A Cold Creek Reunion (4 page)

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.

Unsettled and more than a little rattled by the sudden hot ache in his gut, he took the coward’s way out and opted for the one topic he knew she wouldn’t want to discuss. “What happened to the kids’ father?”

She dumped a trowel full of dirt on the seedling with enough force to make him wince. “Remind me again why that’s any of your business,” she bit out.

“It’s not. Only idle curiosity. You married him just a few years after you were going to marry me. You can’t blame me for wondering about him.”

She raised an eyebrow as if she didn’t agree with that particular statement. “I’m sure you’ve heard the gory details,” she answered, her voice terse. “Javier died six months ago. A boating accident off the coast of Barcelona. He and his mistress du jour were both killed. It was a great tragedy for everyone concerned.”

Ah, hell. He knew her husband had died, but he hadn’t heard the rest of it. He doubted anyone else in Pine Gulch had or the rumor would have certainly slithered its way toward him, given their history together.

She studiously refused to look at him. He knew her well enough to be certain she regretted saying anything and he couldn’t help wondering why she had.

He also couldn’t think of a proper response. How much pain did those simple words conceal?

“I’m sorry,” he finally said, although it sounded lame and trite.

“About what? His death or the mistress?”

“Both.”

Still avoiding his gaze, she picked up another flower start from the colorful flat. “He was a good father. Whatever else I could say about Javier, he loved his children. They both miss him very much.”

“You don’t?”

“Again, why is this your business?”

He sighed. “It’s not. You’re right. But we were best friends once, even before, well, everything, and I would still like to know about your life after you left here. I never stopped caring about you just because you dumped me.”

Again, she refused to look at him. “Don’t go there, Taft. We both know I only broke our engagement because you didn’t have the guts to do it.”

Oh. Ouch. Direct hit. He almost took a step back, but he managed to catch himself just in time. “Jeez, Laura, why don’t you say what you really mean?” he managed to get out past the guilt and pain.

She rose to her feet, spots of color on her high cheekbones. “Oh, don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. You completely checked out of our relationship after your parents were murdered. Every time I tried to talk to you, you brushed me off, told me you were fine, then merrily headed to the Bandito for another drink and to flirt with some hot young thing there. I suppose it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone that I married a man who was unfaithful. You know what they say about old patterns being hard to break.”

Well, she was talking to him.
Be careful what you wish for, Bowman.

“I was
never
unfaithful to you.”

She made a disbelieving sound. “Maybe you didn’t actually go that far with another woman, but you sure seemed to enjoy being with all the Bandito bar babes much more than you did me.”

This wasn’t going at all the way he had planned when he stopped to talk to her. Moving into the inn and taking the temporary carpenter job had been one of his crazier ideas. Really, he had only wanted to test the waters and see if there was any chance of finding their way past the ugliness and anger to regain the friendship they had once shared, the friendship that had once meant everything to him.

Those waters were still pretty damn frigid.

She let out a long breath and looked as if she regretted bringing up the past. “I knew you wanted out, Taft.
Everyone
knew you wanted out. You just didn’t want to hurt me. I understand and appreciate that.”

“That’s not how it happened.”

“I was there. I remember it well. You were grieving and angry about your parents’ murder. Anyone would be. It’s completely understandable, which is why, if you’ll remember, I wanted to postpone the wedding until you were in a better place. You wouldn’t hear of it. Every time I brought it up, you literally walked away from me. How could I have married you under those circumstances? We both would have ended up hating each other.”

“You’re right. This way is much better, with only you hating me.”

Un-freaking-believable. She actually looked hurt at that. “Who said I hated you?”

“
Hate
might be too big a word.
Despise
might be a little more appropriate.”

She drew in a sharp breath. “I don’t feel either of those things. The truth is, Taft, what we had together was a long time ago. I don’t feel anything at all for you other than maybe a little fond nostalgia for what we once shared.”

Oh. Double ouch. Pain sliced through him, raw and sharp. That was certainly clear enough. He was very much afraid it wouldn’t take long for him to discover he was just as crazy about her as he had always been and all she felt in return was “fond nostalgia.”

Or so she said anyway.

He couldn’t help searching her expression for any hint that she wasn’t being completely truthful, but she only gazed back at him with that same cool look, her mouth set in that frustratingly polite smile.

Damn, but he hated that smile. He suddenly wanted to lean forward, yank her against him and kiss away that smile until it never showed up there again.

Just for the sake of fond nostalgia.

Instead, he forced himself to give her a polite smile of his own and took a step in the direction of his truck. He had a meeting and didn’t want to be later than he already was.

“Good to know,” he murmured. “I guess I had better let you get back to your gardening. My shift ends tonight at six and then I’m only on call for the next few days, so I should have a little more time to work on the rooms you’re renovating. Leave me a list of jobs you would like me to do at the front desk. I’ll try my best to stay out of your way.”

There. That sounded cool and uninvolved.

If he slammed his truck door a little harder than strictly necessary, well, so what?

Chapter Four

W
hen would she ever learn to keep her big mouth shut?

Long after Taft climbed into his pickup truck and drove away, Laura continued to yank weeds out of the sadly neglected garden beds with hands that shook while silently castigating herself for saying anything.

The moment she turned and found him walking toward her, she should have thrown down her trowel and headed back to the cottage.

Their conversation replayed over and over in her head. If her gardening gloves hadn’t been covered in dirt, she would have groaned and buried her face in her hands.

First of all, why on earth had she told him about Javier and his infidelities? Taft was the
last
person in Pine Gulch with whom she should have shared that particular tidbit of juicy information.

Even her mother didn’t know how difficult the last few years of her marriage had become, how she would have left in an instant if not for the children and their adoration for Javier. Yet she had blurted the gory details right out to Taft, gushing her private heartache like a leaky sprinkler pipe.

So much for wanting him to think she had moved onward and upward after she left Pine Gulch. All she had accomplished was to make herself an object of pity in his eyes—as if she hadn’t done that a decade ago by throwing all her love at someone who wasn’t willing or capable at the time of catching it.

And then she had been stupid enough to dredge up the past, something she vowed she wouldn’t do. Talking about it again had to have made him wonder if she were
thinking
about it, which basically sabotaged her whole plan to appear cool and uninterested in Taft.

He could always manage to get her to confide things she shouldn’t. She had often thought he should have been the police officer, not his twin brother, Trace.

When she was younger, she used to tell him everything. They had talked about the pressure her parents placed on her to excel in school. About a few of the mean girls in her grade who had excluded her from their social circle because of those grades, about her first crush—on a boy other than him, of course. She didn’t tell him that until much later.

They had probably known each other clear back in grade school, but she didn’t remember much about him other than maybe seeing him around in the lunchroom, this big, kind of tough-looking kid who had an identical twin and who always smiled at everyone. He had been two whole grades ahead of her after all, in an entirely different social stratosphere.

Her first real memory of him was middle school, which in Pine Gulch encompassed seventh through ninth grades. She had been in seventh grade, Taft in ninth. He had been an athletic kid and well-liked, always able to make anyone laugh. She, on the other hand, had been quiet and shy, much happier with a book in her hand than standing by her locker with her friends between classes, giggling over the cute boys.

She and Taft had ended up both taking a Spanish elective and had been seated next to each other on Señora Baker’s incomprehensible seating chart.

Typically, guys that age—especially jocks—didn’t want to have much to do with younger girls. Gawky, insecure, bookish girls might as well just forget it. But somehow while struggling over past participles and conjugating verbs, they had become friends. She had loved his sense of humor and he seemed to appreciate how easily she picked up Spanish.

They had arranged study groups together for every test, often before school because Taft couldn’t do it afterward most of the time due to practice sessions for whatever school sport he was currently playing.

She could remember exactly the first moment she knew she was in love with him. She had been in the library waiting for him early one morning. Because she lived in town and could easily walk to school, she was often there first. He and his twin brother usually caught a ride with their older brother, Ridge, who was a senior in high school at the time and had a very cool pickup truck with big tires and a roll bar.

While she waited for him, she had been fine-tuning a history paper due in a few weeks when Ronnie Lowery showed up. Ronnie was a jerk and a bully in her grade who had seemed to have it in for her for the past few years.

She didn’t understand it but thought his dislike might have something to do with the fact that Ronnie’s single mother worked as a housekeeper at the inn. Why that should bother Ronnie, she had no idea. His mom wasn’t a very good maid and often missed work because of her drinking, but she had overheard her mom and dad talking once in the office. Her mom had wanted to fire Mrs. Lowery, but her dad wouldn’t allow it.

“She’s got a kid at home. She needs the job,” her dad had said, which was exactly what she would have expected her dad to say. He had a soft spot for people down on their luck and often opened the inn to people he knew could never pay their tab.

She suspected Ronnie’s mom must have complained about her job at home, which was likely the reason Ronnie didn’t like her. He had tripped her a couple of times going up the stairs at school and once he had cornered her in the girls’ bathroom and tried to kiss her and touch her chest—what little chest she had—until she had smacked him upside the head with her heavy advanced-algebra textbook and told him to keep his filthy hands off her, with melodramatic but firm effectiveness.

She usually did her best to avoid him whenever she could, but that particular morning in seventh grade, she had been the only one in the school library. Even Mrs. Pitt, the plump and kind librarian who introduced her to Georgette Heyer books, seemed to have disappeared, she saw with great alarm.

Ronnie sat down. “Hey, Laura the whore-a.”

“Shut up,” she had said, very maturely, no doubt.

“Who’s gonna make me?” he asked, looking around with exaggerated care. “I don’t see anybody here at all.”

“Leave me alone, Ronnie. I’m trying to study.”

“Yeah, I don’t think I will. Is that your history paper? You’ve got Mr. Olsen, right? Isn’t that a
coin-ki-dink? So do I. I bet we have the same assignment. I haven’t started mine. Good thing, too, because now I don’t have to.”

He grabbed her paper, the one she had been working on every night for two weeks, and held it over his head.

“Give it back.” She did her best not to cry.

“Forget it. You owe me for this. I had a bruise for two weeks after you hit me last month. I had to tell my mom I ran into the bleachers going after a foul ball in P.E.”

“Want me to do it again?” she asked with much more bravado than true courage.

His beady gaze narrowed. “Try it, you little bitch, and I’ll take more from you than just your freaking history paper.”

“This history paper?”

At Taft’s hard voice, all the tension coiled in her stomach like a rattlesnake immediately disappeared. Ronnie was big for a seventh grader, but compared to Taft, big and tough and menacing, he looked like just what he was—a punk who enjoyed preying on people smaller than he was.

“Yes, it’s mine,” she blurted out. “I would like it back.”

Taft had smiled at her, plucked the paper out of Ronnie’s greasy fingers and handed it back to Laura.

“Thanks,” she had mumbled.

“You’re Lowery, right?” he said to Ronnie. “I think you’ve got P.E. with my twin brother, Trace.”

“Yeah,” the kid had muttered, though with a tinge of defiance in his voice.

“I’m sorry, Lowery, but you’re going to have to move. We’re studying for a Spanish test here. Laura is my tutor and I don’t know what I would do if something happened to her. All I can say is, I would
not
be happy. I doubt my brother would be, either.”

Faced with the possibility of the combined wrath of the formidable Bowman brothers, Ronnie had slunk away like the coward he was, and in that moment, Laura had known she would love Taft for the rest of her life.

He had moved on to high school the next year, of course, while she had been left behind in middle school to pine for him. Over the next two years, she remembered going to J.V. football games at the high school to watch him, sitting on the sidelines and keeping her fingers crossed that he would see her and smile.

Oh, yes. She had been plenty stupid when it came to Taft Bowman.

Finally, she had been in tenth grade and they would once more be in the same school as he finished his senior year. She couldn’t wait, that endless summer. To her eternal delight, when she showed up at her first hour, Spanish again, she had found Taft seated across the room.

She would never forget walking into the room and watching Taft’s broad smile take over his face and how he had pulled his backpack off the chair next to him, as if he had been waiting just for her.

They hadn’t dated that year. She had been too young and still in her awkward phase, and anyway, he had senior girls flocking around him all the time, but their friendship had picked up where it left off two years earlier.

He had confided his girl troubles to her and how he was trying to figure out whether to join the military like his brother planned to do, or go to college. Even though she had ached inside to tell him how she felt about him, she hadn’t dared. Instead, she had listened and offered advice whenever he needed it.

He had ended up doing both, enrolling in college and joining the Army Reserve, and in the summers, he had left Pine Gulch to fight woodland fires. They maintained an email correspondence through it all and every time he came home, they would head to The Gulch to share a meal and catch up and it was as if they had never been apart.

And then everything changed.

Although a painfully late bloomer, she had finally developed breasts somewhere around the time she turned sixteen, and by the time she went to college, she had forced herself to reach outside her instinctive shyness. The summer after her freshman year of college when she had finally decided to go into hotel management, Taft had been fighting a fire in Oregon when he had been caught in a flare-up.

Everyone in town had been talking about it, how he had barely escaped with his life and had saved two other firefighters from certain death. The whole time, she had been consumed with worry for him.

Finally, he came back for a few weeks to catch up with his twin, who was back in Pine Gulch between military assignments, and she and Taft had gone for a late-evening horseback ride at the River Bow Ranch and he finally spilled out the story of the flare-up and how it was a miracle he was alive.

One minute he was talking to her about the fire, something she was quite certain he hadn’t done with anyone else. The next—she still wasn’t sure how it happened—he was kissing her like a starving man and she was a giant frosted cupcake.

They kissed for maybe ten minutes. She wasn’t sure exactly how long, but she only knew they were the most glorious moments of her life. When he finally eased away from her, he had looked as horrified as if he had just accidentally stomped on a couple of kittens.

“I’m sorry, Laura. That was… Wow. I’m so sorry.”

She remembered shaking her head, smiling at him, her heart aching with love. “What took you so blasted long, Taft Bowman?” she had murmured and reached out to kiss him again.

From that point on, they had been inseparable. She had been there to celebrate with him when he passed his EMT training, then paramedic training. He had visited her at school in Bozeman and made all her roommates swoon. When she came home for summers, they would spend every possible moment together.

On her twenty-first birthday, he proposed to her. Even though they were both crazy-young, she couldn’t have imagined a future without him and had finally agreed. She missed those times, that wild flutter in her stomach every time he kissed her.

She sighed now and realized with a little start of surprise that while she had been woolgathering, she had weeded all the way around to the front of the building that lined Main Street.

Her mom would probably be more than ready for her to come back and take care of the children. She stood and stretched, rubbing her cramped back, when she heard the rumble of a pickup truck pulling alongside her.

Oh, she hoped it wasn’t Taft coming back. She was already off-balance enough from their encounter earlier and from remembering all those things she had purposely kept buried for years. When she turned, she saw a woman climbing out of the pickup and realized it was indeed a Bowman—his younger sister, Caidy.

“Hi, Laura! Remember me? Caidy Bowman.”

“Of course I remember you,” she exclaimed. Caidy rushed toward her, arms outstretched, and Laura just had time to shuck off her gardening gloves before she returned the other woman’s embrace.

“How are you?” she asked.

Despite the six-year difference in their ages, they had been close friends and she had loved the idea of having Caidy for a sister when she married Taft.

Until their parents died, Caidy had been a fun, bright, openly loving teenager, secure in her position as the adored younger sister of the three older Bowman brothers. Everything changed after Caidy witnessed her parents’ murder, Laura thought sadly.

“I’m good,” Caidy finally answered. Laura hoped so. Those months after the murders had been rough on the girl. The trauma of witnessing the brutal deaths and being unable to do anything to stop them had left Caidy frightened to the point of helplessness. For several weeks, she refused to leave the ranch and had insisted on having one of her brothers present twenty-four hours a day.