Page 60 of Kiss Across the Universe
“Something like that.” He took a few more steps, his head down, frowning. He did that a lot, she realized. The twin shallow folds between his brows were constantly on stage. “Then there was the view,” he added.
Alannah laughed. “Which you never look at.”
“No,” he agreed heavily.
“Sounds like you need a new career.”
“Maybe.”
They walked another few minutes, then he said, “I thought for a while that…maybe…a wilderness tour company. A small one. I’d be looking at the view, then.”
“You mean, start your own company? Take tourists around the mountains?” She was astonished. Kit McDonald was so laconic and laid back, she had a hard time imagining him chatting to tourists about the history of a place and all the other patter a tour guide usually handed out.
Kit kept his gaze ahead, his chin up. “Yeah, well, I didn’t think about it for too long. You know how many tour guides there are, operating just out of Banff National Park?”
“No idea, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s hundreds of them,” she said. “But if you really want to do it, then there’s gotta be a way to pull it off.”
“If you want it bad enough, the universe will deliver?” he said, his tone dry. “I know personally that it doesn’t matter how much you want something, just wishing it so doesn’t work.” There was a note in his voice that took Alannah a second to identify because it was unexpected.
Pain.
It prodded her into saying, “What did you want that you didn’t get?”
Kit shook his head.
“No, really,” she insisted. “You seem like a…capable guy.”
He still didn’t look at her. “I wanted a tour company,” he said flatly.
Alannah felt a small jerk of disappointment. He was deflecting her. But that was typical for Kit. He deflected everyone about almost everything. But some people were like that. In her family, everyone was an open book, whether they wanted to be or not. Even Alexander, one of the most private men she’d ever met, regularly had his decisions and actions dissected by the family. He tolerated it well, because there was no one else who knew the full truth about him and his life, who could help him when he needed it. Which was the situation for everyone in the family. They were close because they had no one else.
Kit clearly was in the same category. He would talk…but to only a few people he utterly trusted. He had spoken of a family. Likely they were the people among whom he let himself relax and speak freely. Alannah wasn’t one of the people he trusted, or he wouldn’t be trying to deflect her now.
So Alannah kept her tone breezy as she said, “You could have a tour company if you wanted one. You just have to find a unique marketing proposition that differentiates your company from the hundreds already out there.”
“You know marketing?” he asked, his tone as light as hers. “That’s what you studied at Harvard?”
“Economics,” she said. “Probably the complete opposite of marketing. But I’ve spent years working in the spin capital of the world. I’ve watched the best of the best position a movie in a way that maximizes appeal, even if it’s the tenth coming of age movie that year.”
He glanced at her. The furrows between his brows had gone. “Movies all do seem to be the same, these days.”
“That’s because it costs upward of fifty million to make even a basic movie,” Alannah told him. “Hollywood is risk averse. If a movie style did well last year, they’ll put new treads on it and push it out because they can guarantee revenue. They can’t do that with a brand new concept, even if it’s a stratospherically high concept idea. No, make thatespeciallyif it’s a risky new high concept idea.”
“So how would you spin a tour company to make it different from all the tour guides in Banff?”
She thought about it for a while. “It’s no good going for something that puts a facet on it that you have no interest in yourself. You’ll burn out and hate yourself in a year. It has to be something that fits with you, that you can see yourself providing to tourists for years.”
“Okay.”
Alannah mulled it over. “You said you thought working as a warden would be peaceful. You wanted to gear down after the Army.”
“Pretty much.”
She shook her head a little. Kit was next to impossible to open up if he didn’t want to. “Okay, so instead of taking the average tourist and showing them the normal things so they can stamp their bingo map, give them what you wanted when you took the warden job.”
She’d taken five steps before he responded. “What did I want?” His tone was curious.
“Healing,” she said. “De-stress and detox. Take them to placid lakes and get them to watch sunsets over the peaks. Listen to the wind in the tops of the trees. Feel the cold of a mountain pass on their cheeks and watch goats climb up vertical walls.”
