but all three of them worked equally hard at securing the blind border collie’s affection. So far, Zoey was winning.
“We asked him if he wanted to come, but he preferred to sleep by the fireplace.” Adjusting her glasses, Zoey said, “I think he was done being dressed for the day. Graham changed his outfit four times.”
“Jake’s wearing pajamas right now, isn’t he?”
“His Christmas Ninja Turtle pj’s,” Zoey said. “They’re his favorite.” They both knew whose favorite those pj’s actually were. “How did the meeting go?”
“Festively phallic,” Lana said. “How did it go meeting Graham’s parents?”
“They’re like him. Loving, wonderful, excessively loquacious. Their place in Anchorage is right off the inlet, and it’s very cute.”
“But?”
“But that’s a lot of Barnett humor in one room.” Zoey shuddered. “I might need to crash with you tonight so I don’t murder him.”
“My couch is always yours.” Lana squeezed Zoey’s hand, briefly leaning into her friend’s shoulder companionably. “I don’t think the heater is doing much to help.”
“Graham is bringing another one and some more chairs. I guess people always show up when his cousin’s wife, Leah, makes her holiday mix.”
As Zoey expounded on the deliciousness of holiday mixes, Lana made a mental note. Leah, Graham’s cousin’s wife, owner of a local car rental business and one of Lana’s recent acquisitions. These days, it seemed like everyone was either directly or indirectly affected by her company’s mass purchase.
“You have your work face on.” Zoey nudged Lana with her elbow. “You’ve been running a hundred miles an hour since this summer. You need a day off.”
“If I took a day off, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself,” Lana replied. Zoey wasn’t wrong though. Lana was dying for a day of no phone calls, no emails, and no penises.
“Have you ever been to one of these things?” Zoey asked.
Lana started to answer, but Zoey was immediately distracted as her boyfriend arrived, his muscled arms full of space heaters.
Graham Barnett, a cheerful Alaskan local in his late twenties, was about as handsome as a man could get. Tall and broad shouldered, Graham tried his best to be lazy as often as life would let him, which wasn’t very often these days. Despite his best efforts to the contrary, Graham’s small one-man diner, the Tourist Trap, had become a foodie sensation for the thousands of guests who passed through Moose Springs every year.
Despite trying to run his customers off with grumpiness and bad service, they just kept coming back in droves…Lana included. His specialty cocktail, the Growly Bear, had become world-renowned, in spite of Graham thinking they were disgusting. Considering Graham had wanted to be a professional chainsaw artist and live a life of solitude in the woods, he found the entire successful entrepreneur thing to be very disappointing.
Pausing just inside the doorway, Graham searched for Zoey in the crowd. Beside her, Lana could hear Zoey’s breath catch. The pair met the previous summer over one of those Growly Bears, when Zoey had joined Lana on a two-week vacation over the Fourth of July. Since the moment they first locked eyes, the diner owner had been smitten. And since Zoey had chosen to stay in Moose Springs permanently, the pair had been inseparable.
Happy was a good look on both her friends.
“Hey, Romeo, move it,” a muffled female voice spoke up from behind Graham. “My arms are getting tired.”
Chuckling, he moved into the barn, looking for a place to set his heaters. Graham’s best friends—the very tall, very man-bunned Easton, and Easton’s heavily tattooed twin sister, Ashtyn—followed him, their arms full of extra folding chairs. Where one found a Graham, one usually would find the Lockett twins, although it was impossible to identify the leader in their little trio. Easton’s expression was hidden behind his reddish-brown beard, but Ashtyn’s super short, multicolored spiky hair was both visible and fabulous.
“I wish I could pull off that style,” Lana said as she watched Ash, fingers absently touching her shoulder-length auburn locks. The closest she’d come to exciting was freshly redone lowlights for the winter.
“I wish I were brave enough to.” Zoey quirked a grin at Lana. “Brace yourself. A Moose Springs town hall is nothing like what you’d expect. They get a little weird.”
“Quirky weird or get-out-of-the-room weird?”
“It’s more like…do you remember that guy who always came in at the end of my shifts on Friday nights?”
“The one with the underwear or the one without?”
“The one without.” Zoey rubbed her hands together to warm them. “This will be worse.”
In a