I had my first lesson today.” Anya used air quotes to emphasize the word lesson.
“Oh, great!” Clementine beamed. “What was it like?”
“He had me read the entire newspaper aloud to his two puppies.”
“The whole front page?” The smile on Clementine’s face dimmed, replaced with a look of confusion.
Join the club, Anya thought. “Every section, not just the front page. The whole paper. I almost lost my voice.”
“Hmm. What was he doing while you read the paper?”
“He was whittling. Whittling.” Anya shook her head. The entire episode sounded completely unbelievable, even to her own ears. And she’d actually been there. “Who does that?”
Beside her, Clementine’s shoulders shook with laughter. “I hear that guy from Nome who always drives around with a reindeer in the bed of his pickup truck likes to carve things out of sheep horns.”
“My point exactly,” Anya huffed.
It wasn’t the whittling. It wasn’t the mysterious, unexplained reading-to-the-dogs assignment. It wasn’t even the bear suit. It was all of it put together.
Brock Parker was one unusual package.
So why did her heart seem to kick into overdrive at the mere thought of him?
Clementine narrowed her gaze at her, as if trying to see inside her head. “What does he look like?”
Anya’s fingers slipped, and she dropped a stitch in the hat she was knitting.
Oops.
“Um,” she started, as her face flushed with warmth.
“I see.” Sue laughed. “He looks that good, huh?”
Anya hadn’t even realized Sue had been paying attention to their conversation. She wanted to crawl under the table and hide. Clearly that wasn’t an option, seeing as Sue and Clementine were watching her with great interest. Her fingers fumbled once more, and she dropped another stitch. Darn it. She’d never finish the hat at this rate.
She decided to go ahead and fess up. They’d find out eventually.
“He’s blond, blue-eyed and Nordic looking.” She cleared her throat. “Not that it matters.”
“Nordic looking?” Clementine lifted an inquisitive brow.
“You know, like a Viking or something.” Anya ignored the flush still simmering in her cheeks and focused intently on her knitting. “Like I said, it doesn’t make a bit of difference.”
“Of course it doesn’t,” Sue said, tongue firmly planted in cheek.
Anya looked up from her tangle of yarn and sighed. “Seriously, you two. Other than what he can do for my dog, I have no interest in Brock Parker.”
In fact, things would probably be easier if he wasn’t so flawlessly handsome. Because in the end—no matter what they looked like—all men did the same thing. At least the ones Anya had known. They left.
“Seriously,” she repeated for emphasis. “You both know I don’t date.”
Clementine’s fingers stilled, and her yarn stopped moving. “Wait. We do?”
“Of course you do,” Anya said.
Clementine hadn’t yet moved to Aurora when Anya was dumped on national television, but Anya was certain she’d mentioned it to her during the course of their friendship.
“No, I don’t.” Clementine shook her head. “You don’t date? What on Earth does that mean?”
Okay, so maybe she hadn’t mentioned it. Although it was a pivotal moment in her life to be sure, it wasn’t exactly the sort of thing she revisited often. Or ever, really.
Anya sighed. “I had a rather ugly breakup a few years ago, that’s all.”
“How ugly?” Clementine frowned and glanced back and forth between Anya and Sue.
“It was televised,” Sue chimed in, much to Anya’s relief. She’d rather not be forced to tell the entire dreadful tale herself.
Clementine furrowed her brow. “How does a breakup end up on television?”
“I was dating my high school sweetheart, who was a champion skier. A downhill racer.”
“Speed Lawson,” Sue said.
“Speed?” Clementine snorted. “What kind of a name is Speed?”
“The kind for men who beat a hasty trail out of town when the opportunity arises.” Anya’s gaze bore into her knitting. Maybe if she concentrated on the in-and-out of her needles and the twisting of the yarn around her fingers, she could get through this with a modicum of dignity still intact.
“Is that what happened? He just up and left?” Clementine rested a hand on top of Anya’s.
“We’d been dating two years when the Olympic Trials came to Aurora. The night before his event, Speed told me he loved me and wanted us to build a life together.”
Anya still felt ridiculous when she thought about it—the night she’d poured her heart into that boy in a way only a girl who’d never known the love of a father could. And he’d thrown it away. For all the world to see.
“What happened?” Clementine cast a worried glance at Sue.
“He made the team as an alternate,” Sue said. “It was big news around here.”
“The biggest.” Anya nodded. “ESPN interviewed him afterward, right there on the mountain. They asked him about skiing, living in Alaska, the ordinary questions...then they wanted to know if he had a girlfriend or any plans for the future.”
“And what did he say?” Clementine lowered her voice to a near whisper.
Anya appreciated the gesture, but it didn’t matter. Everyone sitting at the table knew the story. Was there a soul in Aurora who didn’t? “He said, and I quote, ‘There’s no one special.’”
“Oh, Anya. He was young. Don’t you think they may have caught him off guard?” Clementine’s word echoed every desperate thought that had entered Anya’s head in the aftermath of the interview.
She’d stood right there, hurt and humiliated, with the rest of Speed’s hometown crowd and listened to him deny her very existence. She’d pretended that the tears streaming down her cheeks were a product of the cold Alaskan wind rather than the pain of her heart breaking. But she hadn’t fooled anyone, least of all herself.
Worse than that, in the instant he’d uttered those words—no one special—something inside her had turned hard and bitter. Just like her mother.
It was that dark thing she felt brewing inside that frightened
