Page 1 of Wind Valley

1

Of all the dive bars in all the wilderness outposts in Alaska, she had to walk into his.

Well, not exactly his, since The Fang belonged to Lachlan’s buddy Bear Davis, and Lachlan was merely helping out through the winter. He’d hoped it would be a good change of scene and increase his chances of meeting someone interesting. Someone who wasn’t Maura Vaughn.

Lachlan steeled himself to offer his usual friendly smile to Maura. He’d made a fool of himself over her because of…circumstances. Okay, loneliness. And urging from his friends.

She’d only arrived in town recently, around Christmas. After an unfortunate encounter with a moose, she’d ended up in a snowbank, and he’d helped pull her out. One look into her dark blue eyes and something inside him had shifted.

A few days later, he’d asked her on a date, if you could call it that. There wasn’t much to do in the winter when all the summer eating spots were closed. So, scientist that he was, he’d invited her to check out the abandoned wolf den he’d discovered not far from Wind Valley. She’d turned him down clearly and without hesitation.

He could accept that, of course. Lachlan McGowan knew he wasn’t for everyone. As a glacier scientist, he lived in his head a lot. He was a big dreamer who would often emerge from a long, complicated thought process to find he’d been staring into the distance while someone was trying to talk to him. Two women had broken up with him because of that—while he’d been doing that. He’d had to ask them to repeat themselves.

Awkward—but he was used to that.

Sadly, getting rejected in Firelight Ridge meant you still had to see that person on a regular basis because there simply weren’t very many people around in the winter.

And for some reason, Maura had decided to stay. She was living with her grandfather, Pinky Bannister, who spent a lot of time at The Fang. Often she would come with him, and sometimes those visits came when Lachlan was helping out Bear and Lila by covering a shift.

Like now.

Friends, he reminded himself. We’re good friends now. You have a genius-level IQ and incredible focus. Just train your goddamn mind to remember she’s a friend.

“Hey Maura. Pinky. Whazzup?” That sounded appropriately casual, right? He set out two cocktail napkins on the bar counter for them.

“Did you just say ‘whazzup’?” Maura asked as she claimed a stool. Her smile was bright and beautiful and sent a zing through his nervous system. “That’s so unlike you.”

“Make me one of them Irish coffees, would you?” Pinky gestured for his personal mug, which was stashed on a shelf behind the bar set aside for the regulars. “Add me a dollop of whipped cream, too. From the can. No one makes ‘em like you, Lachlan.”

“That’s because I have two advanced science degrees,” Lachlan said dryly. “Who knew it would all lead up to this?”

Maura laughed, sympathy in her dark blue eyes—the color reminded him of the deepest part of a coral reef in the Galapagos. “Life is so unpredictable, isn’t it? Six months ago, if someone had told me I’d be spending the winter in Alaska, I would have laughed in their face.”

“Really? That seems so unlike you.”

She smiled at the way he echoed her own words from moments ago. “Touché. It’s actually not very much like me. I teach middle school. You have to be careful with your laughs because kids can take things very personally.”

He wished he could sit down just with her and ask her a million questions about her job, her students, her thoughts, her romantic status…but right now he was just her bartender. “What are you having today, Maura?”

“Oh. Right. Hmm…” She scanned the array of liquor bottles behind him. “It seems a little early for alcohol.”

“It is?” Pinky couldn’t have looked more surprised if she had said that she was actually a bull moose. “How do you figure?”

“Well, it’s not even noon yet. It barely just got light.”

“It’s winter.” Pinky blinked his watery blue eyes at her. “It’ll be dark again before you know it. Might as well have a drink in your hand when it happens.”

Maura shot Lachlan a glance filled with amusement. “I’ll have a cappuccino, if you make those?”

“We do. It’s a new thing, though, and the machine is cranky. Give me a minute.”

“Do you have oat milk or anything like that?” she asked hopefully.

Lachlan tried not to laugh at that naive question. “We have some goat milk from Eve Dotterkind. I don’t know how well it foams. It still has goat hair in it and?—”

“Never mind.” She cut him off with a shudder. “Any old milk is fine. I’m just keeping my dear old grandpa company anyway. We had a little scare this morning. He needed something to settle his nerves.”

Lachlan busied himself pouring a shot of whiskey into Pinky’s coffee mug, then adding the coffee. He’d done a comparison—temperature, taste, customer satisfaction—between the coffee-first and the whiskey-first methods. The differences were infinitesimal, but he was a scientist after all, and he knew that even the most minuscule of shifts could be significant. It held true in his work with glaciers and also here at the Fang.

---