"Even the guys?"

"Cuff links. Tie tacks."

"Oh."

"Afterward, there was a reception at his parents' home, where no one drank too much or cried out loud. When it was over, his mother thanked me for coming all that way. His father shook my hand. His brother drove me to the airport and carried my bag to the counter." Jack's voice hardened. "I'd have felt a whole lot better if someone had taken a punch at me."

They sat for a while, not moving. When she spoke again her ruined voice was so low he couldn't hear her. "What?" he said.

"Thanks," she said, louder but still gruff.

"For what?" he said, with more than a trace of bitterness in his voice. "Ekaterina was right. They're all dead. There was no point in the whole story making the ten o'clock news."

"Well. Thanks, anyway."

He looked down at her. "Will you come back to work for me?" he said.

"No," she said at once. "I'll never live in Anchorage again."

He looked at her for a long, searching moment. When he was done, he sighed, a long, drawn-out sigh, and nodded once, accepting her decision without comment.

"But I'll work for you sometimes. When you need someone who knows the Park. Who's related to half the bush." She raised her head and added, "For four hundred a day, plus expenses."

He had to grin. "Good enough." He slid one gentle, seeking hand over a breast. "It has nothing to do with this," he said. There would be no mistake. He wanted her. He had only been waiting.

"No," she agreed on a long sigh, arching her back and rubbing herself against his hands. She pulled his head down and kissed him. It had been too long, and she had missed this so much, and they'd always fit together so well. Nothing else mattered.

"Kate," he said, pulling back. "I came to Alaska because I wanted to see what it was like to live in a last frontier. I stayed because I wanted you. Just so you know, I feel pretty much the same today."

"All right," she said, unzipping his jeans and sliding one hand inside.

His hands closed around her upper arms in a painful grip. "I'll be out whenever I can get away."

"Yes."

He sighed beneath the touch of her hand. "Did you hear anything I just said?"

"No."

"Okay."

It wasn't going to get any better than this. He was a beggar at the gates, and he knew it. They had just opened, and if he hadn't been deeded the castle at least Kate had come down from her tower. He would take what he could get, and be grateful for it, and show his grat.i.tude as well as he knew how.

He followed her up the ladder to the loft and into her large, lonely bed, and if it wasn't making love, it was as close to it as either one of them would ever get.

Dana Stabenow is the author of the Kate Shugak mystery series A Cold Day for Murder, A Fatal Thaw, Dead in the Water, A Cold-Blooded Business, Play with Fire, Blood Will Tell, Breakup, Killing Grounds, and Hunter's Moon each of which brings to life a different aspect of the Alaskan experience. She lives in Anchorage, Alaska.