WIND VALLEY

Firelight Ridge ~ Book 5

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Chapter One

Of all the dive bars in all the wilderness outposts in Alaska, she had to walk into his. 

Well, not exactly his, since The Fang belonged to Lachlan’s buddy Bear Davis, and Lachlan was merely helping out through the winter. He’d hoped it would be a good change of scene and increase his chances of meeting someone interesting. Someone who wasn’t Maura Vaughn.  

Lachlan steeled himself to offer his usual friendly smile to Maura. He’d made a fool of himself over her because of…circumstances. Okay, loneliness. And urging from his friends. 

She’d only arrived in town recently, around Christmas. After an unfortunate encounter with a moose, she’d ended up in a snowbank, and he’d helped pull her out. One look into her dark blue eyes and something inside him had shifted. 

A few days later, he’d asked her on a date, if you could call it that. There wasn’t much to do in the winter when all the summer eating spots were closed. So, scientist that he was, he’d invited her to check out the abandoned wolf den he’d discovered not far from Wind Valley. She’d turned him down clearly and without hesitation. 

He could accept that, of course. Lachlan McGowan knew he wasn’t for everyone. As a glacier scientist, he lived in his head a lot. He was a big dreamer who would often emerge from a long, complicated thought process to find he’d been staring into the distance while someone was trying to talk to him. Two women had broken up with him because of that—while he’d been doing that. He’d had to ask them to repeat themselves.

Awkward—but he was used to that.  

Sadly, getting rejected in Firelight Ridge meant you still had to see that person on a regular basis because there simply weren’t very many people around in the winter. 

And for some reason, Maura had decided to stay. She was living with her grandfather, Pinky Bannister, who spent a lot of time at The Fang. Often she would come with him, and sometimes those visits came when Lachlan was helping out Bear and Lila by covering a shift. 

Like now. 

Friends, he reminded himself. We’re good friends now. You have a genius-level IQ and incredible focus. Just train your goddamn mind to remember she’s a friend.

“Hey Maura. Pinky. Whazzup?” That sounded appropriately casual, right? He set out two cocktail napkins on the bar counter for them. 

“Did you just say ‘whazzup’?” Maura asked as she claimed a stool. Her smile was bright and beautiful and sent a zing through his nervous system. “That’s so unlike you.” 

“Make me one of them Irish coffees, would you?” Pinky gestured for his personal mug, which was stashed on a shelf behind the bar set aside for the regulars. “Add me a dollop of whipped cream, too. From the can. No one makes ‘em like you, Lachlan.” 

“That’s because I have two advanced science degrees,” Lachlan said dryly. “Who knew it would all lead up to this?” 

Maura laughed, sympathy in her dark blue eyes—the color reminded him of the deepest part of a coral reef in the Galapagos. “Life is so unpredictable, isn’t it? Six months ago, if someone had told me I’d be spending the winter in Alaska, I would have laughed in their face.” 

“Really? That seems so unlike you.” 

She smiled at the way he echoed her own words from moments ago. “Touché. It’s actually not very much like me. I teach middle school. You have to be careful with your laughs because kids can take things very personally.” 

He wished he could sit down just with her and ask her a million questions about her job, her students, her thoughts, her romantic status…but right now he was just her bartender. “What are you having today, Maura?” 

“Oh. Right. Hmm…” She scanned the array of liquor bottles behind him. “It seems a little early for alcohol.” 

“It is?” Pinky couldn’t have looked more surprised if she had said that she was actually a bull moose. “How do you figure?” 

“Well, it’s not even noon yet. It barely just got light.”  

“It’s winter.” Pinky blinked his watery blue eyes at her. “It’ll be dark again before you know it. Might as well have a drink in your hand when it happens.” 

Maura shot Lachlan a glance filled with amusement. “I’ll have a cappuccino, if you make those?” 

“We do. It’s a new thing, though, and the machine is cranky. Give me a minute.” 

“Do you have oat milk or anything like that?” she asked hopefully. 

Lachlan tried not to laugh at that naive question. “We have some goat milk from Eve Dotterkind. I don’t know how well it foams. It still has goat hair in it and—” 

“Never mind.” She cut him off with a shudder. “Any old milk is fine. I’m just keeping my dear old grandpa company anyway. We had a little scare this morning. He needed something to settle his nerves.” 

Lachlan busied himself pouring a shot of whiskey into Pinky’s coffee mug, then adding the coffee. He’d done a comparison—temperature, taste, customer satisfaction—between the coffee-first and the whiskey-first methods. The differences were infinitesimal, but he was a scientist after all, and he knew that even the most minuscule of shifts could be significant. It held true in his work with glaciers and also here at the Fang. 

Now he always went with whiskey first. 

After Lachlan had added a generous dose of whipped cream to the drink, Pinky took a sip and smacked his lips, while Lachlan moved to the new espresso machine to make Maura’s drink. Bear, the owner of The Fang, had recently bought the machine, primarily to make Lila happy. She loved her foamy drinks. Judging by Lila’s blissful expression lately, it had worked. Among other things, obviously. 

“Tell me about the scare,” he said over his shoulder. “Another standoff with a moose?” 

“Oh no, the moose don’t bother us much at Pinky’s place,” said Maura. “They seem to know that Pinky’s a crack shot who has a moose phobia.” 

Pinky gave a full-body shudder. “One of ‘em chased me into a ravine on my way to Goldpan Creek. Had to climb a tree to get away. Turned out I was allergic to the sap and I broke out in hives. I was stuck up there, itching like a sumabitch, until that moose decided I wasn’t worth the wait.” 

Lachlan lost track of their conversation while he activated the foamer wand, which was loud. He never knew how many of Pinky’s stories were literally true, slightly exaggerated, or completely fabricated. No one in town did. No one challenged him, either. Pinky was Pinky.

But Maura was listening to him with total fascination, her head propped on her hand, eyes wide. Lucky Pinky—not just a new audience for his stories, but someone primed to soak in every word because he was family. 

She turned her smile on him when he set her cappuccino in front of her. “Thanks, Lachlan.” 

He nodded and was about to turn back to clean out the tamper when she reached over the counter and touched his arm.

“Don’t go yet. We want to tell you about what happened this morning. You might have some ideas about it.” 

“Me?” He felt his eyebrows lift. “Pinky’s lived here decades longer than I have. There’s not much he doesn’t know about this place.”

“Oh, there’s plenty. Shit keeps coming up. Lotta secrets buried in those mountains.” He would have looked more like a wise old man if he hadn’t had whipped cream smudged across his mustache. 

Maura handed Pinky her cocktail napkin as she addressed Lachlan. “We thought you might have a scientific explanation.” 

Now things were getting interesting. “I’ll bite, then. An explanation for what?” 

Maura tucked her curly dark hair behind her ears, readying herself to launch into her story. She wore a black sweater with neon-green stripes down the arms, with chipped nail polish to match. Not a lot of women wore nail polish here, at least not in the winter. But Maura didn’t really live here. She was on some kind of extended break for mysterious reasons she didn’t want to talk about, which caused wild speculation around town. 

“So,” she began, “we were sitting around watching the sun rise, it was probably about nine thirty this morning. Pinky has a bird feeder outside his living room window.” 

“Better than TV,” Pinky declared. 

“Debatable. I miss TV. Anyway.” Maura tossed a rueful smile at Lachlan. “We were just watching the white-winged crossbills at the bird feeder. The sky was slowly getting light, so at first we didn’t notice. But then we saw all sorts of movement out in the yard. Well, it’s not really a yard. It’s a clearing combined with a junkyard, basically.” 

“I get the picture.” It was a very common one out here. People gathered “resources,” also known as “old cars” or “broken equipment.” Lachlan had yet to see a tidily mowed lawn or a trimmed hedge in Firelight Ridge. 

“So what was the movement?” 

“It was animals. They were sort of…fleeing. Just a couple at a time, or sometimes just one at a time. Not fast, as if they were scared. In fact, they didn’t seem worried about being out in the open. Sometimes they’d stop and sort of stagger around. It was the oddest sight. They were all going the same direction.” 

“Which was?” 

Maura glanced at Pinky. “It was southwest, right?” 

“Yeppers, southwest. Right across my property. Snowshoe hares, three lynx, two red foxes.” 

Lachlan frowned as the picture formed in his mind. “They were probably running from a predator.” 

“But what? They’re used to the eagles. Bears don’t bother the little guys,” said Pinky. “Anyway, they’re all tucked up in their dens by now.” 

“Wolf?” The Wrangell Mountains had plenty of wolves, both gray and black. 

“Maybe, but we never saw one. We kept watching for about an hour. Eventually the wildlife parade stopped, but it was very strange while it lasted.” Maura’s dark blue eyes flicked up to meet his. “I took some photos, do you want to see?” 

“Sure.” He also thought it would make sense to look at a map. Although he knew where Pinky lived, he wasn’t quite sure about the orientation of the ridges and valleys around his place. “I wonder if the earthquake affected them.” 

A quake registering 6.0 on the Richter scale had struck the area shortly after Christmas. It had been deep enough that no one suffered much damage, at least aboveground. Below the surface, things had shifted. 

That was another reason Lachlan was staying the winter. He was curious about how the Korch Glacier had been affected, along with the ice dams and glacial lakes and especially the dangerous flooding phenomenon known as the jökulhlaup—his specialty. 

Maura brought out her phone and leaned across the counter. He resigned himself to breathing in the fresh scent of her skin and peered down at the screen. Before she swiped to her photos page, he caught a glimpse of her lock screen photo. 

In it, she was part of a couple, her arms wrapped around a man, both of them laughing into the camera. They looked carefree, happy, in love. 

He seared the image into his vision to make sure he didn’t forget. Maura had turned him down. She wasn’t interested in him. Let it go. 

Good thing there was an intriguing scientific puzzle to solve. Those, he could handle.