Sleigh Bell Sweethearts

“Yes. I just came from his office, actually.” Zoey nodded and selected a color from the tiny bottles of polish the nail technician offered up for inspection.

Anya chose next—fire-engine red. “What did he say? Could he shed any light on the situation?”

“He apologized for misleading me into thinking there were only a few reindeer on Gus’s property. Apparently, thirty is a modest number as far as reindeer are concerned.” So was thirty-one. Zoey couldn’t help but wonder where Palmer, the errant reindeer, was right now. Should she be concerned?

She hoped not. She had more than enough on her plate without having to worry about a defiant reindeer roaming the city streets.

“Really?” Clementine’s eyes grew wide. “What’s a large number, then?”

“A hundred or more.” Zoey supposed she should be relieved. A hundred? She couldn’t even imagine. Although if she couldn’t afford thirty, what difference did it make? She might as well have inherited five hundred of them.

“Did he mention your mysterious employee?” Anya’s lips curved into a smirk.

“There’s an employee, too?” Clementine asked.

Anya’s smile grew wider. “Oh, yes. His name is Alec, and he’s rather handsome.”

Handsome?

Zoey couldn’t argue against that assessment, but she considered it far too tame an adjective to apply to Alec. She could think of a few words that fit, however—dangerous, moody...tempting.

“He’s also borderline rude, so you can wipe that grin off your face.” Zoey’s cheeks grew warm. She blamed it on the bubbly footbath and the heated massage chair. “And I happen to owe him a thousand dollars.”

Anya’s smile morphed into a frown. “That was real?”

“Unfortunately, yes.” Zoey had pretty much committed to memory the itemized list the lawyer had shown her—fencing supplies, food, hay, straw and yet more fencing supplies. Apparently Palmer’s urge to escape ran deep. He wasn’t about to let something as silly as a fence stand between him and his freedom.

Clementine reached over and gave her arm a squeeze. “What are you going to do?”

Zoey inhaled a deep breath. Could she even bring herself to utter the lawyer’s suggestion aloud?

“I have a few options,” she said cryptically.

Anya and Clementine exchanged confused glances.

“Such as?” Anya asked.

“There’s a log cabin on the property. I thought I could move in there. With the money I save on rent, I might be able to reimburse Alec sometime this century.”

“And then what?” Clementine said, leaning her head back against her comfy leather pedicure chair and closing her eyes.

Zoey stared down at her feet in the soapy water. She couldn’t even look her friends in the eyes. How could she possibly go through with it? “There’s a buyer who’s interested in the herd.”

“Really?” Clementine’s eyes popped back open. “That sounds promising. Maybe you could keep a few—two or three, possibly—and sell the rest. Or do you think they’d miss one another? Do reindeer form attachments like that?”

How would Zoey know? She didn’t know the first thing about the interpersonal relationships of reindeer. And she certainly couldn’t afford a reindeer psychiatrist. “Missing their friends would be the least of their concerns.”

Anya’s gaze slid toward Zoey. “What aren’t you telling us?”

Zoey inhaled a deep breath. She decided to just spit it out. “The prospective buyer is a commercial reindeer breeder.”

Clementine frowned as she appeared to turn Zoey’s words over in her head. “What does that mean, exactly?”

Anya, born and raised in Alaska like Zoey, knew precisely what it meant. “If a commercial breeder buys the herd, they’ll end up as reindeer hot dogs.”

Clementine winced. “Oh.”

“I don’t know if I can do it.” It wasn’t as if Zoey hadn’t eaten her share of reindeer hot dogs in her lifetime. In Alaska, they were practically as common as peanut butter and jelly. But these weren’t just any reindeer.

They were Gus’s reindeer.

Her inheritance.

She swallowed around the lump that had taken up residence in her throat since she’d first heard those impossible words from Gus’s lawyer: you’re Mr. Henderson’s heir.

The phone had nearly slipped out of her hand. She’d been sure she was hearing things. Or dreaming. Things like this didn’t happen in real life. At least, not to Zoey.

She’d been sixteen when her parents died in a small plane crash just north of the Chugach Mountains. It had been a freak accident, the product of a mountain downdraft. Her dad had been the pilot. Even when faced with the sudden loss of her family, the only thing she’d inherited had been her father’s love of flight. Aviation hadn’t simply been a livelihood for her dad. It had been his passion.

Zoey’s own fascination with flight had started on the very day of her parents’ funeral. She could pinpoint the moment exactly—she’d been sitting in the front pew of the Aurora Community Church, listening as one pilot after another eulogized her father, speaking of his passion for flying and the love he had for the extraordinary beauty of Alaska.

The last of them had been Gus. His words had struck up a symphony of memories in Zoey—being buckled into the backseat of her dad’s Super Cub, looking out the window at spouting whales and sandstone peaks or touching down at some pristine, unspoiled place. As she’d relived one moment after another, she felt closer to her parents. It had been almost as if they were still alive, even though their bodies rested in coffins nearly close enough for her to reach out and touch. After the memorial service, she’d gone home and collapsed on her childhood bed for the last time, and she’d imagined she was soaring through a cloudless winter sky.

It was the only thing that kept her from crying. When her aunt and uncle told her she was to go home with them to Kentucky and leave her beloved Alaska, she’d squeezed her eyes closed and thought about what it would be like to float above the mountains with her arms spread wide and the wind whipping through her hair. Her musings about flight became her refuge.

She knew better than to tell anyone, particularly her aunt and uncle. She was sure it would worry them, and she’d had enough trouble convincing them to let her stay in Aurora to finish out her last year and a half of high school. The members of the church, particularly the pastor and his family, took her in. They were the closest thing to family she had left in Alaska.

And still, she kept her daydreams of flight to herself. It was a secret between her and God. Without a doubt, people would find her sudden fascination with aviation worrisome. Or even morbid, perhaps. But to Zoey, it was her way of remaining her father’s daughter in the days, weeks and years after his passing.

Her inheritance was a passion for the thing he loved most, the thing that ultimately took his life and that of Zoey’s mother. But it was the only thing she had.

Until the reindeer.

“I don’t want to sell them.” Was it what Gus would have wanted? Zoey was sure it wasn’t. But why did he have the reindeer in the first place? And why had he left them to her?

They’d been close. After hearing him speak at the funeral, Zoey had sought him out. Gus seemed to have known exactly what she wanted, because he told her more stories about her father. Things she’d never heard before. Stories that fed her soul in those dark days. Her unconventional friendship with Gus was rooted in mutual grief.

They’d begun meeting for ice cream once a week and kept up the habit even after all Gus’s stories had been told three times over. She’d come to think of him as family. He’d always been there for her, whether she needed consoling when no one asked her to the senior homecoming dance or just needed to know how to change the oil in her car. Once, in a rare moment of sentimentality during one of their many flights together, he’d looked over at her and told her she was like the daughter he’d never had.

But it still wasn’t the same thing. People just didn’t leave things like reindeer farms to their friends. Even close ones.

Why me, Lord? “I want to keep them. All thirty-sometimes-thirty-one of them. Is that crazy?”

Anya propped her feet up, her toes ready and waiting for red polish. “Sort of.”

“Sometimes thirty-one? Have you lost count of your reindeer already?” Clementine grinned.

“Trust me. You don’t want to know.” Zoey closed her eyes and did her best to forget about the reindeer farm.