it was Monday morning, not Friday night. “I mean, come on. What does a woman like that know about what a man from Alaska likes? It’s not worth the space in the paper or the airtime on TV.”
“Listen to yourselves.” Coach’s voice rumbled like a logging truck speeding over rutted black ice. “Talking as if you had any idea about life or love.”
“I just said life was like a good car.” Coop sat up straighter. There was nothing that got his heart pumping like a good bar argument. “And women like a good car. Just look at me.” He spread his arms. “I’m good-car material.”
“Sure you are.” Coach poured the sarcasm over Coop’s belief. “You’re cheap, boring and stuck in a rut. Just like my wife’s snowbound sedan out on Old Paris Road. Won’t get that out until spring. If ever.”
And if that didn’t deflate Coop’s tires...
Ty was still lost in thought when Gideon jumped to Coop’s defense. “Men know what they want in a woman. To make a match, you’d just have to dig down deep to discover what the heck a woman really wants. That matchmaker using her ‘intuition’ is farcical. If two people would just be honest about what they wanted—”
“Exactly.” Coop leaped back into the fray. “If a woman would just say, ‘I do want a long-term commitment from a man that’ll likely lead to marriage and probably having babies,’ it would cut through all the awkward, getting-to-know-you part.” And transition Coop to the “sorry, that’s not me, been nice to know you” part.
Coach chuckled, but it wasn’t the sound of shared humor. “The three of you sit in my bar every Friday and Saturday night, and most Sundays, too. Sometimes you go to Anchorage to meet women, but you don’t date anyone regular. What could you possibly know about matchmaking?”
“I bet we could make introductions with more success than that woman.” Coop’s voice rang with confidence. It wasn’t as though he was actually going to have to prove his point. “Look at all the single guys in this bar. There’s a catch here for every gal.”
They all scanned the bar’s patrons.
Coop almost considered issuing a retraction. Scraggly beards. Scraggly hair. Scraggly flannel shirts. K-Bay wasn’t exactly Baywatch.
But Gideon was back in the game. “I bet we could match more couples than her, too. And I wouldn’t use my intuition.”
“We’d have the Bar & Grill’s bell ringing on the hour.” Coop’s statement might have been a little over the line. Whenever someone found The One, they rang the bell over the bar. The bell hadn’t been heard in more than a year.
“I’ll take that bet,” Coach said, puncturing the wind from their sails. He leaned on the bar, capturing their attention the same way he had years ago as their high school hockey coach—with a steely-eyed stare that said he was done with small talk and ready for action. “There are three weeks until Valentine’s Day. I’ll bet you three can’t get three couples to ring that bell by Valentine’s eve.”
“Three?” Coop scoffed, the first of their trio to find his voice. “We could do twice that.”
Ty and Gideon stared at Coop as if he’d just told them he’d traded his truck for a minivan.
“Deal.” Coach offered his hand.
Coop reflexively put his out, but Gideon arm-barred his hand aside. “We don’t know the terms. What do we get if we win this bet?”
“A hundred bucks.” Coach smirked, making his face as wrinkled as a shar-pei’s.
Again, Coop put out his hand.
Again, Gideon batted it down. “That’s not worth one match, let alone six.”
“Six hundred, then.” Coach’s grin said he thought they’d fail.
Heck, Coop thought they’d fail. Six? What had he been thinking?
Clearly he hadn’t been. Still, Coop kept his smile—the one that had helped him sell hundreds of cars—glued to his face. No reason to let Coach sense blood in the water.
Coop glanced at Gideon. Gideon glanced at Coop. It was too late to back out now. They nodded and extended their hands to seal the deal, but this time it was Ty who stopped them from accepting the bet.
“Forget the money. If we win, we want jobs on one of your hockey teams.” Ty had an expression on his face that Coop hadn’t seen in seven years—like a bull charging toward the china shop. He’d scowled like that during a high school championship and had defended four shots on goal in two minutes to ensure their team won.
Coop wasn’t sure if the entire bar heard Ty’s terms or not. For a moment everything seemed quiet. Or it could have been the ringing in Coop’s ears that blocked out the clinking of glasses, beer-roughened voices and deep drifts of laughter.
Jobs in the Lower 48? It was all they’d ever wanted—to get out of town and work together in professional hockey.
Coach’s gaze morphed from dismissive to appraising. He owned large stakes in a couple of farm teams in the contiguous US. He’d been a successful hockey coach at the highest level, retiring early due to a severe case of rheumatoid arthritis now under control with a change in lifestyle and diet. “You want to sell popcorn and pretzels at some of my games?”
Ty didn’t flinch at the jab, although it hit him where it hurt because his thickly bearded chin jutted out. He’d gone from being a potential hockey superstar at eighteen, predicted to go high in the draft, to a jack-of-all-trades employee at K-Bay’s run-down skating rink. “Coop can sell bottled sand in the desert. I’m sure you have marketing positions. Gideon can make money grow on trees—”
“Legally,” Gideon murmured.
“And I know the game inside out.” Ty’s chin thrust halfway to Russia. “I could coach.”
The stakes of the bet had increased astronomically. It was what the three of them had dreamed of as boys: escaping Alaska. Only, back then, Coop was going to be Ty’s sports agent and Gideon his financial adviser. When Ty’s dreams had fallen apart, so had Coop’s and Gideon’s.
Coop tried not to look as though he’d swallowed a fish bone. “Is it a bet, Coach?”
“You’ve forgotten one thing.” The older man leaned against the back bar and crossed his beefy forearms. “What do I get when you lose?”
“We’ll swim the Polar Bear Challenge naked,” Ty offered.
Coach shook his gray, grizzled head. “You did that when you were teens.”
“We’ll bartend for you on weekends.” At Coach’s frown Gideon added, “For a month.”
“I like tending bar,” Coach said. “Gets me out of the house. Now...if you wanted to take my wife shopping in Anchorage every weekend for a month...”
They didn’t.
Coop stared at Kelsey’s article, at the suited matchmaker, at Kelsey’s postage-stamp picture. “We’ll take out an ad in the Anchorage Beat. Full page. Stating we know nothing about life or
