nine-year-old twins who had lived here when she was in high school. Other than Brock’s array of unopened moving boxes, the living room looked pretty much the same—wood floors, dark paneled walls and huge floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the rugged, snow-capped Chugach Mountain range. The view was breathtaking, even to Anya, who’d seen the splendors of Alaska virtually every day of her life.
Brock strode past the window with barely a glance, leading her through the dining room and kitchen and out the back door. The snow crunched beneath their feet as they headed toward a barnlike structure about a dozen yards from the house. The barn was new—at least it hadn’t been part of the landscape when the Davis twins were nine. If there was a walkway, it wasn’t visible beneath the previous night’s snowfall. Flurries were still coming down, swirling and drifting through the branches of the evergreen trees. By the time they reached the barn, the shoulders of Brock’s bear costume were dusted with a fine layer of white.
“This is my training area.” He pushed the door open with a grizzly paw and ushered her inside.
The smell of sawdust and puppies drifted to Anya’s nostrils. A strange combination, but not at all unpleasant. In fact, she found it oddly comforting. “Wow. Nice.”
Calling it a barn wasn’t really fair. The word barn conjured up images of dirty, hay-strewn floors and farming equipment covered in layers of dust. This building had been swept and cleaned to the point of perfection. A series of short, wooden dividers separated the center of the room into four pens. What Anya assumed was leftover lumber had been stacked neatly against the wall. Brock may have been new in town, but clearly he’d been busy.
Above the excess planks of wood were a series of hooks. What looked like a ski patrol jacket hung from one of them. Anya’s gaze lingered on the bright-red parka and moved over the intersecting lines of the bold white cross printed on it until Brock spoke again, stealing her attention.
“Sit there.” He pointed to one of the square, wood-framed pens.
Anya glanced at him, wishing he would offer more of an explanation. She didn’t see a chair anywhere. What was she supposed to do? Sit on the floor? But as she approached the box, a cute, furry head peeked over one of the short walls. Then another equally adorable face popped up beside it.
“Puppies!” Anya clapped her hands.
She swung her leg over the short wall and climbed inside with the dogs, sitting cross-legged in the center of the pen. One of the puppies immediately crawled into her lap, but the other one eyed her from a foot or two away.
They didn’t look like any puppies Anya had ever seen, certainly not the customary sled dogs that populated Alaska. These were a lovely red color, with white markings on their feet and chests.
“What kind of dogs are these?” she asked. “They almost look like little foxes.”
“Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retrievers,” Brock said, as if that mouthful of an answer made a lick of sense to Anya. He reached for a newspaper that was folded and placed neatly on one of the wooden dividers and handed it to her. “I’d like you to read this.”
She glanced at the paper, this morning’s edition of the Yukon Reporter. She scanned the front page for anything dog-related but came up empty. “Um, what exactly am I supposed to be reading?”
He shrugged what appeared to be a rather muscular shoulder, visible even through the bear suit. “It doesn’t matter. Just read it.”
“Okaaay.” She gave him a wary glance, but the look on his face told her nothing. He still wore that same stony expression. Stony, but undeniably handsome.
She unfolded the paper. The headline had something to do with the ski resort. Anya skipped over that particular article. Intentionally. Although the ski mountain loomed over Aurora, Anya had managed to pretty much ignore it since the day she’d had her heart broken atop it. She instead found a story about a moose that had been spotted roaming the streets of downtown after dark.
The moose, a young adult bull according to eyewitnesses, is thought to be the cause of recent...
Brock’s deep voice interrupted her train of thought. “Out loud.”
“Out loud?” Anya raised her brows and looked back down at the newspaper, then at the two puppies with their sweet little fox-like faces, and back at Brock. “You want me to read the newspaper to the dogs?”
“Yep.” He nodded, crossed his big bear arms and waited.
Odd, she decided. Most definitely.
But she couldn’t deny he was odd in a rather intriguing way.
She resumed reading, aloud this time, acutely aware of those glacial blue eyes watching her. Her cheeks grew warm, and she had to concentrate so her tongue wouldn’t trip on the words. Those flawless good looks of his were unnerving. Not that she was attracted to him, because she wasn’t. Of course she wasn’t. He made her nervous, that’s all.
Still, she almost wished he’d cover up his perfect bone structure with that silly bear head.
* * *
Brock watched Anya read to the pups until she’d finished the article about the rogue moose that was vandalizing downtown Aurora. Not that there was much of a downtown, he mused. Certainly not compared to Seattle, where he’d lived for the past year and a half. There wasn’t a Starbucks or a Seattle’s Best anywhere in sight.
“...authorities are asking anyone who sees the moose to contact Wildlife Care and Control.” Anya paused and blinked up at him with the most beautiful eyes he’d ever seen.
Brock ignored the zing they sent straight to his chest and nodded. She started on another article, something about a rehabilitated sea otter being released into nearby Kachemak Bay.
Brock shook his head and marveled at the fact that he’d somehow landed in a place where moose and sea otters made the front page of the local paper. To top it off, he was sweltering in the grizzly suit. It was the dead of winter in Alaska, but the barn was heated and he was used to the cold. Brock had spent the better part of his adult life in the snow—if not actively searching for avalanche victims, then training for the inevitable event of a slide.
He left Anya to her reading and went to change. The two pups had settled around her comfortably, even Sherlock, the more cautious of the pair. Brock was pleased. The aim of the whole newspaper exercise was to socialize the young dogs to new people, new voices. The bear suit was a similar tool for socialization training. The dogs would be living in Alaska. They needed to be prepared for the sight of bears when they were out on the mountain training for search and rescue.
Sherlock had warmed to Anya faster than he’d anticipated. It wasn’t often that Brock had a woman around to assist with training. Then again, Anya’s voice had a pleasant, lyrical quality about it. Who wouldn’t warm to the sound of that?
He frowned as he headed back to the house. This was why he’d hesitated when Anya Petrova had shown up on his doorstep asking for help with her dog—unexpected pleasantries, such as the sound of a feminine voice and a pair of eyes the exact color of Rocky Mountain lavender, only complicated things.
Since the disappearance of his brother when Brock was a child, he’d worked hard to keep people at arm’s length. It was a necessary life skill for an eight-year-old boy who’d come to learn that sometimes people vanished. And they never came home.
As an adult, he’d devoted his life to finding the missing so other families could avoid the pain and uncertainty his own had experienced. But that’s where his relationships most often ended. After the find. He’d seen the pain that losing a loved one caused. He’d lived it. And he honestly didn’t think he had it in him to live it again. So he structured his life in a way that ensured he wouldn’t.
But it had been those eyes of hers that convinced him to open the door.
He’d never seen eyes that color—such an intense shade of violet. They brought to mind a vineyard. Or a field of wildflowers. Or a dozen other romantic