by Katy Regnery
I sit there on the carpet, across from her, and watch her face as her mouth drops open. I’m fairly certain that she didn’t mean to say that last part because she blinks at me, then clenches her jaw tight and stares down at her lap.
“And now you’re also the jerk that made me say too much before I was ready,” she murmurs, her voice small and upset.
I’m in love with you!
I reach for her hands with mine, letting her lace her fingers through mine where she can, and swallowing over the lump in my throat.
In love with...me. It can’t be. It’s not possible.
“You’re...in love with m-me?” my voice breaks on the whispered words.
“Yeah,” she says, staring down at our hands. “I am.”
I squeeze her hands in mine, and speak softly, my words prayerlike and reverent. “I never dared to hope that someone like you could fall in love with someone like me.”
“Sorry.” She finally looks up at me, her eyes glassy. “I couldn’t help it.”
My eyes flood with tears, but I’m somehow able to blink them back. She is holding my hands with hers—my hands!—and she’s...in love with me.
“I’m in love with you too,” I tell her.
She sniffles. “I know. Rita told me.”
“I never told Rita!”
“You didn’t have to,” she says, a little smile finally brightening her face.
“It’s that obvious?”
“I guess it is.” Suddenly, she frowns. “So please stop saying that I should be with someone else, because it’s like a thorn in my paw. Or a knife in my heart. It hurts me, Cody. I only want to be with you.”
“I promise,” I say. “I won’t say anything like that again.”
“You can trust this,” she says.
This? Our feelings? Yes. Okay. I will trust that what we feel is real.
But the future? As she said earlier, she has no idea what will happen when she leaves in January, and neither do I. But if I worry about the terrible-then, I’ll miss out on the spectacular-now.
“I trust it,” I tell her, standing up and pulling her to her feet.
We undress quickly and fall in to bed, but then, while the dogs sleep soundly in front of the fire, we love each other slowly, all night long, our bodies tangled together until the dawn.
Chapter 11
Juliet
“Juliet! You can’t let Gus call the shots!” yells Cody from behind me. “She’s not listening to you! You’re going to get the dogs, or—God forbid, yourself—killed!”
Since Thanksgiving, we’ve had six major snowfalls, and Cody and I have been racing in sleds over snow for two weeks now. A clear day like today means a five-hour, fifty-mile run under blue skies with bright sun. It’s cold as hell, but I’ve never experienced anything as unique and exhilarating as sled dog racing.
That said, today was terrifying, and Cody is right.
As much as I love Augusta, and as much as I’ve championed her, she’s not working out as a lead dog. She’s ignoring my commands and gets easily distracted by new sights and smells.
Today, while I was telling the team to turn right, she insisted on going left. Why? I discovered her reason about two minutes later when we happened upon a fourteen-point bull elk, who was not at all pleased to have eight dogs suddenly yapping at him.
He “bugled” angrily—a unique sound halfway between a scream and wail that reminded me a little of what a whale call might sound like out of water—leaning down to show his antlers to the dogs and edging forward like he might charge.
I screamed for Cheyenne and Augusta to back up, but Augusta kept urging them forward into a confrontation only curtailed when Cody caught up with us. Blocking our path, he fired his shotgun twice into the air, which, thank God, scared the elk, who ran back into the woods. But even then, Augusta tried to pursue him, which meant that my team got tangled up with his and had to be unraveled and straightened out before we could all head home.
It was a dangerous and awful experience and forced me to recognize what Cody knew all along: Augusta isn’t cut out to be a lead dog. She needs to be demoted to team dog, for now.
I pull into the snowy area beside the kennel, exhausted after five hours of sledding and the elk encounter, and look over my shoulder at Cody.
“I know,” I say, sliding my ski goggles to my forehead. “I know.”
“Whoa, boys! Whoa! Whoaaaa.”
Cody’s team stops beside mine, and he swipes at his nose with a gloved hand, shaking his head. “She can’t—”
“I know!” I say again, leaning down to begin the arduous process of unharnessing the dogs. “She can’t be lead dog.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, putting his hands on his hips. “But you scared the hell out of me back there.”
I unhook Cheyenne and August first, opening the kennel yard for them and watching them trot over to their houses to wait for a snack.
“I scared the hell out of myself,” I tell him, unlatching Topeka, Juneau, Helena, Salem, Olympia, and Phoenix. I still need to take their harnesses off, but at least they aren’t attached to each other and the sled anymore. “I’m going to get them food.”
I head over to the grub shack, scooping up eight pieces of semithawed frozen meat strips. The dogs are howling by the time I enter the kennel, and I give each her snack, telling them all what a good job they did before heading back to my sled.
It takes Cody about five times as long to unlatch his dogs, so I help him, getting his two swing dogs, two team dogs, and two wheel dogs unlatched in the same time it takes him to free his leads, Dover and Boston. He herds them all into the kennel area, then grabs snacks for them too.
I remove the racing harnesses from all the dogs and hang up the equipment on pegs in the shipping container while Cody disassembles the sleds and pulls them inside. Once the dogs and sleds are taken care of, we take Denver and Concord, the two male dogs that didn’t race today, into the paddock for some exercise, and lean on the split-level fence side by side.
“What are you going to do?” Cody asks me.
“I don’t know.”
“I think you should consider letting Chey lead alone.”
“A seven-dog team?” I ask.
“She’s the only one willing and ready. I don’t have a second female trained to be lead. Closest in temperament is Salem, I think, but she’s too young.” He shrugs. “Might be I just don’t have a second female lead.”
I know what he means. A good deal of the job a dog can handle is based on his or her inherent nature. Olympia and Phoenix, for instance, are great swing dogs. They’re eager and willing to follow all of Cheyenne’s instructions, enforcing her rule over the team. And Helena, the largest female of the pack, is a perfect wheel dog, using her muscle to carry out my turns and signals from close to the sled.
“I don’t see another leader,” I say.
“There isn’t one,” he agrees. “Let’s try solo lead tomorrow.”
“Who do we cut?” I ask.
“Topeka,” he suggests, watching Denver chase Concord with unrestrained glee. “You need Gus for her strength. Make her a team dog next to Juneau, behind Phoenix and in front of Helena. They’ll keep her in line.”
I look up at him and grin. “Do you know how good you are at this?”
“Yeah?”
“Oh, yeah,” I say, reaching up to cup his cheek with my mittened hand.
Since the snow started in earnest, we’ve been racing for hours a day, and dog meals have become a bigger deal since we’ve added another pot to each feeding, giving them the calories they need.
Still working up our stamina, Cody and I are wiped out after dinner every night and fall into bed utterly exhausted by eight. Though we sleep next to each other, we haven’t had sex in days, and it feels like all we talk about lately is the dogs. It makes sense. The Qimmiq is in five weeks, and I still need a lot of practice to feel comfortable racing. But part of me misses the more carefree days of October and early Nov
ember.
Christmas is only two weeks away, and I haven’t asked Cody to join me yet. I understand the rigors of training now, and I feel certain he’ll say no if I invite him, telling me it’s bad enough that one of us is leaving and he can’t leave too. And even though it makes sense, I’m just not sure I want to be rejected like that. But at the same time, I know I won’t forgive myself if I don’t take a chance and ask.
“You did really good today,” he says. “You must have been scared.”
“I was,” I tell him. “And that godawful noise.”
“The bugling? Yeah. It’s intense.”
“I’ll say. I expected more of a roar and less of a shriek.”
“It’s surprising. That’s for sure.”
I clear my throat. “Hey, um...I wanted to ask you something.”
His elbows still rest on the fence, but he turns away from the dogs, looking at me. “What’s up?”
“So...you know how I’m going home for Christmas?”
His grin fades. “December twenty-third to twenty-sixth. I know.”
“Well, I was just—I mean, I was sort of hoping you’d consider...” I take a deep breath and exhale sharply. “...coming home with me.”
He stares at me, expressionless, like it was the last thing he expected me to say.
“You want me to come to Montana?”
I nod. “I want you to know you’re welcome.”
Inside, I cringe. That’s not really what I mean. Yes, of course he’s welcome, but I really want him to come. In a weird way, his coming to Montana would be a sign that a future—however unlikely—was possible between us. Part of me wants to say that, but part of me doesn’t feel right pressuring him like that.
“Thanks,” he says. “That’s really nice.”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I’ve got eighteen dogs here to look after. I can’t just... leave them.”
“Maybe Jonas and Rita could stop over to feed them and—”
“They need to be training,” he says. “Jonas doesn’t race, and while Rita grew up around sled dogs, using a three-dog team to go to town for groceries is night and day from racing.”
“Will Mitch be home? Maybe he could...”
“You heard him,” says Cody. “We tried to teach him to race. It didn’t take.”
“So...” I say, feeling much more emotional than I’d anticipated. “That’s a no?”
“I’m sorry, darlin’,” he says. “I just don’t see how it would work.”
The way he says darlin’ for the first time curls my toes.
The context in which he says it makes me want to cry.
Because if he’ll never leave Nome, I don’t see how we can work. I appreciate the fact that he’s happy making this tiny town his whole world. But for me? There’s a whole world out there waiting for me, and Nome isn’t enough.
I take a deep breath, but when I exhale, it’s shaky. “Okay.”
“Hey...you’re upset?”
“I just wish...”
We’re interrupted by the sound of an arriving car or truck and the beep-beep of a horn in front of the house.
...things were different.
“Are you expecting anyone?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Nope. You?”
“UPS maybe? I’ll go check it out.”
It’s probably just the postman delivering something I forgot I ordered, but I’m a little relieved for a moment to myself. Fat tears crowd my eyes, and I swipe them away, embarrassed by them. Cody’s never pretended to be anything aside from what he is: a retired Marine living in Nome and racing sled dogs. The choice to accept that life or reject it is up to me.
As I walk around the side of the house, I see a taxi waiting out front. The cabbie sees me and waves, backing up and pulling out of the driveway. I continue around the house to the front door where I see a man standing on Cody’s front porch.
“Can I help you?”
And I swear to God, I almost faint when Glenn Steinbuck, dressed in jeans, boots and a brand-new parka, turns around to greet me.
“Jules!” he cries. “There you are!”
I stop dead in my tracks, staring at him, my mouth ajar, more shocked than I’ve ever been in my entire life.
“Wha...How did...What are you doing here, Glenn?”
He jumps off the porch and approaches me, his arms wide. “I came to see you, baby.”
I take a step back, crossing my arms over my chest. “You flew from Minneapolis to Nome to...see me?”
“Not exactly. I was in Anchorage for an Iditarod Trail Committee meeting. Decided to catch a puddle jumper over to Kotzebue to see my old friend, Jacques, and I couldn’t resist taking a commuter flight to check on you too.”
“You didn’t have to do that,” I say.
“I know, baby,” he says, reaching for my arms and pulling at them, forcing me to stop clenching them. “I wanted to.”
He pulls me against his chest and hugs me, even though it should have been clear from my body language that I wasn’t interested in being touched by him.
“Juliet? Who’s here...?”
Cody’s voice drifts off as he rounds the house to find me in Glenn’s arms. I jump away from my erstwhile professor, pushing against his chest to make space between us.
“C-Cody...this is Glenn, um, Steinbuck. Glenn, this is Cody Garrison.”
“Hey, there, Garrison. Good to meet you. I was Juliet’s, um, professor...back in Minneapolis.”
Glenn offers his hand to Cody, who looks at it for a second, then shakes it. I watch Glenn’s face carefully, catching the slight furrow of his brows when he shakes Cody’s gloved hand. Cody pulls away quickly.
“Is this a surprise?” he asks, looking back and forth between me and Glenn.
“Yes,” I say. And not a good one.
“I was just telling Jules...I was in Anchorage for an ITC meeting, then jumped a commuter flight to come say hello.”
“Long way for a surprise hello,” Cody observes, putting his hands on his hips.
“Well, Jules and I were...special friends.”
The way he says it is so gross, I want to gag for ever letting him touch me.
Cody flicks his eyes to me. “Jules, huh?”
“Pet name,” says Glenn, winking at me.
Enough is enough. “Glenn, I was pretty clear about staying here to train. I’m not interested in the opportunity in Kotzebue.”
“Opportunity?” asks Cody.
“Yes,” Glenn interjects. “A few weeks ago I told Jules about a musher in Kotzebue—maybe you’ve heard of him—Jacques Favreau?”
Cody doesn’t give anything away, just stares stone-faced at Glenn.
Glenn grins, sensing an advantage he doesn’t have. “Well, he offered to let Jules stay with him, observe, train, et cetera. No offense, Garrison, because this a cute operation you have here, but Favreau’s kennel is...” He kisses his fingers like a chef. “...first class.”
Sliding his eyes to me, Cody says, “You didn’t mention this to me.”
“Because I told Glenn I wasn’t interested. Immediately. In no uncertain terms. I told him I wanted to stay here with you.” I turn to Glenn. “Did we cross wires somewhere? I felt like I was clear in my email.”
“Oh, you were,” he says, smiling at me. “I just thought a personal visit could convince you to reconsider.”
It’s the sexy smile he used to flash at me from behind the podium at the front of the lecture hall—the one that used to get me turned on. Now? It just reminds me of a puddle-deep affair I’d just as well forget.
“I couldn’t resist. I was so close,” Glenn adds.
“Close? Anchorage?” asks Cody. “It’s an hour and a half. By plane.”
“Details,” says Glenn. “When I want to be somewhere, I make it happen.” He smirks at Cody, then skims his eyes to me. “I’m used to getting what I want.”
Enough is enough...take two. I lift my chin, hoping my
eyes are as icy as I feel. “Well, I’m afraid this visit isn’t welcome, Glenn.”
“Jules, give me a break,” he says, looking uncertain for the first time since arriving. “I flew all the way here.”
“I didn’t ask you to do that,” I say, taking a step closer to Cody.
Glenn looks at me, then Cody. Me, then Cody.
“Oh, shit,” he says. He chuckles and it’s a nasty, hollow sound. “You’re fucking him.”
Cody takes a step forward, nostrils flaring, and suddenly I’m reminded of the bull elk earlier today. I grab his arm and pull him back. “He’s not worth it.”
“I’m not worth it?” Glenn demands with another snarky laugh. “I’m a fully tenured college professor. A doctor. A respected animal expert. A valuable Iditarod veterinarian. Who’s this guy? Some no-name musher who shakes hands like a girl!”
“Shut up, Glenn,” I snarl, holding Cody’s arm tighter.
I can feel the coiled anger he’s throwing off like heat. Cody may not be able to make a perfect fist, but he’s practically made of muscle. In a fight, Glenn’s going down. No contest.
Alphas don’t like to choose, J, and they certainly don’t like to be rejected.
Sil’s text slides through my mind, and it occurs to me that I’m watching a dick-measuring contest unfold here. I’m the female they’ve both mated with, and Glenn thinks he’s the alpha, but he’s about to get his ass beat by Cody, who is the alpha.
“Glenn, I’ll call you a cab,” I say. “You need to go. Now.”
“Fuck you, Jules. You don’t tell me what to do.”
My hand on Cody’s sleeve is no match for his fury.
He surges forward with a low growl and head-butts Glenn in the chest, knocking him to his back in the driveway. Leaping over to his rival, Cody kneels down, straddling Glenn’s body with muscular thighs, then uses Glenn’s face like a punching bag. Left, right. Left, right. Lucky for Glenn, Cody’s gloves act as shock absorbers and don’t allow the full force of his anger to break every bone in Glenn’s stupid face.
