by Katy Regnery
Mr. Garrison plans to race in the Iditarod, which means that the rigors of his training schedule should be equal to that of Favreau, and with the first snowfall imminent, moving to a different location in Alaska feels illogical.
Thank you, again, for your kind words and thoughtful suggestions.
Juliet Sanderson
I read through what I’ve written before pressing Send, satisfied that I’ve used as professional a tone as possible, then close my laptop.
This is the second time that Glenn’s reached out to me in six weeks, and I really don’t get it. I clearly didn’t mean anything to him. He was sleeping around. So why all of this attention now? Just trying to prove to me that he’s a great professor? I never disputed that fact. I just think he’s a shitty human being.
All of this makes me long for Silvia. (I mean, it’s not like I can talk to Cody about the professor I was banging.) So I unplug my phone from its charger and open a text box to Sil.
JULIET:
Hey, stranger. Miss me yet?
SILVIA:
JULIET! OMG! Long time, no talk! Yes, I miss you! Give me an update!! I haven’t heard from you in weeks!
JULIET:
Well...things took a turn with the guy. The musher. Cody.
SILVIA:
I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! OMG! You’re in love, aren’t you?!
JULIET:
Love is a strong word, Sil. We’re...together.
SILVIA:
Is he AMAZING in bed?
JULIET:
Yes.
SILVIA:
OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG! I knew it! I love this so hard! You’re paving the way for me to find MY hot Alaskan man someday!
JULIET:
LOL. We’ll see.
Hey, I heard from Steinfuck today. He’s interfering in my project. He wanted me to leave here and go observe a different musher all the way across the state.
SILVIA:
I’m not surprised. Your guy is hot.
JULIET:
How would Steinfuck know that? And why would it matter?
SILVIA:
It’s called the internet...and because you two used to fuck.
JULIET:
Okay. But he didn’t want to be with me. Obviously.
SILVIA:
Did he say that? I don’t remember him saying that.
JULIET:
Don’t you remember? He was with that other girl, Sil.
SILVIA:
Right. I know, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t want to be with you too. He probably wanted to be with both of you. Alphas don’t like to choose, J, and they certainly don’t like to be rejected. They want to mate with WHO they want WHEN they want. You know that. In fact, by walking away from him, you probably triggered some sort of biological chase instinct in him.
Ugh.
She’s right.
If Glenn sees himself as an alpha male, he wants to fuck all the bitches he can. And as the one bitch he cannot have anymore, I’ve instigated a stalking instinct in Glenn. He wants what he can’t have. That’s why he can’t stop thinking about me. That’s why he’s meddling in my business. And the fact that my man is movie-actor-hot and ten years younger than Steinfuck is probably driving him nuts.
Well, too bad.
I don’t want him. Not at all. Not even a little bit.
In fact, when I think back on the brief and tawdry sexcapade I shared with Glenn and compare it to what I’m sharing with Cody right now, the differences are so vast as to make my liaison with Glenn feel like a raindrop...while what I have with Cody feels more like an ocean.
JULIET:
You’re exactly right! Thanks, Sil. I miss you! Talk soon?
SILVIA:
You bet! And while you’re up there, do some recon for me! xo
Downstairs, I hear Cody come inside and turn on the sink, no doubt starting tonight’s dinner routine, and I smile, plugging my phone back in and running downstairs, eager to help him in any way I can.
***
Cody
Thanksgiving.
It’s all I can think about lately.
That, for four days, Juliet won’t be barefoot in the kitchen making breakfast,
won’t be sitting next to me in the golf cart or behind me in the sled while we run the dogs,
won’t wash her hair in my shower with her vanilla shampoo,
won’t fall asleep reading on the couch and need to be carried to bed,
won’t reach for me in the night, peppering my lips with kisses, or guiding me into the willing warmth of her body,
won’t be the last thing my eyes see when I fall asleep at night or the first when I wake up in the morning,
won’t be...here.
And it hurts, which is crazy, because I’ve only known her for six weeks.
But that’s all the time it took for me to fall in love with her: six weeks...to fall totally and completely in love.
I had no idea I was capable for feeling this much...for anyone. And now that I know, I can’t decide if it’s a blessing or a curse because losing her is inevitable, but I don’t know how I will survive it.
When I lost my fingers, the doctor told me that once in a while, I might still feel them, and they might cause me pain. He called it “phantom pain,” and I’m reminded of that now: the pain of something you once had that’s now gone.
One day soon, I will reach for Juliet only to discover that she’s no longer there, and I will figure out how to deal with that eventuality, but fuck me, but I cannot bear to lose any days between then and now.
I don’t care if it’s pushy or not: I need to know her plans. And maybe more important, I need her to know that I want her to stay.
After the dogs have been fed and our dinner dishes have been washed, I look for her in our room, only to realize she’s in the shower. I can hear John Denver singing “Annie’s Song” through the wall, and I sit down on the bed for a second, intending to wait for her. I’ll bring up Thanksgiving as soon as she’s finished...but then I imagine her in the shower, her skin slick from warm water and soap, and another plan quickly takes shape.
When I open the curtain, standing before her in my birthday suit, with a massive erection, I half expect her to tell me to get lost, but she grins at me, giggling as she leans back to get the suds out of her long hair.
“You coming...in?” she asks.
“I was thinking about it,” I say, my lips twitching because I love it when she’s a little sassy. It turns me on like a lightbulb.
“Not sure there’s room for the three of us,” she says, glancing meaningfully at my cock before leaning her head back again.
She knows full and well that leaning back shoves her breasts in my face, and I waste no time reaching for them as I step inside the steamy stall with her. They’re slick as wet silk, her skin smooth and pink from the hot water. I lean forward and take one nipple between my lips, puckering around it before I let it go. Her breathing and heart rate speed up—I can tell by the way her chest rises and lowers, by the way the heartbeat in her neck suddenly beckons me like a beacon. With my left hand, I fondle her other breast while my lips touch down on her throat, licking that pulse point so slowly, I can feel her heartbeat on my tongue.
Just then, the song changes and John Denver intones, “It’s by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done...to be so in love with you, so alone...”
I close my eyes, pulling her into my arms and holding her tightly against my body. She winds her arms around my neck, letting them hang loose and limp over my shoulders. And suddenly, what started off as sexy shower time, has turned into us slow dancing under a gentle spray of warm water.
“Don’t leave,” I hear myself whisper close to her ear.
“What?” she murmurs.
“Stay here for Thanksgiving,” I say. “I know—”
“Cody—”
“—it probably doesn’t sound like much fun, but I’ll...I can make it better, um, fun. We could have Jonas and Rita over,
or—”
“Cody—”
“Before you say no, just...just think about it. I’ll do—I mean, I’m an okay cook, right? I’ll do all the cooking and you can just—”
“Cody!”
She leans back, looking up at me, her arms still draped around my neck, though she clasps her hands together and her eyes flare like she means business.
“What?” I ask.
There are droplets of water sticking to her eyelashes like diamond dust, and my heart clutches because she’s so beautiful and I can offer her so little. Surely, she’s about to tell me that she’s already made plans to go hom—
“I’d love to stay,” she says.
I’m so surprised, I blink at her, my lips parting and my chest tightening with a deep sob I never felt coming. I cough to cover it, pulling her back into my arms because if I look into her sweet, kind eyes, it’ll be too much.
“You’re...staying?” I ask.
“Yeah. I mean, I want to,” she says, “if it’s okay with you, which I guess...”
“It is.”
She takes a deep breath, pressing her lips to my shoulder for a second before laying her cheek on my shower-soaked skin.
“My brother sent me an email with all these flights this morning, but I couldn’t even write back. It felt...I mean, the thought of leaving felt...”
I stroke her back because if her feelings for me are anything like mine for her, I know exactly how it felt. “Awful.”
“Awful,” she agrees in a soft and small voice. “I don’t know what’s happening between us. I only know that I think about you all the time. I love being here with you, learning from you...I’m not saying this right...”
“You’re doing great, beautiful.”
“I want to stay,” she says, with a soft, almost surprised, laugh. “So I guess I will.”
She leans up to look at me, her eyes lingering on my lips. I know what she wants. I want the same thing. Reaching behind her, I turn off the water, then take her hand, leading her out of the shower.
Grabbing a towel from the shelf beside the shower, I wrap her up, rubbing her arms before giving her a light smack on the bottom. “I’ll meet you in bed.”
“Don’t be long,” she orders me, slipping out the door as I grab a second towel for myself.
Because I don’t want to let my woman down, I dry myself quickly, rolling on a little deodorant and brushing my teeth for good measure.
When I walk naked into our bedroom, she’s turned on the Christmas lights only, and the room is filled with a warm glow. Juliet lies in the middle of the bed on her side, her hair towel-dried and wavy, her skin milky and smooth in the dim light.
“How is this possible?” I ask, lying down on my back beside her.
“This?”
“You and me.”
“Oh,” she says, dropping her index finger on my chest to trace hearts on my skin. “Us.”
“Us. It should be impossible.”
“It’s not.”
“A beautiful, young goddess like you. A broken, old veteran like me—”
“With a face like a movie star,” she interjects, placing a sweet kiss inside one of the hearts she’s drawn.
“You’re ten years younger than I am,” I say.
“Yep,” she says. “When you got your driver’s license, I was in first grade.”
“Does that bother you?”
“My last boyfriend was in his forties, so...no.”
I didn’t know this. I don’t like it, because I irrationally hate any man who’s ever been intimate with her. But some stupid part of me is also comforted by it because it means that liking older guys is a pattern for her, not some weird new experiment that she’s trying out for the first time.
“Why’d you break up with him?”
She looks at me for a second, about to say something, then goes back to drawing. “He broke it off.”
“Right before they hauled him away to an insane asylum?”
She snorts with laughter and the sound is so awesome, I reach for her under the arms, sliding her body onto my chest. I can feel the tight points of her nipples against my pecs, and it makes me suck in a breath as my cock, which never really softened much in the shower, thickens and hardens.
Her blue eyes lock onto my green as she sits up, grasping onto the base of my erection. Positioning herself over it, she lowers her body slowly, never taking her eyes away from mine, and fuck if it’s not the most intense thing I’ve ever experienced.
“Juliet...” I say, gasping softly as she sheaths me to the balls. “I’m...I’m falling for you.”
She leans forward, placing her palms flat on my chest. “I know.”
“Hard,” I say.
“I know,” she says again, dropping her lips to mine as I reach for her hips, so I can guide her movements.
I pull her forward, impaling her, then push her back, before sliding her close again. After a few minutes of my being in control, however, her hands land on mine when I’m in deep. She stays still, with my cock fully inside of her, and squeezes the walls of her pussy around me. I gasp, feeling my balls, swollen with cum, tighten. While we’re connected as intimately as humanly possible, she takes my scarred, mangled hands and places them over her perfect breasts, then covers them with her own.
And that’s when I realize why it’s been so easy to fall in love with this woman.
Because she doesn’t shrink back from the ugly parts of me.
Because she embraces all of me—the good parts, the ugly parts, and everything in between.
Still holding my hands against her skin, she looks into my eyes.
“I’m falling for you too,” she says softly, her eyes glistening with emotion.
Jackknifing into a sitting position, I wrap my arms around her, pulling her tightly against my chest. She wraps her legs around my waist, and I thrust up into the sweet heaven of her body once...twice...three times.
Her forehead falls on my shoulder, as she goes rigid, then slack, her muscles vibrating against my cock. It only takes one more deep thrust for me to climax with her, coming in surges of hot cum that baptize the sacred shrine where I worship.
Holding each other tightly, we ride out our shared bliss together: two unlikely halves of a perfect whole, two wandering souls now bound by new love.
Chapter 10
Juliet
The smell of roasting turkey basted with butter wakes me up...and if there’s a better alarm clock in the entire world, I have yet to figure out what it is.
At home, my mother and father are no doubt bustling around the kitchen, getting everything ready for my extended family, who’ll be arriving any minute. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, just about to end now, will be showing on every TV, and Braydon will be helping set the table with his girlfriend, Kristy.
My family was disappointed in my decision to stay in Nome for Thanksgiving, but I agreed to come home for Christmas, which softened the blow. I have the same feelings about leaving Cody at Christmas as I had about leaving him at Thanksgiving, but maybe—just maybe—I can persuade him to come home with me. No, I don’t know who’d look after the dogs, and no, I don’t know if a man who hasn’t left Alaska in over a decade would even consider coming to Montana for a few days, but I’ll wait for the right moment, cross my fingers, and hope for the best.
The light filtering in through the windows tells me it’s much later than usual, and I look at my phone to see that it’s almost ten o’clock. Cody let me sleep in, which means he’s not only preparing Thanksgiving dinner for us and our guests, Jonas, Rita, and their son, Mitchell, but he also took care of the dogs’ breakfast on his own.
Stretching my arms over my head, I think about Cody in broader terms, further down the road of life—as a husband and a father. He’ll be the best, I decide, feeling envious of the woman he marries someday. He’ll be hands-on and involved, grateful for the people he loves and eager to make them happy. Will she even realize how lucky she is? How lucky her
children are? Will she know that of all the men in the world she could have married, that she got a man who will intentionally and faithfully love her longer and harder and better than most other men would even be willing to try?
I sigh, sitting up and swinging my legs off the side of the bed.
I hate her, I think.
I hate her so much for the amazing future she’s going to have with him.
I’ll be a vet in Missoula, working with my dad and brother. I’ll probably end up marrying one of Braydon’s friends, who, honestly, are all very nice guys.
But none of them is Cody, whispers my heart.
Maybe not, I think. But we’ll buy a beautiful house in a nice neighborhood, with a green lawn and landscaped gardens. We’ll have two or three kids, that play little league or take ballet lessons, who will grow up with lots of family nearby.
It’ll be a good life, I tell myself. The sort of life you always dreamed of, Juliet.
I look around Cody’s bedroom—at the mostly bare walls and mismatched furniture. Outside it’s gray and cold, and after only two snowfalls, the icy winter hasn’t even set in yet. He’s chosen to live at the edge of the world. And truly, I have loved being here with him for a few months. But forever?
I sigh.
I can’t picture it. I don’t think Nome would make me happy long-term...even if it included Cody.
But today isn’t a day for such worries, I think, standing up and shrugging into my bathrobe. Today is a day for gratitude.
After all, it’s Thanksgiving, and I’m spending it with the man I adore.
***
“So Mitchy sees that bear comin’ at him, and he freezes,” says Rita, telling a story at the Thanksgiving table, “and it’s all Jonas can do to get the shotgun aimed in time, but hell if he don’t. Got that grizzly between the eyes. Bear went down. Son was spared. An’ I got a nice, new rug.”
Mitchell Beaudoin clears his throat, then rolls his eyes at me with embarrassment. As the youngest guest at our table, he’s been getting a little hazing by his parents, and while it’s good-natured, I’m sensing he’s had enough.
