“Ten years I’ve kept every secret in Grizzlyclaw, hon. Yours is the one I hung under the bell.”
One year ago, on the worst night of her life, Nora Calloway drove 200 miles from Anchorage and stopped at the only lit door in Grizzlyclaw, Alaska. Her fiancé had just sold her restaurant out from under her. Her grandmother’s recipes went with it.
A bartender poured her a whiskey on the house, ran off to the drunk two stools down, and told her she’d keep. She left before last call. She left her grandmother’s jacket on the stool.
This Halloween she’s back to settle the tab and take the jacket home. Ten minutes, in and out.
She hadn’t planned on Booker Whitlow.
Big, quiet, and grumpy as a locked door. Army, two tours. Single dad. Ten years behind the bar at The Bear’s Den, the saloon on the corner of Main and Ridge Road where every hard night in Grizzlyclaw gets poured. He’s kept the whole town’s stories, heard every Hollister brother fall across that wood, and never once told his own.
Now his cook has quit five days before the Grizzlyclaw Halloween Festival, and on Saturday the whole town eats out of his kitchen. So he gives her the week. The warm room over the kitchen. Cash. Done by Halloween. Her coffee hits the bar before she orders it. His flannel ends up around her shoulders. His solemn eight-year-old slides her a coaster like a deed.
But she has a start date in Anchorage. And Grizzlyclaw has had about enough of both of them. Mae Hollister is done waiting for him to pull the rope. Posey Hollister will trade cherries for a yes. Beth Proctor is sending day-olds “for the boy,” and Sheriff Vasquez has noticed whose truck is backed in nose-out.
She came to Grizzlyclaw to settle a tab. He’s going to make her the whole ledger.
Titles in the Grizzlyclaw Brothers series include: The Mountain Man’s Blueprint ~ Towed by the Mountain Man ~ The Mountain Man’s Lodge ~ The Mountain Man’s Inspector ~ The Mountain Man’s Lesson ~ The Mountain Man’s Last Vow ~~ (related to series) ~ Halloween at the Bear’s Den ~
This story may contain language, violence, and/or sexual situations intended for an adult 18+ audience.
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