Sleigh Bell Sweethearts

Chapter Two

“North Pole Nails? Really?” Zoey glanced at the sign on the door of the nail salon where Anya and their mutual friend Clementine had suggested they meet for an emergency pedicure session. “I thought the purpose of this mission was to make me forget about reindeer.”

Anya opened the door and nudged Zoey inside. “That’s our intention. I promise. But it’s not like Aurora is teeming with day-spa options.”

“Try to pretend it’s called something else, something non-Christmasy,” Clemetine said.

Try not to think about Christmas? When it was less than a month away? That idea only made Zoey feel worse. “I love Christmas. I just never imagined I’d be spending it with my very own herd of reindeer.”

Or that they were such expensive creatures.

She would have been perfectly happy to stop thinking about her reindeer’s spending habits. But that wasn’t possible. She’d even declined the pedicure offer at first. Surely she had something else she should be spending her money on. Like reindeer chow or something.

What do they eat, anyway? I don’t even know.

She really shouldn’t be here. This afternoon was one of her regularly scheduled volunteer shifts at the church thrift store. Staffed entirely by volunteers, the thrift shop raised money to help a few of the impoverished, hard-to-reach communities out in the bush, the area of Alaska that was inaccessible by roads. Having flown with Gus on numerous missions of mercy to such villages, Zoey had a heart for the people of the bush. But her pressing need to see her lawyer had thrown a wrench into her afternoon plans.

Since when had she become the sort of person who met with lawyers?

Since she became an heiress.

One thing had become crystal clear over the course of the morning—being an heiress wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be.

“Sit down and take off your shoes. And smile. This is supposed to be fun. Remember?” Anya steered Zoey by her shoulders to one of the sumptuous leather spa chairs.

Zoey sank into it, and Anya flipped a switch. The chair hummed to life. “What’s that noise?”

“It’s a massage chair. Relax. Please.” Anya sank into the next chair.

“Are you sure your mom is okay with this?” Zoey frowned. Anya’s mother headed up the church thrift store. As a seamstress, it was pretty much her baby.

“She’s fine. I just talked to her. She’s got more volunteers there this afternoon than she has customers. The thrift store is fine. Everything and everyone is fine, except for you, apparently.” Anya pointed at Zoey’s feet.

She took the hint. She removed her snow boots, dipped her bare feet in the tub of warm, bubbly water in front of her chair and said a prayer of thanks that her friends had insisted on treating her to this little luxury.

“Did you get a chance to meet with the lawyer yet?” Clementine asked as she settled into the chair immediately to Zoey’s left.

“Yes. I just came from his office, actually.” Zoey nodded and selected a color from the tiny bottles of polish the nail technician offered up for inspection.

Anya chose next—fire-engine red. “What did he say? Could he shed any light on the situation?”

“He apologized for misleading me into thinking there were only a few reindeer on Gus’s property. Apparently, thirty is a modest number as far as reindeer are concerned.” So was thirty-one. Zoey couldn’t help but wonder where Palmer, the errant reindeer, was right now. Should she be concerned?

She hoped not. She had more than enough on her plate without having to worry about a defiant reindeer roaming the city streets.

“Really?” Clementine’s eyes grew wide. “What’s a large number, then?”

“A hundred or more.” Zoey supposed she should be relieved. A hundred? She couldn’t even imagine. Although if she couldn’t afford thirty, what difference did it make? She might as well have inherited five hundred of them.

“Did he mention your mysterious employee?” Anya’s lips curved into a smirk.

“There’s an employee, too?” Clementine asked.

Anya’s smile grew wider. “Oh, yes. His name is Alec, and he’s rather handsome.”

Handsome?

Zoey couldn’t argue against that assessment, but she considered it far too tame an adjective to apply to Alec. She could think of a few words that fit, however—dangerous, moody...tempting.

“He’s also borderline rude, so you can wipe that grin off your face.” Zoey’s cheeks grew warm. She blamed it on the bubbly footbath and the heated massage chair. “And I happen to owe him a thousand dollars.”

Anya’s smile morphed into a frown. “That was real?”

“Unfortunately, yes.” Zoey had pretty much committed to memory the itemized list the lawyer had shown her—fencing supplies, food, hay, straw and yet more fencing supplies. Apparently Palmer’s urge to escape ran deep. He wasn’t about to let something as silly as a fence stand between him and his freedom.

Clementine reached over and gave her arm a squeeze. “What are you going to do?”

Zoey inhaled a deep breath. Could she even bring herself to utter the lawyer’s suggestion aloud?

“I have a few options,” she said cryptically.

Anya and Clementine exchanged confused glances.

“Such as?” Anya asked.

“There’s a log cabin on the property. I thought I could move in there. With the money I save on rent, I might be able to reimburse Alec sometime this century.”

“And then what?” Clementine said, leaning her head back against her comfy leather pedicure chair and closing her eyes.

Zoey stared down at her feet in the soapy water. She couldn’t even look her friends in the eyes. How could she possibly go through with it? “There’s a buyer who’s interested in the herd.”

“Really?” Clementine’s eyes popped back open. “That sounds promising. Maybe you could keep a few—two or three, possibly—and sell the rest. Or do you think they’d miss one another? Do reindeer form attachments like that?”

How would Zoey know? She didn’t know the first thing about the interpersonal relationships of reindeer. And she certainly couldn’t afford a reindeer psychiatrist. “Missing their friends would be the least of their concerns.”

Anya’s gaze slid toward Zoey. “What aren’t you telling us?”

Zoey inhaled a deep breath. She decided to just spit it out. “The prospective buyer is a commercial reindeer breeder.”

Clementine frowned as she appeared to turn Zoey’s words over in her head. “What does that mean, exactly?”

Anya, born and raised in Alaska like Zoey, knew precisely what it meant. “If a commercial breeder buys the herd, they’ll end up as reindeer hot dogs.”

Clementine winced. “Oh.”

“I don’t know if I can do it.” It wasn’t as if Zoey hadn’t eaten her share of reindeer hot dogs in her lifetime. In Alaska, they were practically as common as peanut butter and jelly. But these weren’t just any reindeer.

They were Gus’s reindeer.

Her inheritance.

She swallowed around the lump that had taken up residence in her throat since she’d first heard those impossible words from Gus’s lawyer: you’re Mr. Henderson’s heir.

The phone had nearly slipped out of her hand. She’d been sure she was hearing things. Or dreaming. Things like this didn’t happen in real life. At least, not to Zoey.

She’d been sixteen when her parents died in a small plane crash just north of the Chugach Mountains. It had been a freak accident, the product of a mountain downdraft. Her dad had been the pilot. Even when faced with the sudden loss of her family, the only thing she’d inherited had been her father’s love of flight. Aviation hadn’t simply been a livelihood for her dad. It had been his passion.

Zoey’s own fascination with flight had started on the very day of her parents’ funeral. She could pinpoint the moment exactly—she’d been sitting in the front pew of the Aurora Community Church, listening as one pilot after another eulogized her father, speaking of his passion for flying and the love he had for the extraordinary beauty of Alaska.

The last of them had been Gus. His words had struck up a symphony of memories in Zoey—being buckled into the backseat of her dad’s Super Cub, looking out the window at spouting whales and sandstone peaks or touching down at some pristine, unspoiled place. As she’d relived one moment after another, she felt closer to her parents. It had been almost as if they were still alive, even though their bodies rested in coffins nearly close enough for her to reach out and touch. After the memorial service, she’d gone home and collapsed on her childhood bed for the last time, and she’d imagined she was soaring through a cloudless winter sky.

It was the only thing that kept her from crying. When her aunt and uncle told her she was to go home with them to Kentucky and leave her beloved Alaska, she’d squeezed her eyes closed and thought about what it would be like to float above the mountains with her arms spread wide and the wind whipping through her hair. Her musings about flight became her refuge.

She knew better than to tell anyone, particularly her aunt and uncle. She was sure it would worry them, and she’d had enough trouble convincing them to let her stay in Aurora to finish out her last year and a half of high school. The members of the church, particularly the pastor and his family, took her in. They were the closest thing to family she had left in Alaska.

And still, she kept her daydreams of flight to herself. It was a secret between her and God. Without a doubt, people would find her sudden fascination with aviation worrisome. Or even morbid, perhaps. But to Zoey, it was her way of remaining her father’s daughter in the days, weeks and years after his passing.

Her inheritance was a passion for the thing he loved most, the thing that ultimately took his life and that of Zoey’s mother. But it was the only thing she had.

Until the reindeer.

“I don’t want to sell them.” Was it what Gus would have wanted? Zoey was sure it wasn’t. But why did he have the reindeer in the first place? And why had he left them to her?

They’d been close. After hearing him speak at the funeral, Zoey had sought him out. Gus seemed to have known exactly what she wanted, because he told her more stories about her father. Things she’d never heard before. Stories that fed her soul in those dark days. Her unconventional friendship with Gus was rooted in mutual grief.

They’d begun meeting for ice cream once a week and kept up the habit even after all Gus’s stories had been told three times over. She’d come to think of him as family. He’d always been there for her, whether she needed consoling when no one asked her to the senior homecoming dance or just needed to know how to change the oil in her car. Once, in a rare moment of sentimentality during one of their many flights together, he’d looked over at her and told her she was like the daughter he’d never had.

But it still wasn’t the same thing. People just didn’t leave things like reindeer farms to their friends. Even close ones.

Why me, Lord? “I want to keep them. All thirty-sometimes-thirty-one of them. Is that crazy?”

Anya propped her feet up, her toes ready and waiting for red polish. “Sort of.”

“Sometimes thirty-one? Have you lost count of your reindeer already?” Clementine grinned.

“Trust me. You don’t want to know.” Zoey closed her eyes and did her best to forget about the reindeer farm.

She made little progress. Even when her foot massage got under way, she was still distracted by thoughts of reindeer chow, moving from her apartment into the cabin on the ranch and what would happen on Friday when she was supposed to deliver the check for the down payment on her airplane. A Super Cub, just like her father’s. She was so close to making her dreams come true. At last.

Perhaps Alec would be open to some sort of payment arrangement. Somehow, she doubted it. He’d been pretty blunt about asking for his money. And though she was loath to admit it, she found him a little intimidating. After her grand speech about how he’d misjudged her, she’d fled. Fled! As if all the reindeer weren’t enough of a handful, she had Alec Wynn’s brooding intensity to contend with.

From the depths of her purse, her cell phone rang. Alec’s chiseled face flashed in her mind, although why she’d want to hear from him was a mystery.

She fished her ringing phone out of her purse with the intention of simply turning the ringer off. But when she saw all the missed-call notifications on the screen, she paused. “I have five missed calls.”

Clementine looked up from the magazine in her lap. “Who from?”

“I’m not sure.” Zoey answered the call before it rolled to voice mail again. “Hello?”

“Is this Zoey Hathaway?” It was a man. He sounded exasperated but polite, which ruled out Alec entirely.

“Yes.” She was hyperaware of everyone’s eyes on her. Clementine, Anya and even the manicurists were all watching her with mounting curiosity. “How can I help you?”

“This is Chuck Baker, out at the airfield.”

Zoey bit her lip. Chuck was the head air-traffic-control officer at the town’s one and only airport, located at the back of the Northern Lights Inn, the heart of Aurora. For years, she’d poured Chuck’s coffee from behind the hotel’s coffee bar. Double espresso in the morning. Decaf in the afternoon. And she’d spoken to him countless times from the cockpit once she’d started her flying lessons.

But he’d never called her before.

“Chuck, hi.” Nerves bounced around in her stomach for reasons she couldn’t quite pinpoint. “What’s up?”

“It seems we’ve got a situation down here at the airport.” The frustration in his tone kicked up a notch.

Zoey gripped the phone tighter. What if there’d been an accident? Lord, please no. Not again. Somewhere in the logical part of her brain, Zoey knew this wasn’t the case. Why would Chuck call her, of all people, if there’d been a tragedy? “A situation? I hope no one is hurt.”

“No one’s hurt. It’s nothing like that. But we’ve had to ground all flights. It’s chaos down here, and if we don’t get things under control you’ll be facing a hefty fine from the FAA.”

Hefty fine?

She blinked. What could she have possibly done to incur a fine? She was in the middle of a foot massage. What might the Federal Aviation Administration have against pedicures? “I don’t understand. Have I done something wrong?”

“Not you, per se.” He released a sigh. “It’s your reindeer.”

Zoey’s panicked gaze darted up to Clementine and Anya. “My reindeer?”

“Yep. There’s a big, fat reindeer parked in the middle of the runway. He won’t budge, and rumor has it he’s yours.”

Palmer.

Oh, please, God. No.

* * *

Alec slid onto a barstool at the coffee counter at the Northern Lights Inn and fought the urge to drop his head into his hands. Exhaustion had worked its way deep into his bones. The past six days had been a killer. Not that he was complaining—he’d always relished the opportunity to lose himself in a hard day’s work. There was a sweetness to forgetting...forgetting the past, the present, the future and living fully in the moment. And forgetting had never come easily to Alec.

Growing up in a home with parents who struggled with addiction had provided him with a laundry list of things he’d just as soon forget. At the best of times, his mom and dad had been too out of it to function. In the worst, there’d been the beatings—usually a product of sweaty, heated withdrawal from all the drugs. Alec had witnessed the angry cycle for seventeen years until he’d finally made the decision to leave home and never look back. The leaving had been easy. It was the looking back he sometimes still struggled with.

Since arriving in Alaska, he’d almost managed it. That was a good thing, since he’d traveled to the literal edge of the continent. If he couldn’t outrun his past here, there was nowhere else to go without falling into the stormy waters of the Bering Sea.

Finding Gus Henderson sprawled facedown in the snow hadn’t been the best of starts. It was a stark reminder to Alec that he could run all he wanted, but wherever he went, trouble would always be there to find him. Ironically, it was the reindeer that had kept him sane in the aftermath. He couldn’t very well leave. Who would care for them?

“Can I get you something?” the barista asked.

Alec looked up. “Sure, thanks. Coffee. Black.”

“Tough day?” The guy seated two barstools away glanced in Alec’s direction. He had a red parka slung on the back of his chair and a copper-colored dog curled at his feet.

Alec noticed they both looked vaguely familiar. “You could say that.”

Working for the forest service in Olympic State Park back in Washington had prepared him somewhat for the brutal weather, but he’d been completely inexperienced in the reindeer department. He’d gotten himself up to speed on the reindeer soon enough, but traveling north through Canada on his bike, the sudden death of his new employer and the daily demands of running the ranch solo were beginning to catch up with him.

And now there was the farm’s new owner to contend with.

Alec couldn’t help but wonder if she would prove to be far more trouble than she was worth.

“You new in town?” the stranger asked. “I don’t think I’ve seen you around before.”

“I just moved here a week ago.” Alec accepted his coffee from the barista and took a long, hot swallow. It burned its way down his throat. “Alec Wynn. I’m working at a reindeer farm up in the hills about five miles from here. Nice dog, by the way.”

“Thanks. Brock Parker.” He offered his hand over the empty barstool between them. “Welcome.”

“Thank you.” Alec frowned. Brock looked familiar, and Alec was almost certain he’d heard the name before. Just what he didn’t want, or need—a face from his past.

Brock appeared to study him for a moment. He took a sip of his own coffee and grinned. “I think you may have met my wife earlier today out at the reindeer farm.”

Wife?

A wholly unexpected pang hit Alec in the chest. Could Zoey Hathaway be married?

Then he remembered the rather heart-wrenching look in those green eyes of hers when she’d unleashed her I’m-not-your-average-heiress outburst on him. She couldn’t possibly have a husband. Not a decent kind of guy, anyway. A decent man wouldn’t make her feel as if she hadn’t come from a loving home, even if it were the case.

He swallowed. What did he know about decent guys? It wasn’t as if he would ever be that kind of man, considering where he’d come from. He’d tried the decent route before—the Sunday-school, one-woman kind of route. He’d even gone so far as to put a ring on the woman’s finger.

Marriage. He’d thought it was something he could do. Not like his parents, of course. Better. He’d reveled in the idea of doing it the right way—two people bound together by God.

He’d never gotten the chance. His fiancée’s family had made sure of it. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, they’d said.

She’d believed it. Why shouldn’t Alec? He’d be lying if he said he’d never wrestled with the fear that he would one day end up like his parents.

He turned his attention once again to Brock. “Your wife?”

Brock nodded. “Her name is Anya.”

Anya. The friend. Of course. “Yes, we met. Very nice lady.”

“She and Zoey are good friends. I think they’re out getting pedicures right now, actually.” Brock shrugged. “They worked together for a while here at the coffee bar, before Anya started up full time with the ski patrol and Zoey decided to buy her airplane.”

Alec’s hand tightened around his coffee mug.

So Zoey Hathaway went around getting pedicures and buying airplanes...but she wasn’t a spoiled princess.

Yeah, right.

And to think for a split second, he’d thought they might actually have something in common.

“Hey, speaking of Zoey...” Brock rose from his barstool and took a few steps toward the window overlooking the frozen lake behind the hotel. The dog scrambled to its feet and followed on Brock’s heels. “Is that her?”

Alec took another swig of his coffee. He didn’t bother looking out the window. Unless she was writing him a check, what Zoey did was none of his concern. “Hmm?” he muttered, more to have something to say rather than expressing any real interest in whatever was going on outside.