Just In Time: An Alaskan Nights Novel Read Free Page A

a billion miles away. What is he expecting, calling her every damn day flirting with her?”
    Mick shook his head. “That’s how it works, man. I realize you’ve been living in the rarefied air of a celebrity athlete, where women throw themselves at you with wild abandon, but the rest of us have to work at it.”
    “Some call it a courtship ritual,” Walker added. “Maybe you’ve heard of it.”
    “What the hell is he courting her for?”
    Shitty peripheral vision or not, Roman didn’t miss the glances and raised eyebrows Walker and Mick exchanged across the room. It was Mick who spoke first. “He likes her, Roman. Is that so hard to believe?”
    “No. Of course not. She’s spectacular.”
    But it was Walker who put the proverbial nail in the coffin. “I hope you’d at least agree she deserves it.”
    •   •   •
    Avery watched Sloan walk down the aisle of the small, A-frame nondenominational church that dominated the end of Main Street and thought she’d never seen a more radiant bride. But it was Walker’s incandescent smile as their gazes met that would put any woman into sighs of ecstasy.
    Grier reached over and squeezed her hand, a bright smile shining through her tears. Avery squeezed back, the sappy feelings that had swamped her earlier winging back through her chest in a heady rush.
    So why the hell—in the middle of a moment of sweet, glorious perfection—did she clamp eyes on her ex-boyfriend across the aisle?
    Roman stared back at her, that green gaze as compelling as it was when she was sixteen. Add in the fact that all six-foot-four feet of him was decked out in a tuxedo that had to be custom-made and her traitorous body gave a leap of appreciation that wasn’t quite appropriate for church.
    One dark eyebrow lifted in silent challenge and Avery fought the urge to stick out her tongue.
    Damn the man. He’d make a stripper blush with those bedroom eyes and thick, luscious hair that begged to be mussed.
    And wasn’t that the problem?
    Everything was way too easy for Roman and it always had been.
    It had just taken her too long to understand that fact.
    Dragging her gaze away, Avery focused on the bride. Grier took Sloan’s flowers as she took her place beside Walker, and Avery did a quick refluffing of the train so it lay evenly on the aisle.
    Jobs completed, she and Grier met Mick and Roman where they escorted them the few brief steps to their front pew seats. Roman took her arm, and it took everything inside her to keep her gaze straight and her smile firmly fixed as the entire town of Indigo looked on with interest.
    “You look beautiful.”
    Avery swallowed hard at the warm breath in her ear, those inconvenient feelings rising once more in a hard clutch of her belly.
    “Thank you.”
    She took her seat, the words playing over and over in her mind.
    So many images stood out in her memories of the two of them, but the one that held the top of the list was the year they began to notice each other as more than friends. Roman had whispered in her ear in the middle of a soccer match on the town square. He’d told her where to line up a shot and she’d nearly melted into a puddle as his words skittered down her spine, light as a feather and as powerful as an avalanche.
    The sensation—a mixture of inexperience and the sudden change in a relationship she’d had since grade school—had taken her so off guard that she’d pushed him away with a smart-ass retort. But she’d thought about his words long into the night, wrapped up in her tiny bed in the back room of her mother’s house.
    Clearly not much had changed in eighteen years.
    “You ready?”
    Avery felt Grier’s quick poke to her thigh and realized she’d nearly missed her cue along with most of the ceremony. She and Grier returned to the altar to help Sloan with her dress, then moved to the side as Mick and Roman stepped forward to flank Walker.
    Mick produced two shining platinum bands from his vest pocket and laid them