Free Melting His Alaskan Heart by Rebecca Thomas Page B

head for Sabrina, too, but he kept them to himself, and instead said to Carly, “This way. Follow me.”

CHAPTER 9
    Carly wasn’t sure what had come over her, except she wanted to be with Ethan. His mom had been so nice. His brother and sister-in-law stood there not correcting Mrs. Forrester. It seemed so easy to let her assume. No one interrupted to say she wasn’t with Ethan, not in that way. Zak and his wife, Sabrina, had to have known. She had talked to Zak when she called the lodge and asked to speak to Ethan. Certainly, if Ethan and she were close, she would have his number and wouldn’t have been calling the lodge asking for him. It felt like a conspiracy. Like everyone in this lodge wanted her with Ethan, except for Ethan.
    He guided her past the front of the prow-fronted lodge where a huge rock fireplace stood. He wasn’t saying a word. Typical. She’d find a way to make him talk. Even if she had to look at him as a business project, the subject of her next article, whatever she had to do to get him to speak.
    She craned her neck up, looking at the rock-covered chimney. It went up three stories. The ceiling had large natural wood rafters and what looked like knotty pine wood paneling. The comfy-looking leather sofa covered with blankets called to her. Maybe if she buried herself under a blanket, her deception would magically disappear. Ethan’s mother had made the assumption she was more than a guest, and she’d let her believe it.
    She glanced around the gigantic room with its log walls, and decided it was more than a lodge, it was a retreat. “This place is amazing.”
    Ethan set down the bags while she took in every aspect of the lodge’s aesthetic appeal. “It is, isn’t it?”
    A tingling sensation crept over her skin, as though they weren’t speaking about the lodge at all. Or maybe she secretly hoped they were talking about more than the lodge. She wanted to speak rationally about the issue at hand. It wasn’t every day she became someone’s fake girlfriend for the weekend. “It seems I read somewhere that you and your brothers built this place yourself?”
    “Yes, we did most of the log work, the basic structure of the building. We had to hire out the electrical and plumbing, but we did a large part of the work ourselves.”
    “How did you do it? I mean how did you come up with this idea? You know, for a lodge out in the middle of nowhere.”
    “Gold Creek was a town before we moved here. We thought it was an ideal location. It has hunting, fishing, a hot springs, a lake. It’s perfect for outdoor recreation. We hired a designer, but the log work itself took a lot of trial and error. We went through a lot of chain saws.”
    She kept noticing the details of the logs, the track lighting, the colors of the stones. “Not all the logs are the same size.”
    “That’s because they aren’t manufactured logs. They’re cut from Alaskan spruce trees. The trees were cut, peeled, and varnished by my brothers and me. The notches fit together because we took chain saws and made them fit.”
    “Wow. There really is such a rustic appeal to the place. I was trying to put my finger on why it feels so…so warm and welcoming, part of it has to be the logs themselves. Every single one of them is unique. Not put through a mill and made to all be the same size and look alike.” She hummed in quiet appreciation. “I can’t imagine all the work and time that went into this. How long did it take you to build it?”
    “We worked on it over the course of three summers. The first summer we cut all the trees. We let them dry a year, then the next summer peeled and varnished them, the next summer put them all together. We also gathered river rocks to build the fireplace. That was a job, too.”
    She noticed the pride in his voice, the determination. “I’ll bet. You and your brothers working together like that…it must have bonded you.”
    Ethan shrugged. “Yeah, you could say that. We managed to not kill