Nome-o Seeks Juliet (An Odds-Are-Good Standalone Romance, #2)

by Katy Regnery

  Juliet heads for a group of three ladies, sitting in easy chairs by the fireplace, while I bring Dover and Boston to each wheelchair-bound resident, letting them lavish attention (and treats) on my boys.

  Siberian huskies and Alaskan malamutes have a long and treasured relationship with the native people of Alaska, and I am comfortable saying that every elder in this room probably grew up with a dog that looked much like the four visiting today.

  Though most Yupik now live in modern homes and drive cars and snowmobiles, it wasn’t so long ago that every family needed to have enough sled dogs for transportation. In fact, some of the folks here suffering from Alzheimer’s get mixed up and start calling my dogs by old Yupik names from their past...which is actually fine. The dogs couldn’t care less, and the elders feel like they’ve had a visit with an old friend.

  While two ladies spend time with Boston, and Dover gets surreptitious treats from a gentleman in a wheelchair, I look over at Juliet, who’s still sitting by the fire. She listens intently to something one of the women is saying—probably qanruyutet (wisdom or instruction) in the form of legend or storytelling—while the dogs flank her, their soft fur scratched and petted by Juliet and the other ladies in the circle. After a while, Juliet glances at me thoughtfully, then reengages with the ladies, nodding at them, and finally, letting the lady in the middle kiss the top of her blonde head.

  I wonder what they said to her.

  Later, when we’re driving home in the dark, I ask her.

  “They were talking about love,” she says, sitting beside me in the front seat of my truck. Dover, Boston, Cheyenne, and Augusta are in the back, happiest with the wind whipping through their thick fur. “She was speaking mostly in Yupik with a little English. She used a phrase that sounded like, um, ell-u-arr-luc-i pi-ci-qu-ci. Something like that. It basically means, ‘Love well and prosper.’ It made me think of the way you care for your dogs.” She grins at me. “You’re going to win the Iditarod someday, Cody.”

  My chest swells with pride. “You think?”

  “Uh-huh. I know.” She pauses. “Something I haven’t told you yet about my being here...I have to write a report about my experiences. A paper. It could be published.”

  “Huh. Wondered what you were doing up in your room at night. I can hear you typing sometimes.”

  “Does it bother you?” she asks.

  “What?”

  “To be my subject? You and your dogs?”

  I shrug. “Why would it bother me? I’m flattered.”

  She sighs with relief. “Thanks. I wasn’t sure. Not everyone likes being studied.”

  “Are you studying me?”

  “To some extent,” she says. “You’re teaching me about sled dogs: how to care for them, how to race. Yeah. I’m studying you...and them.”

  “Well, it’s fine with me,” I say.

  Anything would be fine with me, I think, if it meant you being here beside me.

  “Thank you for taking me with you today,” she says. “I really liked it there. Felt good to...I don’t know, just to be there, I guess.”

  “So come back next month,” I tell her.

  “I’d love t—Hmm. We’ll see.”

  I glance at her. “Why wouldn’t you?”

  She clears her throat. “My parents asked me about coming home for Thanksgiving.”

  It’s not that I haven’t thought about her leaving. I have, of course, but it’s always in the context of her leaving in January, not before. The realization that I might have less time with her hits me like a ton of bricks, sitting in my stomach heavy and sour.

  “Are you going?”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” she tells me. “If I go for Thanksgiving, they’ll ask me for Christmas, and that’s a lot of time away from, um...here.”

  I nod once, curtly, because missing her for several days over Thanksgiving and several more over Christmas sounds, well, awful. But it’s not my place to tell her where she can and cannot go. And it’s not my right to pressure her to spend her holidays with me so early in our relationship.

  “What do you usually do?” she asks. “Over the holidays?”

  “Um...” I turn into my driveway, rumbling down the dirt and pebble road and stopping in front of my house. “Not much.”

  “Huh,” she says, staring at me for a second like she wants to ask me more questions, but she doesn’t. She cocks her head to the side and smiles. “You know what? I bought hot cocoa mix the last time we were in town. How about you put the dogs back in their kennels, and I’ll go make us some? It’ll be ready by the time you come inside, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She opens her door and walks into the house, and I get the dogs settled before joining her. When I get inside, she’s made a fire in the living room stove, there’s country music coming from the phone she’s placed on the living room coffee table, and she’s in the kitchen stirring two mugs of hot chocolate as she sings along to the music.

  My heart.

  Oh, my stupid, fucking heart.

  It throbs and swells with the warmth of this moment. The fire and the music. The smell of chocolate and her sweet voice in song. But mostly, it yearns for her—for Juliet—to stay and never leave. I don’t know what that looks like. I haven’t the slightest idea of how to make it happen. And part of me even acknowledges that it never will.

  But I want this.

  How desperately I want this...forever.

  “Hey!” she says, noticing me in the doorway. “Take off your coat. It’s almost ready.”

  I unzip my parka, then bend down to unlace my boots. I toe them off, leaving them on a mat beside the front door, and hang up my coat on the rack beside the mat, next to hers.

  She comes out of the kitchen, blonde braid sitting pretty over one shoulder, and warm smile making me want things I shouldn’t even wish for.

  She’s going back to college after the Qimmiq, I tell myself. You always knew that.

  After placing the mugs on the coffee table, she pats the cushion next to her. “Come sit with me.”

  Because her wish is, and likely will always be, my command, I cross over to the sofa and sit down. She puts her feet up on the coffee table and her head on my shoulder. I lean forward to take my mug carefully, then think twice and decide to leave it until it cools. Unlike people with all their fingers, it’s hard for me to hold a mug. It’s best if I can hold mugs and glasses firmly between both palms, but the ceramic is too hot to hold flush against my skin right now.

  “Don’t want it?” she asks.

  “I’ll drink it in a bit.”

  She’s quiet for a second, then says, “Tell me about Thanksgiving and Christmas, Cody.”

  “There isn’t much to tell,” I say, pulling a blanket of the back of the couch and covering our laps with it. “Sometimes Jonas and Rita invite me to spend Thanksgiving with them. But sometimes they spend it with their son, Mitchell, down in Juneau. One year I took a couple of the dogs over to the Quyana House. They invited me to stay for supper.”

  “How about Christmas?” she asks.

  “Last year we took a long ride,” I say. “Maybe six hours. We were tired out by the time we got back.”

  Her breath releases in a small “ahh” sound, and I don’t know what that means, but I suspect my holidays sound pretty awful. Not much to entice her to stay.

  “Remember earlier today?” she says. “When I asked about your grandparents? What did you mean when you said you never knew them?”

  I really don’t like talking about this stuff. “What are you trying to get at here?”

  “I want to know you,” she says. “I want to know...why you don’t know your grandparents...why you live all alone here in Nome...why you don’t celebrate major holidays.”

  I sigh audibly, but she doesn’t retract her questions. And frankly, I guess it’s my fault for mentioning the fact that I have no grandparents in the first place. I inadvertently piqued her curiosity. So I guess I should take responsibility for that a
nd just tell my whole sad story in one fell swoop.

  “Fine. You want my story? Here it is. My parents weren’t married. My mother was an exotic dancer in Rancho Cordova, outside of Sacramento. My father was a salesman with a wife and daughter in Fresno. I only saw my father once or twice a year, and never met my half-sister until his funeral, when I was fifteen.”

  “Whew,” she says softly, sipping her chocolate, but keeping her head on my shoulder. “Are you still in touch with her?”

  “Sort of,” I say. “She’s on Facebook. We exchange messages every so often.”

  “What about your mom?”

  “She was originally from Florida and always said she was an orphan, which may have been true. When I was in middle school, I remember a guy coming around now and then who she said was her ‘foster brother,’ so maybe she was an orphan. I don’t know. We never heard from anyone. Never visited anyone. Nothing. Anyway...from the time I was sixteen, she was at home less and less often. A night here. Two days there. Then one day, she never came home at all.”

  Juliet gasps softly. “What? What do you mean? She abandoned you?”

  “No, it wasn’t really like that.”

  “If she left when you were sixteen and never came back, that’s exactly what it was like.”

  “It was better after she left,” I tell her. “She called from a pay phone to say she’d relocated to Vegas and I was old enough to fend for myself. She’d paid up the rent for six months, so I got a job after school and on weekends, banked every dime and was able to make ends meet until I entered the service.”

  “Cody,” she says softly, burrowing closer to me. “That’s terrible.”

  Honestly? It really wasn’t that terrible. I was young to be on my own, but it was a relief not to worry about her anymore. I could imagine her having the time of her life in Vegas, while I finished up the last two years of high school with lots of freedom. It could have been worse.

  “Do you ever hear from her?”

  “Not much.” I shrug. “She’s on Facebook, too. Pops up every so often and sends me a message. Mostly on my birthday.”

  “When’s your birthday?”

  “June.”

  We sit there in the dim light of the fire, with Vi at our feet and Juliet’s head on my shoulder. My chocolate’s probably cool by now, but I don’t want to move. The blanket’s warm, and the woman’s soft, and telling her my hard-luck story didn’t make me feel as pathetic as I expected it to. She’s a good listener. Just another thing to love about her.

  I don’t know how long we sit together, but when I hear her softly snoring, I nudge her.

  “Hey, beautiful,” I whisper. “It’s time for bed.”

  “Mmm,” she hums, breathing deeply and nestling closer.

  “Hey...Juliet...” I say, but she doesn’t move. She’s sleeping soundly, and I don’t have the heart to wake her up. I stand up without waking her, then scoop her into my arms, blanket and all.

  I walk to the back hallway with Vi at my heels, push open the door to my bedroom with a socked foot, and deposit Juliet gently onto my bed.

  Still dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, I lie down beside her, cover us with a comforter, pull her into my arms, and fall asleep.

  Chapter 9

  Juliet

  Although we never have an actual conversation about my moving into Cody’s bedroom and sharing it with him, it just happens.

  Like falling asleep.

  Like breathing.

  Like blinking.

  Little by little over the next two weeks, the furniture from my room ends up in his. My fresh sheets and brand-new comforter now cover his aqua-painted bed. The little shelf that holds my clothes sits beside his bureau, and the nightstand and lamp from my room now rest on my side of Cody’s bed. Gone is his nasty, old, vomit-yellow chair, exchanged for my pretty gingham bean bag and fuzzy throw blanket. Even his old carpet makes its way to the dump and my sage green carpet from upstairs warms our feet in the mornings.

  And this morning when I open my eyes?

  He’s roped the room with the Christmas lights and sage-green ribbon while I was asleep.

  How he pulled that off in the middle of the night, I’ll never know, but in its own way, it’s so achingly romantic, it almost makes me cry.

  The only things that have stayed upstairs are my air mattress, desk, laptop, and heater. When I need to work, as I do now, the loft is still my office.

  It shows Cody’s thoughtfulness that while he stealthily relocated me to his bedroom, he left some of what I needed behind for privacy and work. It makes me—I don’t know. Yes, I do—it makes me like him so much that like doesn’t feel like the right word anymore. No man has ever anticipated my needs so keenly or made my comfort such a priority. Cody shows his affection for me in action, in attention, and I value it more than every flowery word ever spoken.

  Sometimes, when I wake up naked beside him, with his dark room smelling of our lovemaking, I’m filled with a sensation so strong, so absolute, I almost feel like I’m a part of him. And I wonder if human beings can forge a bond so intimate, so intense, so fierce that even when your bodies aren’t physically joined together, your heart still beats in his chest, and his breath is the air that fills your lungs.

  My feelings for him have grown in the same way that his bedroom has become mine. Organically, without permission or trial, my affection for him deepens day by day until I fear a time will come that I won’t be able to remember when it didn’t exist.

  It will just...be.

  Like blinking.

  Like breathing.

  Like falling asleep beside him or in his arms.

  I won’t just be Juliet Sanderson anymore. I’ll be Cody’s Juliet, and I think maybe I’ll want to die if I ever have to be less than that.

  From the window over my desk, I watch Cody open the kennel gate for all eighteen dogs after two hours of free play in the pasture. With their tails high and wagging, each dog enters the fenced area without hesitation. They aren’t leashed or harnessed. They could bolt for the mountains at any time and only stop running when they so chose.

  But they don’t bolt. They don’t run.

  They come home to Cody, whom they love.

  And they stay.

  My email program chirps at me, demanding my attention, and I glance down at my laptop, clicking on Gmail to see who’s looking for me.

  Hmm. Wi-Fi must have been down for a while, because I have sixteen messages waiting for me. I delete twelve that are just spam and look at the remaining four. Two from Dr. Grant, one from my brother, and one from...ugh...Professor Steinbuck.

  I click on Braydon’s first, which is basically just a list of links to affordable flights on Expedia and Travelocity and an email urging me to come home at Thanksgiving. Sighing softly, I move it to my Braydon’s Emails folder.

  In my heart, I’ve decided that I want to stay here for Thanksgiving, and I think part of me is running down the clock so that the cost of leaving will be so prohibitive, I’ll be forced to stay. I don’t want to hurt my parents or brother, but I also can’t bear to think of Cody all alone. The problem is, Cody hasn’t asked me to stay. It’s a topic I need to broach with him soon, but I don’t want to come off as either mothering or clingy, so I’ve been dragging my feet.

  I open the two emails from Sheila Grant, perusing them quickly. One is a confirmation that she received my notes from last week. The other asks me to clarify some points in the notes about the dogs’ diet and care. I answer her questions, reminding myself to be more specific with my notes about details that will be hard to remember once I am back at school.

  Finally, I open Glenn’s email, taking a deep breath before I start reading.

  Hi, Juliet:

  I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately and wondering how you’re getting on in Nome. According to Sheila Grant, you’re working with a very junior musher, Cody Garrison, who has yet to successfully race in the Yukon Quest or the Iditarod.

  I have reache
d out to some of my contacts in the area on your behalf, and found a placement for you with Jacques Favreau, a Quebecois musher who recently relocated to Kotzebue, Alaska, which is located to the northwest of Nome.

  Jacques has twice won the Défi Taïga 200, he placed second in the Ivakkak last year, eighth in the Yukon Quest and tenth in the Iditarod. You should be able to relocate to Kotzebue just in time for the first heavy snowfall. With a kennel of twenty-six racing dogs, you will be kept busy working with him and his animals for the remainder of your fellowship.

  I’m sure you will agree with me (and Sheila, with whom I took the liberty of speaking about this terrific opportunity) that staying with Jacques would be a major improvement in your learning experience, and I hope this gesture will—in some small way—make amends for the way we parted. Please let me know when Jacques may expect you in Kotzebue.

  I didn’t expect to miss you quite as much as I do, Juliet.

  Be well and with much affection,

  Glenn

  I finish reading and slam my laptop closed, jumping up from my desk seat and eyeing the computer like a snake.

  “How dare you!” I growl, clenching my jaw with fury.

  I plop down on my air mattress, then lie back, staring up at the ceiling, my body practically shaking with anger.

  What right does Steinfuck have to walk back into my life and call the shots? And fucking Sheila? She approved this switch-up without even mentioning it to me? No. Fucking...no. I’m not going anywhere. Absolutely not.

  Crossing back over to my desk, I hit Reply, and start writing a message to Steinfuck, cc’ing Dr. Grant.

  Dear Professor Steinbuck:

  Thank you for your interest in my fellowship, but I am having an excellent experience with Cody Garrison, who has allowed me unfettered access to his dogs, and is, in fact, training me to race the Qimmiq, instead of just allowing me to observe his interactions with the eighteen dogs in his care. It’s been a very hands-on experience so far, and as Dr. Grant can share with you, I have already submitted over a hundred pages of notes that act as the basis for this dissertation. As generous as it is, your offer to work with Jacques Favreau comes a bit too late. I am sure you can appreciate that after six weeks of research and bonding with Mr. Garrison’s animals, I’m not anxious to start over.