Nome-o Seeks Juliet (An Odds-Are-Good Standalone Romance, #2) Page 3

  Is it cozy? No.

  But I don’t require cozy. I require a bed to sleep in, a carpet where a recovering dog can rest in front of the stove in my bedroom, and a chair where I can sit down to lace up my boots.

  And that’s all well and good for me...a single man.

  But for a woman in her midtwenties from the Lower Forty-Eight?

  It might seem a little rough.

  I throw off my covers to inspect the rest of my hovel and hear Viola’s paws hit the wooden floor to follow me. To my right is a functional bathroom with a shower, water heater, sink, and john. At the end of the hallway is a great room with an open plan sitting area and kitchen. The sitting area has two mismatched couches covered with blankets and bookshelves so full of books, I’ve started making piles on the floor. I put my hands on my hips and, best I can, look around through the fresh eyes of a young woman.

  It’s bleak.

  My eyes drift to the far side of the room where a staircase leads upstairs to a loft. Hmm. I probably haven’t been up there in a year or more.

  Telling Viola to stay downstairs, I climb the steep steps to the loft and stand at the top of the stairs. It’s a large room, the length of my kitchen, bedroom and bathroom combined, and has lots of windows, including a huge round one at the apex of the roof. It’s about twenty degrees cooler up here, but that could be remedied with a plug-in heater. Over the years, I’ve used this space for storage, so there’s some broken furniture, old dog harnesses, a beat-up Christmas tree and a few boxes, but it wouldn’t take more than an afternoon to clear it out. I could order a few things on Amazon Prime to furnish it. A bed, mattress, sheets, and a bureau. Maybe a mirror too. Girls like mirrors.

  True, she’d have to go downstairs to use the toilet, but maybe I could figure out how to run a pipe from my bathroom through the floor to the upstairs so she could have a sink. Wouldn’t need more than a faucet, basin, and drainpipe to make it happen.

  “It could work,” I whisper, hustling back downstairs to finish my email and feeling hopeful.

  My hand skims along the bannister as I head downstairs, and for a second, for just a few seconds, I can almost feel my fingers. All ten of them, like I’m a whole man again.

  And then, just as quickly as the sensation came over me, it disappears.

  It’s like that when you lose a limb—a hand or arm, leg or fingers—you feel them sometimes. On more than one occasion, they’ve even caused me pain.

  I subscribe to the theory that somewhere between my nervous system and brain, there’s a sensation misfire. My brain remembers how it felt to be whole and gives my nervous system instructions for all ten fingers. When only five digits receive and answer the call meant for ten, sometimes there’s pain, whether psychosomatic or real.

  I can tell you this: It feels real. It feels terrible.

  When I get to the bottom of the stairs, I hold up my hands and stare at them.

  It’s been thirteen years, and it still makes me gasp softly. Something inside me wants to believe that it’s not true. That it can’t possibly be true.

  My left hand looks like someone took a knife and cut cleanly from the base of my middle finger to my wrist, hacking off my index finger and thumb. The stump is mostly smooth and even, almost like the fingers never existed at all.

  My right hand is much more startling. Grotesquely frozen like a deranged Hawaiian surfer telling everyone to “hang loose,” my three middle fingers have ghosted my hand, leaving melted, puckered skin and a flesh-claw in their wake.

  How will Juliet Sanderson react to my injuries?

  The thought drifts through my head before I can halt it, bringing uncomfortable follow-up questions with it:

  Will she look away, disgusted by the sight of my mangled flesh? Or will she feel sorry for me? Will she decide that a man with such a profound physical disability can’t be trusted to train her, and inform me that she’s heading back to Montana?

  Viola, who can sense my changes in mood, whines at me, rubbing her cold, wet nose against my palm.

  “It’s okay, girl,” I tell my dog. “If she takes a look and doesn’t want to race with me, I’ll drive her to the airport and buy her a ticket home.”

  I lift my chin with a bravado I don’t feel and head back to my room to finish my email.

  ***

  I don’t have many friends.

  I have even fewer female friends.

  I know a few guys on the mushing circuit who I admire and respect, but my only real friends after almost a decade in Nome are Rita and Jonas. They’re the only people I really trust, anyway. So the next day, after I feed and exercise my dogs, then move the odds and ends from the loft into the shipping container behind my house, I stop by the Klondike to talk to Rita.

  “Cody!” she greets me, her dark eyes twinkling with kindness. “Having lunch here today?”

  “Um, sure,” I say, though lunch wasn’t my main objective in coming into town.

  I need to order things for Juliet’s room, and I don’t know what the hell to get. I need Rita’s advice.

  She places a menu before me. Without glancing at it, I say, “I’ll take a burger with fries and a side of macaroni salad, please.”

  “You got a summer body, Cody.” She tilts her head to the side. “You gotta pack the muscle back on for racing.”

  Actually, I’m made of muscle. Muscle’s all I am. If I stood up and lifted my shirt, she’d see the tight cording of a skeleton virtually covered in muscle. I’m sinewy and strong. My dogs and I eat a similar diet of meat, vegetables, and fruit. What I probably need is a little more fat. Muscle alone is not going to keep me warm this winter.

  “Okay,” I say, “I’ll take a slice of pie and ice cream too.”

  She grins at me, disappears to shout the order at someone in the kitchen, and then returns to set a place for me.

  “Uh...Rita,” I say, “can I ask you something?”

  “You can ask me anything,” she says, putting a paper placemat, fork, knife, spoon, and napkin in front of me.

  I slide my phone to her, open to my Amazon account. “If you were going to, uh, to decorate a room for a girl...for a woman...what would you buy for her?”

  Rita stares at me for a beat. “What woman?”

  “The one coming to do the Qimmiq with me.”

  “Uh-huh. She stayin’ with you, Cody?”

  “I hope so. I’m waiting for an answer from her, but if she says yes, I want to have everything ready.”

  “She, uh...she goin’ to live with you up there at your place?” Her eyes search my face like she’s not sure about this plan.

  “Yep.” I nod. “She said she needs a place to stay. I can offer her the loft at my house.”

  “You gotta loft in that house? Ain’t never seen it.”

  “It’s nice and big,” I tell Rita. I cleaned it out good this morning. It’s just clean wood and shiny windows now. “But it’s empty. I want to make it nice for her.”

  Her lips tilt up for a millisecond before she puts on her reading glasses. She picks up my phone. “You want me to choose some things?”

  “Yeah. If you don’t mind. Like, um...she’ll need a bed.”

  “Maybe a good air mattress,” says Rita, typing the words into a search bar.

  We quickly decide on a queen-sized, comfort-top air mattress with a built-in pump and good reviews.

  “You’ll need a pillow or two. Sheets...a nice down comforter,” says Rita.

  “Add it all to my cart.”

  “What colors you want?” she asks, scrolling through various options.

  “I don’t care.”

  “How ’bout sage green? That’s nice, right? Neutral?”

  “Sure. Green’s nice.”

  Rita clicks on a few items, then looks up at me. “What else?”

  I shrug. “I don’t...”

  “How ’bout an area rug? The floor’ll be cold up there, right?”

  “Yeah. Good thinking.”

  Rita’s talking more
to herself now than me. “...little nightstand. Yep. And a lamp. Uh-huh. Ooo. That’s a nice green. Should have a chair for relaxing, probably. Maybe a bean bag sorta thingee...”

  “And a plug-in heater,” I say.

  “Oh, yep. A heater. That’s a good idea.” She types in something else, nodding at what she finds. “You want her to have a little desk and chair?”

  “Probably, yeah,” I say. “And a mirror.”

  “Standing mirror. Check. How ’bout shelves for her clothes?”

  “Yeah. Good. How much are we up to?”

  Rita swipes the screen and taps twice. “Four hundred and eighty-two dollars and fifty-six cents.”

  Whew. I can’t remember the last time I spent that much money on something that had nothing to do with my dogs...but then I remember: this has everything to do with them. Without Juliet, we can’t race. Without Juliet and the Qimmiq, no Iditarod.

  “Buy it.” I blink at her, then clear my throat. “Buy it all.”

  Rita taps my phone a couple of times, giggles with glee, then places it back down on the bar so I can see the confirmation.

  “Free shipping and it’ll all be here in seven to nine days. Don’tcha just love Amazon Prime?” She winks at me. “I’ll go check on that burger.”

  As I watch her go, my phone vibrates on the bar to tell me I have an incoming message.

  Assuming it’s just a confirmation from Amazon, my heart thunders when I see it’s from Juliet. This is the moment of truth. Will her answer be yes or no?

  I swipe the screen with my thumb and tap on my in-box, holding my breath.

  Dear Cody:

  Thank you for offering me a place to stay. I accept.

  I look forward to learning from you.

  You can enter us into the Qimmiq as a team. With your help, I hope I’ll be able to finish.

  Please send a packing list ASAP and a street address where I can ship my belongings.

  My flight will arrive in Nome at 7:20 p.m. on September 30. I assume you can pick me up at the airport. If not, please advise. If so, see you then.

  Juliet

  “She said yes,” I whisper to myself, a little stunned that my insane plan to find a racing partner in a dating magazine has somehow worked.

  It worked! Sweet Jesus, she said yes!

  My lips twitch, and I realize that for the first time in a very, very long time, I want to smile. I look around the bar, maybe searching for a friendly face with whom to share my good news, but I’m all alone. That’s okay. Maybe it’s good that no one witnesses me sitting alone at a bar, grinning like a lunatic on the prowl.

  She said yes. Hallelujah.

  While I’m sitting there smiling at no one, my eyes slide back to the top of the bar, where my disfigured hands are resting.

  I gulp softly, remembering myself.

  I didn’t tell her about my disability. I didn’t want to give her a reason not to come.

  Please God, I think, clenching my jaw until it aches, please give me this one good thing.

  Please don’t let the day she arrives also be the day she decides to go.

  Chapter 3

  Juliet

  Ten days.

  That’s all the time I had to temporarily relocate my life from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Nome, Alaska. Ten whirlwind days that came and went in a rush of shopping, packing, shipping, and good-byes.

  Now that I’m sitting on Alaska Airlines flight 153 from Kotzebue, Alaska, to Nome, I can barely remember them.

  I look down at the tiny seaside village of Kotzebue as we take off, marveling that an hour ago, I’d never even heard of Kotzebue, let alone considered visiting. I thought this was a direct flight from Anchorage to Nome, so I was surprised when we landed in Kotzebue, deplaned and hung out for about an hour.

  During that hour, I learned that Kotzebue calls itself “The Gateway to the Arctic” and is home to roughly three thousand souls, which, incidentally, is the population of Nome too.

  Nome...where I’ll arrive in about forty minutes. And where I’ll be spending the next four months living and training with Cody Garrison, my trainer, teammate, and landlord.

  Fingers crossed Cody Garrison isn’t some psycho ex-con who lures unsuspecting women to his remote cabin outside of Nome with promises of dog sled training, only to murder them in their sleep.

  “Anything to drink, miss?” asks the flight attendant.

  Just in the nick of time. “Vodka, please. Straight up.”

  “No mixer?” she asks. “No ice?”

  “No cup. Just the bottle. Or two,” I say, thanking her when she puts them in my grabby hand.

  I unscrew the top of the first bottle and take a big gulp, wrinkling my nose at the burn as the liquor slides down my throat.

  To be honest, I don’t know why I’m nervous. After I got Cody’s full name and street address, I found a reputable detective agency in Minneapolis who ran a background check on him, and they didn’t find anything disturbing.

  According to the report, Cody Michael Garrison was born in 1985, in Sutter Creek, a suburb outside of Sacramento, California, to a now-deceased father and mother for whom they could not find a current address.

  He graduated from high school in 2003, and immediately enlisted in the US Marine Corps. After rising to the rank of Corporal in 2006, he was (suddenly) Honorably Discharged from the service.

  Of note? He is also listed as “retired,” which confuses me a little. Why would he retire at age twenty-one? The only reason I could find, after scouring the internet, is that he was likely placed on the PDRL (Permanent Disability Retired List).

  Okay. Fine. But his ad read that he was “fit.” So...is the disability mental? Like, PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) or some other issue that rendered part of him mentally disabled? I thought about asking him over email, but then I reminded myself that for the purposes of the fellowship and my study, it doesn’t really matter if Cody Garrison has a mental disability or not. What matters is that he’s an active sled dog racer, and he’s letting me live at his place during the rigorous three to four months of training prior to racing season.

  Anyway, there were no major red flags in his profile. In the thirteen years between leaving the military and now, he has never been arrested, owes nothing on credit cards or in back taxes, has never been married, has no children, claims no dependents, owns his land and home outright, and has placed in the top twenty-five in most of his races.

  The next slug of vodka goes down smoother than the first.

  The Wi-Fi’s free on this flight, so I take out my phone and open an internet browser. I’ve checked out Cody’s musher profile so many times on the Copper Basin 300 website, at this point, when I start typing c...o...p, my browser opens to his musher page, which includes his picture.

  Staring at his face, my last gulp of liquor slides down my throat like liquid silk.

  Cody Michael Garrison is hot.

  I mean, I can only see his face, of course, so for all I know, the rest of him is hideous, but his face is decidedly handsome.

  He’s got light eyes—Green? Blue? I can’t wait to find out—and dirty blond hair with gold highlights. He wears a moustache and beard, the length of which he keeps somewhere between scruffy and bushy. It’s thin enough to highlight, not hide, a strong jawline and square chin, which I like in a man.

  But it’s his lips that make me sigh as I unscrew the top of my second vodka bottle.

  I lock on them like a laser on target.

  His bottom lip is plush and full, and I know when I meet him in person, my eyes will instantly beeline to it, wondering what it would feel like caught between my teeth.

  Cody’s lips remind me of Brad Pitt’s when he was in A River Runs through It, which happens to be my dad’s all-time favorite movie. I spent many a night swooning over Brad while my father swooned over fly-fishing.

  In fact, it’s not just the lips. Cody looks a lot like a young Brad Pitt, I think, downing the second bottle of alcohol like momma’s milk. He
looks like a rugged, angry, messy-haired, unsmiling, bearded, thirtysomething Brad Pitt.

  That. Bottom. Lip.

  It’s so fucking sexy, it makes me want to be inappropriate.

  I’m glad I’m staying at his place and he hasn’t, as far as I know, murdered anyone in cold blood. Maybe, in addition to being my trainer, teammate, and landlord, Cody Michael Garrison could be—ah-hem—something else for me, as well.

  (Take that, Professor Steinfuck.)

  For the record, I do not think it’s a good idea to get romantically involved—oh, let’s just be honest here—physically involved with Cody Garrison, but I’m single and he’s single, and we’re about to spend a few months with each other in a place that’s very remote and very, very cold.

  I’d be lying if I said that a tryst-on-the-side—just to keep each other warm, of course—hadn’t crossed my mind.

  “Attention, ladies and gentlemen, we have started our descent into Nome. Please stow all carry-on baggage under the seat in front of you and fasten tray tables to their full and upright position. We’re landing about ten minutes earlier than expected, despite the soup outside. It’s thirty-eight degrees on the ground with light rain. Welcome to Nome, and thank you for flying Alaska Airlines.”

  I hand my empty bottles to the flight attendant, ignoring her judgey expression, and look out the window as we approach Nome.

  It’s wet and rainy but still light enough for me to see the landscape.

  To my left, the Bering Sea crashes white and angry against the beach as the city of Nome comes into view. The entire town is organized into a grid system, laid out perfectly in about ten north-south streets, and maybe fifteen running east-west. Roofs in red, blue, yellow, and green remind me of aerial pictures of towns in Iceland and Greenland and make me wonder why Arctic towns choose such colorful roofs. Maybe it has something to do with the otherwise drabness of the landscape. From what I can tell, there are no trees and not much natural color aside from the mossy-green of the grass and some brown patches of exposed land.