY ANDERSON lay sprawled on the floor beneath the wildly swinging moose-antler chandelier and tried not to scream her frustration. Her finger, the left ring finger, was broken. She just knew it. Thank goodness she’d left Doug’s wedding ring in the wall safe at her friend’s house in Anchorage. There sure weren’t any jewelers around this neck of the woods to cut it off after her finger swelled.

      Talk about stupid! She hadn’t been able to stand looking at the thick furring of dust on those moose antlers for one more minute, and against her better judgment, she’d climbed the first few rungs of a shaky ladder before it had toppled to the floor, taking her along with it. She’d better get an ice pack on her injured finger, and fast.

      Kerry sat up and took stock of the rest of her. Fortunately her hand had broken her fall, and aside from a bruised hip, she was okay. But what if she wasn’t okay? Something else could go wrong, and she’d never forgive herself if it did. Experimentally she smoothed her right hand, the uninjured one, over the slight curve of stomach and abdomen. Nothing hurt, nothing cramped, and she drew a deep breath of relief.

      She had planned it all so carefully: She’d stayed in Seattle until she could take care of business that had been postponed for too long, then she’d retreated to the lodge. In the three months since she’d been there, she’d accomplished a lot in the refurbishing of the eighteen-room building, but it had taken much longer than she’d expected, mostly because she sometimes got hung up on details. Like dusty moose antlers.

      But the moose antlers were, well, picturesque and would lend an air of rustic authenticity to the lodge. That’s what tourists in Alaska paid good money for. And money was what Kerry needed at this point. Otherwise she’d never even contemplate opening her late husband’s ancestral fishing-and-hunting retreat to the public.

      She couldn’t help sparing a thought for funny old Captain Crocker. He’d wanted her to leave with him on the last run of the River Rover over Labor Day weekend, and he’d called her a crazy cheechako, which was what Alaskans called someone new to the Country. The word came from the Chinook language, and it meant “tenderfoot.”

      Cheechako or no, Kerry had blithely waved him away from the dock anyway. If he were here, she would have grudgingly admitted that he’d been right. She should have left when she had the chance. No one with any sense, particularly a cheechako, would camp on the edge of an Alaskan glacier with winter coming on. Now, feeling the weight of responsibility settling squarely on her narrow shoulders, she wanted to cry. She couldn’t, wouldn’t fail.

      As soon as she could perambulate, Kerry dusted herself off and headed back to Silverthorne’s original homestead cabin, where she’d been living ever since she’d arrived. A light snow was sifting out of a milky gray sky, and the temperature had dropped drastically since lunchtime. It was only the middle of September, and it wasn’t supposed to be snowing yet. She’d been prepared for lots of rain, since she knew that it rained overmuch in Alaska. But snow? No.

      As if I don’t have enough to worry about without bad weather, she told herself as she tried to ignore the stabs of pain darting up her arm. She was chilled to the bone and wondering if she’d made the worst mistake in her life when she’d told Captain Crocker to go back to Anchorage without her.

      FOUR HOURS LATER, the pain in Kerry’s finger was horrendous, but a broken finger wasn’t her worst worry. The storm was.

      The cabin was engulfed in a blinding snowstorm complete with a howling wind that shook it to its foundations. Kerry huddled drowsily on the couch nursing her finger with an ice pack, her favorite goose-down pillow cradling her head. She wished she had a first-aid kit, and somewhere upstairs was one of those medical advice books. But right now she didn’t have the energy to climb the narrow ladder to the loft to get it. She was exhausted, and sometimes she felt so queasy. And if only her finger didn’t hurt so much, she’d sleep. She closed her eyes, trying to drift away, making herself think of pleasant things, of happy times…

      She awoke with a start. Her finger was swollen to twice its size, and the ice she’d packed around it had melted. No telling how long she had dozed; she glanced out the window and tried to figure out if the storm was letting up. No, it was as fierce as ever.

      And then she saw it—a face at the window above the couch. It wavered in the flickering light from the kerosene lamp on the table.

      Kerry jumped up with a little shriek, clutching the pillow to her chest. Was she dreaming? She didn’t think so. She must be having hallucinations from the pain. There could be no other explanation for such a frightening visage.

      The face was distorted in the wavy glass and encircled by a big furry hood. The eyebrows bristled white with crusted snow. The nose was red from the cold, the jaw dark with stubble, and the mouth a wide gash uttering words that she couldn’t hear for the lashing of wind-driven snow against the windowpane.

      As she stared at the apparition, it moved toward the door. She was seized with sudden irrational fear. She was alone here and at the mercy of anyone who came along, and she’d thought she was protected by the surrounding wilderness, by the fact that the closest human beings lived sixty miles away. Yet here was this stranger who was now banging loudly on the door. She hadn’t bolted it when she came in earlier; she had been in pain and thought there was no need.

      Whoever it was scrabbling at the latch. In a panic now, Kerry threw her full weight, all one hundred and ten pounds of it, against the door.

      Too late she realized that she should have armed herself with the poker from the fireplace. As the door swung open on rusty hinges, the sound of the wind was deafening. A snow-covered figure stumbled into the storm vestibule, the wind gusting hard against its broad back. Knowing that she had to protect herself from this unwelcome intruder, Kerry summoned all her strength and socked it as hard as she possibly could—

      With the pillow. Which broke open and scattered feathers everywhere.

      A cry of outrage drowned out even the howl of the wind.

      “Hey, don’t you know me? I’m Sam, Sam Harbeck!” The figure ripped off its hood, and Kerry’s mouth dropped open in astonishment. She forgot, for the moment, her pain.

      “Sam?” she said, her voice rising on an incredulous note. The intruder couldn’t be Sam Harbeck.

      But it was. In those crazily disoriented seconds, she couldn’t imagine how Doug’s best friend came to be tapping on her window here in the middle of the wilderness during a blinding snowstorm, but it was Sam, all right. How could she not have recognized his square, stubborn chin, that sharp, straight blade of a nose? Even now, with wet feathers plastered in his hair and all over his face, he couldn’t be mistaken for anyone else.

      A flurry of snow billowed into the room and mingled with the floating feathers on a burst of cold that almost knocked Kerry over. She dropped what remained of the pillow and struggled to slam the door, but the wind was too strong. Sam joined her in throwing his full weight against the heavy door, and together they managed to shut out the raging storm.

      In the sudden hollow silence, Sam spat feathers out of his mouth, slung his backpack into a corner and peeled off his parka.

      “What kind of welcome is this? I hammered on the door and yelled until I almost froze. Or is that what you had in mind?” His piercing blue gaze swept over her, taking in her mussed hair now frosted with feathers, the worn jeans, the red wool hiking socks with a hole in one toe. She stood gaping at him, unable to speak.

      “You shouldn’t have dressed up,” he said, stomping clumps of snow off his boots and making a feathery mess on the floor. He threw the parka over a peg beside Kerry’s coat and strode through a few still-fluttering feathers to the kitchen area where he helped himself to a towel from the shelf over the dry sink.

      “You forgot to shave,” Kerry snapped back, picking feathers from her hair, her sweater, her jeans. She felt perilously near