“No, not moose.” His face gave little away, which was exactly the problem with Kellan, because I could never quite tell when he was kidding. “Bears.”

“Bears?”

“Yep, bears. And maybe mountain cats, too.” He had these intense baby blue eyes, which always seemed slightly magnified behind his glasses, eyes that were amused now, at my expense.

“Well, that settles it,” I said, only half-kidding. “We have to turn around.”

He smiled, pushing up his glasses again. “You wanted to come out here, Lucy.”

As if I’d forgotten that this was completely of my own doing. Or that my nickname was I-Love-Lucy, due to my uncanny ability to land myself in outrageous situations without even trying.

Welcome to my most outrageous situation yet.

“In fact,” he went on, still amusing himself, “I think your exact words were ‘I want to broaden my horizons, Kel. I want to take my adventures to a whole new level.’”

“I did not say that.”

“Yes, you did. You said Alaska was going to be a good start on the rest of your life. A change from the dull and mundane.”

Okay, I’d actually said that, but it hadn’t sounded so cheesy at the time. “Thanks for throwing my own words back in my face.”

His knowing smile said “any time,” and I rolled my eyes and stared out the window again, at the sharp, craggy precipices and dizzying valleys coming up to greet us at stomach-shrinking speed as we came in for a landing.

Nerves hit me like a one-two punch, knocking the air out of my lungs. I didn’t need a restart, I thought hastily. My life was just fine! But unfortunately, they weren’t kidding when they said “starving artists.” And though I wasn’t exactly starving (in fact, I was stuffed into my Capris with some overflow), I wasn’t exactly flush with cash either.

Truth was, I barely scraped by each month.

Being broke wasn’t anything new to me, but this B &B hadn’t come with a college fund. So really, I had no choice but to come here and check it out, to decide what to do with it before-I don’t know-someone got stepped on by a moose and sued me.