An Alaskan Proposal

by Beth Carpenter

  “So, who’s the plus-one you’re bringing?” Zack asked Leith.

  “Plus-one? What are you talking about?”

  “The wedding. Caitlyn says you RSVPed that you’re bringing a guest. Who is she?”

  Oh, great. Leith’s sister had volunteered to send in his RSVP card when she did her own. He should have guessed Volta was up to something. She probably had someone all picked out she was planning to fix him up with. “That was a mistake. You can tell Caitlyn I’m not bringing anyone.”

  “No way, dude. If you said plus-one, you’re bringing someone to fill that chair. I don’t care if it’s your grandma. Caitlyn has been going nuts trying to figure out how to arrange the tables. She has all these relatives who she can’t put too close together or she says there will be blood. She’s finally managed to find the perfect seating plan. If one little thing changes, it’ll mess it all up. I’m not going to be the one to make her head explode.”

  “Speaking of explosions,” Erik said with a sly smile. “You ought to ask Explosion Girl. She’s probably great at weddings.”

  “Who’s Explosion Girl?” Zack asked.

  Leith just shook his head, so Erik explained about the beans. Zack laughed. “Sure, bring her. She should liven things up.”

  “I’ll take it under advisement.” Leith stepped away to drop the keys to the company truck into a drawer. “Who are you bringing?” he asked Erik.

  “I invited this woman I met from the parks department. She’s just here for a month, on some government project. No strings. The most important quality in a relationship.”

  “That’s what I used to think, until I met Caitlyn,” Zack said. “Someday you’re going to want some strings.”

  “No way. Leith will back me up, right?”

  “I’m not getting in the middle of this.” After his own marital disaster, Leith was inclined to agree with Erik, but he didn’t want to upset Zack. He had to admit, Zack had been a lot happier since Caitlyn had come into his life, even if she was a little obsessive about the wedding plans. He just hoped their marriage was more successful than his had been. Not a high bar.

  Carson cleared his throat. “Well, if we’re about done with advice for the lovelorn, maybe we can get a little work done around here?”

  They all scattered. Leith went to his desk to fill out his time sheet and a summary of the day’s events. While his computer booted up, he thought about his options.

  Weddings made his skin itch, but since he’d been drafted as a groomsman, he couldn’t miss this one. Now, thanks to Volta, he was going to have to find a date. And it better be soon, before his sister coerced him into taking out whatever new friend she had in mind for him. The last woman she’d set him up with, six months ago, had been a walking disaster. That two-hour date had to have consumed at least ten years of his life. No, if he had to have a date, he was choosing her himself. Volta didn’t get a vote.

  That decided, he opened a spreadsheet and went to work. Work, he understood. He could worry about this other stuff later.

  * * *

  SABRINA RANG UP a sleeping bag the color of a roadwork sign and a snap-together salt-and-pepper shaker for a woman with a long braid hanging down her back. The customer checked the tag. “This says it’s comfortable down to forty-five degrees. Do you think that’s accurate?”

  Sabrina had spent most of her off time during the last two days since the great bean incident reading product descriptions on the company’s website, but that didn’t help with questions like this. “Honestly, I haven’t tried out this particular sleeping bag, so I’m not sure.” Sabrina called to Clara, “Do you think this bag would keep you warm at forty-five?”

  “Sure, if you’re wearing sweats or thermals to sleep in. It’s a great bag.”

  “Oh, good. Thanks.” The customer waved at Clara and left the store. Clara finished ringing up her customer and handed him the sack of merchandise. For once, no one was waiting in line to check out.

  Clara wandered over to Sabrina’s register. “That’s our most popular summer bag. You’re probably used to a lighter one where you come from, huh?”

  “Mmm. Does it come in any colors besides orange?” Sabrina had found the best way to deflect Clara was to ask a question. Clara loved to talk, and Sabrina had already picked up a few nuggets of wisdom she could pass on to customers and sound as if she might know what she was talking about. Besides, she was curious. Surely not everyone wanted a sleeping bag in a color that could be seen from space.

  But before Clara could answer, Walter hustled over to the registers. Today his bolo tie slide was a silver horseshoe. He hadn’t said anything since the team-builder, but Sabrina kept expecting him to call her in and expose her as the fraud she was. Her stomach tightened in anticipation, but he just smiled. “Say, Clara, do you mind if we borrow Sabrina for a little while? Tim needs some help with a display in camping.”

  “That’s fine. Randy will be back from lunch in fifteen minutes. If I get backed up in the meantime, I’ll call for help.”

  “Great.” Walter motioned for Sabrina to walk with him. “I saw on your résumé that you’ve worked in fashion, so I thought you might have some experience with display.”

  “Yes, I have.” Sabrina used to enjoy creating displays when she was working retail in high school and college. Even after she’d gotten the buyer job, she’d often sent out tips and ideas to the local stores. But she wasn’t sure her flair for fashion accessories was going to be a big help with a camping display. Still, the basics of form and balance she’d learned in her design classes should apply across the board.

  Walter introduced her to Tim, a tall, skinny guy with thick glasses. Tim looked more like a chemistry professor than a camping enthusiast, but he was setting up the tent Sabrina had almost destroyed in less time than it had taken her to shake it out of the bag. Fortunately, she’d found tent-washing tips on the internet and managed to get the bean stain off the rain fly, no thanks to survival expert Leith Jordan.

  Now, that guy made her nervous. Everyone at the store seemed to take her at face value, but Leith wasn’t buying her act. His disdain for her inexperience had been pretty clear at the team-builder. In fact, she’d just about reached the conclusion he was going to expose her to all her coworkers, when he’d suddenly started being nice and loaned her his vest. Which she’d washed and now had to figure out how to return without asking anyone in the store where to find him. She didn’t want to call attention to the fact that she’d been unprepared for the weather. Among other things.

  “Hi, Sabrina,” Tim said. “Would you mind grabbing me a couple of ’biners? I want to hang this canoe from the ceiling.”

  Beaners? She wondered if this was some sort of joke aimed at her, but he didn’t look as though he was joking. “Sure.” Beaners. Whatever those were. Sabrina scanned the area for anything that looked likely.

  “Aisle ten,” Walter prompted, before walking away.

  “Thanks.” Sabrina hurried over to the aisle. It seemed to contain miscellaneous camping gadgets. She found cooking utensils, lanterns, some sort of special toilet paper and a bunch of C-shaped hooks with levered latches.

  Will, the guy who’d built the fire at the team-builder, walked past, presumably on his way to the shoe department. “Hi, Sabrina. What are you looking for?”

  “Beaners.”

  He gave her a puzzled frown and gestured at the hooks. “Right there.”

  “Oh, duh.” Sabrina gave a little laugh. “Right in front of me. Good thing it wasn’t a snake.” Quick, change the subject. “So, has Amy had her baby yet?”

  “Soon. She called in while her husband drove her to the hospital this morning. Asked me to finish the inventory without her.” He grinned. “She says she’s going to name the baby after me. Course, her husband, Bill, is really named William, too.”

  “That’s convenient. Well, I’d better get these to T
im. See you later, Will.” Sabrina grabbed a few medium-sized hooks, which she now realized were labeled as carabiners. Ah, like the clips on the tent. Carabiners equals ’biners. As if she didn’t have enough trouble with camping terms, they were using nicknames for tools. Hopefully, Will would just assume she was blind, rather than ignorant.

  She brought the carabiners to where Tim was now on a ladder, threading ropes over beams. “There you are. I thought you’d deserted me.”

  “Sorry. I ran into Will and he said Amy is having her baby.”

  “I heard. Maybe she’ll take some time off now. She was over there stocking shoes last week even though she could hardly bend over. Did Will say she’s doing okay?”

  “I don’t think he had any updates yet.”

  “I’m sure we’ll hear something soon. Can you give me one of those?”

  Sabrina handed him the carabiner. The employees here all talked to and about each other like they were all part of one big family. At least that was how Sabrina assumed families functioned. She really didn’t have a lot of experience. It had been just her and her mom since she was twelve, when her dad left.

  That was when Sabrina discovered security was an illusion. That counting on someone else for love and support was a gamble. Sabrina didn’t believe in gambling. The only person she could absolutely depend on was herself. And that was why she had to keep this job.

  She thought she’d done all the right things. In college, she’d been tempted to go into fashion design, but chose the safe route of fashion merchandising. Only it turned out not to be so safe. The department store where she’d been working as a buyer went bankrupt. With her experience and references, Sabrina had assumed she’d be able to find a similar position, but in-store sales were down all over, and everyone was cutting back.

  There was a rumor circulating that one of the senior buyers at McCormick and Sons was about to retire. McCormick’s had always been Sabrina’s dream job. A family-owned chain of upscale department stores based in Scottsdale, they had the reputation of hiring the best and keeping them forever. Once you were a part of McCormick’s, you were set.

  Sabrina had tried to wait it out, but the buyer stubbornly refused to retire. Time went by and Sabrina’s carefully accrued savings dwindled. A friend of her mother’s mentioned this management trainee program with Orson Outfitters in Seattle. Sabrina applied there along with several dozen other places, but Orson’s was the only company that showed interest.

  At the time she applied, she’d assumed they were a casual clothing company. It wasn’t until they’d contacted her requesting an interview that she’d researched the company and discovered they made and distributed outdoor equipment, with clothing making up only a small portion of their product line. But after five months of unemployment, and her cash reserve almost gone, Sabrina was determined she was going to get the job with Orson Outfitters, even if it meant she had to fudge a little about her outdoor experience.

  “Sabrina? Another one?”

  “Oh, sorry.” She handed Tim the second carabiner.

  “Attention, everyone.” Walter’s voice came over the speaker. “We have a new member of the Orson family. It’s a boy, nine pounds, eleven ounces.”

  Everyone cheered. Tim grinned. “Wow. Almost ten pounds. And my wife thought an eight-pounder was big. We’ll have to go by and see Amy and the baby after work.” He tied the ends of the ropes into loops and passed them to Sabrina. “Can you use a couple more carabiners to clip these onto the gunwales of the canoe, so we can hoist it up?”

  Okay, Sabrina didn’t know what a gunwale was, but the only reasonable place she could fasten a carabiner onto a canoe had to be the posts across the top. She clipped the ropes to the canoe, front and back. “How’s that?”

  “Good. Pull on those lines to raise it?”

  She tugged on the lines, lifting the canoe off the ground, while Tim guided it into place from the ladder. Once they had it in position, he tied it off. “Great. I just need to set out a chair in front of the tent, and I’ll be all done.”

  She thought about offering to create the display. She had an idea about arranging two chairs in front of the tent with a few stones suggesting a fire ring, like the one at the team-builder. She could set a bird-watching book and some binoculars on one of the chairs, and hang one of those cute lanterns she’d spotted in aisle ten somewhere. Maybe lean a paddle in place to draw the eye toward the canoe. But the more she was around other employees, the more likely it was that her secret would come out. She’d better not risk it. “I should get back on the register.”

  “Okay. Thanks for your help, Sabrina.”

  “No problem. See you later.” Sabrina returned to her post next to Clara. This was ridiculous. She was supposed to be gaining practical experience as a preliminary to moving into management, but instead she spent most of her energy avoiding any conversation that would expose her ignorance.

  Only the top half of the candidates working in the stores would be chosen to move to the next round of the training program. If Walter didn’t give her a high rating in a little over three months, she would once again be searching for a job. And so far, the only impressive thing she’d managed to accomplish was to blow up a few cans of beans.

  If she was going to keep this job, she needed a crash course. And obviously she couldn’t get it from any of her coworkers. There was only one person in Anchorage she could think of who might be able to help her without giving away the whole thing. After all, he was already suspicious, and training people to survive outdoors was what he did for a living. So be it. She’d contact him. Because, obnoxious though he might be, Leith Jordan was her best bet if she wanted to keep her job.

  * * *

  TIRED AND A little damp, Leith rolled into the office after a long day of watercraft survival training in the swimming pool at one of the local high schools. He unloaded the kayaks and headed to his desk to fill out his reports. Everyone else had gone home for the day. Before he could even sit down, his phone rang. Volta.

  “Hi, sis.”

  “Hi. Want to come for dinner? I made a big pot of spaghetti and meatballs.”

  Leith’s stomach growled at the mention of food. He loved Volta’s spaghetti. She usually only made it when she was having a bunch of people... Wait. “Who else is coming?”

  “Just some people from work. You know most of them.”

  Nicely evasive. But he knew her. “And who don’t I know?”

  “Oh, well, there’s a new nurse. She just came from the military. She has some great stories. So funny. You’ll like her.”

  “Uh-huh.” As good as a homemade spaghetti dinner sounded, he was too tired to fend off his sister when she was in matchmaker mode. “Yeah, well, I’m pretty wiped out. I think I’ll just head on home.”

  “Oh, but you have to come. I already told—” She stopped talking.

  “You already told who what?”

  “I, uh, already told Emma you were coming. She’d be so disappointed if her uncle Leith didn’t show up.”

  They both knew it wasn’t Emma she’d been about to mention, but he let that pass. He did want to see Emma. He’d helped her put together something for show-and-tell last week, and he wanted to see how it went. “Okay, I’ll be there, but I do not want a setup. Are we clear?”

  “Who said anything about a setup?”

  “I did. I mean it, Volta. I’m not going out with your friend. Remember Mina?”

  “That was a fluke. How was I supposed to know she had a dog phobia?”

  “What about what’s-her-name with the purple hair?”

  “Jaci was sweet.”

  “Jaci wanted to plan our wedding before we’d even ordered appetizers.”

  “She was joking.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Okay, whatever. Just come for dinner in an hour.”

  “All right. You w
ant me to bring anything?”

  “A better attitude. See you then.” She ended the call.

  Leith set his phone on the desk and started on the report. If he could finish in the next fifteen minutes, he’d have time to swing by his house for a quick shower and to collect the dog before heading to Volta’s. But he was only halfway through when he heard the chime signaling the front door opening. “Hello? Anyone here?”

  Nuts, he’d forgotten to lock the door behind him. “We’re closed. Sorry.” He strode into the reception area. Explosion Girl herself was standing there, a striped tote bag tightly gripped in hands tipped with shiny pink nails. What was Sabrina doing here?

  She looked a little different than she had on the mountain. Her dark hair was down, waving across her shoulders. She wore a multicolored scarf, which looked like a watercolor painting, draped around her neck over a bluish dress that stopped just above her knees. Cute was an understatement. His eyes followed the curve of her calf down to highly impractical pink shoes, before his gaze quickly returned to her face. Big eyes the color of milk chocolate stared back at him, as though she was as surprised to see him as he was to see her. But she was the one who’d come to him.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Oh, uh, I hope so.” She reached into her bag. “I wanted to return your vest. Thanks for loaning it to me last week.”

  “You’re welcome.” Good—now he didn’t have to chase it down. He took the vest, but she wasn’t making any move to go. Now what? “Was there something else?”

  “Yes. It’s just, um, you teach classes, right? On outdoorsy stuff?”

  He chuckled. “That’s not exactly the term we use, but yes, we do.”

  “So, if I were to want to learn about camping and whatever, you know, just the basics, do you have classes on that?”