They all scanned the bar’s patrons.
Coop almost considered issuing a retraction. Scraggly beards. Scraggly hair. Scraggly flannel shirts. K-Bay wasn’t exactly Baywatch.
But Gideon was back in the game. “I bet we could match more couples than her, too. And I wouldn’t use my intuition.”
“We’d have the Bar & Grill’s bell ringing on the hour.” Coop’s statement might have been a little over the line. Whenever someone found The One, they rang the bell over the bar. The bell hadn’t been heard in more than a year.
“I’ll take that bet,” Coach said, puncturing the wind from their sails. He leaned on the bar, capturing their attention the same way he had years ago as their high school hockey coach—with a steely-eyed stare that said he was done with small talk and ready for action. “There are three weeks until Valentine’s Day. I’ll bet you three can’t get three couples to ring that bell by Valentine’s eve.”
“Three?” Coop scoffed, the first of their trio to find his voice. “We could do twice that.”
Ty and Gideon stared at Coop as if he’d just told them he’d traded his truck for a minivan.
“Deal.” Coach offered his hand.
Coop reflexively put his out, but Gideon arm-barred his hand aside. “We don’t know the terms. What do we get if we win this bet?”
“A hundred bucks.” Coach smirked, making his face as wrinkled as a shar-pei’s.
Again, Coop put out his hand.
Again, Gideon batted it down. “That’s not worth one match, let alone six.”
“Six hundred, then.” Coach’s grin said he thought they’d fail.
Heck, Coop thought they’d fail. Six? What had he been thinking?
Clearly he hadn’t been. Still, Coop kept his smile—the one that had helped him sell hundreds of cars—glued to his face. No reason to let Coach sense blood in the water.
Coop glanced at Gideon. Gideon glanced at Coop. It was too late to back out now. They nodded and extended their hands to seal the deal, but this time it was Ty who stopped them from accepting the bet.
“Forget the money. If we win, we want jobs on one of your hockey teams.” Ty had an expression on his face that Coop hadn’t seen in seven years—like a bull charging toward the china shop. He’d scowled like that during a high school championship and had defended four shots on goal in two minutes to ensure their team won.
Coop wasn’t sure if the entire bar heard Ty’s terms or not. For a moment everything seemed quiet. Or it could have been the ringing in Coop’s ears that blocked out the clinking of glasses, beer-roughened voices and deep drifts of laughter.
Jobs in the Lower 48? It was all they’d ever wanted—to get out of town and work together in professional hockey.
Coach’s gaze morphed from dismissive to appraising. He owned large stakes in a couple of farm teams in the contiguous US. He’d been a successful hockey coach at the highest level, retiring early due to a severe case of rheumatoid arthritis now under control with a change in lifestyle and diet. “You want to sell popcorn and pretzels at some of my games?”
Ty didn’t flinch at the jab, although it hit him where it hurt because his thickly bearded chin jutted out. He’d gone from being a potential hockey superstar at eighteen, predicted to go high in the draft, to a jack-of-all-trades employee at K-Bay’s run-down skating rink. “Coop can sell bottled sand in the desert. I’m sure you have marketing positions. Gideon can make money grow on trees—”
“Legally,” Gideon murmured.
“And I know the game inside out.” Ty’s chin thrust halfway to Russia. “I could coach.”
The stakes of the bet had increased astronomically. It was what the three of them had dreamed of as boys: escaping Alaska. Only, back then, Coop was going to be Ty’s sports agent and Gideon his financial adviser. When Ty’s dreams had fallen apart, so had Coop’s and Gideon’s.
Coop tried not to look as though he’d swallowed a fish bone. “Is it a bet, Coach?”
“You’ve forgotten one thing.” The older man leaned against the back bar and crossed his beefy forearms. “What do I get when you lose?”
“We’ll swim the Polar Bear Challenge naked,” Ty offered.
Coach shook his gray, grizzled head. “You did that when you were teens.”
“We’ll bartend for you on weekends.” At Coach’s frown Gideon added, “For a month.”
“I like tending bar,” Coach said. “Gets me out of the house. Now...if you wanted to take my wife shopping in Anchorage every weekend for a month...”
They didn’t.
Coop stared at Kelsey’s article, at the suited matchmaker, at Kelsey’s postage-stamp picture. “We’ll take out an ad in the Anchorage Beat. Full page. Stating we know nothing about life or love, just like you said.”
Ty made a noise like a polar bear right before it dived under dark and stormy seas.
Coach’s faded blue eyes narrowed. “I want pictures, too. And an article about why Alaska is the best place in the world to live.”
Everything they stood against. Everything they complained about. Everything that made living in K-Bay as boring and rut filled as Coach had accused Coop of being.
It was one thing to be disappointed in his lot in life, another to be called on it. Coop didn’t hesitate. “Deal.”
They all shook on it and Coach left them to check on other customers. They each stared at their shaggy, bearded reflections in the glass behind the bar.
“Seriously, Coop?” Ty took aim with his hellfire expression. “An ad? This is worse than the time you convinced us to hitchhike to Anchorage our senior year. It’s not as if anyone knows who you are. But me—”
“Coach wasn’t going for a naked swim in the Bering Sea.” Ty’s anger didn’t faze Coop. They’d known each other too long for him to take it personally. “And he wouldn’t have gone for something simple like a case of rare whiskey.”
“It is what it is,” Gideon said, always the peacemaker. “But we can’t tell anyone what it is.”
Coop nodded. They’d be laughed out of K-Bay. “Where do we start?”
“Maybe we can get people to fill out an online survey.” Gideon perked up. He loved anything techish. “I could design a program to pair them up.”
The inner front door opened and a woman stepped in. She was wrapped from neck to snow boots in a reddish-brown parka that made her look like a stuffed sausage. Conversation in the room died away as every pair of male eyes turned toward her. She peeled off her knit cap, revealing shoulder-length, glossy blond hair and artfully applied makeup.
She was pretty, beautiful even. The kind of woman that men stopped and took notice of.
Coop sat up straighter. Noticing. “Here’s our first customer.”
She unfastened her jacket with small, delicate hands, revealing a small, delicate head covered in blond fuzz. A baby. Strapped to her chest.
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