Iditarod Nights by Cindy Hiday Read Free Book Online Page B

Anchorage to attend the mandatory mushers'
meeting, a chaotic assembly of rookies and veterans, officials
laying out rules, veterinarians speaking on dog care. Claire
remembered very little of what was said. The whole affair went on
for hours, with a break midday for pictures with their Iditariders.
A fifty-eight-year-old doctor from Texas paid for the privilege of
racing the first eleven miles of the Iditarod with Claire. She only
hoped she didn't dump him out of the sled on the first sharp turn.
Dillon's Iditarider was a mother of three from Fairbanks.
    The banquet began at 6:00. Mushers dined on
boneless beef ribs and drew for their starting positions. Out of
almost seventy mushers participating in the race, Claire would be
the twenty-second team to leave Anchorage Saturday morning. Dillon
drew number eighteen.
    Saturday morning. The day after tomorrow.
Claire felt like a green rookie, with the emphasis on green. Nerves
churned the contents of her stomach. She'd come close to fainting,
for God's sake. She cast Dillon a look from the corner of her eye.
The Land Cruiser's dash lights shadowed the angles of his face,
sharpening his features. He drove with both hands on the steering
wheel. Strong hands. Her body suffused with heat, remembering their
heart-stopping tenderness.
    "You alright?" he asked.
    The intimacy in his voice threw her
already-busy hormones into overtime. She cleared her throat. "I'm
fine. Did you get your shopping done this afternoon?"
    "Yeah." He pulled a small paper bag from a
pocket of his parka and tossed it in her lap.
    She looked inside. "A box of matches?"
    "I always pay my debts."
    "There's three hundred here. The debt was
only two fifty."
    "Interest."
    "Twenty percent? Steep. Generous, but steep."
Claire put the matches in her pocket. "About the other day – "
    "I don't regret it."
    She stared at him, felt her face grow warm
when she realized he was referring to the kiss. "Nor do I," she
admitted.
    "But that's not what you wanted to talk
about, is it?"
    "I..." She tucked at her hair. "No." That
doesn't mean I haven't thought about it, she wanted to tell him,
but fear held her back. The emotions were too raw yet, too
uncertain.
    "What did you want to talk about?"
    "When I told you about the murder case, how
did you know?" Then at his confused look, "That I regretted my
client's life sentence, while his victims got death." They were
tortured before they died.
    Don't personalize the case, Claire. Let it go
and move on.
    "It's how I would have felt. The need to
avenge the innocent. It eats at you."
    Yes. It ate at her. Haunted her in spite of
all the well-meaning advice.
    The night sky shimmered to life, a curtain of
greens, swirling and waving like colored sheets hanging from the
line on laundry day. Dillon pulled to the side of the road and
stopped. He left the engine running, the heater fan blowing warmth
across their faces. The green waves of light shifted direction,
took on a reddish hue at the edges.
    "I never get tired of seeing that," Claire
whispered, as though saying it too loud might cause it to
disappear.
    "The first time I saw the Northern Lights, I
was on some back road, lost, trying to read an Anchorage city map."
He grinned, the lights turning his teeth an eerie green. "I was a
cab driver at the time."
    Claire burst out a laugh.
    "I didn't have the job very long. Then I took
a job selling snowmachines, but I sucked at sales." He paused, as
though drawn inside a memory. His smile flattened. "The only thing
I was ever good at was being a cop," he said in a subdued voice.
"But I fucked that up too."
    While Claire grappled for a response, the
Northern Lights faded and Dillon put the Land Cruiser in gear. The
hard set to his profile didn't encourage questions. He'd closed
himself off again. It was evident he hadn't intended to reveal as
much as he did, that if he could take it back, he would. In a
heartbeat.
    Okay, she'd guessed right about the cop part.
Now what? That it hadn't worked out