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With Alex in charge and Kade happy to be riding behind her on the sled, if only for the excuse of wrapping his arms around her, they sped through the frozen back lots of town to where her single-engine plane was tethered at Harmony’s joke of an airstrip. Aside from the hangar where the bodies of the Toms family still rested in temporary storage, the airport consisted of a short strip of hard-packed snow and landing lights that barely cleared the tops of the highest drifts.

Alex’s de Havilland Beaver had one neighbor for company, a small Super Cub that was rigged with fat tires instead of straight skis like Alex’s. A wind gust rolled through the cleared land of the runway, pushing a cloud of powdery snow across the ground like a tumbleweed.

“Bustling place, eh?”

“Better than nothing.” She parked the snowmachine and they climbed off. “Go ahead and get inside. I’ve got to run the system checks before we’re ready to take off.”

Kade might have balked at being ordered around by a female, if he hadn’t been so intrigued by Alex’s confidence in what she was doing. He climbed into the unlocked cockpit of the plane and closed the door. Even though the Beaver was the workhorse plane of the interior, Kade was struck immediately by the claustrophobic fit of the cockpit. At six foot four and 250 pounds without weapons and clothing, he was a large male by any standards, but sitting in the passenger seat of the single-engine plane, the curved metal panels and narrow windows felt like a tight cage.

Alex came around to the pilot’s side and hopped into the seat behind the wheel. “All set,” she announced cheerfully. “Buckle up and we’ll be airborne in no time.”

This far remote in the Alaskan interior, it wasn’t surprising that there was no traffic control, no tower to radio in to for clearance before takeoff. It was all on Alex to get them off the ground and headed in the right direction. Kade watched her work, impressed as hell by the way she took charge of the aircraft and set it moving on the pitifully brief runway. A minute later, they lifted off into the darkness, climbing higher and higher into a morning sky devoid of light except for the distant blanket of stars that glittered overhead.

“Nice job,” he said, glancing at her as she leveled off their ascent and steered them through a few short patches of bumpy, gusting wind. “I take it you’ve done this once or twice before.”

She slid him a little smile. “I’ve been flying since I was twelve years old. Had to wait to get my official training and license until I was eighteen, though.”

“You like being up here with the stars and clouds?”

“I love it,” she said, nodding thoughtfully as she checked a couple of the gauges on the plane’s dashboard, then looked back out at the vast nothingness in front of them. “My dad taught me to fly. When I was a kid, he used to tell me that the sky was a magic place. Sometimes when I’d get scared or wake up out of a nightmare, he’d take me up with him—no matter what time it was. We’d climb high into the sky, where nothing bad could reach us.”

Kade could hear the affection in her voice when she spoke about her father, and he also heard the sorrow of her loss. “How long since your father passed?”

“It’s been six months—Alzheimer’s. Four years ago, he started forgetting things. It got worse pretty quickly, and after about a year, when it started to affect his reflexes in the plane, he finally let me take him to the hospital in Galena. The disease progresses differently for everyone, but for Dad, it seemed to take hold of him so fast.” Alex let out a deep, reflective sigh. “I think he gave up as soon as he heard the diagnosis. I don’t know, I think maybe he was giving up on life even before then.”

“How so?”

It wasn’t meant to be a prying question, but she bit her lip as he asked it, a reflexive reaction that said she probably felt she’d already told him more than she’d intended. From the sudden, uneasy look she gave him, he could see that she was trying to size him up somehow, trying