The hairy beast’s eyes met mine, unblinking.

It startled me, but I didn’t dare move in case it took it into its walnut-sized brain to charge.

“Shoo,” I said, keeping my hands held loosely at my sides. “Shoo. Go away,” I repeated, but the moose kept staring placidly at me through the window.

I’d traveled quite a bit for Cole Enterprise, but never to such a remote outpost as Nome, Alaska. The guys would laugh their asses off if they were here to witness my first run-in with a two-thousand-plus-pound bull moose and the fact there was only a window between us.

I wasn’t sure if I should move. Maybe I should draw the curtains and make a mad dash to the back of my house. What was the correct protocol for a stalker moose?

When I was told about my assignment, I was excited. The wilds of Alaska had sounded almost romantic. The adventure itself, not so much. And the cold? Good God, the cold! What was it the British said, it would freeze the balls off a brass monkey? I highly doubted a monkey, let alone a brass one, would hop a plane to go on an Alaskan adventure, but if it did, it’d totally end up with frozen cojones.

Why the hell hadn’t Nova been in Haiti like she was supposed to be?

And worse? I wasn’t going home, or what I called home, for a while.

My mission was two-fold. Pick the property to house another Cole Enterprise location, and then do everything I could to convince her to join the team.

As far as Cole Enterprise intelligence knew, she’d left Haiti and hung up her stethoscope when she returned to Alaska. The most recent intel said she’d came back home to take care of her ailing grandmother.

Her parents had divorced when she was twelve. Her father took off to Virginia once the paperwork was signed. Her mother stayed long enough to see her graduate high school and bounced the next day. Cole Enterprise found record of the mother living in Southern New Mexico with husband number three and their eight-year-old son.

Did she know?

No stranger myself to broken families, I compared our lives, realizing there were no comparisons at all. As far as I was concerned, the Bennetts were my mother and father. Life before that was something I never looked back on. When I was young, it had hurt too much. Now that I was older, I saw the pointlessness of looking back on the things I had no power to change.

The silver lining, should one need it to justify all the horror, was the life I’d created for myself. The friends I’d made. I knew in my heart they were put in my life for a reason. Maybe it was to make up for all the things I went through that no child should bear witness to.

The Six had been my rock. My support system. My family. I’d worried, a lot, when graduation rolled around. I knew we’d stay friends, but I also knew life would put a wedge between us that we’d be powerless to remove.

But something bigger had kept us all together. Fighting for the same cause, yet allowing us to be different. Individual.

The moose snorted, fogging the window from the other side.

“Shit!” I hissed as I jumped, grabbed the curtain, and then yanked it across the rail.

It slid with a screech, and something heavy bumped the window casing. I spun, hands covering my head in case the window shattered.

Seconds later, with my heart thundering in my chest like a stampede of wild horses, I straightened and reached out, pulling back the curtain just enough to see outside. The moose was gone.

A sigh of relief burst from me, and then I laughed. “Damn moose.”

I’d researched Nome before coming. Not much to it with Nome being such a small city. Knowing my way around would make things much easier for me, especially if an emergency came up. “But what kind of emergency could there be here?” I asked the empty room as I picked up the small piece of paper with her address written on it.

Nova… her name echoed along my thoughts.

Would she be happy to see me after I’d left without saying goodbye?

The first step to any mission was, well, the first step.

My first step was to stock the house and ensure I was ready for the climate challenges of Alaska. At the top of that list was buying the right clothing. T-shirts and jeans wouldn’t cut it—no matter how many layers I put on.

A chill rolled through me just thinking about stepping outside wearing the only winter jacket I owned. People might not believe it got cold in Alabama, but it did. We bundled ourselves up in sweatshirts, jackets, jeans, and sweatpants to sit in front of a fire while we blew steady streams of vapor out of our mouths when we talked. When winter cleared out, we got blistering hot summers that made people want to peel off their clothes and jump into the nearest body of water to cool down. Pretty much, it was the best of both worlds. I seriously doubted that even on its hottest day in Alaska, no one in their right mind would think of stripping down and jumping into any body of water other than a hot bath.

Thermal underwear would be needed. And soup. Adding those items to my list, I stuffed it into my pocket and scooped up my keys. “Time to suck it up.” 

Downtown Nome, while small, was a hustling little seaport with folks coming and going. Some in vehicles, some on snow sleds. I’d purchased a sled because I was told it might be a better way to navigate when the roads went to crap from the mix of snow and coastal air. Not to mention that if I wanted to get anywhere inland, it would be more resourceful than the small pickup I’d acquired when I’d purchased the house. Well, technically it wasn’t me who purchased it. Really it belonged to Cole Enterprise, but for security purposes, my name was on the deed.

I bought the property online after seeing a handful of pictures, and then locating it on our satellite imaging. When the ink was dry on the contract, Cole Enterprise sent someone in to set up wireless communications and a back-up generator so that no matter the weather, I’d be fully functioning with power and internet access.

The sooner I had Nova on board, the sooner she could start her medical training. And while she immersed herself in fast tracking her medical career, I’d be researching areas that would best suit another facility for Cole Enterprise.

Nadia and Grant couldn’t leave Scotland at the moment to start all over again. Knowing they trusted me for such a huge project sort of baffled me, but made me proud at the same time. Although, I couldn’t help but wonder what it would mean for the Six having another new facility.

An even better question was, who the hell would run it? I couldn’t see any of my friends raising their hands to voluntarily take a position in the arctic tundra. We were tried and true southerners who didn’t do the cold.

And at least it wasn’t January. Yet.