I hopped off the bar stool and was heading for the bathroom when my foot caught on an uneven floorboard and sent me pitching into the wall of man standing behind me. It felt as if my whole body had burst into flame. My cheek tingled where it had brushed against his chest. I could feel the heat from his steadying hands searing through the sleeves of my shirt.
I exclaimed something like “Oof!” and looked up. It was the eyes that stunned me into silence—the same electric blue-green that had stared out at me from the woods the night before. I shook off the sleep-smeared memory and tried to smile politely.
“Mo, meet Cooper Graham. Cooper, this is my new friend, Mo,” Evie said in a bemused voice.
With a gulp, I swallowed the drool puddling in my mouth. You noticed the eyes right off the bat, wide and bottomless blue over sharp cheekbones, and a slim, long nose that had obviously been broken when he was young. His hair seemed both dark brown and black, not long enough for a ponytail but too long to keep under that faded maroon baseball cap he was wearing.
Cooper was exactly the type of guy I would have sex with before the first date back home. Dark, rough, athletic. Here I was faced with my own personal sexual kryptonite, and I’d abandoned my contraception.
Cooper offered me a brief view of brilliantly white teeth as he set me on my feet. He had the biggest hands I’d ever seen. I wondered how they would feel on my skin, whether his fingertips would touch if he had both hands on my hips. Whether he was that big everywhere—
I was snapped out of my subconscious ogling when Cooper looked to Evie. “Vacationing?” he asked in a husky, no-nonsense tone.
Apparently, he wasn’t bothering to address me directly.
“New blood,” Evie said wryly, shaking her head. “Mo’s renting the Meyers place. With an option to buy.”
“I’ve heard that song before,” Cooper rumbled. His smile was sharp and not terribly friendly. He pressed his lips together and exhaled. With lips quirked, he told me, “Try Evie’s apple-raisin pie. It’s a life changer.”
My eyebrows shot up as he turned and walked toward the end of the counter without another word. I noticed that while most of the diners were greeted with slaps on the back and manly jokes about work ethic or penis size, Cooper was left unscathed. It wasn’t a cold shoulder, exactly. In fact, several people acknowledged his presence with a nod. But there was a distance, a pointed lack of familiarity with the other Grundians. Except for Lynnette, who scurried over to drape her bone-thin frame beside his stool under the pretense of taking his order.
I turned to Evie. “Did I do something to offend him?”
“Oh, Cooper’s just . . . well, he’s surly as all hell, but he’s family, so I put up with him, even when no one else will. He’s a cousin on my mother’s side, so we sort of grew up together over in the Crescent Valley,” she said, shaking her head. “He’s got a thing about outsiders moving up here. Just don’t let him hear you say the words ‘commune with nature,’ or the top of his head will pop right off.”
While I’d experienced little of it so far, I’d read about the Alaskan feelings toward outsiders, a general attitude of distrust and exasperation for people who came to their home looking for the peace and fulfillment of living off the land. You could live there for twenty years and still be considered an outsider. I’d been warned by Mr. Gogan that the local postmaster, Susan Quinn, wouldn’t bother delivering my mail until I’d made it through my first winter. I’d have to pick it up at the post office myself. Susie Q, as the natives called her, was a bit of a character in a town full of them. Platinum blond by the good grace of Miss Clairol, with a countrified ’do that would put Dolly Parton to shame, she wore tight western shirts on her heavily endowed frame and drew a little beauty mark on her cheek every morning. But when it came to running the post office, she was all business, save for the fact that she kept her beloved dachshund, Oscar, in the mailroom for company.
I eyed Cooper again, trying to discern exactly where the territorial bubble he seemed to have established began. No one got within a foot of him, everyone shying around him to place orders at the counter, reach for ketchup. Again, except for Lynette, who couldn’t have communicated her eagerness to burst that bubble any more clearly if she’d been wearing a sandwich board that read, “10 Seconds from Naked!” So far, Cooper hadn’t responded to her overtures with more than a few disinterested grunts.
He was a charmer.
“If you stay past the first big snow, Cooper might actually speak to you without rolling his eyes,” Evie offered, her voice full of hope.
I muttered, “Well, woo-freaking-hoo. And you know, we had winter in Mississippi.”
Evie gave me a pitying shake of her head.
“We actually had to wear long sleeves,” I told her, but she seemed unimpressed.
“Shit fire!” I heard Buzz yell from the kitchen.
My eyes went wide, but everyone else seemed too occupied with their food to respond. Evie read my expression, smiled to herself, and rolled her eyes. “My husband, the poet.”
But then someone called in a stage whisper, as if not to disturb the customers, “Evie! I need some help back here.” A lanky Asian teenager in a stained white apron stepped around the corner, pulling a pale Buzz in his wake. Buzz’s hand was wrapped in a white dish cloth already soaked with blood. Evie’s expression changed to one of alarm.
“What happened, Pete?” she asked, concern roughening her voice. I quietly stepped around the bar and helped Pete steady Buzz. We took him back into the kitchen and sat him down on a case of canned chili beans. I gently lifted Buzz’s arm over his head so Evie could pull the cloth away. I saw enough of the wound that I thought I might have to sit down, too.
“Just a little accident,” Buzz mumbled, wincing with pain.
Poor Pete had worked himself up into a fine froth. Whether it was panic from the sight of blood or fear of losing his job, I had no idea. He babbled, “We were waiting for the fries to finish, and we got a little bored. And you know, Buzz just got these new knives, and he was bragging on them and trying to tell me that they were sharp enough to cut through a beer bottle, and I said, ‘No way.’ And he said, ‘I’ll prove it to you . . .’”
“John Matthew DuChamp, are you trying to tell me that after getting through two tours of duty unscathed, you’ve maimed yourself trying to cut a beer bottle in half?” Evie demanded.
Buzz was looking rather sheepish at the use of his full name . . . and green.
“It’s pretty bad,” Pete told her. “We need to get him to the clinic right now.”
“I’ll take him,” Evie said, whipping her apron over her head and reaching for her purse.