Kisses in the Rain (26 page)

"That way I won't be selling them at the Bagel Barn, so it won't make Sidney angry," Martha said.

"Right. And it would be wrong to deprive people of those cookies now that you've perfected the recipe. Why, Hallie tells me that Wanda's grandchildren are spoiled for any other kind. They only want to eat yours."

"What about the profits? I've been turning them over to the Bagel Barn."

"Start your own business, Martha. You keep the profits."

"My own business? You understand how I feel about that after what happened to my father's business," Martha said. "It scares me. I don't want to take the chance."

"I thought you told me you were a creature of impulse."

Martha gazed at the white-capped mountains in the distance. The sun, bright enough to cast a shadow only minutes ago, was shrouded in clouds. She thought carefully before she spoke.

"I've never been a creature of impulse where business is concerned," she said. "Not when it involves my own money. I don't have much money to invest in supplies now that I'm paying Randy out of my own pocket. I'd need packaging for the cookies. I'd need to buy ingredients, which I was paying for with Bagel Barn money while I sold them at the Bagel Barn."

"Hey," Nick said gently. His eyes bespoke confidence in her, which she found reassuring. "I'd like to be your business partner."

"My business partner?" Surprised at this encouragement, she stared at him, trying to figure out if he really meant it. It appeared that he did. He put his arm around her and kissed her on the cheek.

"Sure," he said easily. "It's a small investment of capital, and I know it'll pay off. You can buy me out later when you're making money."

"I hardly know what to say," she said in confusion. This was totally unexpected, and yet she was encouraged by Nick's faith in her. If he didn't think her cookie business would succeed, he wouldn't offer to bankroll it, would he?

"Think of it this way," urged Nick. "With our cookie business, you won't be subject to the whims of a boss. Remember what I told you about why fishermen like leading their kind of life? It's the same reason I enjoyed fishing for a living. It's a way of being self-sufficient and independent. This cookie business could make you independent, too."

Her recent experiences with Sidney's unreasonableness had certainly soured Martha on working for someone else. And she trusted Nick's business acumen. She hesitated, though, caught up in doubts.

"Martha?"

"I don't know, Nick. I just don't know what to say about it."

"Say you'll do it," he urged. "Be a creature of impulse."

Martha thought for a moment. She loved knowing that people enjoyed eating her cookies.
She
enjoyed eating her cookies. She'd come a long way in the development of the perfect chocolate-chip cookie, and it would be foolish to stop now just because of Sidney.

She flung a smile up at Nick. His personal involvement, his faith in her, made all the difference. And he was right—the money she'd have to invest wouldn't be so much if it was a joint venture. The business wouldn't require much inventory, and supplies could be bought as she went along. Also, right now she had her job to pay the bills in case this new venture failed.

"Okay," she said recklessly. "We're partners."

"Partners," Nick agreed. They shook hands. "Oh, heck," Nick said. "That's much too formal." And he pulled her into his arms and kissed her in front of a group of tourists.

"Are they on their honeymoon?" piped a little girl's high-pitched voice before someone shushed her.

Nick and Martha pulled apart self-consciously and let the group pass them on the path.

"Back to our discussion," Nick said when the group had rounded a bend in the path ahead. "Let me take care of the packaging. I deal with a packager who ships me boxes for packing my salmon, and I'm pretty sure he can come up with some kind of simple cookie box on short notice. You won't need sales help, because my salespeople in the store will sell your cookies right alongside my salmon."

"Salmon and cookies, isn't that a strange combination?"

"Maybe, but it doesn't matter. We also sell newspapers and saltwater taffy made by a friend of Hallie's. We cater to tourists, and I'll sell whatever is popular with them. I don't have hidebound rules like Sidney does. And your cookies will encourage the local people to come into my store, which is something I'd like. I have a feeling that unless I have something to sell besides salmon, it's going to be a long, cold winter at the store."

What if I'm not here to bake my cookies in the winter?
The thought struck Martha with the force of a southeasterly gale. She was supposed to leave soon after Labor Day, and she couldn't bear the thought of being separated from Nick.

Despite her feeling of adventure at the prospect of beginning a new business with Nick, the thought ruined the rest of the outing for her. She was quiet and withdrawn, and she was grateful that Davey talked a lot on the way back to Williwaw Lodge. The sun stayed behind the clouds, almost as though it was wary of coming out.

Martha had a lot of serious thinking to do, and she needed to start now.

* * *

Over the next few days, Martha did think about her future plans. But she found it easy to be distracted when she was increasingly caught up in sharing Nick's life in the present.

She had not known that it was possible to lead such a life. Certainly nothing had ever prepared her to wake up to such big-scale bold beauty right outside her window every morning.

Here on Mooseleg Bay, nothing other than the occasional chatter of a faraway boat's engine disturbed the silence. Occasionally they heard the throaty cries of arctic loons or the slap of their wings on the waves as they frolicked in the whitecaps. Or maybe the peace would be disturbed momentarily by the crashing of a porcupine through the surrounding thickets. But there were few man-made sounds.

Martha gloried in the wealth of wild fruits they picked on Nick's land. Sweet pickings were bountiful. There were bright blueberries, crunchy cranberries, salmonberries, raspberries and more. Berrying was always fun, because Davey had such a good time trying to pick more berries than either Martha or Nick. Here nature gave freely of her bounty, and all one had to do was take it.

Martha learned to pick cow parsnip for salads and to cook wild rhubarb. Hallie, who still lived with Wanda, directed her in this, and the results were encouraging. Martha learned to eat dandelion greens that Nick cooked, and she learned that the leaves of nettles were edible. She discovered that she enjoyed grubbing in the dirt while Davey swung from an old mooring buoy hung by a rope from a nearby spruce.

Nick showed her and Davey how to pan for gold in the stream. He brought little rocker boxes out of the shed, boxes that his father had made for him and his brothers, and he demonstrated how to shovel sand and gravel into them so that the boxes would separate tiny flakes of gold from the gravel. They found only a bit of gold, not enough to amount to much, but Davey carried it around in an old pill bottle, whipping it out at odd moments to admire the shining flecks within.

Nick showed Martha some gold nuggets he had found when he was a boy. The largest one was about half the size of her thumbnail.

"Are they worth much?" she asked.

Nick shrugged. "I've hung on to these because of their sentimental value. That I found any at all was a fluke. If this stream were known for its gold, my father wouldn't have remained a fisherman all his life. There's gold in Alaska, but not here at Williwaw Lodge. Too bad, but that's the way it is." He wrapped the nuggets in a handkerchief and put them back in a drawer.

Martha was pleased to discover that flowers bloomed at the lodge all summer long. The soil was acidic, and it supported daffodils, rhododendrons and azaleas as well as delphiniums and dahlias. The flowers brightened the place on gray days. One thing for sure—with all the rain, the flowers never lacked water.

"I could stay here forever," Martha sighed one morning as she stood with Nick on the front porch of his cabin. She had just awakened and hadn't been able to resist coming outside to feast her eyes on the blazing display of colors as dawn flickered up from the tops of the mountains.

Nick kissed her neck. "Do you mean that? Really?" He wrapped his arms around her to keep her warm.

"Yes, I mean it. I don't mind the rain, and I don't mind the clouds, and I don't mind the chill. I love everything about this place," she said fervently. "I love not straightening my hair, and I love not fussing with my clothes. I love not feeling as though I have to put on a style show for people who couldn't care less."

"I almost think you mean it," he said, looking down at her in surprise.

She regarded him with a long, level look. "I wouldn't say it if I didn't mean it, Nick. It's a comfortable way to live, and this has to be one of the most beautiful spots on earth."

"I've always thought so," he admitted, but Martha's declaration set him wondering. Did she like Williwaw Lodge well enough to stay forever? To quit her job with Sidney and live with him and Davey? To marry him?

He had never thought he'd find a woman who would appreciate Williwaw Lodge the way he did. Women found life in Alaska difficult. You had to battle ice and snow and hordes of mosquitoes, and if that wasn't enough to test your endurance, there was the williwaw wind sweeping down off the mountainsides.

And then there were the little towns, some of them no more than clumps of small buildings with rusting snowmobile parts strewn outside. As for running a household, it was difficult even in one of the more civilized places like Ketchikan. Everything cost so much because it had to be shipped in from Outside. No, this wasn't the kind of place where most women felt comfortable. This he knew from past experience.

His best friend Hank's wife hadn't stayed on in Alaska after Hank died. She'd taken her three kids and headed back to the Lower Forty-eight, where she lived now. But then, he wasn't sure that Jillian had ever wanted to live here.

The only reason she'd come to Alaska in the first place was that she'd fallen in love with Hank while he was in the service, and once married there'd been no alternative except for her to follow him back here. Hank and Nick had always known they'd be partners on a fishing boat someday, and that was the only way Hank knew to make a living once his enlistment in the navy was over.

So Nick had watched his best friend's wife sour on Alaska, and in only a few months, too. She'd poured her heart out to him many times in her loneliness. But Jillian was Jillian. Nick knew Martha well enough to realize that she was a different kind of woman.

For the first time in his life, Nick Novak had met a woman who wasn't pretending to be something she wasn't. He was sure that he had fallen in love with the real person inside Martha Rose, not someone who was trying to live up to his expectations.
 

With every day that passed, Martha seemed to find something new and different to love about her surroundings. If it wasn't a hike up Deer Mountain, it was trolling on the
Tabor.
If it wasn't chocolate-chip cookies, it was Davey. Nick had grown accustomed to Martha's bright-eyed eagerness to know and to do and to see. He was used to the merriment that always seemed to simmer just below the her surface. He couldn't imagine how he would ever manage to get along without Martha Rose in his life.

Would she marry him? He didn't know. But, cautiously, Nick began to hope.

Chapter 14

Martha began selling her cookies in Nick's Front Street store, and she didn't notice any drop-off in sales. If anything, she sold more. Baking the cookies became such a burden that she began to inquire about people who could be trusted to bake them exactly to her recipe.

"That's easy," Randy said when she asked him. "My sister could do it. She's home all day with a tiny baby, and she'd like having the extra income." And so Randy's sister Suzy became Martha's adjunct baker.

When a cook from one of the smaller cruise ships asked if Martha could supply the ship with twenty dozen cookies each time it docked in Ketchikan, Martha knew she was onto a good thing. She sent free boxes of her cookies to other, smaller cruise ships, too, and she received two additional orders.

"It's a good thing I have this cookie sideline," she told Nick one night at the lodge when they sat going over the accounts for their business. "If I didn't, I wouldn't be able to pay Randy this week."