North to Alaska
4/5
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About this ebook
Amanda Perkins boarded a train, then a plane headed north to Alaska to marry one man and ended up snowbound with another.
Riley Bishop knew the moment he saw her on the sidewalk in his small town that he wanted her for himself.
Through an odd turn of events, both Amanda and Riley ended up getting exactly what they wanted.
Olivia Gaines
Olivia is a USA Today Best Selling and multiple award-winning author who loves a good laugh coupled with some steam, mixed in with a man and woman finding their way past the words of “I love you.” An author of contemporary romances, she writes heartwarming stories of blossoming relationships about couples not only falling in love but building a life after the sensual love scene. 2015 Swirl Award Winner, Best Erotic Romance, Thursdays in Savannah. 2017 IRAE Award Winner, Best Contemporary Romance, Wyoming Nights 2019 IRAE Award Winner, Favorite Series, The Men of Endurance 2019 IRAE Award Winner, Reader's Choice Award 2019 Nominee, Top Female Authors, The AuthorShow.com When Olivia is not writing, she enjoys quilting, playing Scrabble online against other word lovers and spending time with her family. She is an avid world traveler who writes many of the locations into her stories. Most of the time she can be found sitting quietly with pen and paper plotting more adventures in love. Olivia lives in Hephzibah, Georgia with her husband, son, grandson and snotty evil cat, Katness Evermean. Learn more about her books, upcoming releases and join her bibliophile nation at www.ogaines.com Subscribe to her email list at http://eepurl.com/OulYf Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/olivia.gaines.31 Twitter: https://twitter.com/oliviagaines Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gaines.olivia/
Read more from Olivia Gaines
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Reviews for North to Alaska
17 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ridiculously cute story about two people who are snowed in. Extra sweet love story anf quick read.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I loved it really good I had a great time reading this book
Book preview
North to Alaska - Olivia Gaines
Chapter 1. North to Alaska...
The train rumbled along the tracks of the silent backside of America as Amanda Perkins wrung her hands together for the ninetieth time since setting out for Paystreke, Alaska, a little mining town south of Anchorage. Each small town and little fishing hamlet the train rolled through brought her closer and closer to her future, and a new life with a man she had never seen but was about to marry. Cullen Mulroney had written her consistently over the past eight months and since the death of her beloved Aunt Linnie, there was little if anything left for her in Montpelier, Idaho. The only thing that town was famous for was a bank heist by Butch Cassidy in 1896; there was even a plaque on Washington Street to commemorate the town’s 15 minutes of glory. The last time anything exciting happened there was probably also in 1896. Still, it was home, or at least it had been for the past 30 years.
The lack of excitement was why she chose to answer the ad she saw in the back of the magazine she found on the counter in Ole Johnny’s General Store. Amanda Perkins was bored with her life and tired of being one of two black women in Montpelier. Since there were even less black men, her chances of getting hitched were slim to none. Heck, she hadn’t even been on a date with the exception of the pastor’s son, who was blackmailed, or gently coaxed, as Aunt Linnie liked to call it. Blackmail, coercion, bribery; it didn’t matter. She wanted a life with a husband and a few kids running around her feet in her great big kitchen.
For the thirtieth time, she pulled out the envelope and gazed at the photographs Cullen had sent of their home. It was a gigantic log cabin with glass windows that overlooked the Denali Peninsula. It sat high on a hill, almost up in the mountains, with lots of natural woods and trees. Her husband to be, in three days from today, was a rugged man with a beard, who hunted and provided a great deal of fresh meat to the townsfolk in Paystreke as well as in the neighboring town of Hope. Although Anchorage was only 90 miles away, he said it would be tough getting back and forth in the winter. He was very specific about the months and when he wanted her to travel. Based on her understanding, and she had done her research, she would be arriving before the first snowfall. She was ready. Her winter clothing had been sent ahead, along with her books, manual sewing machine and manual typewriter. It was her goal to write the novel that had been burning in her brain for the past five years.
Yeap.
Ready.
Amanda had spent a great deal of the past eight months preparing for the trip that was going to change her extremely dull life. How she longed for adventure because nothing ever really happened in her world. She lived in a world of seconds that milled together to create minutes of no consequence, which ironically bided their time for a pop of chance to become fully alive. Her time was now and it had arrived.
It was a fluke really, being in the store that day waiting for the deliveries to come in so she could pick up Aunt Linnie’s mail order medications. The magazine was on the counter and she was only perusing through the pages with her head down when Doctor Sorenson wandered in with his nurse. They never saw her sitting there as they openly spoke about her aunt’s health. Linnie was dying and the medicine she was waiting to pick up was nothing more than drugs to make her comfortable as she stitched together her minutes before making her journey to Heaven. That was how Amanda found out her aunt had cancer.
It was an aggressive cancer that ripped through her body like a silent killer cashing in a bounty offered on the head of a very weak woman. Aunt Linnie only lasted a month and a half and the two black women in town eventually were down to one. As much as she tried to stay and run her Aunt’s newspaper, her heart was not in it, nor was it in this town. That same day in the store when she stormed out, furious with the Doctor and his gossip-mongering nurse, Amanda inadvertently took the magazine with her. Locked in the bathroom in her Aunt’s small, three bedroom home—the third bedroom served as the newsroom—she held the periodical close to her bosom. As natured called, she thumbed through the pages and saw Cullen’s ad for a wife. Her initial response was nothing more than a mere postcard. Over the next two weeks she waited.
As her Aunt’s sickness took over their lives, Amanda found respite in Cullen’s letters. A whimsical joy unfolded in the photos he sent of him and his friends who mined for gold in the small town. His words echoed a loneliness, which resonated in the cavernous hole of her empty life as she sat beside to the only real friend she ever had. A friend, who in the middle of a cool March evening, closed her eyes to be with her Maker.
Aunt Linnie never had any children. Amanda was an only child whose mother had dropped her off on Linnie’s doorstep when she ran away to join a traveling side show with a man named Erskin, who smelled like cotton candy and elephant dung. He was a smooth talker who led her mother down a dark road from which she never recovered, dancing about in the life in her head where she imagined she would have with him, far from the real life she actually led with Erskin. A sad life where she, too, came to Idaho to die in her sister’s arms, from what Amanda heard the church ladies call the nasty woman’s disease.
Nope. This was not going to be her life. Amanda knew she was not ready to live in a big city and try to survive among people who did double talk and had fancy dinners with French wine. She was a simple girl who wanted a simple life. A man to love her and be a father to their children while she wrote books about adventures she would only have in her mind. In her real life, she was far more practical.
In April, after her Aunt Linnie’s death, she made a point of getting with Joe Slankiski to learn how to shoot. She learned how to handle and clean a .9mm, a rifle, and a shotgun. She even went fishing and learned how to flay, gut, and clean fish. The month of May she spent at Lucky Luke’s Taxidermy and Bait Shop learning how to properly skin and prepare furs for tanning.
Yeap.
Ready.
Cullen’s letters were becoming more romantic even after she sent him a photograph of herself. He didn’t care that she was black. If hindsight was truly a gift, then she was about to wish she had married an ophthalmologist. So many clues he had given her, but for some reason, she was so fixated on the idea that she could that it never entered her head whether or not she should actually pack her bags and head north to Alaska.
It was too late now. She was off the train and onto a plane. Amanda was in the air and flying over the Continental Divide across Canada and into Alaska. It was late October when she landed in Anchorage and boarded a bus to one town only to find out Cullen didn’t actually live there, but he resided even further south, miles away from a five-square-block town called Talkeetna on the southeast