“Find another way to get turned on,” I say.
“I know of a good one. It works every time.” His icy hand slips beneath my sweater, making me shriek.
“Oh my God, stop! You’re freezing!” I cackle as I fight to wriggle free. But Jonah holds tight, grinning as his fingers coast over the small of my back and slide up my spine to unfasten my bra.
His phone rings then, and Agnes’s name flashes across the screen.
“You need to answer that.”
He groans. “No, I don’t. She’s gonna yell at me.”
“Agnes, yell?” The woman is the most docile person I’ve ever met. I don’t think she’s capable of showing anger. I’ve certainly never seen it.
“In her own way.” His palm weasels beneath my bra to cup my breast, his hand still a cold shock but less so than it was a moment ago.
“Too bad. Time to pay the piper.” I grab his phone before he can stop me and, hitting Accept, hold it to his ear.
He glares at me. “Hey, Aggie … yup … uh-huh … I know …” His hand falls from beneath my shirt—the moment temporarily doused—and, collecting the phone from me, urges me off his lap. With a playful swat against my ass, he heads up the stairs.
And I breathe a sigh of relief that everything between Jonah and me is back to normal.
I take a few minutes to finish the post I was working on for Calla & Dee—about Zeke and my disturbing, possibly imaginary, animal experience from earlier—and then save and close.
On a hunch, I open The Yeti’s in-box, to see an unread email sitting at the top. When I see the subject line, I click through, scanning the details.
And let out a little shriek at the details of our first official website booking.
Chapter Fifteen
April
“All right, Miss Fletcher, turn right up here.” The brunette woman shrewdly watches from over the frame of her bifocals, clipboard in hand, pen poised to strike her checklist, as I flick the signal switch and navigate our battered old truck down a side street in Wasilla.
When I woke up this morning—the day of my road test—and saw the plump snowflakes falling and the fresh layer of snow that had landed overnight, I panicked. But the plows have already been out to clear and sand the streets. Fifteen minutes into the test and, so far, I haven’t slid through any stop signs or otherwise screwed up.
“See that Ford ahead?” She points at the green pickup truck parked on the side of the street, at the end of a driveway. “I’d like you to parallel park behind it.”
“Okay.” I say a silent prayer of thanks. She’s kind—she’s chosen a quiet street and a car with nothing behind it. I sidle up beside the truck, checking my rearview mirror. It’s early in the day; no one is behind me.
I give the steering wheel of this big old beast a tight squeeze to calm my nerves. Why couldn’t Phil have left us a small sedan? Taking a deep breath, I check my mirrors again and, shifting the truck into reverse, I begin backing up.
A flash of movement in my side-view mirror catches my eye before the truck suddenly jolts.
“How was that my fault?” I stare at the failed test form in my hand, close to tears.
“You can’t hit anything during a road test. It’s an automatic fail.” Jonah lifts his baseball cap off his head, only to smooth his hair out and put it back on. “How did you not see a moose?”
“It came out of nowhere!” I burst.
His hands go up in a sign of surrender. “Whoa … Okay. I’m just tryin’ to understand how it happened,” he says.
“I don’t know how it happened! She told me to parallel park behind that truck. There was a driveway and this big hedge, and a tree …,” I sputter, trying to rationalize how a full-grown bull moose managed to make its way down the driveway and into the path of my reversing truck, without me spotting it first. “I was nervous, and I was looking for cars on the road, not moose?”
“Fair enough,” Jonah says, but I sense he doesn’t buy that.
“The tester didn’t see it, either.” A thought strikes me. “Unless maybe she did? Is this how they test drivers in Alaska? Do they put moose around town and get them to ambush you as part of the road test?”
Jonah chuckles and collects my hand in his. He gives it a squeeze. “No, babe. It was just a crazy fluke.”
“Why did it have to happen to me?” I was ready. Jonah and I have been out every day practicing since I got my test date. Now I’m a twenty-six-year-old who failed her driver’s test because she backed into a damn moose! I’ll bet this has never happened in the history of road tests! I’ll bet the people working at the licensing office are having a field day with this. Beyond my anger and disappointment, I’m embarrassed.
He starts the engine. “At least you were goin’ slow. No one got hurt.” The right taillight on Phil’s truck is cracked, but the moose walked away. Literally. “It’s no big deal. People fail their road tests all the time. You can rebook in a week and try it again.”
And what if I fail again?
How much longer am I going to be stranded at our house, relying on snowy ditches to get around town in a snow machine while Jonah’s working?
Jonah pulls out of the parking lot.
“Don’t tell anyone. Please.”
“Won’t say a word.”
“And don’t you dare ever tease me about this,” I warn in a severe tone.
The corners of his mouth twitch. “I would never.”
Right.
He reaches over to rest his palm on my thigh. “Don’t worry, you’ll laugh about it one day.”
“I have a lot of laughing to do later on in life,” I mutter.
Chapter Sixteen
“Mark Sheppard said he’s been keeping Jonah busy.”
“Mark Sheppard, John McGee, Nathan Mineault … Jonah’s been flying somewhere almost every day that the weather cooperates.” I rotate a cream crockery pot to check the price. And while he’s been flying, I’ve been slowly building a list of contacts all over Alaska, for business but also in case he forgets to call me and goes off course again. So far, he has kept his word.
“I figured he would be. He knows a lot of people. I get someone coming into Aro every single day, asking about him.”
I can hear the smile in Agnes’s voice. She sounds like a proud mother. “I can’t believe he was so worried. We’ve had a few bookings through the website already, too. He’s taking a travel journalist around to a bunch of places next week. And a film-scout crew wants to book him for a solid week in early May.” It’s a good thing the days are getting long—the sun crept over the horizon at six today and it won’t dip past it until ten tonight—because he’ll need all the daylight he can get. It also means less time with him for me, when I can’t tag along.
I try to keep myself busy on those days.
“So, what are you up to today?” she asks.
“I’m going to bake Jonah a chocolate cake for his birthday, even though he’s refusing to take the day off.”