by Teri Wilson
Melting His Heart
Never stay in one place too long. These are the words Brock Parker lives by. Roaming the world to save avalanche victims keeps the search-and-rescue patrolman from getting too close to anyone. The resort ski town of Aurora is no different. Until Brock meets Anya Petrova. The Alaska native needs someone to train her dog. Who better than the man who works wonders with his canine rescue team? Haunted by a family tragedy, Brock doesn’t think he’s anyone’s hero. But Anya refuses to believe that. And when she shows her true mettle in the face of breathtaking danger, Brock realizes what he’ll risk for the woman whose love has healed his heart.
Brock grinned and Anya gasped in delight as the dog scooted alongside
her leg and began eating from her hand.
Anya beamed at him. “Thank you.”
“This is your doing. Not mine.” Brock swallowed with great difficulty. “So let me get this straight. When you’re not making the best coffee in Aurora, you’re helping me with the ski patrol, knitting hats for poor people and rescuing frightened dogs?”
She laughed. “It’s only the one.”
He handed her a few more treats. “One what?”
“One hat and one dog.” She shrugged. “I’m kind of new at this…faith and making a difference.”
“It suits you,” he said in a voice almost too quiet for her to hear.
Who was he kidding? This was more than just business.
He hadn’t asked for it, but Anya had crawled under his skin. His reluctance to admit it didn’t change the fact that they were becoming friends.
Close friends.
Books by Teri Wilson
Love Inspired
Alaskan Hearts
Alaskan Hero
TERI WILSON
grew up as an only child and could often be found with her head in a book, lost in a world of heroes, heroines and exotic places. As an adult, her love of books has led her to her dream career—writing. Now an award-winning author of inspirational romance, Teri spends as much time as she can seeing exotic places for herself, then coming home and writing about them, of course. When she isn’t traveling or spending quality time with her laptop, she enjoys baking cupcakes, going to movies and hanging out with her family, friends and five dogs. Teri lives in San Antonio, Texas, and loves to hear from readers. She can be contacted via her website at www.teriwilson.net.
Alaskan Hero
Teri Wilson
Though the mountains be shaken
and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love
for you will not be shaken.
—Isaiah 54:10
In loving memory of Robert K. Wilson, Sr.,
my grandpa and a real-life hero.
This book is also dedicated to
the men, women and dogs involved with
search and rescue all over the world.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Beckie Ugolini, for her support, friendship and the idea for Brock’s bear suit.
Also, thanks to Meg Benjamin, my writing friend, RWA roommate and awesome critique partner.
As always, I owe a debt of gratitude to my fantastic agent, Elizabeth Winick. And I’m blessed
with the best editors in the world,
Rachel Burkot and Melissa Endlich.
Thank you to my loving and supportive family.
Thank you to the people of Alaska
and the Iditarod Trail Dog Sled Race for a bottomless well of inspiration: Emil Churchin,
Hugh Neff, Deby Trosper, Kate Swift and
especially Zoya DeNure, for giving me the
“the odds are good, but the goods are odd” line.
And Silvia Furtwaengler for giving me the ride
of my life at Iditarod 2012.
Thank you to Elizabeth Chambers and everyone
at Bird Bakery, for giving me a fun place to write and for the many, many cupcakes.
And last but not least, thank you
Wendy Pohlhammer for creating the pattern
for Brock’s hat and for doing the impossible—teaching me how to knit.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Epilogue
Dear Reader
Questions for Discussion
Excerpt
Chapter One
Anya Petrova shoved her mittened hands in the pockets of her parka as she stood on Brock Parker’s threshold and tried not to react. The man had answered the door dressed in a furry bear costume. It wasn’t every day that she knocked on a stranger’s door and found a grizzly bear, albeit a fake one, on the other side. Even in Alaska.
She pasted on a smile. “Hi, I’m Anya Petrova. I emailed you about my dog. You’re Brock, right?”
He nodded, but made no move to take off the bear head.
Super. Anya had to stop herself from exhaling a frustrated sigh.
She’d expected someone normal, especially considering Brock Parker’s reputation. He was new in town, an avalanche search and rescue expert and alleged dog genius, at least according to what Anya’s friend Clementine had told her. Anya had been trying in vain to reach him for the past two days, but he appeared to be a mystery. He didn’t even have a locally listed phone number, and he’d yet to make an appearance in town. And she’d been looking—hard—because a dog genius is exactly what she needed at the moment.
Fortunately, Clementine had managed to procure Brock’s email address. Anya had fired off a message and was thrilled when he agreed to meet with her. Clementine had predicted he would turn out to be the answer to Anya’s prayers. What she’d failed to predict was that Brock Parker would be dressed head to toe in a grizzly bear costume when he answered his front door.
The odds are good, but the goods are odd.
Some considered it Alaska’s best kept secret.
The rest of the free world seemed all too aware of the fact that men outnumbered women in the Land of the Midnight Sun. So much so that sometimes the statistics Anya Petrova saw on the subject made her shake her head in disbelief, if not snort with laughter. Fifteen to one? Did people in the Lower 48 really believe that?
Anya had lived in Aurora, Alaska, since the day she was born. She even had a dash of Inuit blood in her veins, and she knew as well as every other Alaskan woman that such statistics were exaggerated at best. At worst, they were baloney. In any event, the exact ratio didn’t make a bit of difference. Because the men of Alaska weren’t like other men. The majority of them, anyway. Like anything else, there were exceptions.
A few.
A very few.
The odds are good, but the goods are odd. Or, to put it nicely, Alaskan men could be eccentric. And it wasn’t just the locals. Sometimes the transplants could be even worse. There seemed to be something about Alaska that attracted independent spirits, adventurers...and oddballs. Case in point—the man standing in front of her in a bear costume.
Not that she cared a whit about Aurora’s bachelor population, strange or otherwise. She’d lea
rned a long time ago that men were trouble. In her infancy, actually. Being abandoned by her father at three months of age didn’t exactly set her up for success in the man department. Neither did being unceremoniously dumped on top of the highest mountain in Aurora for the entire town to witness. More than the town’s population, actually, because television cameras had been involved.
As a result, dating wasn’t anywhere on the list of things that mattered most to Anya. Her life was simple. She cared about three things—God, coffee and her dog.
She had a good handle on the coffee situation. As the manager of the Northern Lights Inn coffee bar, she was given free rein to develop all sorts of lattes, mochas and espresso drinks. Whatever struck her fancy, really. She enjoyed it. And she was good at it. Sometimes—particularly on days when all she did was serve up cup after cup of plain black coffee—she wondered if there was something else she should be doing with her life. Something more meaningful. But that was normal, wasn’t it? Did people really ever feel completely fulfilled by their jobs?
The God thing was new, so she really couldn’t say how that was going. But it mattered to her. More than she ever knew it could, so it went on the list.
But the dog was another issue entirely. And that’s where Brock Parker came into the picture, or so Anya hoped. Clementine had been so sure he could help her. She’d used the word genius to describe his proficiency at training.
He sure didn’t look like a genius standing there in his doorway in that bear costume. Then again, what did Anya know about geniuses? Hadn’t she read somewhere that Albert Einstein couldn’t tie his own shoes? Maybe Einstein had a bear suit too.
She glanced down at Brock’s feet poking out from the dark-brown fur. He wore hiking boots, and they were indeed tied.
Was that a good thing? Who knew?
She inhaled a deep breath of frigid winter air and tried again. “I have a very anxious dog, and I was told you might be able to help me. I’m kind of desperate.”
She’d planned to tell him more, but suddenly her eyes burned with the telltale sting of tears. To say she was desperate was an understatement. Things seemed bad enough when she’d first rescued Dolce. The poor thing hid under the bed all the time. Anya barely saw her. Little did she know Dolce’s shyness was the least of her problems.
The tiny dog also howled at the top of her canine lungs. At first, Anya had been able to convince the people at the Northern Lights Inn—who were not only her employer, but also her landlord—to give the dog some time. Surely Dolce would settle down.
She hadn’t. Not yet anyway. And the hotel management had run out of patience. They’d finally given her an ultimatum—give up either the dog or her rent-free cottage.
The choice was hers. She had a mere fourteen days to fix the problem or lose her dog or her home. She’d pinned her last hope on Brock’s purported genius, and from the looks of things, that might have been a mistake.
She sniffed and willed herself not to shed a tear. Desperate or not, crying in front of a man dressed as a bear was simply out of the question.
She heard a sigh. Brock’s furry chest rose and fell. Then—finally—he removed the bear head, exposing his face.
Anya wasn’t altogether sure what she’d expected, but the cool blue eyes, straight perfect nose and high cheekbones that looked as though they’d been chiseled from granite were most definitely not it. The man resembled some kind of dreamy Nordic statue. Anya had to blink to make sure she wasn’t seeing things.
“You say your dog is anxious? How anxious?” He spoke without cracking the slightest smile, which only made him look more like something Michelangelo had carved out of stone.
Anya swallowed. Her mouth had abruptly gone dry. The snowflakes floating against her cheeks felt colder all of a sudden, and she realized her face had grown quite warm. “Very. I rescued her from a bad situation, and unless she’s attached to a leash, I can’t get her to come out from under my bed. She even eats there and only in the dark.”
It was pathetic. Every night when Anya drifted off to sleep, it was to the sound of poor Dolce crunching on kibble.
“But that’s not the worst of it. She howls. Rather loudly.” Anya’s voice grew wobbly. “I’m about to be kicked out of my cottage.”
“I see.” Brock nodded, and a lock of his disheveled blond hair fell across his forehead.
She’d heard of bedhead, but never bearhead. It, too, appeared to have its charms.
A shiver ran up Anya’s spine—a shiver she attributed to the fact that she was still standing on his front porch and the temperature had dipped well below freezing.
Yeah, right.
“Come with me.” Still clutching the bear head under his arm, he led her inside.
Anya had been in the house once, long before she’d ever heard of Brock. She’d babysat nine-year-old twins who had lived here when she was in high school. Other than Brock’s array of unopened moving boxes, the living room looked pretty much the same—wood floors, dark paneled walls and huge floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the rugged, snow-capped Chugach Mountain range. The view was breathtaking, even to Anya, who’d seen the splendors of Alaska virtually every day of her life.
Brock strode past the window with barely a glance, leading her through the dining room and kitchen and out the back door. The snow crunched beneath their feet as they headed toward a barnlike structure about a dozen yards from the house. The barn was new—at least it hadn’t been part of the landscape when the Davis twins were nine. If there was a walkway, it wasn’t visible beneath the previous night’s snowfall. Flurries were still coming down, swirling and drifting through the branches of the evergreen trees. By the time they reached the barn, the shoulders of Brock’s bear costume were dusted with a fine layer of white.
“This is my training area.” He pushed the door open with a grizzly paw and ushered her inside.
The smell of sawdust and puppies drifted to Anya’s nostrils. A strange combination, but not at all unpleasant. In fact, she found it oddly comforting. “Wow. Nice.”
Calling it a barn wasn’t really fair. The word barn conjured up images of dirty, hay-strewn floors and farming equipment covered in layers of dust. This building had been swept and cleaned to the point of perfection. A series of short, wooden dividers separated the center of the room into four pens. What Anya assumed was leftover lumber had been stacked neatly against the wall. Brock may have been new in town, but clearly he’d been busy.
Above the excess planks of wood were a series of hooks. What looked like a ski patrol jacket hung from one of them. Anya’s gaze lingered on the bright-red parka and moved over the intersecting lines of the bold white cross printed on it until Brock spoke again, stealing her attention.
“Sit there.” He pointed to one of the square, wood-framed pens.
Anya glanced at him, wishing he would offer more of an explanation. She didn’t see a chair anywhere. What was she supposed to do? Sit on the floor? But as she approached the box, a cute, furry head peeked over one of the short walls. Then another equally adorable face popped up beside it.
“Puppies!” Anya clapped her hands.
She swung her leg over the short wall and climbed inside with the dogs, sitting cross-legged in the center of the pen. One of the puppies immediately crawled into her lap, but the other one eyed her from a foot or two away.
They didn’t look like any puppies Anya had ever seen, certainly not the customary sled dogs that populated Alaska. These were a lovely red color, with white markings on their feet and chests.
“What kind of dogs are these?” she asked. “They almost look like little foxes.”
“Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retrievers,” Brock said, as if that mouthful of an answer made a lick of sense to Anya. He reached for a newspaper that was folded and placed neatly on one of the wooden dividers and handed it to her. “I’d like y
ou to read this.”
She glanced at the paper, this morning’s edition of the Yukon Reporter. She scanned the front page for anything dog-related but came up empty. “Um, what exactly am I supposed to be reading?”
He shrugged what appeared to be a rather muscular shoulder, visible even through the bear suit. “It doesn’t matter. Just read it.”
“Okaaay.” She gave him a wary glance, but the look on his face told her nothing. He still wore that same stony expression. Stony, but undeniably handsome.
She unfolded the paper. The headline had something to do with the ski resort. Anya skipped over that particular article. Intentionally. Although the ski mountain loomed over Aurora, Anya had managed to pretty much ignore it since the day she’d had her heart broken atop it. She instead found a story about a moose that had been spotted roaming the streets of downtown after dark.
The moose, a young adult bull according to eyewitnesses, is thought to be the cause of recent...
Brock’s deep voice interrupted her train of thought. “Out loud.”
“Out loud?” Anya raised her brows and looked back down at the newspaper, then at the two puppies with their sweet little fox-like faces, and back at Brock. “You want me to read the newspaper to the dogs?”
“Yep.” He nodded, crossed his big bear arms and waited.
Odd, she decided. Most definitely.
But she couldn’t deny he was odd in a rather intriguing way.
She resumed reading, aloud this time, acutely aware of those glacial blue eyes watching her. Her cheeks grew warm, and she had to concentrate so her tongue wouldn’t trip on the words. Those flawless good looks of his were unnerving. Not that she was attracted to him, because she wasn’t. Of course she wasn’t. He made her nervous, that’s all.
Still, she almost wished he’d cover up his perfect bone structure with that silly bear head.
* * *
Brock watched Anya read to the pups until she’d finished the article about the rogue moose that was vandalizing downtown Aurora. Not that there was much of a downtown, he mused. Certainly not compared to Seattle, where he’d lived for the past year and a half. There wasn’t a Starbucks or a Seattle’s Best anywhere in sight.
