Stars Over Alaska

by Jennifer Snow

  Right. ’Cause cabins in remote Alaskan wilderness had electric heat.

  Leslie brought the groceries to the kitchen, placing the bags on the counter, then went straight to the hall closet. She carried a stack of blankets back to the living room. “Sit and wrap up in these. I’ll start a fire right away.”

  Selena remained standing, looking around the cabin. “Take me back to LA.”

  “So your stalker can kill you?”

  She huffed. “You think I’ve never had a stalker before?”

  As if it was something to be proud of. Though based on the number of social media followers these VIP people had, fandom was almost low-grade stalking anyway. They craved the attention and validation they received from society. “Not like this one,” she said.

  “What makes this one so dang...dangerous?” Selena’s teeth chattered and she reluctantly grabbed a blanket and wrapped it around her shoulders, though she stayed standing near the door.

  “He was in your bedroom, that’s what.” That was all she’d reveal to her. Selena didn’t need the sordid details...not yet anyway. If she continued to not take this seriously, then that might be the time to be brutally honest with her. Scared straight kinda thing, if all else failed.

  Leslie’s hands trembled from the cold as she stacked several logs into the fireplace and lit a match. Grabbing some old newspapers, she lit the end and tossed it in, then closed the protective metal gate.

  “All I’m saying is that if I were in that much danger, wouldn’t they have assigned some big, burly—preferably hot—bodyguard to keep me safe instead of you?”

  Leslie ignored the question she’d already answered a dozen times. She was assigned because she was just as capable, if not better trained than any of the men at the agency and she...blended in better. Selena’s management had been clear that the star’s brand depended on her being seen as approachable by her fans. A thick-headed guard didn’t go well with the image they were trying to portray.

  “But we are only here for a few days, right?”

  Leslie’s grunt was noncommittal.

  “Leslie...” Selena’s tone was a warning bell. “How long are we staying here?”

  A three-year-old would be easier to deal with. “Until it’s safe to go back.”

  Selena’s eyes widened. “What about my commitments? I’m starting on a new movie in three weeks. I have a promotional tour for my upcoming movie starting next week.”

  Yeah, she most likely wouldn’t be making that tour. The thought depressed Leslie just as much. She wasn’t exactly thrilled to be putting her own life on hold indefinitely either. Not that she had much of a life outside of work, but still... “Look, I’ll get you back to LA as soon as I can. I need to call the office for updates. Hopefully, the stalker will be caught and arrested quickly.”

  Selena’s eyes narrowed. “You flinched just now when you mentioned the office. Do they know you took me out of LA?”

  Damn. Lie or tell the truth? If she expected Selena to trust her, better to be honest. “No.”

  “But you cleared this with my management, right?”

  “It might have been an inside job. Someone was in your house—they had to have gained access somehow.” Leslie couldn’t trust even the people closest to Selena right now. That house was well secured, so the possibility that someone on her team might be in on it was very real.

  “Does anyone even know where we are?”

  Shit. Leslie bit her lip.

  Selena’s eyes widened. “What the fuck? No one knows where I am and you’ve taken away my cell phone?”

  The cell phone was left behind on purpose. Selena was glued to the thing and it was easy enough to track, unlike Leslie’s, which had a ghost app. “It was the only way to make sure your stalker doesn’t find out where you are.”

  “So, essentially, you’ve kidnapped me.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic.”

  “How do I know I can trust you?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “A hundred percent. You could be working with my stalker. This could all be a setup.” Frantic eyes darted around the room.

  “Calm down.”

  Selena threw off the blanket and struck a kung fu pose. “I’m a black belt.”

  “And I have a gun.”

  “Help! Someone help!” Selena whipped open the front door and started yelling into the void. Her voice echoed on the nothingness around them.

  “Hey, shhh... Calm down!” Leslie said, closing the door. “I’m not kidnapping you or going to kill you.” As tempting as it was. “If I was going to do that, I would have done it already and dumped your body along the deserted stretch of highway, not wait until we were in my family’s cabin.”

  Selena still didn’t let her guard down. “How do I know this is your family’s cabin?”

  Leslie pointed to the picture of her and her siblings above the fireplace. “The one in the middle? That’s me.”

  Selena peered at it, her arms lowering slowly to her sides. “The one with the boy’s haircut and braces?”

  Leslie’s teeth clenched as she nodded. “Yes.”

  Selena’s face gave way to a look of amusement. “Oh my God...talk about an awkward stage! Do you have any more photos like that?”

  Leslie sighed. “In the ottoman, there’s a family photo album.” To further confirm that she wasn’t lying or to make fun of her some more, Leslie didn’t care.

  As long as the pain-in-the-ass movie star stopped screaming for help.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Fairbanks, Alaska

  LEVI STARED ACROSS his desk at the interviewee, Tyler Forrester. Ironic choice of name for someone wanting to become a smoke jumper in the Alaskan wilderness. The guy was well trained—volunteer firefighter for eight years. Lead rescue on the search and rescue team in Wild River. Avalanche training. Drone training. Definitely met the higher-level requirements. He looked physically fit and had passed all of the written applications. But Levi wasn’t convinced.

  “I see you’ve recently relocated to Fairbanks from Wild River,” Levi said. This, he’d need to explore a little. Not many people left a ski resort town to move into a more remote area of Alaska unless they were running from something...or toward it.

  “Yes, sir.” The guy’s face broke into a smile.

  Toward it. Levi’s guess would be a woman was the motivating target. “Your girlfriend lives here.” Not a question. He’d seen it before.

  “Yes, sir...fiancée, actually. Well, hopefully. I plan on proposing tomorrow night.” The smile faded slightly. “But, I’m fairly confident she’s going to say yes.” Tyler shifted in the seat. “We were high school sweethearts... Things got complicated...”

  Levi sat back and listened to the guy ramble on about his relationship drama. As head of the Alaska smoke jumping team, he’d mastered the art of active listening to relationship ups and downs with his open-door policy—which the men on his team took to mean resident therapist. Hearing everyone else’s issues made him grateful that he was solidly single.

  Funny enough, everyone in his life kept pushing him to date. Misery loved company, right? Life balance, everyone said. He knew relationships just complicated the hell out of things, but no one was listening to his protests.

  The ping of his cell phone indicating a new Tinder match on the account his co-worker, Chad, had set up for him was evidence of that.

  When Tyler stopped talking, Levi sat forward and shook his head. “I’m sorry, Tyler, I just don’t see this being a good fit.”

  The guy’s face fell. “What? Why? I meet the requirements, right?”

  All but a very important one: no serious attachments.

  It wasn’t technically a job requirement, but it was a Levi Grayson prerequisite of sorts. The guys on his team liked to date; casual relationships that lasted several weeks at most, but
they were essentially like him—single, no family, unattached. They all happily shared a canine at the station cabin, Smokester, a retired rescue German shepherd who was currently snoring loudly in his dog bed in the corner of the office. Other than that, there was no one in the back of their minds when they threw themselves out of a plane and dropped into the middle of a raging wildfire. The job may not be a year-round gig, but during the on season, hours were long and unpredictable. Usually men moved on to more stable, regular firefighting positions once they settled down and started families. The demands of the job were a little too much for most at that stage in their lives.

  Tyler’s expression when he talked about his fiancée told Levi that there would definitely be someone to distract Tyler, and his crew’s safety depended on no distractions. “I’m sorry, Tyler, but I just don’t think this is the right fit...for either of us.”

  Tyler looked determined as he reached forward and pointed to the impressive skill list on his résumé. “Come on, man. I even have additional certifications the job doesn’t call for.”

  Levi spotted an exposed tattoo on his forearm—a watercolor of the aurora borealis. He took a chance. “What’s your girlfriend’s name?”

  Tyler frowned as he said, “Aurora.”

  Bingo.

  Levi hated to turn down an amazingly qualified candidate, but he’d try to explain things to Tyler as best he could. “Okay, let me give you a ‘what if.’”

  Tyler nodded slowly. “Okay.”

  “What if we get a call about raging fires in Swan Lake and at the same time, you get a call that your wife is in labor. What do you do?”

  Tyler’s eyes widened. “Dude, I haven’t even proposed yet.”

  “Right, but you plan to and engagements lead to marriage and I suspect kids at some point?”

  Tyler cleared his throat and tugged at his tie. “I guess so... I mean...yeah, I think. We haven’t really planned that far ahead.”

  “To you, that timeline might seem far away, but when I’m recruiting, I have to look at least five years into a candidate’s future. A lot of training and time and effort goes into new recruits and I need my crew to be focused at all times. We run a skeleton crew because not many recruits have what it takes to succeed in this career.”

  “I do,” Tyler said.

  “Yeah, you do...which makes it tough for me to say this, but I can’t offer you a place on the team.”

  Tyler looked annoyed. “So, you’re telling me none of the other guys on the crew have relationships?”

  “Not serious ones, no.”

  Tyler seemed to struggle with his next point of argument. “But...they have other family members. Aren’t those distractions?”

  “Okay let me rephrase my question: What if we get a call to a fire and at the same time your sister went into labor. What do you do?”

  “Obviously take care of the fire.”

  Levi smiled. He rested his case.

  Tyler sighed. “I’m pretty sure you can’t turn down my application because I’m in love.”

  “You’re in your right to file a complaint, but I’m sticking to my decision.”

  Tyler looked ready to argue but common sense obviously prevailed. Getting a hot head wasn’t the way to go and he had to give the guy even more credit for having the sense to know it.

  Damn, this guy would have been a good one.

  Tyler extended a hand to Levi and he accepted it.

  “This isn’t the last you’ll see of me,” he said before leaving the office.

  Part of Levi hoped the guy was right, the other part hoped his girlfriend said yes to his proposal.

  Chad entered the office as the station door slammed shut. “You know you have to stop turning candidates away because they have a personal life. We’re going to get sued for discrimination.” Chad was the longest-standing member on the team and his ten years of experience made him the perfect spotter. It was only the two of them who worked the station year-round, the only full-time employees, and Chad was happy to defer to Levi for most decisions, but recruiting was one issue they argued about.

  “There were other reasons,” Levi said.

  “Sure. Like what?” Chad folded his arms, the new addition to his sleeve tattoo still wrapped in a bandage.

  “He’s from Wild River.”

  “So are you.”

  “I’m not really from anywhere. I lived in Wild River as a kid, but I’ve lived all over Alaska.” And all over the world on different military bases. “Tyler’s never been anywhere but the ski resort town, which is about as far from real Alaska as you can get.”

  Chad leaned against the door frame. “Real Alaska?”

  “You know what I mean. Rugged, outback wilderness Alaska. Besides, he’s in Fairbanks because he’s chasing a woman. I give him six months before he’s convincing her to move back to Wild River with him.”

  Chad glanced at Levi’s cell phone on the desk as it pinged with another Tinder match. “Look, just because you strike out with the ladies doesn’t mean we all do.”

  Levi ignored the comment. He couldn’t argue with facts. He never claimed to be good at relationships. How could he be?

  His parents had divorced when he was a kid. His mom readily let his father take over raising him and Levi hadn’t heard from her since. He’d moved from one military base to another, until his father decided he wasn’t the best option to raise him either and shipped him back to Wild River to live with his grandmother. She was in her sixties by then and she did her best, but she’d already raised her children and had little interest in or energy to do it again.

  The only family he ever felt he had was in his two best friends, Dawson and Leslie, both of whom left him three years ago...in different ways.

  His alarm sounded on his phone and he stood. “Shit, I gotta go.”

  “Well, I know it’s not a hot date,” Chad said, rolling his eyes as Levi grabbed his jacket and keys and left the station.

  Chad was wrong about one part of that sentence. Mrs. Powell was certainly coming in hot...or coming toward him hot. Did that phrase still work?

  “Levi! So nice to see you,” she said as he entered the restaurant in downtown Fairbanks a half hour later. “Thank you for meeting me here.”

  He accepted her hug and forced a smile when he pulled away. He wasn’t looking forward to that day’s meeting. But she’d left several voicemails for him in the last few weeks and he couldn’t avoid her forever.

  Plans to start a Dawson Powell memorial foundation for supporting mental health had him experiencing every mixed emotion his body was capable of.

  He thought it was very honorable of the Powell family to do this—set up a charity in their son’s name after he’d died in a high-speed chase with a man on a suicide mission. Showing forgiveness in the form of trying to help support programs that assisted in mental health was an amazingly charitable way to preserve Dawson’s memory and do something good in the process. Levi just wasn’t sure how he felt taking a leadership role in it.

  He wanted to honor his friend’s memory, and the Powells had hardly given him much choice in being involved. They said he’d been Dawson’s best friend, so he was the natural choice to be the face of the foundation. He’d practically been raised by the family—they’d treated him like a son, having given him clothes, food, sporting equipment—the list went on. But more than that, they’d given him structure, discipline and advice.

  He could hardly say no to this now.

  It was just that he was more of a behind-the-scenes kinda guy. Unlike Dawson, he didn’t like the spotlight. He’d be happier doing the heavy lifting with fundraising campaigns and such, rather than being front and center.

  But how did he communicate that without it coming out wrong?

  “Levi, I’d like you to meet Angelica. She’s going to be helping us with the legal side of thin
gs—the paperwork and getting established as a charity, that kind of thing,” Mrs. Powell said, stepping back to reveal a pretty redheaded woman who definitely lived up to her name. Pale skin, emerald green eyes, dressed in a pale pink dress—she did look angelic.

  Unfortunately, the look on Mrs. Powell’s face was rather devilish. She obviously had more than a working relationship in mind for the two of them. “Nice to meet you,” he mumbled.

  “Likewise. Karlene speaks very highly of you. A smoke jumper—wow, that must be incredibly exciting,” Angelica said, eyeing him with open attraction.

  Attracting a woman wasn’t the issue, it was lack of “game” that had him struggling with lasting relationships. “Yeah... I mean, no, it’s actually quite intense during the fire season and almost boring during the off-season. The gear is hot and uncomfortable and a bunch of smelly, dirty guys sleeping in tents at base camps isn’t exactly bachelor living...”

  Angelica nodded politely as he rambled, but Mrs. Powell shot him a look that said “less is more,” so he zipped it.

  “Let’s get started,” she said. “There’s so much to do before we can announce the first charity event later this spring.”

  Wow, she was really moving full steam ahead on this. She’d first approached him with the idea only months after Dawson’s death, and had thrown herself into researching these kinds of charities and applying for the appropriate licenses and aligning herself with the mental health institute of Alaska. She’d jumped in headfirst and it had become her new mission. Levi understood why. This was her way of coping, of not breaking down and disappearing behind a wall of despair. Everyone grieved in their own way. Karlene Powell planned and organized and felt better giving back to the world in some way in memory of her son.

  Levi followed them to the table near the window. He pulled out both of their chairs and sat between the two women, doing his best to look and sound engaged, all in, but he was secretly hoping for an emergency call to get him out of there and back to keeping his best friend’s memory in his own way.