A fine and bitter snow by Dana Stabenow Page B

to saying, How long is what going to go on? but then thought better of it. Ethan's expression was very clear in the moonlight. "I'm just—I'm a little—I don't know, uncertain."
     
    "What's this uncertain? You want me; I want you. I'm here, so are you. Jesus, Kate, this is just like college all over again."
     
    Her head came up. " 'Just like college?' Who you going to sleep with instead of me this time, Ethan?"
     
    He blew out an explosive breath. "That's not what I meant."
     
    Anger was a good refuge. She thought about ducking into it for maybe ten seconds. "I know," she managed to say.
     
    "We've been dancing around sleeping together for, what, three months now?"
     
    "No," she said in a low voice. "I've been dancing around it."
     
    "Well," he said. "Okay." His smile flashed again.
     
    She smiled in return, relieved. "I'm sorry, Ethan. It just hasn't felt right. I'm not ready. I don't jump into these things."
     
    "Jack must have been one hell of a guy in the sack."
     
    "It's not that," she snapped.
     
    "I know," he said. "I'm sorry. I'm a little edgy around you."
     
    She shoved her hands into the parka's pockets. "I'd better get inside."
     
    "Hold it." He stepped forward to pull her into his arms and kiss her. He raised his head. "Feel that?"
     
    Her response was instinctive, her legs opening a little to cradle him between diem. "Who wouldn't?"
     
    He kissed her again, this time with enough force to press her up against the cabin wall. He kneed her legs apart and rubbed himself between them. "I've wanted you for nearly twenty years. Jack is dead. Margaret left me. There's no reason not to. Unless you don't want to."
     
    "It's not that. I—oh." His hand had worked its way inside her parka, and she arched into his hand. This was Ethan, high school heartthrob, very nearly her first lover. He was smart, he was funny, and, above all, he was capable, a quality she had always found irresistible in men. If his voice wasn't as deep as Jack's had been, as rough-edged in its desire, well, he wasn't Jack.
     
    No one was.
     
    He kissed her again. But he sure as hell could kiss. When he raised his head, her lips were swollen, her head was buzzing, and her knees were weak. And the smug grin on his face told her that he knew it. "More of that where it came from," he said, straddling his snow machine. "One bedroom over."
     
    She stayed where she was, leaning up against the cabin for support, as he raised a hand and roared off into the night.
     
    Back inside, she hung up her parka and worked the pump to fill up a pitcher of cold, clear water from the well located directly beneath the cabin. The well, fed by the water table created by the creek out back. Yet another example of her father's foresight and ability on this property he had homesteaded before she was born, like the handmade cabin and outbuildings, made of logs carefully fitted together, and as carefully chinked with moss and mud. Stephan Shugak had finished the inside of the cabin the same way, working a winter in Ahtna for a builders' supply company in exchange for insulation, Sheetrock, and nails, and the hammer to pound them in with. He had sanded the wall paneling by hand after cutting the planks from carefully selected trunks of Sitka spruce that he had felled himself on Mary Balashoff's setnet site on Alaganik Bay.
     
    It had taken him six years to finish the job; in the process, he had sweated out the last of the memories from the months he had spent in the Aleutians as one of Castner's Cutthroats. When the last nightmare of the hand-to-hand combat on the beaches of Attu had faded into an uneasy memory, he had judged himself able to take a wife. He chose Zoya Swensen, a lithe woman of his own age, whose family came from Cordova, but like his had originated in the Aleutians, relocated first to Old Harbor on Kodiak Island and from there to Cordova where, it must be said, the first generation of expatriates complained bitterly of the warm