Lucky in Love (26 page)

In the cookies of life, friends and lovers
are the chocolate chips.

M
allory stared at Ty and got light-headed, which turned out to be because she wasn’t breathing.

“I thought you chocoholics met over cake,” Ty said.

Two weeks. It’d been two weeks since she’d seen him, and he wanted to discuss cake. She hungrily drank in the sight of him. He wore battered Levi’s and a white button-down, looking as good as ever. But he’d lost some weight, and his eyes were guarded.

“We’ve been banned from cake,” Grace said. “On account of the candles.”

Amy pointed at Ty with her fork. “You planning on walking in and out of her life again?”

“Just in,” he said, his gaze never leaving Mallory’s. “We need to talk.”

“So talk,” Grace said.

Amy nodded.

Heart pounding, Mallory stood up and gave both of her friends a shake of her head. “You know what he’s asking. Give us a minute.”

“Okay, but this is his third time interrupting us,” Amy pointed out. “And—”

“
Please
,” Mallory said to her friends.

Amy looked at Ty, using her first two fingers to point at him, going back and forth between his eyes and hers, silently giving him notice that she was watching him and not to even
think
about misbehaving.

Grace dragged her away.

Mallory waited until they were out of earshot to look at Ty. Her entire being went warm as she drank him in. She had no idea why he was back but she hoped like hell she was part of the reason.

“You still trying to save me, Mallory?” Ty asked quietly.

Her heart was hammering so loud she couldn’t hear herself talk. “I can’t seem to help myself.”

“I don’t need saving.”

No. No, he sure didn’t. He was strong and capable, and more than able to take care of himself. “What
do
you need?”

“You,” he said simply. “Only you.”

“Oh,” Grace breathed softly from behind them. “Oh, that’s good.”

Both Mallory and Ty turned to find that Amy and Grace had scooted close enough to eavesdrop. Grace winced and held up an apologetic hand. “Sorry. Continue.”

Mallory turned back to Ty, who took her hand in his big, warm one to entwine their fingers, bringing them up to his chest. His heartbeat was a reassuring steady thump. “I know you’ve looked for Mr. Right,” he said. “And then Mr. Wrong. I was thinking maybe you’d be interested in a Mr.…Regular.”

Her throat went tight. “That’d be great,” she managed. “But I don’t see any regular guys standing in front of me.”

The corner of his mouth tipped up and melted her but she wasn’t going to be distracted by his hotness right now. “Your job,” she said.

“Yeah, I thought that’s what drove me, gave me what I needed. I was wrong, Mallory. It’s you.
You
fulfill me, like no job or no person ever has. You make me whole.”

There was a sniffle behind them. Two sniffles. Mallory ignored them, even as she felt like sniffling herself. “Won’t you go crazy here?”

“There’s an opening in Seattle for a trauma flight paramedic. Also, I was thinking I want to work with veterans at HSC. I think I could help. And if I get bored and need some real action, there’s always the arcade.”

Mallory was absorbing this with what felt like a huge bucket of hope sitting on her chest. “And me,” she whispered. “I could show you some action. You know, once in awhile.”

“Mallory,” he said, sounding raw and staggered and touched beyond words. “God, I was so stupid. So slow. I didn’t know what to do with you. I tried to keep my distance but my world doesn’t work without you in it.”

She melted. Given the twin sighs behind her, she wasn’t the only one. “But is a trauma paramedic job enough for you?”

“There’s more important things to me than an adrenaline rush. There’s more important things than
any
job. But there’s nothing more important than you,” he said. “Mallory, I lo—”

“
Wait
!” This was from Amy, and she looked at Mallory. “I’m sorry, but don’t you think you should tell him about the car before he finishes that sentence?”

“
No
,” Mallory said, giving Amy the evil eye. She wanted the rest of Ty’s sentence, dammit!

Ty frowned. “What’s wrong with the Shelby?”

“
Nothing
,” Mallory said quickly.

“Nothing,” Amy agreed. “Except for the dinged door where she parked too close to the mailbox.”

“Oh my God,” Mallory said to her. “What are you, the car police?”

“The
classic
car police,” Amy said smugly.

“You parked the Shelby on the street?” Ty asked Mallory incredulously.

She went brows-up.

“Okay,” he said, lifting his hands. “It’s okay. Never mind about the car.”

“I’ve got this one,” Grace said, wrapping an arm around Amy, covering the waitress’s mouth while she was at it. “Go on.”

Mallory turned back to Ty, who pulled her off her stool and touched the small scar on her cheek before leaning in to kiss her. “I love you, Mallory,” he said very quietly, very seriously. “So damn much.”

Warmth and affection and need and so much more rushed her. “I know.”

“You know?”

“Yes.”

“Well, hell,” he said with a small smile and a shake of his head. “You might have told me and saved me a lot of time.”

“How about I tell you something else?” she said. “I love you, too.”

The rest of the wariness he’d arrived with drained from him. “Tell me what you need from me for there to be an us,” he said.

Hope blossomed, full and bright. “You want an us?”

“I want an us. Tell me, Mallory.”

“I like what we had,” she said. “Being together after a long day, maybe dinner out sometimes. That was nice. We could skip the orchestra, though.”

“Mallory,” he said on a short laugh. “Tell me you want more from me than that.”

She bit her lower lip, but the naughty grin escaped anyway. “Well, maybe a little bit more.”

He laughed softly, his eyes going dark. He pulled her in and kissed her hard, threading his hands in her hair. “How do you feel about sealing the deal with a ring?” he murmured against her lips.

All three women gasped.

“What?” Mallory squeaked. “You mean an engagement ring? To be
married
?”

“Yes,” he said. “You’re it for me, Mallory. You’re everything.”

He was serious. And suddenly, so was she. “I’d like that,” she said softly.

“Good,” he said. “Anything else we need to work out?”

Only a hundred things. Where was he going to live?
With her
, she thought possessively. She wanted him with her. Wait—Did that mean that she’d have to learn to cook? Because that might be a stretch. And she didn’t have any room in her closet to share. And the cat. What if Sweet Pea pooped in his boots?

Ty cupped her face and made her look at him, deep into his eyes, and it was there she found the truth. All these worries were inconsequential. They didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but this.

Him.

Besides, she had time to make room for him in her closet. The cat had time to get used to him. They had all the time they needed, because he’d told her he was hers, and he was a man of his word. “I’ve got all I need,” she told him.

He leaned down and kissed her again, then stroked a finger over her temple, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “I want you to know,” he said. “That you’re the best choice I ever made.”

“No regrets?”

“No regrets.”

Heart full to bursting, she tugged him down and kissed the man she was going to spend the rest of her life with.

I
’m not lost,” Amy Michaels said to the squirrel watching her from his perch on a tree branch. “Really, I’m not.”

But she so was. And actually, it was a way of life. Not that Mr. Squirrel seemed to care. “I don’t suppose you know which way?” she asked him. “I happen to be looking for hope.”

His nose twitched, then he turned tail and vanished into the thick woods.

Well, that’s what she got for asking a guy for directions. Or asking a guy for anything for that matter…She stood there another moment, with the high-altitude sun beating down on her head, a map in one hand and Grandma Rose’s journal in the other. The forest around her was a profusion of every hue of green and thick with tree moss and climbing plants. Even the ground was alive with growth and running creeks that she constantly had to leap over while birds and squirrels chattered at her. A city girl at heart, Amy was used to concrete, lights, and people flipping other people off. This noisy silence and lack of civilization was like being on another planet, but she kept going.

The old Amy wouldn’t have. She’d have gone home by now. But the old Amy had made a life-long habit out of running instead of taking a stand. She was done with that. It was the reason she was here in the wilds instead of on her couch. There was another reason too, one she had a hard time putting into words. Nearly five decades ago now, her grandma had spent a summer in Lucky Harbor, the small Washington coastal town Amy could catch glimpses of from some of the switchbacks on the trail. Rose’s summer adventure had been Amy’s bedtime stories growing up, the only bright spot in an otherwise shitty childhood.

Now Amy was grown up—relatively speaking—and looking for what her grandma had claimed to find all those years ago—hope, peace, heart. It seemed silly and elusive but the truth was sitting in her gut—Amy wanted those things, needed them so desperately it hurt.

It was harder than she expected. She’d been up since before dawn, had put in a ten-hour shift on her feet at the diner and was now on a mountain trail. Still on her feet.

Unsure she was even going in the right direction, she flipped open her grandma’s journal, which was really more of a spiral notepad, small enough that it fit in the palm of her hand. Amy had it practically memorized, but it was always a comfort to see the messy scrawl.

Amy could hear the words in her grandma’s soft, trembling voice, though of course she would have been much younger when she’d actually written the journal. Grandpa Scott had died when Amy was five so she couldn’t remember much about him other than a stern face and that he’d waggled his finger a lot. It was hard to picture the stoic man of her memories taking a whimsical journey to a diamond rock and finding hope, but what did she know.

She hiked for what felt like forever on the steep mountain trail that sure had looked a whole lot flatter and straighter on the map. Neither the map nor Rose’s journal had given any indication that Amy would be going straight up until her nose bled. Or that the single-track trail was pitted with obstacles like rocks, fast-running creeks, low-dropping growth, and in two cases, downed trees that were bigger than her entire apartment. But Amy had determination on her side. Hell, she’d been born determined. Sure, she’d taken a few detours through Down-On-Her-Luck and then past Bad-Decisions-Ville, but she was on the right path now.

She just needed that hope. And peace would be good, too. She didn’t give much of a shit about heart. Heart had never really worked out for her. Heart could suck it, but she wanted that hope. So she kept moving, amongst skyscraper-high rock formations and trees that she couldn’t even see the tops of, feeling small and insignificant.

And awed.

She’d roughed it before, but in the past, this had meant something entirely different, such as giving up meals on her extra lean weeks, not trudging through the damp, overgrown forest laden with bugs, spiders, and possibly killer birds. At least they sounded like killers to Amy, what with all the manic hooting and carrying on.

When she needed a break, she opened her backpack and went directly for the emergency brownie she’d pilfered from work earlier. She sat on a large rock and sighed in pleasure at getting off her feet. At the first bite of chocolaty goodness, she moaned again, instantly relaxing.

See, she told herself, looking around at the overabundant nature, this wasn’t so bad. She could totally do this. Hell, maybe she’d even sleep out here, like her grandparents had, beneath the velvet sky—

Then a bee dive-bombed her with the precision of a kamikaze pilot, and Amy screeched, flinging herself off the rock. “Dammit.” Dusting herself off, she stood and eyed the fallen brownie, lying forlorn in the dirt. She gave herself a moment to mourn the loss before taking in her surroundings with wariness.

There were no more bees, but now she had a bigger problem. It suddenly occurred to her that it’d been awhile since she’d caught sight of the rugged coastline, with its stone arches and rocky sea stacks. Nor could she hear the roar of the crashing waves from below as her northward guide.

That couldn’t be good.

She consulted her map and her penciled route. Not that
that
helped. There’d been quite a few forks on the trail, not all of them clearly marked. She turned to her grandma’s journal again. As directed, she’d started at the North District Ranger Station, gone right at Eagle Rock, left at Squaw Flats…but no ocean sounds. No meadow. No diamond rock.

And no hope.

Amy looked at her watch—six thirty. Was it getting darker already? Hard to tell. She figured she had another hour and a half before nightfall, but deep down, she knew that wasn’t enough time. The meadow wasn’t going to magically appear, at least not today. Turning in a slow circle to get her bearings, she heard an odd rustling. A human sort of rustling. Amy went utterly still except for the hair on the back of her neck, which stood straight up. “Hello?”

The rustling had stopped, but
there
, she caught a quick flash of something in the bush.

A face? She’d have sworn so. “Hello?” she called out. “Who’s there?”

No one answered. Amy slid her backpack around to her front and reached in for her pocket knife. Once a city rat, always a city rat.

Another slight rustle and a glimpse of something blue—a sweatshirt maybe. “Hey!” she yelled, louder than she meant to but she
hated
being startled.

Again, no one answered her and the sudden stillness told her that she was once again alone.

She was good at alone. Alone worked. Heart still racing, she turned back around. And then around again. Because she had a problem—everything looked the same, so much so that she wasn’t sure which way she’d come.

Or which way she was going. She walked along the trail for a minute but it didn’t seem familiar so she did a one-eighty and tried again.

Still not familiar.

Great. Feeling like she’d gone down the rabbit hole, she whipped out her cell phone and stared down at the screen.

One bar…

Okay, don’t panic.
Amy never panicked until her back was up against the wall. Eyeing the closest rock outcropping, she headed towards it. Her guide book had said that the Olympics’ rock formations were made up of shales, sandstone, soft basalts, and pillow lava.
She
would have said they were sharp and craggy, a fact attested to by the cuts on her hands and legs. But they were also a good place to get reception.

Hopefully.

Climbing out onto the rocks was fine. Looking down, not so much. She was oh-holy-shit high up.

Gulp.

But she had
two
bars now for her efforts. She took a moment to debate between her two closest friends, Grace or Mallory. Either of the Chocoholics were good in a tough situation but Mallory was local, so Amy called her first.

“How’s it going?” Mallory asked.

“Taking a brownie break,” Amy said casually, like she wasn’t sitting on a rock outcropping a million feet above earth. “Thought you could join me.”

“For chocolate?” Mallory asked. “Oh, yeah. Where are you?”

Well, wasn’t that the question of the day. “I’m on the Sierra Meadows trail…somewhere.”

There was a beat of accusatory silence. “You lied about meeting you for a brownie?” Mallory asked, tone full of rebuke.

“Yeah, that’s not exactly the part of my story I expected you to fixate on,” Amy said. The rock was damp beneath her. Rain-soaked mosses adorned every tree trunk in sight, and she could hear a waterfall cascading into a natural pool somewhere nearby. Another bush rustled. Wind?

Or…?

“I can’t believe you lied about chocolate,” Mallory said. “Lying about chocolate is…
sacrilege
. Do you remember all those Bad Girl lessons you gave me?”

Amy rubbed the spot between her eyes, where a headache was starting. “You mean the lessons that landed you the sexy hunk you’re currently sleeping with?”

“Well, yes. But my point is that maybe you need
Good
Girl lessons. And Good Girl Lesson Number One is
never
tease when it comes to chocolate.”

“Forget the chocolate.” Amy drew a deep breath. “Okay, so you know I’m not all that big on needing help when I screw up, but…” She grimaced. “
Help.
”

“You’re really lost?”

Amy sighed. “Yeah, I’m really lost. Alert the media. Text Lucille.” Actually, in Lucky Harbor, Lucille
was
the media. Though she was seventy-something, her mind was sharp as a tack, and she used it to run Lucky Harbor’s Facebook like New York’s
Page Six
.

Mallory had turned all business, using her bossy ER voice. “What trail did you start on and how long have you been moving?”

Amy did her best to recount her trek up to the point where she’d turned left at Squaw Flats. “I should have hit the meadow by now, right?”

“If you stayed on the right trail,” Mallory agreed. “Okay, listen to me very carefully. I want you to stay right where you are. Don’t move.”

Amy looked around her, wondering what sort of animals were nearby and how much of a meal she might look like to them. “Maybe I should—”

“No,” Mallory said firmly. “I mean it, Amy. I want you to stay. People get lost up there and are never heard from again.
Don’t move from that spot.
I’ve got a plan.”

Amy nodded, but Mallory was already gone. Amy slipped her phone into her pocket, and though she wasn’t much for following directions, she did as Mallory had commanded and didn’t move from her spot. But she did resettle the comforting weight of her knife in her palm.

And wished for another brownie.

The forest noises started up again. Birds. Insects. Something with a howl that brought goose bumps to her entire body. She got whiplash from checking out each and every noise. But as she’d learned long ago, maintaining a high level of tension for an extended period of time was just exhausting. A good scream queen she would not make, so she pulled out her sketch pad and did her best to lose herself in drawing.

Thirty minutes later, she heard someone coming from the opposite direction she
thought
she’d come from. They weren’t making much noise, but Amy was a master at hearing someone approach. She could do it in her sleep—and had. Her heart kicked hard, but these were easy, steady footsteps on the trail. Not heavy, drunken footsteps heading down the hall to her bedroom…

In either case, it certainly wasn’t Mallory. No, this was a man, light on his feet but not making any attempt to hide his approach. Amy squeezed her fingers around the comforting weight of her knife.

From around the corner, the man appeared. He was tall, built, and armed and dangerous, though not to her physical well-being. Nope, nothing about the tough, sinewy, gorgeous forest ranger was a threat to her body.

But Matt Bowers was
lethal
to her peace of mind.

She knew who he was from all the nights he’d come into the diner after a long shift, seeking food. Lucky Harbor residents fawned over him, especially the women. Amy attributed this to an electrifying mix of testosterone and the uniform. He was sipping a Big Gulp which she’d bet her last dollar had Dr. Pepper in it. The man was a serious soda addict.