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A Family Under the Stars
by Christy Jeffries
Chapter One
Alex Russell glanced over his shoulder at the silver four-door Jeep pulling up behind him, its color matching the clouds overhead, which in turn matched his mood. The decals plastered to the side of the vehicle were a brighter version of the ones stenciled on the raft he was stocking with dry boxes, paddles and waterproof bags.
His grandfather, who everyone in western Idaho—including Alex—referred to as Commodore due to the man’s expertise in navigating the Sugar River, hopped out of the driver’s side while the female passenger remained inside talking on her cell phone. Alex rolled his eyes. Exactly the kind of city slicker he’d figured.
But when Alex’s father called him this morning, hacking up a lung and complaining about a sore throat, Alex had immediately offered to take over as the guide for today’s whitewater excursion. While his dad could probably steer through these rapids blindfolded, let alone with a fever of 103, it wouldn’t be good for business to get the paying customers sick. It was bad enough that they had to expose the public to Commodore’s ever-present crotchetiness, but they really needed someone to run the shuttle between the put-in and pickup locations.
“I thought Dad said there were supposed to be five in the group today,” Alex said when his grandfather approached.
“S’posed to be.” Commodore had never been described as a people person and always kept a toothpick clamped tightly between his teeth, probably as an excuse to avoid talking. It gave his weathered face a permanent grimace, like Popeye smoking his pipe, and it gave Alex a permanent headache trying to communicate with the seventy-five-year-old man.
“So, what happened to everyone else?”
“Don’t know.” Commodore limped over to the raft, checked the carabineers and tested out the tautness on the slings harnessed near the stern. “Some of us mind our own business.”
Alex took off his polarized sunglasses, letting them dangle from the strap around his neck, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He was tempted to remind his grandfather that this was their business, their family’s bread and butter. But that would only serve as an invitation to launch into another round of the ongoing argument about why Commodore was no longer allowed to do the bookkeeping for Russell’s Sports. “You gotta give me more info than that, Com.”
Com jerked the remaining half of his right thumb at the Jeep. “Gal’s name is Charlotte Folsom. Bankroller, far as I can tell. You want more than that, you can ask her yourself when she gets off the phone.”
Bankroller was the term some people in their small town of Sugar Falls, Idaho, used to refer to the tourists who vacationed on the mountain and, in the course of a weekend, injected plenty of their big-city dollars into the local economy. It probably wasn’t the politest thing to call the patrons that kept their small family company afloat, but Commodore wasn’t exactly known for his civility or his business acumen.
Alex looked at his watch. How long was her call going to take? He was surprised the woman even had reception this far upriver. “Is she allergic to the fresh air or something?”
“Not that she mentioned when she signed the release form.” His grandfather snorted before the last part, confirming that the old man was still miffed that his son and grandson had taken over the legal side of the business.
“Then why isn’t she getting out of the car?”
Yet, as soon as Alex asked the question, the woman opened the Jeep door. He noticed her hair first because it was the exact shade of his favorite dark chocolate– covered granola bar. It was styled as plainly and conservatively as possible, stick straight and cut in a uniform line just below her shoulders, with a headband holding everything but the thick sweeping bangs away from her face.
And what a face it was. Her cheekbones were high and sharp, her nose elegant and straight, and her lips reminded him of the cotton candy his dad bought him the first time they’d attended a minor league baseball game. They were pink and full and caused a spike in his bloodstream, like an instant sugar rush.
Man, something about this lady kept making him think of food.
“Hello,” she said, reaching out her hand. “I’m Charlotte Folsom. I’m terribly sorry for being on the phone when we arrived, but my editor had an update on my crew’s flight.”
“Your crew?” Alex asked, shifting his attention to the long, pale fingers clasped inside his. The ones that looked much too delicate to handle an oar.
“Yes. The producer, her assistant and the two photographers. They were supposed to fly into Spokane, but were diverted to Seattle because of a lightning storm. I don’t think they’re going to make it.” She looked up at the gray sky. “It’s not a problem, is it?”
“The weather or the lack of people?”
“Either.”
“Nah. Weather’s fine.” Commodore shifted his toothpick to the right side of his mouth. “And Miss Folsom’s rowed before, so you should be good to go.”
Alex’s untraditional upbringing meant that he’d learned to steer a raft before he’d learned to a drive a car. So he wasn’t concerned about his own ability to handle the river singlehandedly, but he would prefer having someone aboard who knew what they were doing. Unfortunately, every visiting tourist had a different definition of what constituted experience, and paddling through Class IV rapids required a lot more skill than most novices realized.
Not that he wanted to jump to any unfair conclusions about Charlotte Folsom, but Alex had been in business with his family long enough to recognize a greenhorn trying too hard to look the part. He wouldn’t be surprised if she’d just cut the price tags off her athletic clothes this morning.
“How many times have you been whitewater rafting?” he asked, setting his sunglasses back over his eyes so he didn’t offend the woman with an inadvertent look of doubt.
“Oh, this is my first time rafting. But when I was in middle school, my bunk won the canoeing finals two years in a row at Camp Butterhorn.”
Commodore whistled around his toothpick as if this was some sort of accomplishment. Were they serious? Com knew better than anyone else that rowing a canoe at some fancy sleepaway camp in seventh grade was not the same thing as navigating a six-man raft down the roaring Sugar River. Actually, Alex was just assuming the camp had been a fancy one judging by the rock-sized dia
mond studs in Miss Folsom’s ears and the way she stood tall and poised in her overpriced, brand-new skin-tight paddling pants and bright pink, waterproof North Face jacket.
His eyes shot down to her left hand, noting the absence of a wedding ring on her finger. Not that he was interested in her marital status. Alex preferred his women a lot less frilly and way more down-to-earth. And the one standing before him, who’d given off that supermodel vibe even before she’d mentioned having a camera crew, looked more suitable to being on the cover of the Neiman Marcus holiday book than an REI catalog. He simply didn’t want anyone losing any valuable jewelry on his watch.
“Here’s that lip cream I was telling you about in the car, Mr.... I mean Commodore.” Her quick correction indicated that Com had already warned her that he only answered to the nickname. Then she reached into a small pack slung over her shoulder and pulled out a jar of something. “This will really help with the dryness and the cracks. I told you I never leave home without it. Just put it on like this...”
She dipped a finger inside the tiny glass container and then proceeded to spread some sort of balm all over her own lips. Alex sucked in his breath when she held out the open container to his grandfather. He waited for the old guy—who’d once walked out in the middle of a haircut when the new barber offered to apply a deep conditioning treatment—to let out a string of curses about beauty product nonsense. But Com scrunched his eyes into slits as he swiped his stubby fingers across his tightly clamped frown, reminding Alex of one of the kids he coached in Pop Warner who’d accepted his teammates’ dare to eat a spoonful of spicy red peppers at the after-game pizza party.
“Actually, maybe we should just reschedule this whole thing,” Alex offered and saw his grandfather’s squint deepen and the barely perceptible shake of the elder Russell’s silver crew-cut head. He wasn’t sure if Com’s reaction was to Alex’s suggestion or to the novelty of having a foreign—and probably highly expensive—substance applied to any part of his anatomy.
“We can’t reschedule,” she said a bit forcefully, and Alex had the sense that not many people said “no” to Charlotte Folsom. “My magazine is on a deadline. We were already rushing to get the article done last week, but then I had child care issues and one of our columnists came down with a horrendous case of food poisoning so we had to scrap his review of Indonesian food trucks. So if I can’t come up with at least a few shots and five thousand words on gourmet dining off the land, then next month’s issue will completely tank.”
Child care issues? So the woman had kids, but no wedding ring? Not that it was any of Alex’s business, he told himself as he rocked back on his heels. He didn’t mind making small talk with the customers, but he rarely found himself curious about anything beyond their skill level and whether he’d need to keep them from getting killed while participating in an extreme sport they shouldn’t be doing in the first place. It was only the unusualness of the situation that had him wondering why a lady as beautiful as Charlotte Folsom was single. In his experience, it usually meant that the woman was too much of a pain for any man to deal with.
Again, not his business. What was his business was Russell’s Sports and how to turn a better profit this year. Thanks to Commodore’s refusal to book a corporate retreat last year and some bad online reviews of his grandfather’s customer service, the company’s savings account was at an all-time low.
Last week, his father had mentioned something about a San Francisco–based magazine booking them for some sort of photo shoot. Having no interest in any publication that didn’t contain ads for Bass Pro Shops or Cabela’s, Alex had just chalked the whole thing up to some travel article that might garner them some free publicity. Suddenly, this was sounding like more than he’d bargained for.
“Wait, back up.” He ran a hand over his face, his palm scratching against the dark-brown stubble on his chin. “What’s the point of going through all the effort of staging a photo shoot if the model is the only person who showed up?”
Miss Folsom slid her oversized tortoiseshell sunglasses off and Alex found himself looking into eyes that weren’t quite purple, but weren’t quite blue. “I’m not the model. The food is the model.”
“What food?” Alex looked back at his grandfather, shrugged as if to say, not my problem, then turned and walked over to the Jeep, presumably to grab more gear out of the back.
“Mr. Russell, I work for Fine Tastes. It’s one of the top cooking and home entertainment magazines in the industry. I thought our producer had explained that we’re doing a feature article on glamping and resourcing foods indigenous to the wilderness areas in order to create gourmet al fresco meals.”
“What the hell is glamping?” Commodore called out from behind the tailgate before Alex could ask what al fresco meant.
“It’s glamorous camping,” she said, then beamed a wide smile at his grandfather. “I know it’s an oxymoron, but it’s all the rage right now with urban families.”
“Sounds moronic, all right,” Commodore said, carrying over a bright orange bag then rubbing his lips together. It was tough to tell with the bobbing toothpick, but it almost seemed as though the old guy wasn’t quite frowning. Maybe that lip balm contained some magical ingredient that cured personality disorders.
The woman laughed, a throaty sound that was both way too feminine and way more genuine than he’d expected, and Alex stared at his grandfather, trying to determine what it was this particular lady had done to make the cantankerous Commodore Russell fall so completely under her spell.
He tried to stop his judgmental thoughts, reminding himself that not every woman from an overpopulated metropolis was his mother. Nor did many women take the time to pick a few fallen pine needles off his grandfather’s flannel shirt as the man passed by.
Alex asked, “So, what exactly is the goal for this two-day excursion if you don’t have your crew to help with the article?”
Because he was only supposed to be here as a guide. He certainly wasn’t going to glamp it up with her or otherwise assist in—what did she call it? Resourcing indigenous foods? Sure, she seemed sweet enough toward Com, but Alex could already see her as the type to start ordering him around, treating him as some sort of low-level assistant who was there to do the job of her entire crew.
“Frankly,” she said, turning that wide smile on him, “since time and weather are already a potential issue, I don’t see the need to make this a two-day excursion. We can just make a few stops along the river and stage a couple of scenes for the pictures. Then, if you don’t mind me conducting an informal interview of sorts, I can pick your brain and get a good enough idea of what the experience would be like so I can convey that to our readers.”
Alex looked up at the gray sky again. “Honestly, I don’t even know if we have one day. What does your old knee say, Com?”
His grandfather reached down to pat his arthritic leg, which was usually a better weather forecaster than most barometer stations. “Should hold off until tonight.”
“You sure?” Alex asked, noticing the subtle wobble of the toothpick.
“Sure as death and taxes.”
“When was the last time you paid taxes?” Alex mumbled under his breath. It was now a running joke among family and friends that Commodore Russell wasn’t always on the most hospitable terms with his neighbors or the IRS, which was why Alex and his dad kept the old man away from the financial side of the business, as well as many of the customers. Of course, that running joke was also the reason why they really couldn’t afford to cancel this trip. The beginning of the season was right around the corner and Russell’s Sports needed all the positive publicity it could get.
“If I’m wrong, then you get a lil’ wet,” Com said, a firm challenge in the man’s clear green eyes. It was no secret that Alex inherited his tan coloring and his competitive athletic spirit from the paternal side of the family. As well as his dry lip
s, apparently. He pulled out his plain store-bought lip balm and swiped it on, wishing the familiar gesture would sooth his apprehension, as well.
“Please, Mr. Russell,” Miss Folsom said, her eyes taking on a darker, more serious hue. “Just for a couple of hours. I know it’ll be more of a challenge for you than for me, but I have a friend watching my daughters back in town. I had to pull them out of school and make all kinds of alternate travel arrangements so I could make this article work. Plus, I told them Mommy was going to bring them back a wilderness treasure and I would hate to disappoint them.”
He had no clue what a wilderness treasure was, but Alex was a sucker for a challenge. And for kids. It was why he volunteered as a coach for almost every recreational league in town and ran a youth day camp during the summers. He was also a team player when it came to the family business and didn’t want to let his dad down.
So, against his better judgment, he decided not to disappoint anyone. “Let’s get the rest of your gear. I’ll explain the basics to you while we load up.”
* * *
They were only two miles downriver and Charlotte wished she hadn’t convinced herself, let alone her stoic rafting guide, that this was a good idea. What Charlotte hadn’t told the Russell men was that she desperately needed this article to help launch her career to the next level by—hopefully—winning a shot as a permanent contributor for a nationally syndicated cooking show. Sure, doing freelance writing for Fine Tastes had been a blessing after Mitchell had gone to prison, leaving her to raise their two daughters alone. But after some of the webisodes on her personal blog started gaining upward of 400,000 hits per day, her editor and several local news channels back in San Francisco were now referring to her as a younger, fresher Martha Stewart, and if Charlotte could turn her home and lifestyle brand into a success, then she’d finally be able to prove to her parents and her ex-husband that she was more than something to be paraded about at cocktail parties and charity events.
Pregnant by Mr. Wrong Page 19