“What about a quick lesson?”
She bit the tip of her tongue between her front teeth as she worked at the hard orange shell. “Nope. I’ve got this.”
Dan watched with great amusement as Jo worked her way toward a slow rhythm, eating the sweet meat inside as each morsel was revealed. Josephine Hannah really could put on a show, and he never wanted to miss another episode for as long as he lived.
“You were right,” she said setting her utensils to the side and smiling over at him proudly. “This is delicious. And I also feel like I’m getting a workout while I eat, so hooray for multitasking.”
Dan chuckled and shook his head. “You make it much harder than it needs to be.”
“Story of my life, right?” She winked at him, and he could have died right there. This woman never ceased to surprise and amaze him. One moment she was a fearful, cowering flower and the next she shone bright as the sun on a clear and cloud-free day.
He liked that about her. He liked it a lot.
Just like his career offered one new adventure after the next so, too, did his new girlfriend—and he had already fallen so hard.
Jo picked up the shellers and got back to work on her meal. A look of triumph flashed across her face as she maneuvered the tool almost as quickly and deftly as Dan now. He didn’t have the heart to tell her that his game was off because he was too busy observing and admiring her performance.
“When did you know you wanted to be a movie star?” he asked between their symphony of cracks on the crab legs.
“A star? Never.” She kept her eyes on her work with the shellers as she spoke. “But I’ve wanted to act ever since I landed the role of a rainbow in my kindergarten play.”
“I don’t think I read about that particular credit on IMDb,” he joked. “How does one become a rainbow? I’m very intrigued now.”
“Well, it was very challenging,” she said with a grin. “I had to make sure I came on stage at the exact moment the raindrops exited. It required a great deal of precision.”
“I bet.”
“How about you? Were you ever in any school plays?”
“Yeah, no,” he said perhaps too quickly. “Not because I didn’t find it interesting. More that I knew I wouldn’t be any good.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I like adventure, the unknown. I don’t want someone telling me what to say, how to act.”
“Well, not all of us are born with a tiny writer in our brain. Some of us need the extra help figuring out what to say. And besides, I think you could be a great actor.”
“Really?” He deadpanned at her, but she didn’t back down.
“Really!” she insisted. “Here, I’ll give you a stage test right now.”
“Okay, show me what you’ve got.”
“Actually.” She paused to laugh. “It will be the other way around. Ready?”
He nodded and placed an elbow on each side of the table, using his hands to cradle his chin in anticipation. “Ready.”
“The true test of a great actor is the stage kiss,” she explained with a mischievous flash across her features. “Give me the best kiss of my life. Make me believe it.”
Whoa. Dan placed his palms flat on his table to brace himself. Kissing Josephine wasn’t acting, but it was something he knew he could do very, very well…
Chapter 8
Josephine couldn’t believe the words that had just come out of her mouth. Should she take them back, or wait to see how Dan would react first? The strangest part was that she wasn’t playing a part at all. This was her, the real Jo shining through, flirting, falling.
Dan regarded her with a veiled expression. “I like that prompt very much, and I’d be happy to follow director’s orders, but are you sure you want me to do it here in the middle of the restaurant with all these people around?”
They both glanced around the room which had filled quickly with other diners since they’d first sat down. How could she be so reckless?
“I…” she began, but then let her voice fall away.
“Say no more. I’ll save it for act two of tonight’s date. And believe me, it’s not because I want to.” He licked his lips, drawing her eyes to his alluring mouth, making her want that kiss even more.
“You’re right,” she admitted. “Thank you.”
The waitress returned to the table and handed them each a tiny dessert menu with gold foil lined along the edges. “Shall we end tonight with something sweet?” she asked, looking from Dan to Jo and back again.
Dan raised an eyebrow. “What do you say, Jo?”
She swallowed the nervous knot in her throat and said, “Honestly, I’d rather skip ahead to act two.”
Dan’s eyes widened as he grabbed the menu from Jo, stacked it on his, and handed it to the waitress. “Check, please!” he cried.
Josephine laughed, and it felt wonderful. “Just so you know,” she told him tapping her finger on her glass as if it were a microphone. “I’m not that kind of girl. Kissing is absolutely where it stops. I want to get to know you, not your body.”
Now Dan was blushing in earnest. “Yes, ma’am. And for the record, you’re not like any kind of girl I’ve known ever before.”
“Yeah, yeah, and that’s why you like me so much.”
Dan sucked air in through his teeth. “I really am a broken record, aren’t I?”
“Yup. But luckily you’re playing my favorite song.”
“Now who’s showing off some serious writing chops?” he asked with a laugh.
“I guess we’re just good together,” she said, giving a small shrug. “Thanks for not giving up on me.”
The waitress brought the check and handed it to Dan, who already had his card at the ready.
“I don’t mind getting it,” Jo told him. They both knew full well that she had much more money than he did, but Dan shook off her offer.
“No way! I asked you on this date. I’m paying. C’mon, let me be a gentleman. After all, that’s what you told me you wanted.”
“Fair enough,” she conceded. “Thank you for dinner. I loved it.”
A smirk spread across his face as he signed the check and put his card back into his wallet. “I could tell.”
Heat rose to Josephine’s face, but it didn’t dampen her excitement one bit. “So what do you have planned next?”
His eyes shone playfully. “I think you know the answer to that.”
“Besides that.” Now she felt embarrassed all over again. It was almost as if she were at war with herself when Dan was around—half of her fighting to maintain appearances and the other half giving in to him one smile at a time.
He rose to his feet and offered her his hand to help her up, even though they both knew she didn’t need it. “Well, since you’re new here, I’m going to show you the city through my eyes.”
The city through Dan’s eyes?
She couldn’t wait to see it.
Dan opened his truck’s door for Jo and waited for her to climb in and buckle up. “You ready for your Tour of Alaska by an honest-to-goodness Alaskan?” he asked, sliding into the cab beside her.
“Oh, yes! I was born ready,” Jo said with a huge smile.
Reaching under his dashboard, Dan pulled out a radio handset and put on his best airline pilot voice. “Thank you for choosing Rockwell’s Romantic Rides, the most exclusive tour in all of Alaska. Your safety is our primary concern, so please remain seated with your seatbelt fastened and keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. In the event of any feelings of need or affection, your captain can be used as a flotation device.”
He winked at Jo as she continued to laugh at his goofy airline pilot impression. With deft, practiced moves, he steered his truck into the dense grid of Anchorage’s many one-way streets and up a steep hill. He’d learned to drive on these streets, but today his hands almost trembled on the wheel. With a deep breath, he steadied himself.
“They call this area ‘Government Hill’ becaus
e it butts up against the military base there,” he paused, knitting his eyebrows together as he thought back to history class.
“And I think,” he whispered like an inside joke to her, and his heart skipped a beat when she chuckled. “With the way they named things around here, it could be that Tom Government was killed there in World War II.”
They shared a laugh and Jo put her hand on Dan’s arm. Tingles shot up his spine and shivers followed close behind. Just the small touches and moments already meant so much to him.
“My family used to come through here during the Christmas season to look at the fancy lights people used to put up. Mom’s really big into Christmas, so from November until December, it’s all Christmas, all the time.”
“No Thanksgiving?”
“Oh you mean Christmas dinner, take one? No, we’ve always been thankful anytime we can all sit down to a family dinner together. An occasion that is rapidly becoming harder to fit into Mom and Dad’s house.” Dan chuckled. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been called over to move furniture from the living room to my old childhood bedroom so they can fit a table with enough seating for everyone in there. Where was I? Oh yeah, so we never felt that needing one whole day was necessary.”
“Okay. Why are we starting over here?”
Dan thought for a moment before responding. “Well, I figured it’d be best to start with the beginning, and we’re currently over the port of Anchorage. I kind of think that, when they named this place, it was something else to the Inuits, but as people kept using this as a place to anchor, they just referred to it as Anchorage.”
He pointed out the window at the various train tracks far below the street they were on.
“That’s the history? Or is your little internal writer coming up with stuff?”
“That one’s all me. I think the real start was because of the railroad or something.” He chuckled a bit and turned onto a street that was already lit up like Christmas. During the day the street looked nice enough, but at night the city shone. Crowds of people passed by on either side of the street laughing and carousing through the night.
“So now we’re passing through downtown Anchorage, which I know you’ve seen, but you were probably too busy hiding to notice it properly. It’s only busy right now because this is also where all the bars are. Been called out a few times for drunken shenanigans a few times. Anyway, on Fourth Avenue here, there are street vendors during the summer, which I’m sure you’ve got in New York and L.A., but I doubt they sell reindeer sausages.”
“Ew, reindeer? Like Rudolph?”
He laughed at her expected reaction. Most people didn’t know what to think about game meat when they were first introduced to it. “More like delicious. If we hadn’t just eaten, I’d have to find some for you to try. One of the many strange and exotic delicacies of Alaskan cuisine.”
“Exotic? Am I going to need a passport?” She nudged him with her elbow and made a funny face.
He laughed, recognizing the sarcasm, but also feeling a bit of warmth from the contact. It was driving him crazy to have to keep his eyes on the road and off of her, but he still managed to sneak as many glances as he could. She’d often be right there looking back at him. “C’mon, don’t start acting like the tourists. I just mean you generally don’t eat moose and caribou in the lower forty-eight.”
Josephine put on a determined expression and nodded. “Point taken.”
Dan glanced both ways quickly before shooting across an unlit intersection. Part of him thought about locking the doors as he slowly drove into Mountain View. “Now, I don’t want to alarm you, but some people think this is ‘the bad side’ of Anchorage.”
“Really?” she asked, glancing out the windows at the various old houses with beat-up cars parked in front of them.
“Yeah.” At a particularly derelict corner, he took his foot off the gas, spun the wheel and drifted on the packed snow. He grinned and shot Jo a wink.
“I dunno, maybe it is. I do get an awful lot of calls to come out here and normally not for good reasons. There was even a fire over there,” he said, pointing to a burned down strip mall. “Which I realize you can see for yourself. I got called to that one. It was really bad. There had been a dog fighting ring in one of the building spaces and we couldn’t save all the animals.”
Jo gasped. “That’s terrible!”
It had been. The smell was awful and the screams of the fearful dogs they couldn’t help would probably haunt Dan for the rest of his days, but it came with the job. He shook himself from his thoughts. “It was all caused by a careless cigarette.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. People even went to jail for that.”
“Wow.”
“But enough of the depressing stuff,” he said, turning through a couple back alleys. “Here is the skating rink my folks used to take us to. Still up and running all these years later.” He pointed to the large white roller skate on the top of the building.
“Roller skating?”
“Well, yeah. It can’t all be ice and snow year round, can it?” he chuckled. People seemed to forget that even Alaska has seasons.
“I guess not. Maybe I just never expected a roller rink to still be up and running.”
Dan smiled as he thought about all the birthday parties and random teenage hangouts at this particular skating rink. Over time it had worn down and now it appeared to be abandoned. “Alaska doesn’t move at regular people time. Heck, we got a Dairy Queen like ten years ago. Before that we had to drive ten hours to get some ice cream.”
He chuckled as he recalled the various restaurants that had finally popped up from the lower 48. Each one had beaten national sales records when they opened. Chili’s in 2002, Dairy Queen in 2007, even Olive Garden in 2012. Alaskans were always hungry for something new.
“No, you didn’t,” Jo chimed in incredulously.
“Well, no,” Dan said sheepishly. “At least not the way I drive—used to!—used to drive,” he added with a laugh. Road trips were measured in time in Alaska, mostly because of how far everything was from everything else. He and his brothers had once or twice gotten into what they jokingly referred to as the Tundra Time Trials. His best had been making the five-hour journey from Homer in two and a half hours flat. Looking back now with Jo at his side, it was dangerous and could’ve gotten him killed.
“Where to next, Speed Racer?” she teased.
“Funny. Now we’re headed to midtown, but the road we’re on now? This is my road.”
“Are we on Dan Boulevard or something?”
“No, that would be silly. Although there is a Rockwell Avenue over at the airport. No, my cousins and I adopted this bit of road as part of a community service project.”
“That’s sweet.”
“Not the way we did it. We got in trouble a couple of times for having trash wars with each other. But cousins, you know? If an activity doesn’t involve violence, well, someone will figure out how to add it.”
From the car, Dan even managed to see the old, faded white ‘R’ on the overpass — little youthful graffiti. They’d gotten in so much trouble for that. He noticed a building rapidly approaching on the right.
“Oh and as we pass through this area here, you see those brand-new condos?”
“Over where?” she asked.
“Right here.” He pointed.
“Oh yeah, those are cute.”
“Now they are. Before, they were three apartment buildings and one of them burned to the ground. It was all we could do to save the other two buildings. Someone had left a hibachi grill on their balcony and—poof—there it went. More than twenty people ended up homeless after that fire, but thankfully… and I guess, tragically, it happens all too often, so people take small fires seriously.”
“That’s pretty sad.”
“Yeah, that’s why the landlord tore it all down and built condos. He figured if he increased the prices, he wouldn’t have tenants with hibachis anymore.”
“It’s a beautiful area,” she offered.
“It really is,” he said, not bothering to look anywhere but Jo’s face. “We’re getting into kind of a second downtown here, which I know is weird but Anch-“
“Anchorage doesn’t follow the rules?”
He pointed to his temple and made a quick clicking noise. “Now you’re getting it. Over here is the first place we’d stop when ever we came back into town from down south. And I mean Kenai, Seward, and Homer. I know, they’re weird names for cities, but they really encompass all of Alaska. See, Homer was named for a goldmining promoter, Seward was named for the senator that brokered the deal to buy Alaska from the Russians, and Kenai kept its Athabaskan name which means a flat, open meadow, with few trees and low ridge.”
“Those writers are at it again, aren’t they?”
“No ma’am. That’s the God’s honest. If you want the really strange history, I can tell you about how an Alaskan town assassinated a U.S. President.”
“I’m not falling for that one. If Alaska had killed a president, I would’ve learned about it in school.”
“Well, I guess, sit back and let me regale you with more stories of the Last Frontier…”
He smiled as Jo loosened her limbs, let out a big, dreamy sigh, and settled in for the ride.
Chapter 9
Jo could have driven around with Dan in his truck for an eternity. But as it was, she’d already stayed out far later than she’d ever intended.
“I saw that yawn,” her date said as he turned the corner back into downtown Anchorage. “Am I really that boring?”
Josephine straightened in her seat. “Oh, no!” she insisted, “It’s just that—”
Dan interrupted her with a cheery laugh. “Relax. Actually, wait, it looks like you already are. I’m just teasing you anyway. I suppose I should get you back to your car, huh?”
Jo nodded sleepily. Suddenly, the weight of her fatigue settled on her like a thick blanket. “Could you take me straight to my hotel instead?”
When he answered, Dan’s voice sounded smooth and melodic like a lullaby. “Of course. Call me tomorrow and I can take you to get your car from the restaurant. Okay?”
The Alaska Sunrise Romances: A 9-Book Sweet Romance Collection Page 61