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“Listen to yourselves.” Coach’s voice rumbled like a logging truck speeding over rutted black ice. “Talking as if you had any idea about life or love.”
“I just said life was like a good car.” Coop sat up straighter. There was nothing that got his heart pumping like a good bar argument. “And women like a good car. Just look at me.” He spread his arms. “I’m good-car material.”
“Sure you are.” Coach poured the sarcasm over Coop’s belief. “You’re cheap, boring and stuck in a rut. Just like my wife’s snowbound sedan out on Old Paris Road. Won’t get that out until spring. If ever.”
And if that didn’t deflate Coop’s tires...
Ty was still lost in thought when Gideon jumped to Coop’s defense. “Men know what they want in a woman. To make a match, you’d just have to dig down deep to discover what the heck a woman really wants. That matchmaker using her ‘intuition’ is farcical. If two people would just be honest about what they wanted—”
“Exactly.” Coop leaped back into the fray. “If a woman would just say, ‘I do want a long-term commitment from a man that’ll likely lead to marriage and probably having babies,’ it would cut through all the awkward, getting-to-know-you part.” And transition Coop to the “sorry, that’s not me, been nice to know you” part.
Coach chuckled, but it wasn’t the sound of shared humor. “The three of you sit in my bar every Friday and Saturday night, and most Sundays, too. Sometimes you go to Anchorage to meet women, but you don’t date anyone regular. What could you possibly know about matchmaking?”
“I bet we could make introductions with more success than that woman.” Coop’s voice rang with confidence. It wasn’t as though he was actually going to have to prove his point. “Look at all the single guys in this bar. There’s a catch here for every gal.”
They all scanned the bar’s patrons.
Coop almost considered issuing a retraction. Scraggly beards. Scraggly hair. Scraggly flannel shirts. K-Bay wasn’t exactly Baywatch.
But Gideon was back in the game. “I bet we could match more couples than her, too. And I wouldn’t use my intuition.”
“We’d have the Bar & Grill’s bell ringing on the hour.” Coop’s statement might have been a little over the line. Whenever someone found The One, they rang the bell over the bar. The bell hadn’t been heard in more than a year.
“I’ll take that bet,” Coach said, puncturing the wind from their sails. He leaned on the bar, capturing their attention the same way he had years ago as their high school hockey coach—with a steely-eyed stare that said he was done with small talk and ready for action. “There are three weeks until Valentine’s Day. I’ll bet you three can’t get three couples to ring that bell by Valentine’s eve.”
“Three?” Coop scoffed, the first of their trio to find his voice. “We could do twice that.”
Ty and Gideon stared at Coop as if he’d just told them he’d traded his truck for a minivan.
“Deal.” Coach offered his hand.
Coop reflexively put his out, but Gideon arm-barred his hand aside. “We don’t know the terms. What do we get if we win this bet?”
“A hundred bucks.” Coach smirked, making his face as wrinkled as a shar-pei’s.
Again, Coop put out his hand.
Again, Gideon batted it down. “That’s not worth one match, let alone six.”
“Six hundred, then.” Coach’s grin said he thought they’d fail.
Heck, Coop thought they’d fail. Six? What had he been thinking?
Clearly he hadn’t been. Still, Coop kept his smile—the one that had helped him sell hundreds of cars—glued to his face. No reason to let Coach sense blood in the water.
Coop glanced at Gideon. Gideon glanced at Coop. It was too late to back out now. They nodded and extended their hands to seal the deal, but this time it was Ty who stopped them from accepting the bet.
“Forget the money. If we win, we want jobs on one of your hockey teams.” Ty had an expression on his face that Coop hadn’t seen in seven years—like a bull charging toward the china shop. He’d scowled like that during a high school championship and had defended four shots on goal in two minutes to ensure their team won.
Coop wasn’t sure if the entire bar heard Ty’s terms or not. For a moment everything seemed quiet. Or it could have been the ringing in Coop’s ears that blocked out the clinking of glasses, beer-roughened voices and deep drifts of laughter.
Jobs in the Lower 48? It was all they’d ever wanted—to get out of town and work together in professional hockey.
Coach’s gaze morphed from dismissive to appraising. He owned large stakes in a couple of farm teams in the contiguous US. He’d been a successful hockey coach at the highest level, retiring early due to a severe case of rheumatoid arthritis now under control with a change in lifestyle and diet. “You want to sell popcorn and pretzels at some of my games?”
Ty didn’t flinch at the jab, although it hit him where it hurt because his thickly bearded chin jutted out. He’d gone from being a potential hockey superstar at eighteen, predicted to go high in the draft, to a jack-of-all-trades employee at K-Bay’s run-down skating rink. “Coop can sell bottled sand in the desert. I’m sure you have marketing positions. Gideon can make money grow on trees—”
“Legally,” Gideon murmured.
“And I know the game inside out.” Ty’s chin thrust halfway to Russia. “I could coach.”
The stakes of the bet had increased astronomically. It was what the three of them had dreamed of as boys: escaping Alaska. Only, back then, Coop was going to be Ty’s sports agent and Gideon his financial adviser. When Ty’s dreams had fallen apart, so had Coop’s and Gideon’s.
Coop tried not to look as though he’d swallowed a fish bone. “Is it a bet, Coach?”
“You’ve forgotten one thing.” The older man leaned against the back bar and crossed his beefy forearms. “What do I get when you lose?”
“We’ll swim the Polar Bear Challenge naked,” Ty offered.
Coach shook his gray, grizzled head. “You did that when you were teens.”
“We’ll bartend for you on weekends.” At Coach’s frown Gideon added, “For a month.”
“I like tending bar,” Coach said. “Gets me out of the house. Now...if you wanted to take my wife shopping in Anchorage every weekend for a month...”
They didn’t.
Coop stared at Kelsey’s article, at the suited matchmaker, at Kelsey’s postage-stamp picture. “We’ll take out an ad in the Anchorage Beat. Full page. Stating we know nothing about life or love, just like you said.”
Ty made a noise like a polar bear right before it dived under dark and stormy seas.
Coach’s faded blue eyes narrowed. “I want pictures, too. And an article about why Alaska is the best place in the world to live.”
Everything they stood against. Everything they complained about. Everything that made living in K-Bay as boring and rut filled as Coach had accused Coop of being.
It was one thing to be disappointed in his lot in life, another to be called on it. Coop didn’t hesitate. “Deal.”
They all shook on it and Coach left them to check on other customers. They each stared at their shaggy, bearded reflections in the glass behind the bar.
“Seriously, Coop?” Ty took aim with his hellfire expression. “An ad? This is worse than the time you convinced us to hitchhike to Anchorage our senior year. It’s not as if anyone knows who you are. But me—”
“Coach wasn’t going for a naked swim in the Bering Sea.” Ty’s anger didn’t faze Coop. They’d known each other too long for him to take it personally. “And he wouldn’t have gone for something simple like a case of rare whiskey.”
“It is what it is,” Gideon said, always the peacemaker. “But we can’t tell anyone what it is.”
Coop nodded. They’d be laughed out of K-Bay. “Where do we start?”
“Maybe we can get people to fill out an online survey.” Gideon perked up. He loved anything techish. “I could design a program to pair them up.”
The inner front door opened and a woman stepped in. She was wrapped from neck to snow boots in a reddish-brown parka that made her look like a stuffed sausage. Conversation in the room died away as every pair of male eyes turned toward her. She peeled off her knit cap, revealing shoulder-length, glossy blond hair and artfully applied makeup.
She was pretty, beautiful even. The kind of woman that men stopped and took notice of.
Coop sat up straighter. Noticing. “Here’s our first customer.”
She unfastened her jacket with small, delicate hands, revealing a small, delicate head covered in blond fuzz. A baby. Strapped to her chest.
The room heaved a sigh of regret. Conversations resumed, albeit not at their usual volume.
Slumping, Coop returned his attention to his beer. “And there goes our first customer.”
Boots rang across the oak floor.
Gideon tapped Coop on the shoulder. “She’s coming over here.”
Coop turned back around.
It was the weirdest thing. Coop was used to Alaska’s winters, used to the cold. But as the woman and the baby approached, the room took on a chill.
She stopped in front of him and arched a golden brow. “Cooper Hamilton?”
Coop nodded, rather numbly, because there was something familiar about the woman’s face, about her smooth voice, about the swing of her pretty blond hair across her shoulders.
She gestured to the baby. “I believe I have something of yours.”
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_f7819ca6-cfd7-5bea-b451-698bf23058fa)
“YOU DON’T REMEMBER ME, do you?” Nora Perry couldn’t help sounding angry and embarrassed. She’d traveled more than one hundred miles on a bus. It’d taken six hours instead of two. She was tired. The baby was tired.
And the witty, handsome man she’d met ten months ago with the mischievous smile? He wasn’t witty—he was speechless. He wasn’t handsome—his dark hair brushed his shoulders unevenly and grew from his chin in short, thick stubs. He wasn’t smiling—his lips formed a shell-shocked, silent O.
Coop led Nora to a tall wooden booth in the dimly lit, seen-better-days bar. She hung her parka on a booth hook, dropped her backpack to the floor and sat on the cold wooden bench too quickly, landing on her sit bones.
Zoe fussed, probably overheated from Nora’s resolve-melting mortification.
Coop didn’t remember her? Subtract fifty points from his man-appeal tally.
Last time Nora had seen Coop, he’d had a stylish, clean-shaven jaw, a stylin’ opening line and a styled set of dance moves that would’ve qualified him for a spot on Dancing with the Stars, Alaska edition. They’d met at a bar in Anchorage last spring. Spring being a time when folks got a little nutty in Alaska because everything returned to “normal” for a few months. You didn’t have to wear parkas the size of sleeping bags or shovel as much snow.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” Nora repeated when Coop continued to be struck dumb. She was having trouble slipping off the baby-carrier straps. Her lower lip trembled, much like Zoe’s did when her dirty diaper didn’t get changed quickly enough. “Am I that forgettable?” Her pride and her stomach slid to the floor. “Don’t answer that.”
Nora finally got the straps off and settled Zoe in the crook of her arm. “You had no trouble with words that night in Anchorage.” There. A clue. Perhaps the humiliation would end.
Coop couldn’t seem to drag his green gaze from Zoe. “I...uh...”
Or not. More mortifying heat flash flooded her body. And when emotion flooded her hormonal, postpregnancy body, which was often lately, her milk came in.
Could things get any worse? “We met at a bar.”
“Uh...” His gaze stroked her face and then dropped below her chin to the milk-production department.
“I didn’t have these then.” She waved a free hand in front of her now-tingling, melon-size chest and tried her best to glare at him. But it was hard to glare when the father of your child couldn’t remember you.
Zoe squirmed then squinted and made a squishing sound in her pants.
So much for a classy, civilized meeting.
Still, it was hard not to love Zoe. Unless you were Coop. His gaze was still caught on the milk-production department.
“Excuse me.” Nora scootched off the bench seat and rummaged in the backpack that served both as her purse and her diaper bag. Was it just last year she’d carried a budget-busting Dooney & Bourke tote? It seemed like a lifetime ago.
Nora tugged her diaper kit free and shot Coop another deadly glare. “Don’t go anywhere.”
Coop raised his hands slowly, as if in surrender, still in bachelor shell shock.
Nora was having a shock of her own. She wasn’t just a one-night stand. She was a forgettable one-night stand.
Coop was just like her father: a happy-go-lucky drunk going through life in memory-stealing binges.
I’m not going to let Coop hurt Zoe like Dad did me.
Nora was in Kenkamken Bay for one thing and one thing only. Child support. She wasn’t looking for a relationship with her baby daddy. Coop, being a self-centered bachelor, would probably be relieved that all she wanted was money. With direct deposit from his bank to hers, he need never see her or Zoe again. In fact, given who he was, Nora preferred it that way.
The ladies’ room was a pleasant surprise. It was clean and had a drop-down change table. Nora made quick work of the diaper, enjoying Zoe’s cooing nonsensical song. But the restroom lacked a place to sit and breast-feed. And boy, did she need to breast-feed. Given Coop’s stupefaction, her breast-feeding in public would probably send him to an early grave, which—setting aside her own discomfort at the public airing of a private event—would be highly satisfying.
Spirits bolstered, Nora opened the door.
Coop was waiting for her, no longer looking like a man who couldn’t believe he’d plowed his beloved sports car into a tree. His green eyes sparkled. His grin dazzled with straight teeth as white as snow. “Tangerine dress. Yellow heels. St. Patrick’s Day.”
She’d wanted him to remember her. And yet...Nora felt as if the unsalted nuts she’d eaten on the bus were giving her indigestion.
“You ordered white wine.” His grin spread over his now handsome—despite the beard—face. Funny what a smile did to a shaggy man’s looks. “We went back to your place and—”
“Please.” Nora walked past him to the booth. “Not in front of the baby.”
Everyone in the bar stared. She felt their eyes like a field mouse feels a circling hawk’s calculating gaze, almost as if they were protective of Coop, more than ready to join him in rejection of her paternity claim.
Her steps quickened. A woman in a strange town accusing the local golden boy she’d had his baby?
It’d been a mistake to come. A desperate, stupid mistake. She’d find the means to get by without Coop’s money. She’d get a second job. She’d trade babysitting services with other working moms. There had to be a way to raise Zoe without Coop’s help.
He slid into the booth across from her, looking decidedly chipper. “The thing is, Nancy—”
“Nora.” She resented his too-late chipperness and his too-false charm.
“I remember you.” His voice dropped from light and pleasant to dark and repellent. “And I distinctly remember using protection.” His smile never wavered as he tried to back her off from her claim.
Her father had a smile just like it, one that said he never worried about anything. And Dad didn’t worry. Not when he’d lost everything because one of his many get-rich-quick ideas failed. Not when he had a baby with a woman he didn’t remember meeting in a bar.
