“Nice dolphin on the far right, by the way,” Kellan said. “I caught it yesterday while stuck behind that two-car pileup.”

I managed a smile, sidetracked by the praise. “It was harder to do than I thought.”

“No, you got the dorsal fin just right.”

If I’d gotten it right, it was because he’d hounded me about it night and day since he’d learned I’d be painting it, sending me e-mails, faxes, pictures. “Thanks.”

“You’re really good.”

“He said, sounding so amazed.”

A grin split his face, and he went back to his notes, his too-long hair falling over his forehead and into his eyes. He wore his usual faded Levi’s, athletic shoes that looked as if they’d been on their last legs for a while now and a T-shirt that invited the general public to KEEP THE OCEAN BLUE.

He was, undoubtedly, a complete geek, but he was my geek, and I was very fond of him.

The plane dipped again. Just beneath us, I could see treetops, dense undergrowth and narrow canyons, which challenged the contents of my stomach, and I clutched Kellan’s big, warm hand. “Should we say our last rites? Admit our sins?”

“Oh, you don’t have time for that,” he said. “We’re going down.”

I think I squeaked.

“Down as in landing. It’s going to be fine, Rach. An adventure, remember?”

Right. An adventure to the land of snow and moose and mountain men.

Sounded good.

Really.

And it wasn’t as if I had something else to do. Long-term planning was not a strong suit of mine, much to my perpetually exasperated mother’s frustration. She’d long ago given up trying to coax me into a “real” career, or a marriage, for that matter.

I love painting, and I don’t intend to give it up. A man, however, that might be nice. But I’ve been through quite a few, and I’ve learned a few lessons.

Such as that a good thing never lasts.

The nose of the plane took a sharp dip. Oh God, oh God. Just descending, I told myself. As if I couldn’t tell by the way my eyeballs pressed back into my head.

Finally the wheels touched down. Actually “slammed down” would be more accurate, so hard I nearly ate my own teeth, and I reminded myself I’d done this out of curiosity, which was a good thing, a healthy thing, and I’d make the best of it.

Then I remembered something else: Curiosity was all well and fine, but it’d also killed the cat.

We switched planes in Anchorage, and now we sat in a tiny tin can, a butt-squeaker of a float plane.

“Oh. My. God.” I gripped Kellan’s hand, and stared at the lake below, racing past us at a dizzying speed. We’d been on the float plane for only five minutes.

A lifetime.

The wind made tears stream out of my eyes, and I think I had a bug in my teeth. “Kellan!”

“You’re going to break my fingers.” He tried to free his hand from mine, but that wasn’t going to happen. I had a death grip on him, and the only way he was getting free was to chew free.

Supposedly this “air taxi” could handle both water and air, though as near as I could tell, we hadn’t left the water more than a foot or two below us. The top was open, like that of a biplane, the noise incredible.

The landscape whipped by so fast, I couldn’t catch more than a brown-green-blue blur, the only constant being Jack, the pilot. He sat behind the controls yelling “Woo hoo!” at the top of his lungs as he dodged trees like we were playing some sort of Xbox game with our lives.

Jack looked the mountain-man part: long hair held back by a leather string, the mass flying out behind him. He wore aviator sunglasses, beige cargo pants whose every pocket was filled with God-knew-what and a long-sleeved shirt open over a T-shirt that said FLY MY FRIENDLY SKIES-PLEASE.

The light in his eyes as he flew the plane said he was either very good at what he did or he was thoroughly, one-hundred-percent insane. I was betting on the former, while praying it wasn’t the latter. In spite of the way I had led my life-that is, without much precaution or a single thought-out plan-I was not reckless.

And yet, here I was, on a plane I could have parked in my bathroom, with a man who might have smoked a crack pipe for lunch, flying over the wilds of Alaska.

I’m telling you, the crazy streets of Los Angeles were tame compared to this. Here, there were peaks on peaks, each bigger than the last, layers upon layers, stabbing up into the sky to heights I’d never imagined.

“Seriously, Rach”-this from Kellan, at my side-“I need my fingers back.”

We made another heart-stopping turn at the speed of light, following the river below. Ignoring Kellan, I closed my eyes, then felt my stomach leap into my eyeballs. Whoops. Definitely not a good way to fight vertigo, so I opened them again. “Are we almost there yet?”

Jack craned his neck. “Why, what’s up? You need a pit stop?”

I looked at him hopefully. “You have a bathroom on board?”

He laughed. “Nope. But I can find you a tree.”

Even Kellan laughed at that-the jerk-and I squeezed his fingers harder, until he paled.

There. That made me feel marginally better, but the only thing that could fix this situation entirely was to have Dot at my side. She wouldn’t have found any humor in my need to pee. She’d have been right there with me, demanding a bathroom complete with blow-dryer and scented hand soap.

“Serious,” Kellan gasped, “my fingers-”

I squeezed harder. Suck it up, I thought. And then I couldn’t think, because right in front of us-right in the middle of the river whipping by me so fast that the landscape looked like one of my paintings, still wet and also blurred, as if I had swiped my fingers over it-was a fallen log the likes of which Paul Bunyan had never seen. The thing was massive, with branches still reaching into the sky, like the arms of a downed giant ghost.

And we were going to hit it.

So I did the only sensible thing: I closed my eyes, opened my mouth and screamed.

And screamed.

My stomach bounced, down to my pink toenails, then back up into my freshly touched-up roots and finally to somewhere near the region where it was supposed to be, so I knew Jack was doing some fancy flying-not that I looked. No sirree, my looking days were over.

Then I realized Kellan was saying “It’s okay” over and over in my ear, his breath tickling my skin. Maybe it was the fact he’d grown up with only his mother and three sisters, smothered in feminine woes and Barbie dolls. Or maybe it was from all that practice with the dolphins. However he’d gotten the gift of knowing the right thing to do and to say to a woman, I was grateful. Especially since comfort was an almost foreign concept, given that the men I dated tended to be, well, badasses, and badasses typically don’t do comfort.

Kellan was not a badass by any stretch of the imagination, which for once was a good thing. He was nice to have in an emergency, and this felt like as big an emergency as I could imagine.

“We’re going to be okay,” he was saying. “So you can let go. Any time now, Rach…”

He sounded a bit strangled, and as I took stock, I saw why. At some point, I’d climbed out of my seat and into his, which meant I was in his lap, my arms shrink-wrapped around his neck, which probably accounted for his sounding like he couldn’t breathe. Chances were, with the death grip I had on him, he couldn’t.

My face was pressed into his throat. Since he hadn’t shaved today, and maybe not yesterday either, his skin was roughing up mine, but that felt like the least of my worries, so I just kept holding on as tightly as I could. Our bodies were sandwiched together, like peanut butter and jelly, and though he was definitely trying to put some space between us, I wasn’t allowing it.

“That was hella fun,” Jack said from the cockpit.

I looked up. The crazy bastard was grinning.

“It was a little close,” Kellan pointed out, still holding me. He didn’t really have a choice, since I hadn’t loosened my grip.

“Nah,” Jack said. “Should have seen last time. Lost the tip of the right wing. Anyhoo, we’re here now.” He hoisted himself out of his seat.

I could still feel Kel’s heart beating against my breasts. I could feel a lot of him: his chest, his belly and…“Kel? Something in your pocket is digging into me.”

He sighed, still sounding a bit strangled. “If you’d just let go-”

I looked up into his face in time to see a flush ride up his cheeks. Oh. Oh. I could feel every inch of him. Apparently there were just more inches than I’d realized.

“Here you go.” Jack tossed our bags from the upper storage down to our feet, and put his hands on his hips.

I unwrapped myself from Kellan, who looked very happy to have me do so, then I stood up on legs that were still quivering.

“Tips are welcome,” Jack said, “so don’t be shy.”

“I have a tip,” I said. “Take flying lessons.”

His grin broadened.

Free of my weight, Kellan sat there gasping for breath.

I scowled down at him. “I wasn’t that heavy.”

“Of course not.”

“You’re just too scrawny.” Only he hadn’t felt so scrawny a moment ago…

He rubbed his chest as he stood, gesturing to me to leave the plane ahead of him.

I hopped down. In Los Angeles, we’d have felt a wave of heat, but here there was no wave. Fresh, late-afternoon air brushed over us, cool and clear and crisp, and utterly devoid of the burn of smog.

It did feel good to have solid ground beneath my feet. We stood on the shore of some wildly raging river, surrounded by forest and mountains so tall, I had to tip my head back to see them all. In spite of the noise of the rushing water, we were enveloped in silence, the kind that comes from the utter lack of civilization. At least, the human kind. I looked around for bears, but thankfully, I didn’t see any.