faded blue eyes narrowed. “I want pictures, too. And an article about why Alaska is the best place in the world to live.”
Everything they stood against. Everything they complained about. Everything that made living in K-Bay as boring and rut filled as Coach had accused Coop of being.
It was one thing to be disappointed in his lot in life, another to be called on it. Coop didn’t hesitate. “Deal.”
They all shook on it and Coach left them to check on other customers. They each stared at their shaggy, bearded reflections in the glass behind the bar.
“Seriously, Coop?” Ty took aim with his hellfire expression. “An ad? This is worse than the time you convinced us to hitchhike to Anchorage our senior year. It’s not as if anyone knows who you are. But me—”
“Coach wasn’t going for a naked swim in the Bering Sea.” Ty’s anger didn’t faze Coop. They’d known each other too long for him to take it personally. “And he wouldn’t have gone for something simple like a case of rare whiskey.”
“It is what it is,” Gideon said, always the peacemaker. “But we can’t tell anyone what it is.”
Coop nodded. They’d be laughed out of K-Bay. “Where do we start?”
“Maybe we can get people to fill out an online survey.” Gideon perked up. He loved anything techish. “I could design a program to pair them up.”
The inner front door opened and a woman stepped in. She was wrapped from neck to snow boots in a reddish-brown parka that made her look like a stuffed sausage. Conversation in the room died away as every pair of male eyes turned toward her. She peeled off her knit cap, revealing shoulder-length, glossy blond hair and artfully applied makeup.
She was pretty, beautiful even. The kind of woman that men stopped and took notice of.
Coop sat up straighter. Noticing. “Here’s our first customer.”
She unfastened her jacket with small, delicate hands, revealing a small, delicate head covered in blond fuzz. A baby. Strapped to her chest.
The room heaved a sigh of regret. Conversations resumed, albeit not at their usual volume.
Slumping, Coop returned his attention to his beer. “And there goes our first customer.”
Boots rang across the oak floor.
Gideon tapped Coop on the shoulder. “She’s coming over here.”
Coop turned back around.
It was the weirdest thing. Coop was used to Alaska’s winters, used to the cold. But as the woman and the baby approached, the room took on a chill.
She stopped in front of him and arched a golden brow. “Cooper Hamilton?”
Coop nodded, rather numbly, because there was something familiar about the woman’s face, about her smooth voice, about the swing of her pretty blond hair across her shoulders.
She gestured to the baby. “I believe I have something of yours.”
“YOU DON’T REMEMBER ME, do you?” Nora Perry couldn’t help sounding angry and embarrassed. She’d traveled more than one hundred miles on a bus. It’d taken six hours instead of two. She was tired. The baby was tired.
And the witty, handsome man she’d met ten months ago with the mischievous smile? He wasn’t witty—he was speechless. He wasn’t handsome—his dark hair brushed his shoulders unevenly and grew from his chin in short, thick stubs. He wasn’t smiling—his lips formed a shell-shocked, silent O.
Coop led Nora to a tall wooden booth in the dimly lit, seen-better-days bar. She hung her parka on a booth hook, dropped her backpack to the floor and sat on the cold wooden bench too quickly, landing on her sit bones.
Zoe fussed, probably overheated from Nora’s resolve-melting mortification.
Coop didn’t remember her? Subtract fifty points from his man-appeal tally.
Last time Nora had seen Coop, he’d had a stylish, clean-shaven jaw, a stylin’ opening line and a styled set of dance moves that would’ve qualified him for a spot on Dancing with the Stars, Alaska edition. They’d met at a bar in Anchorage last spring. Spring being a time when folks got a little nutty in Alaska because everything returned to “normal” for a few months. You didn’t have to wear parkas the size of sleeping bags or shovel as much snow.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” Nora repeated when Coop continued to be struck dumb. She was having trouble slipping off the baby-carrier straps. Her lower lip trembled, much like Zoe’s did when her dirty diaper didn’t get changed quickly enough. “Am I that forgettable?” Her pride and her stomach slid to the floor. “Don’t answer that.”
Nora finally got the straps off and settled Zoe in the crook of her arm. “You had no trouble with words that night in Anchorage.” There. A clue. Perhaps the humiliation would end.
Coop couldn’t seem to drag his green gaze from Zoe. “I...uh...”
Or not. More mortifying heat flash flooded her body. And when emotion flooded her hormonal, postpregnancy body, which was often lately, her milk came in.
Could things get any worse? “We met at a bar.”
“Uh...” His gaze stroked her face and then dropped below her chin to the milk-production department.
“I didn’t have these then.” She waved a free hand in front of her now-tingling, melon-size chest and tried her best to glare at him. But it was hard to glare when the father of your child couldn’t remember you.
Zoe squirmed then squinted and made a squishing sound in her pants.
So much for a classy, civilized meeting.
Still, it was hard not to love Zoe. Unless you were Coop. His gaze was still caught on the milk-production department.
“Excuse me.” Nora scootched off the bench seat and rummaged in the backpack that served both as her purse and her diaper bag. Was it just last year she’d carried a budget-busting Dooney & Bourke tote? It seemed like a lifetime ago.
Nora tugged her diaper kit free and shot Coop another deadly glare. “Don’t go anywhere.”
Coop raised his hands slowly, as if in surrender, still in bachelor shell shock.
Nora was having a shock of her own. She wasn’t just a one-night stand. She was a forgettable one-night stand.
Coop was just like her father: a happy-go-lucky drunk going through life in memory-stealing binges.
I’m not going to let Coop hurt Zoe like Dad did me.
Nora was in Kenkamken Bay for one thing and one thing only. Child support. She wasn’t looking for a relationship with her baby daddy. Coop, being a self-centered bachelor, would probably be relieved that all she wanted was money. With
