Page 13

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ORSON

T hey slept so late that housekeeping banging on the door finally woke Orson.

Alex came awake with a start and scrambled out of his embrace. “We’re up!” she called, rolling off the far side of the bed. “We’ll be out soon!” Orson made a note to practice that voice. It wasn’t rude, precisely, but it was full of confidence and not a hint of apology.

“How soon?” he asked, eyeing her curves hopefully as she jiggled her pants up.

She stooped and threw a pillow at him. “We’re on a schedule. Snap to!”

Orson obediently snapped to , and they swiftly packed and loaded their luggage into the truck. Alex checked them out and drove them to Fast Eddy’s for breakfast. It was a brief meal, but not light. His biscuits and gravy were rich and filling, and served with a bowl of cubed melons with halved strawberries.

“Can you grow these things here?” Orson wanted to know.

Alex looked up from the phone she was tapping messages on. “Yes, but those aren’t. Local strawberries are much smaller and sweeter. Melons are enormous and wouldn’t be ripe yet.”

She knows everything, Orson thought in admiration.

“We’ve got a hotel tonight in downtown Fairbanks,” Alex said. She’d picked an omelet with reindeer sausage and had already eaten it efficiently. “ Two rooms, I confirmed with Sandra.”

“We don’t have to use them both,” Orson suggested with a waggle of his eyebrows.

She rewarded him with a glimpse of an answering smirk, quickly smothered. “ Two rooms,” she repeated. “We’ll stop at the Tok project and then drive to the Fairbanks office and get going early tomorrow morning for Coldfoot, where we again have two rooms.”

Orson had the Milepost open on the table beside him. “It’s only five hundred miles to Prudhoe Bay from Fairbanks. Why aren’t we driving straight through? Isn’t that only about eight hours?”

“The Haul Road isn’t paved,” Alex said patiently. “It’s eleven or twelve hours of driving if we don’t stop. We could do it, but it would be a long, miserable day. It’s better to break it up, since we can. And there are no amenities. If you need something for the trip, get it in Fairbanks.”

“I can think of something I’ll need,” Orson said, grinning at her.

She raised an eyebrow at him and Orson cataloged that gesture to use if he ever needed to be New Orson again. It managed to be both threatening, funny, and exasperated. He paid the bill with a company card and left a generous tip.

She didn’t offer him the truck keys, and he didn’t offer to drive.

The trip to Fairbanks was a hundred times more pleasant than the day before. The sky was a shade of clear blue Orson wasn’t sure he’d ever seen before, dotted with fluffy white clouds that looked straight out of romantic classical paintings. It was surprisingly hot, and the air conditioning in the truck didn’t work, so they drove with windows down. Orson was tempted to put his head out like a happy dog and howl.

It wasn’t just the sunshine and the mountain views, though those were still quite grand.

It wasn’t even that he’d gotten laid and had dopamine still coursing through his veins.

It was that Alex wasn’t blowing smoke up his nose anymore, and he didn’t have to hide who he was. She didn’t giggle. Orson didn’t grunt. He asked every question he was dying to ask, and she told him flat out whenever the question was dumb.

She was his soulmate , and she was smart, sexy, and strong.

Orson sang to his favorite songs without shame and coaxed her into the choruses she knew. She had a husky voice and good pitch. They could probably take down the house on karaoke night with the right song.

“Keep your eyes peeled,” she warned. “We’re coming up on North Pole, and you’ll probably see Santa Claus.”

“ The North Pole?” Orson had been concentrating on the road map past Fairbanks. “ Seriously ?”

“It’s a little city called North Pole, and they take Christmas very, very seriously .”

They didn’t leave the highway and didn’t have to. There was a twenty-foot plastic statue of Santa Claus in front of a red and white striped building, and the street light posts were painted like candy canes. The motif continued with curious Christmas-themed buildings and businesses along the highway.

“One of the city council members legally changed his name to Santa Claus a few years ago. He later ran for Congress.”

Orson gave Alex a suspicious sideways look, trying to decide if she was pulling his leg. She didn’t give her terrible giggle, only raised her near eyebrow at him. Was it a joke? He couldn’t tell, and it drove him crazy in the very best way.