A Cold Creek Reunion

She had done her very best to strike the proper tone the day of the fire, polite but cool, as if they were distant acquaintances instead of once having shared everything.

If she told her mother she didn’t want to have Taft here, he would know her demeanor was all an act.

She was trapped. Well and truly trussed, just like one of the calves he used to rope in the high-school rodeo. It was a helpless, miserable feeling, one that felt all too familiar. She had lived with it every day of the past seven years, since her marriage to Javier Santiago. But unlike those calves in the rodeo ring, she had wandered willingly into the ropes that bound her to a man she didn’t love.

Well, she hadn’t been completely willing, she supposed. From the beginning she had known marrying him was a mistake and had tried every way she could think short of jilting him also to escape the ties binding them together. But unlike with Taft, this time she’d had a third life to consider. She had been four months pregnant with Alexandro. Javier—strangely old-fashioned about this, at least—wouldn’t consider any other option but marriage.

She had tried hard to convince herself she was in love with him. He was handsome and seductively charming and made her laugh with his extravagant pursuit of her, which had been the reason she had finally given in and begun to date him while she was working at the small, exclusive boutique hotel he owned in Madrid.

She had tried to be a good wife and had worked hard to convince herself she loved him, but it hadn’t been enough. Not for him and not for her—but by then she had been thoroughly entangled in the piggin’ rope, so to speak, by Alex and then by Maya, her sweet-natured and vulnerable daughter.

This, though, with Taft. She couldn’t control what her mother had done, but she could certainly control her own response to it. She wouldn’t allow herself to care if the man had suddenly invaded every inch of her personal space by moving into the hotel. It was only temporary and then he would be out of her life again.

“Do you want me to call him?” her mother asked again.

She forced herself to smile. “Not at all, Mama. I’m sorry. I was just … surprised, that’s all. Everything should be fine. You’re right—it’s probably a great idea. Free labor is always a good thing, and like you said, the only thing we’re giving up is a room that probably wouldn’t have been booked anyway.”

Maya wandered into the kitchen, apparently tired of playing, and gave her mother one of those generous hugs Laura had come to depend upon like oxygen and water. “Hungry, Mama.”

“Gram is fixing us something delicious for dinner. Aren’t we lucky to have her?”

Maya nodded with a broad smile to her grandmother. “Love you, Gram.”

“I love you, too, sweetheart.” Jan beamed back at her.

This—her daughter and Alex—was more important than her discomfort about Taft. She was trying her best to turn the hotel into something that could actually turn a profit instead of just provide a subsistence for her mother and now her and her children.

She had her chance to live her lifelong dream now and make the Cold Creek Inn into the warm and gracious facility she had always imagined, a place where families could feel comfortable to gather, where couples could find or rekindle romance, where the occasional business traveler could find a home away from home.

This was her moment to seize control of her life and make a new future for herself and her children. She couldn’t let Taft ruin that for her.

All she had to do was remind herself that she hadn’t loved him for ten years and she should be able to handle his presence here at the inn with calm aplomb.

No big deal whatsoever. Right?

If some part of him had hoped Laura might fall all over him with gratitude for stepping up to help with the inn renovations, Taft would have been doomed to disappointment.

Over the next few days, as he settled into his surprisingly comfortable room in the wing overlooking the creek, a few doors down from the fire-damaged room, he helped Mrs. Pendleton with the occasional carpentry job. A bathroom cabinet repair here, a countertop fix there. In that time, he barely saw Laura. Somehow she was always mysteriously absent whenever he stopped at the front desk.

The few times he did come close enough to talk to her, she would exchange a quick, stiff word with him and then manufacture some excuse to take off at the earliest opportunity, as if she didn’t want to risk some kind of contagion.

She had dumped him, not the other way around, but she was acting as if he was the biggest heel in the county. Still, he found her prickly, standoffish attitude more a challenge than an annoyance.

Truth was, he wasn’t used to women ignoring him—and he certainly wasn’t accustomed to Laura ignoring him.

They had been friends forever, even before that momentous summer after her freshman year of college when he finally woke up and realized how much he had come to care about her as much more than simply a friend. After she left, he had missed the woman he loved with a hollow ache he had never quite been able to fill, but he sometimes thought he missed his best friend just as much.

After three nights at the hotel with these frustrating, fleeting encounters, he was finally able to run her to ground early one morning. He had an early meeting at the fire station, and when he walked out of the side entrance near where he parked the vehicle he drove as fire chief—which was as much a mobile office as a mode of transportation—he spotted someone working in the scraggly flower beds that surrounded the inn.

The beds were mostly just a few tulips and some stubbly, rough-looking shrubs but it looked as if somebody was trying to make it more. Several flats of colorful blooms had been spaced with careful efficiency along the curvy sidewalk, ready to be transplanted into the flower beds.

At first, he assumed the gardener under the straw hat was someone from a landscaping service until he caught a glimpse of honey-blond hair.

He instantly switched direction. “Good morning,” he called as he approached. She jumped and whirled around. When she spotted him, her instinctive look of surprise twisted into something that looked like dismay before she tucked it away and instead gave him a polite, impersonal smile.

“Oh. Hello.”

If it didn’t sting somewhere deep inside, he might have been amused at her cool tone.

“You do remember this is eastern Idaho, not Madrid, right? It’s only April. We could have snow for another six weeks yet, easy.”

“I remember,” she answered stiffly. “These are all hardy early bloomers. They should be fine.”

What he knew about gardening was, well, nothing, except how much he used to hate it when his mom would wake him and his brothers and Caidy up early to go out and weed her vegetable patch on summer mornings.

“If you say so. I would just hate to see you spend all this money on flowers and then wake up one morning to find a hard freeze has wiped them out overnight.”

“I appreciate your concern for my wallet, but I’ve learned in thirty-one years on the earth that if you want to beautify the world around you a little bit, sometimes you have to take a few risks.”

He could appreciate the wisdom in that, whether he was a gardener or not.

“I’m only working on the east- and south-facing beds for now, where there’s less chance of frost kill. I might have been gone a few years, but I haven’t quite forgotten the capricious weather we can see here in the Rockies.”

What had she forgotten? She didn’t seem to have too many warm memories of their time together, not if she could continue treating him with this annoyingly polite indifference.

He knew he needed to be heading to the station house for his meeting, but he couldn’t resist lingering a moment with her to see if he could poke and prod more of a reaction out of her than this.

He looked around and had to point out the obvious. “No kids with you this morning?”

“They’re inside fixing breakfast with my mother.” She gestured to the small Craftsman-style cottage behind the inn where she had been raised. “I figured this was a good time to get something done before they come outside and my time will be spent trying to keep Alex from deciding he could dig a hole to China in the garden and Maya from picking every one of the pretty flowers.”

He couldn’t help smiling. Her kids were pretty darn cute—besides that, there was something so right about standing here with her while the morning sunlight glimmered in her hair and the cottonwood trees along the river sent out a few exploratory puffs on the sweet-smelling breeze.

“They’re adorable kids.”

She gave him a sidelong glance as if trying to gauge his sincerity. “When they’re not starting fires, you mean?”

He laughed. “I’m going on the assumption that that was a fluke.”

There. He saw it. The edges of her mouth quirked up and she almost smiled, but she turned her face away and he missed it.

He still considered it a huge victory. He always used to love making her smile.

Something stirred inside him as he watched her pick up a cheerful yellow flower and set it in the small hole she had just dug. Attraction, yes. Most definitely. He had forgotten how much he liked the way she looked, fresh and bright and as pretty as those flowers. Somehow he had also forgotten over the years that air of quiet grace and sweetness.

She was just as lovely as ever. No, that wasn’t quite true. She was even more beautiful than she had been a decade ago. While he wasn’t so sure how life in general had treated her, the years had been physically kind to her. With those big eyes and her high cheekbones and that silky hair he used to love burying his hands in, she was still beautiful. Actually, when he considered it, her beauty had more depth now than it did when she had been a young woman, and he found it even more appealing.

Yeah, he was every bit as attracted to her as he’d been in those days when thoughts of her had consumed him like the wildfires he used to fight every summer. But he’d been attracted to plenty of women in the past decade. What he felt right now, standing in the morning sunshine with Laura, ran much more deeply through him.