Hayley March, start-up entrepreneur of an Alaska-based dating service, has great success helping others find “their person.” But when it comes to finding love herself, the professional matchmaker doesn’t know what she’s doing wrong. Enter Josh Barnes, the sexy firefighter she uses as a profile subject for her Bring Your Heart to Golden Falls campaign. Josh is perfect in every way—except he’s only looking for a fling, while Hayley’s looking for forever.
When Hayley enlists Josh to be her dating coach, she agrees to a temporary liaison under the condition that he point out her dating blind spots and help her become a catch for the next guy who comes along. She reluctantly moves on after their passionate fling, and Josh realizes he might have been a fool to let her go. But is he really ready for forever?
Please enjoy the following excerpt from Josh and Hayley’s love story …
BRING YOUR HEART
His alarm clock wouldn’t go off for another half hour, but Josh Barnes woke when the floodlights in his backyard went on at five o’clock, followed soon after by the not-so-faint furor of barking by his kennel of twenty sled dogs, who eagerly anticipated the soupy slop delivered to them by Josh’s dad, Bruce.
Yard lights. The cacophony of the dogs. The revving sound of his dad’s snowmobile starting up. It all marked morning feeding time at the Sourdough Kennel, at least on the days Josh reported for work at the Golden Falls Fire and Rescue Department. Otherwise, he’d be the one loading his snowmobile to feed the dogs, who were kept at the edge of his twenty-acre property, away from the house to lessen their noise.
And oh, the noise.
You’ll never get a wife this way, his most recent ex-girlfriend, Shannon Steele, had chided him one morning, unhappy about being woken so early and in such a manner. The girlfriend before had said much the same thing, adding, You’d never really expect a woman to live out here with a bunch of yapping dogs, would you?
When he’d been serving overseas in Afghanistan and gotten the call from Bruce telling him old man Ferris next door had passed away and his widow wanted to sell the kennel and house dirt cheap, preferably to Josh if he wanted it, women and marriage had been the last things on his mind.
He’d been thinking only of Golden Falls, where it was greener-than-green in summer and whiter-than-white in winter and where in spring the rivers cracked and the meadows bloomed. Before enlisting as a Navy Hospital Corpsman attached to the Marine Corps, he’d considered relocating to the Lower Forty-Eight and seeing what life had to offer down there, but by the time his dad’s call came in, Josh had seen enough. He just wanted to go home.
Some of his favorite childhood memories were helping old man Ferris train the sled dog puppies. He’d drive a four-wheeler in summer, or a snowmobile in winter, and the Alaskan Husky pups would trail after him, learning to follow their leader. He’d have them haul wood on a sled and teach them not to chew the rope lines.
During his deployment, Josh had been dreaming of the dogs and he’d been dreaming of Denali, the great mountain to the west, which was always in his sights as a child and forever fixed in his mind as the image of his true home.
He’d been dreaming of steering a sled behind a team of dogs out on the tundra without another person in sight.
He’d been dreaming, too, of the Iditarod, the last great race on earth—of its beauty and its brutality, and how racing it would by necessity blot from his brain everything having to do with war and ugly brown deserts and soldiers dying.
He’d thought sled-dog racing might help him forget.
He hadn’t been thinking of women at all.
Josh bought the property.
Bruce, by then retired as chief of the police force, agreed to help manage the kennel, both until Josh got back from the service and afterwards. Josh came home and was hired on as a firefighter for Golden Falls. He’d since gotten his paramedic license, and the job itself gave him a lot of free time, but his forty-eight-hour shifts meant he still needed a kennel manager, a position his father served.
On a fire shift morning, it was just his dad feeding the dogs in the bitter pre-dawn cold of early November in Alaska’s interior, and while Josh could have gone back to sleep for another half-hour, he instead decided to help him. He turned off his alarm clock, turned on the lights, hit the remote to get his electric fireplace going, and got out of bed. He did his daily upon-waking pushups and then layered up. He stopped in the kitchen to get a pot of coffee brewing, then trekked across the yard to the kennel. It would be dark yet for hours, and Josh always found it a lonely time of day.
“Morning, Josh.” His dad greeted him with a nod, his cheeks ruddy.
“Damn cold this morning,” Josh said.
“Always is this time of year. You’re up early.”
“So are you.” The morning feeding was usually a couple hours later, at about seven. “You couldn’t sleep?”
Bruce shook his head. “Tossing and turning, as usual.”
“Ditto.”
Josh couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a solid night’s sleep. Certainly not since high school, and probably not since his mom died when he was thirteen. His mind was restless at night; it was when his ghosts came to haunt him. He guessed it was the same for his dad.
They worked together in companionable silence as the dogs barked en masse, excited because they knew food was coming soon. Each dog had its own little dog house to which it was chained, and several began running to the end of their tether and back, jumping on and off their doghouse, over and over. Others simply stood, barking, tails wagging. Josh and his dad went around with slop buckets and gave each dog his portion, and one by one, the kennel quieted as each began to eat.
“I’ve got coffee on,” Josh said.
“Music to my ears. Want to hop on?”
“Nah, I’ll walk.”
“You go ahead, then. I’ll load up the slop buckets.”
Josh was at his back door when Bruce pulled up. Always a relief to step inside, it was doubly nice to be greeted by the smell of fresh coffee. As Josh poured two mugs, Bruce took a seat at the table with a groan.
“You okay?” Josh asked as he handed his dad his mug and sat at the table across from him.
“My bones feel old on these cold winter mornings.”
“I hear you.”
Bruce smiled. “You’re twenty-nine. What do you know about feeling old?”
“Hey, I’ll be thirty next month.”
“That’s right.” Bruce sipped his coffee. “Speaking of which, your sister wants to know the best day to throw you a surprise party. Any thoughts?”
Josh grinned. His family was famous for faking surprise parties, a little joke they played on the rest of the world. “Well, we’ve got the race my birthday weekend, so not before then.”
Josh had signed up to race the dogs in the Akpaliki Taurtut, a hundred-mile race sponsored by the city of Golden Falls to bring winter business to the area, as a prelude to the Iditarod in March.
“That’s right.” Bruce said. “We do, don’t we?”
“You don’t sound too enthused about it.”
“Winter camping at the age of sixty-one? What’s not to like?”
Josh sized up his dad. For someone who was never one to complain, it sounded quite a bit like a complaint. It sounded, too, like his dad might soon bail on him. He couldn’t blame him. Josh’s older twin sisters lived in the Florida Keys and co-owned a thirty-six-foot sailboat. Why wouldn’t his dad prefer to spend winters there near his daughters and three grandchildren instead of feeding slop to dogs before dawn in below-freezing temperatures? Josh had been lucky to have had his dad’s help for the past three years, and he well knew it.
“Should I try to find someone else to be my kennel manager?”
“No, no,” Bruce said. “I always keep my obligations.”
“I wish it didn’t feel like an obligation.”
“I don’t mind.” His dad shrugged. “I know how important the dogs are to you.”
“It
’s not only the dogs that are important to me, Dad. You and Maggie are, too. Your happiness is important to me.”
“We’re happy enough.”
Maggie was Josh’s sister, older by one year. An ICU nurse on the graveyard shift, she was also his roommate and arguably his best friend. Their brother Jack, also a firefighter like Josh, lived on the opposite side of downtown, but there was bad blood between Bruce and his oldest son. To the best of Josh’s knowledge, no one other than the two of them knew why. Josh had grown up idolizing Jack, but he now resented how he’d ruined the family’s cohesiveness. It had been bad enough losing their mom, but losing all the big-family traditions and holidays had been a second death, a preventable one. So while the brothers worked together at Golden Falls Fire Station One, Josh on the ladder crew and Jack on the engine crew captain, a current of unease still ran between them.
“Speaking of happy, do you have any goals for your thirtieth year?” Bruce asked.
“Just one—not to finish dead last in the Iditarod.”
The race coming up in March would be Josh’s third. The first time he dropped out because of too many dog injuries, and the previous year he’d come in last.
“Third time’ll be the charm.” Bruce peered at him. “And then what? You think you might be ready to get as serious about a woman as you are about dog-sledding?”
“You’ve already got three grandkids,” Josh reminded Bruce. “Can’t you leave me in peace?”
He already got those types of comments from the various women he’d dated since coming home from the military. He was a physical guy in the prime of his life, and he liked sex as much as the next guy, the wilder the better, but he began each potential relationship with the same five words—I don’t do long term.
And he meant them.
Still, hookups commenced, one-night stands turned into short-term flings, and all was great until words like love and forever started to find their way into the conversation. And then things got messy, and Josh broke things off and retreated to the companionship of the dogs, who never asked for anything more than food and water and long miles pulling a sled.
“This isn’t about grandkids,” Bruce said. “Young single women are already few and far between in Alaska. I worry that when you’re finally ready to settle down, all the good ones are going to be taken.”
“Maybe I won’t ever want to settle down.” He grinned at his dad. “It’s not like I’ve been lonely in the bedroom.”
“No,” Bruce said. “But I think you’ve been a little lonely in life.” The words stung, because his father knew him very well. “And, son, trust me when I say there’s nothing quite like the love of a good woman.”
Josh remembered then it was the anniversary of his mom’s death, and Bruce’s uncharacteristic seriousness made more sense.
“Are you going to the cemetery today?” he asked quietly.
“Sure am.” Bruce took a deep breath and stared at the nearly-gone coffee in his mug and looked so, so tired. “You can sleep at night with a good woman beside you. Did I ever tell you that? That’s how you know you’ve found the right one.”
Josh thought of all the nights spent tossing and turning with a woman beside him, of all the hours he’d spent watching them sleep so peacefully while he lay starkly awake, his body satisfied but his mind as unquiet as ever. He felt most alone those nights.
“If that’s true, then I definitely haven’t found the right woman yet,” he said.
“Which is why you should keep on looking.”
“I haven’t been looking.”
“Okay,” Bruce said. “Then it’s why you should start looking.”
When Hayley March burst through the door of the North Star Café, all eyes turned to her. More than any place else in Golden Falls, the North Star Café was where you went to see and be seen, especially in the early mornings when the town’s movers and shakers gathered for business, coffee, and the signature cinnamon buns. It was the quintessential anchor of the tidy downtown square, with a deco-style metal awning out front and big glass windows with decorations that changed with the seasons.
Hayley was there to meet Claire Roberts, her fifty-something boss and business mentor. While earning her marketing degree from Alaska State, Hayley had gotten an internship with the employment agency owned by Claire, one of the many local business she owned. Hayley had flourished in her role and was hired after graduation, and now she wasn’t only working for the employment agency matching people to jobs, but launching her own side-along business, matching people to people: helping others find love as Golden Falls’ one and only matchmaker.
Claire was already at the café, of course, because Hayley was five minutes late and Claire was never late to anything. Hayley settled into the booth near the roaring stone fireplace.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said, knowing Claire considered promptness an essential quality for successful businesswomen. “For the first time in a long time, I actually cared how I looked in the morning.”
“It’s your big interview day! Are you excited?”
“I’m kind of nervous, actually.”
Hayley, the budding entrepreneur, was scheduled to be interviewed by the glamorous Cassie Holt of KFLS Channel Eight later that morning. She’d tried on and decided against four different outfits before settling on black dress pants and the form-fitting teal cashmere sweater Claire had given her for Christmas the year before. The outfit wouldn’t hide the extra ten pounds Hayley was carrying, but it would have to do.
“I love that sweater on you, Hayley,” Claire said. “It contrasts so nicely with your auburn hair, and it makes your eyes even more hazel-y. It’s the perfect thing to wear for TV.”
“You think? It doesn’t make me look too fat?”
“No, because you’re not fat.”
“I gained a few pounds after Danny and I broke up,” Hayley said, having recently gotten on the scale for the first time since her last break-up, which had taken place at about this time the previous year. After that, she’d vowed to get her act together. She’d hit the gym that day, and the next day, and resolved to go every day for the rest of her life. It would be her job, just like going to the office was. She’d be the fittest, sexiest, most successful businesswoman Golden Falls had ever seen … since Claire, anyway.
“Well, it’s a fair tradeoff,” Claire said. “Weight you can lose. Immature, man-child boyfriends like Danny can weigh you down for life if you end up marrying them. Trust me. I speak from experience.”
Claire had one failed marriage behind her, but she seldom talked about it. Once, she’d told Hayley she nearly forgot having been married at all.
“I know. Plus, I got an awesome apartment out of it! Honestly, Claire, I owe you forever for renting it to me on short notice like you did.”
The apartment was a spacious, newly-remodeled one-bedroom on the upper floor of a duplex Claire owned overlooking the Golden Falls City Park and the downtown square. It was perfectly opposite the café, in fact. Claire herself had rented the apartment back when she was Hayley’s age, and when her first business took off, she’d bought the duplex from her landlord. Over the following thirty years, Claire had built up a large portfolio of residential housing in town, mostly near the college campus, as well as owning nearly half the commercial buildings on Main Street—including the one in which they were having breakfast.
“I’m glad it was available at the right time.” Claire smiled. “I loved it, too, when I lived there, although I didn’t decorate it as nicely as you have.”
“You also didn’t go six thousand dollars into debt like I did to decorate and furnish it,” Hayley said with some chagrin.
“More lessons learned,” Claire said without judgment. “At least you got yourself out of it quickly.”
“One bartending shift at a time,” said Hayley, who’d worked at the Sled Dog Brewing Company three nights a week through the busy summer tourist season for the sole purpose of paying off her credit card debt. She still worked
there a few nights a month and used her earnings for splurges. “Rebecca made me. She was more stressed about my debt than I was.”
“Speak of the devil.” Claire smiled as Rebecca Miller approached their table, looking happier than a person had a right to be after waking up at 3 a.m. to start baking. In her mid-thirties, Rebecca co-owned the café with her brother, Eric, who managed the people and the books. All Rebecca wanted to do was bake, and her customers were grateful for it.
That morning, she came bearing gifts—two bowls of chocolate bread pudding with heavy cream to pour over it.
“Devil’s right,” Hayley said, inhaling the scent of warm chocolate as she reached for her bowl. “Rebecca’s the real reason I’ve gained weight.”
“Hey, I just make it,” Rebecca said. “I don’t force you to eat it.”
“You could at least charge me for it.”
“But you’re my number one taste tester!”
“And it’s the best job in the world,” Hayley said, happily pouring cream over the pudding. “Speaking of jobs, mine is finding you a date, Rebecca. Are you coming to Singles Night this week?” Hayley was referring to the weekly event she hosted at the Sled Dog.
“If anyone can make me a believer in love, it’s you, Hayley. I’ll be there.”
“Hayley’s being interviewed by Cassie Holt this morning,” Claire said. “She’s doing a feature story on the Bring Your Heart to Golden Falls campaign.”
Rebecca grinned. “Bring your heart, leave your baggage?”
Weeks away from being launched, Hayley’s online campaign was designed to attract women from the Lower Forty-Eight to move to Alaska in general, and Golden Falls in particular.
“We’re leaving the baggage part out.” Three bites in, Hayley set down her spoon. “This is fantastic, but I can’t eat before the interview. I’m actually feeling kind of sick.”
True North (Golden Falls Fire Book 1) Page 23