The room heaved a sigh of regret. Conversations resumed, albeit not at their usual volume.
Slumping, Coop returned his attention to his beer. “And there goes our first customer.”
Boots rang across the oak floor.
Gideon tapped Coop on the shoulder. “She’s coming over here.”
Coop turned back around.
It was the weirdest thing. Coop was used to Alaska’s winters, used to the cold. But as the woman and the baby approached, the room took on a chill.
She stopped in front of him and arched a golden brow. “Cooper Hamilton?”
Coop nodded, rather numbly, because there was something familiar about the woman’s face, about her smooth voice, about the swing of her pretty blond hair across her shoulders.
She gestured to the baby. “I believe I have something of yours.”
“YOU DON’T REMEMBER ME, do you?” Nora Perry couldn’t help sounding angry and embarrassed. She’d traveled more than one hundred miles on a bus. It’d taken six hours instead of two. She was tired. The baby was tired.
And the witty, handsome man she’d met ten months ago with the mischievous smile? He wasn’t witty—he was speechless. He wasn’t handsome—his dark hair brushed his shoulders unevenly and grew from his chin in short, thick stubs. He wasn’t smiling—his lips formed a shell-shocked, silent O.
Coop led Nora to a tall wooden booth in the dimly lit, seen-better-days bar. She hung her parka on a booth hook, dropped her backpack to the floor and sat on the cold wooden bench too quickly, landing on her sit bones.
Zoe fussed, probably overheated from Nora’s resolve-melting mortification.
Coop didn’t remember her? Subtract fifty points from his man-appeal tally.
Last time Nora had seen Coop, he’d had a stylish, clean-shaven jaw, a stylin’ opening line and a styled set of dance moves that would’ve qualified him for a spot on Dancing with the Stars, Alaska edition. They’d met at a bar in Anchorage last spring. Spring being a time when folks got a little nutty in Alaska because everything returned to “normal” for a few months. You didn’t have to wear parkas the size of sleeping bags or shovel as much snow.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” Nora repeated when Coop continued to be struck dumb. She was having trouble slipping off the baby-carrier straps. Her lower lip trembled, much like Zoe’s did when her dirty diaper didn’t get changed quickly enough. “Am I that forgettable?” Her pride and her stomach slid to the floor. “Don’t answer that.”
Nora finally got the straps off and settled Zoe in the crook of her arm. “You had no trouble with words that night in Anchorage.” There. A clue. Perhaps the humiliation would end.
Coop couldn’t seem to drag his green gaze from Zoe. “I...uh...”
Or not. More mortifying heat flash flooded her body. And when emotion flooded her hormonal, postpregnancy body, which was often lately, her milk came in.
Could things get any worse? “We met at a bar.”
“Uh...” His gaze stroked her face and then dropped below her chin to the milk-production department.
“I didn’t have these then.” She waved a free hand in front of her now-tingling, melon-size chest and tried her best to glare at him. But it was hard to glare when the father of your child couldn’t remember you.
Zoe squirmed then squinted and made a squishing sound in her pants.
So much for a classy, civilized meeting.
Still, it was hard not to love Zoe. Unless you were Coop. His gaze was still caught on the milk-production department.
“Excuse me.” Nora scootched off the bench seat and rummaged in the backpack that served both as her purse and her diaper bag. Was it just last year she’d carried a budget-busting Dooney & Bourke tote? It seemed like a lifetime ago.
Nora tugged her diaper kit free and shot Coop another deadly glare. “Don’t go anywhere.”
Coop raised his hands slowly, as if in surrender, still in bachelor shell shock.
Nora was having a shock of her own. She wasn’t just a one-night stand. She was a forgettable one-night stand.
Coop was just like her father: a happy-go-lucky drunk going through life in memory-stealing binges.
I’m not going to let Coop hurt Zoe like Dad did me.
Nora was in Kenkamken Bay for one thing and one thing only. Child support. She wasn’t looking for a relationship with her baby daddy. Coop, being a self-centered bachelor, would probably be relieved that all she wanted was money. With direct deposit from his bank to hers, he need never see her or Zoe again. In fact, given who he was, Nora preferred it that way.
The ladies’ room was a pleasant surprise. It was clean and had a drop-down change table. Nora made quick work of the diaper, enjoying Zoe’s cooing nonsensical song. But the restroom lacked a place to sit and breast-feed. And boy, did she need to breast-feed. Given Coop’s stupefaction, her breast-feeding in public would probably send him to an early grave, which—setting aside her own discomfort at the public airing of a private event—would be highly satisfying.
Spirits bolstered, Nora opened the door.
Coop was waiting for her, no longer looking like a man who couldn’t believe he’d plowed his beloved sports car into a tree. His green eyes sparkled. His grin dazzled with straight teeth as white as snow. “Tangerine dress. Yellow heels. St. Patrick’s Day.”
She’d wanted him to remember her. And yet...Nora felt as if the unsalted nuts she’d eaten on the bus were giving her indigestion.
“You ordered white wine.” His grin spread over his now handsome—despite the beard—face. Funny what a smile did to a shaggy man’s looks. “We went back to your place and—”
“Please.” Nora walked past him to the booth. “Not in front of the baby.”
Everyone in the bar stared. She felt their eyes like a field mouse feels a circling hawk’s calculating gaze, almost as if they were protective of Coop, more than ready to join him in rejection of her paternity claim.
Her steps quickened. A woman in a strange town accusing the local golden boy she’d had his baby?
It’d been a mistake to come. A desperate, stupid mistake. She’d find the means to get by without Coop’s money. She’d get a second job. She’d trade babysitting services with other working moms. There had to be a way to raise Zoe without Coop’s help.
He slid into the booth across from her, looking decidedly chipper. “The thing is, Nancy—”
“Nora.” She resented his too-late chipperness and his too-false charm.
“I remember you.” His voice dropped from light and pleasant to dark and repellent. “And I distinctly remember using protection.” His smile never wavered as he tried to back her off from her claim.
Her father had a smile just like it, one that said he never worried about anything. And Dad didn’t worry. Not when he’d lost everything because one of his many get-rich-quick ideas failed. Not when he had a baby with a woman he didn’t remember meeting in a bar.
“You missed your weekend with the kids,” Nora’s mother would say. “It was three weeks ago. And your check—”
“Bounced again? I’ll write you another.” Dad would flash a minty smile meant to cover the alcohol on his breath. “Why waste time arguing? I’m here. And the kids want to have fun with their old man.”
Nora