by Liz Isaacson
They looked dangerously like I love you, but Elise knew he wouldn’t tell her that in an arcade, without any sound to his voice. She tucked her hair, a smile moving through her soul, and went to get them a table.
A week later, Elise held one of Gray’s hands and one of Hunter’s as they steadied her so she could step from dry land into the boat. “Whoa,” she said, her body rocking right when it should’ve stayed still.
“Just step right there,” Hunter said. “By the cooler.”
She did as he said, and everything evened out. She really didn’t like how the ground wasn’t solid, but she’d made it into the boat. She flashed a smile at Gray and then his son, the heat of embarrassment filling her face. “I haven’t been on a boat in a while.”
“It’s like a lawn mower,” Gray said, his smile so wonderful and warm.
Elise tipped her head back and laughed. “It is nothing like a lawn mower.” She shook her head and gathered her hair into a ponytail. She wore it up so often, she could tell how it looked just by feel, and she secured it with a white elastic before accepting the fishing pole from Hunter.
“I can’t say I’ve been fishing before,” she said.
“Ever?” Hunter asked, plenty of incredulity in his voice.
“I suppose I did when I was younger,” she said. “I did grow up on an island. I just don’t remember it. We’d catch crabs and lobsters, but fishing wasn’t something you did from the shore.” She held the pole in her hands like she didn’t know what to do with it. Because she didn’t.
“Help her out, son,” Gray said, and Hunter moved from his bench to hers.
“Oh, okay,” she said, throwing her arms out to steady herself, but there was nothing to grab onto but the twelve-year-old.
He grinned at her and reached up to adjust his cowboy hat. “It’s not that bad, Elise.”
“It’s awful,” she said, nudging him with her shoulder. “Now, what do I do?”
“We’ve got to bait the hook,” he said, his voice smooth and even. Elise looked at Gray, who watched his son with a measure of admiration as he rowed them out into the lake. They’d learned that the fish at Prospect Lake liked live bait, and they’d started taking their flies to the rivers and streams in the foothills between Coral Canyon and Dog Valley.
Elise hadn’t wanted to get suited up in waders, so they’d brought her to Prospect Lake for her inaugural fishing trip.
Gray’s powerful arms stroked, and the boat glided smoothly over the still water. Elise was used to getting up early in the summer, and though it was Sunday—and her one day to sleep in—she didn’t mind at all.
In fact, there was nowhere she’d rather be than right here, with these two.
Hunter bent and opened the cooler, and Elise looked away from Gray. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me.” She actually jerked away from the worms in the cooler. “I thought you had breakfast in that thing.”
She looked at Hunter, her eyes wide. He looked back at her and blinked once before he started laughing.
“Oh, you stop it,” she said, though she wasn’t upset.
He quieted and shook his head. “When you saw that mess of snakes by that shed this week,” he said. “That was a reason to freak out. These are just worms.” He reached into the cooler and grabbed one, no hesitation at all. “You thread it right on the hook like this, Elise.”
He got the job done in a swift movement. “And you toss it in.” He threw the line out, the reel clicking as it went, and handed her the pole. “Done.”
She had no idea how to do that, but she figured if she had him to help her, she could just sit here and hold the pole. “So now I just hold it?”
“Yep, you hold onto it,” Gray said.
“Or put it in the rings there,” Hunter said, nodding to the set of three silver rings mounted to the inside of the boat. “When a fish pulls on it, it goes unless you prevent it.”
He moved back to his bench, wobbling the boat around. Elise sucked in a breath, but she managed not to “freak out.” She held onto her pole, and Gray stopped rowing. He and Hunter cast their lines out, and both of them sighed in near unison.
She looked at Gray, then behind her to Hunter. “Now what?”
“Now we relax,” Gray said with a smile.
“This is it?”
“This is it, sweetheart,” he said with a chuckle. “Sometimes Hunt and I have real good conversations while fishing.”
“What should we talk about?” Elise asked, glancing back at Hunter again.
He shrugged, his eyes out over the water. Silence draped over them, and some of Elise’s tension ebbed away. She could see what they meant by finding solace and peace out on the water. She closed her eyes and breathed in through her nose, rooting herself right in the center of her soul.
She felt powerfully the love of the Lord, and she sighed too.
“Dad says you’re going to move to Denver,” Hunter said, startling the silence away.
Elise’s eyes flew open, and she met Gray’s. He wore an unreadable mask.
“Yes,” Elise said, turning to look at Hunter again. She didn’t know what to ask him. Was he upset about that? They’d been getting along so great. Did she need to reassure him of anything? And if so, what?
“Go on,” Gray said. “Ask her.”
Elise nearly got whiplash she looked at him and then immediately back to Hunter. He cleared his throat. “I was wondering if you’d come pick me up from school sometimes.” He looked up, right into her eyes, and something amazing and bonding flowed between them. “If you can. I mean, Dad says you don’t really know what job you’ll have or anything.”
“Of course,” she said. “Of course I will, Hunter.”
“I have friends in that neighborhood,” he said. “And Dad says—”
“If you say that one more time,” Gray warned. Elise looked at him, and he wore lightning in his eyes. “Tell her what you think.”
Hunter glared at his father, a bit of teenager attitude in his eyes. They softened quickly, though, and he ducked his head again. “I think it would be nice to do stuff with you.”
“Stuff,” Elise echoed.
“Yeah,” Hunter said. “Like, I don’t know. Mother and son stuff.” By the time he finished talking, the words came out in a mumble. It took Elise a moment to understand them, and then she handed her fishing pole to Gray.
She stood up, though her heart was pounding very fast. “Oh—whoa.” She managed to step over the bench in the middle of the boat, and she sat next to Hunter. He’d put his pole in the rings, and he looked at her.
“I would love that so much,” she whispered, linking her arm through his. She moved her arm around his shoulders, and he turned into her, hugging her tight. She closed her eyes so she wouldn’t let the burning tears out as she held this beautiful boy.
She loved him so much, and she silently thanked the Lord for opening the doors of her heart to him—and for opening his to her.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Cy rumbled into Coral Canyon, the sun shining overhead. He’d gotten a bit of a late start, but it didn’t matter. He’d broken the eight-hour drive from Ivory Peaks into two days, but he was still ready to get off the motorcycle.
They were great for cruising around neighborhoods, or even going up into the mountains on paved paths. But his was not a touring bike, and after a couple of hours, the vibrations wore him right to the bone.
Still, it was mid-July, and that screamed for a drive across two states under the open sky. The wind in his hair, and his forearms taking the brunt of the sun.
At the moment, the sun moved behind a cloud, and Cy looked up into the sky. Gray clouds foamed in the distance, and Cy was struck by the beauty of the mountains. It had been a long time since he’d seen the magnificence of them.
Yes, he’d just come from Ivory Peaks, where he’d been living for the past two weeks. But there was something different about the Grand Tetons. They seemed to rise up much faster and much steeper than the Rockies.
He could still see snow on the tops of a few of the highest peaks, and that was unfathomable to Cy.
His soul filled with wonder and awe, and Cy smiled to himself. “So this is it, huh? You want me here, Lord?”
Cy felt a very strong call to Coral Canyon, and a sigh moved through his body. Wyoming wasn’t anything like California, and he wondered if he could get McCall and Wade to make the move. Even if he paid for it, they might not. After all, the mountains weren’t anything like the beach.
He pulled into a gas station and filled the tank of his motorcycle. He adjusted his bandana, which kept his hair out of his eyes and watched a mother lean into her minivan and say something to her children that had a lot of bite to it.
She reminded him so much of his mother, and how she used to tell him and his brothers the rules for going grocery shopping with her. “You will not ask for everything you see. You get one thing. One thing. It has to cost a dollar or less. If you ask for even two things, I will put the one thing back and you get nothing.”
Cy chuckled to himself. He’d only made that mistake once, and he’d cried for days over his lost box of Lemonheads.
Today, he went into the convenience store and bought some Lemonheads, a pack of gum, and a Monster energy drink. He’d need the sugar and the caffeine, because he was meeting three people that afternoon for commercial land showings.
He wasn’t even sure what that entailed, but he was ready to take the first step toward getting his shop open again.
Taylor Terry was way too over-eager, but Cy shook his hand and let him walk him around a plot of land that sat across the street from an elementary school. Cy could already hear the calls of complaints from teachers and parents alike.
No, he didn’t want to be right downtown, and he didn’t want his motorcycle shop to be in a residential neighborhood. A strip mall wasn’t a good location, and neither was the huge plot of land the city had just released near the hospital.
“I just don’t see anything that’s going to work for me,” Cy said. He shook Taylor’s hand, thanked him for trying, and sat on his bike, his phone in his hand.
“Gotta give me a gentle push,” he muttered to the Lord. “None of those pieces of land were even close to working for a motorcycle shop.”
He found the address for the office of the next agent, and he drove the few blocks to it. Clint Bailey didn’t seem like he knew much about the land in Coral Canyon, because he asked Cy three times what they were going to look at. He did manage to take him to a large plot of land on the Eastern outskirts of town with a huge commercial real estate sign just behind the fence.
“Great water rights here,” Clint said.
“Water rights?”
“You’re the fellow doing the horseback lessons, right?”
“No,” Cy said, his mood darkening. The sky did too, and he looked up to find the clouds he’d seen hovering over the mountains in the distance had arrived in the valley.
“What are you looking for again?”
Cy glared at Clint. “I need three acres to build a motorcycle shop.”
“A motorcycle shop?”
Cy didn’t know how to say it any other way, so he just nodded.
“Well, you can’t do that out here. Mrs. Fletcher lives right over there, and she calls the police when the wind blows too hard and wakes her up in the night.”
Cy definitely didn’t need to deal with Mrs. Fletcher. “I think we’re done here,” he said.
“Let me call Duane.”
“You do that.” Cy leaned against the fence and looked out at the fields. Had he been doing a facility for horseback riding lessons, this would be the perfect land for it.
“Yep,” Clint said. “Uh huh. All right.” He hung up and said, “We’ve got something out north.”
“Let’s see it,” Cy said.
Clint drove them to the new piece of land, and Cy gazed around at it. It actually wasn’t bad. It was big enough for the two-story building he needed, with plenty of room for a parking lot. “What’s out here?” he asked.
“What you see.”
“No neighbors who get upset if the wind blows?”
Clint chuckled and shook his head. “Nothing like that.”
“What’s the catch then?”
“No catch,” Clint said, but there was something false in his voice.
If there was something Cy loathed more than green peas, it was a liar. “What is it?” he pressed. He hadn’t taken his two billion dollars and opened the country’s biggest and best custom motorcycle shop by being a pushover.
“Some say this is a Native American burial ground,” Clint finally said.
“So if I buy it and start building and come across graves or bones….” Cy turned away from the land. “It’s over.”
“Could be,” Clint said.
“What else have you got?” He checked his phone for the time. Hopefully, Clint was done, because he was supposed to meet Betty at her family orchards. Apparently, they were selling a lot of the land as her father had gotten quite ill and couldn’t keep up with the enormity of the orchards he had.
“Nothing,” Clint said.
“Let’s go back,” Cy said. He’d thanked Clint for his time and looked up Betty’s address before the first drops of rain fell.
His mood only worsened as he drove through the rain to the orchards. They sat on the northwest side of town, a mountain rising to his left and a road leading north to his right. He’d pulled over next to a building the size and shape of a single-story barn, but it was boarded up and closed down. It didn’t bear a name on it, and he wondered if he was in the right place.
A hundred feet down the road, a sign said Dog Valley, 12, and he stayed put. Betty had said it was on the highway leading toward Dog Valley.
The rain wasn’t cold, but the wind sure didn’t heat things up. Cy sat on his bike, waiting in the rain for five minutes.
Then ten.
Annoyance filled him, and he looked at his black leather pants. Ruined.
He’d just lifted his phone to call Betty when a giant SUV came skidding into the parking lot.
Cy yelped and jumped from his bike, because he wasn’t keen to get smashed between the grill of a Hummer and a fruit stand that had seen better days.
He landed on his hands and knees, and the pain fueled his anger. The mud on his clothes and fingers downright spiraled it.
“What in the devil are you doing?” he demanded. He got to his feet and tried to wipe off as much mud as he could. It seemed to be made of super-sticky dirt, because it just smeared everywhere.
He marched toward the SUV, which had come to a stop less than a foot from his motorcycle. “Hey,” he called to the person getting out on the driver’s side of the enormous, boxy vehicle.
They must’ve been fairly short, because he couldn’t see them over the hood. He couldn’t fit around the front of the SUV, so he went toward the back, saying, “Hey, what kind of driving was that?”
A woman came around the back of the SUV, and she wore sourness on her face like she sucked on lemons for a living. “Stop yelling at me,” she barked. “I can hear you.”
“Can you?” he tossed right back at her. “You dang near hit me with this thing.” He tapped the taillight.
Her gaze flew to it, and her eyes narrowed as she looked back at him. They glared at one another, a silent battle which Cy would not lose. He would not look away from her first.
She had very short, golden blonde hair that had been cut into a stylish pixie cut. It wasn’t really his style, but he could appreciate that it fit her face. She wore a pair of jeans with a black pair of boots that had never seen snow or muck, and a pale yellow sweatshirt that seemed to be fitted as it flowed right along the curves of her body.
She deflated after several long moments, and she said, “I’m sorry. It’s my brother’s truck, and I don’t really know how to drive it. And Betty threw this in my lap last-minute, which isn’t your fault but doesn’t make anything any easier for me.” H
er bright blue eyes glinted with anger, and Cy kind of liked it.
She was also sort of familiar to him, though he couldn’t place where he would’ve possibly met her.
“So…you’re not Betty?”
“No,” she said. “Sorry, I’m Patsy Foxhill. Welcome to Foxhill Farms.” She stuck out her hand for him to shake, and Cy put his in hers, her name tickling a memory he couldn’t quite grasp.
He wasn’t prepared for the shockwave of heat to move from her hand into his. She sucked in a breath as if she’d felt it too, and their eyes met.
Cy swore he fell in love that very moment, because he hadn’t felt any attraction this powerful since meeting Mikaela, months ago.
“Who are you?” Patsy asked, her voice somewhat hushed.
“Cy Hammond, ma’am,” he said. “And I swear I know you. Have we met?” He cocked his head and waited for her to answer, but all she did was stare at him with those big, beautiful, blue eyes.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Patsy’s ears rang with the words Cy Hammond.
Hammond.
Hammond.
Everything around Whiskey Mountain Lodge had changed the day the storm blew in Colton Hammond, eighteen months ago.
Yes, she knew who Cy was. One of the twins who wore weird pants to a wedding. Patsy had sized up this man as he’d done the same to her, and he was wearing those same leather pants right now. They actually fit with the leather jacket and the bandana on his head. They had not fit with the suits and dresses at a wedding.
He has nice shoulders, she thought, immediately horrified at the thought. This was Colton’s brother. Wes’s brother. Gray’s brother.
Patsy was not going to be charmed with a pair of dark, deep, midnight-colored eyes….
She shook herself and looked away from Cy. She’d met him before and felt no sizzle. Her hand was still in his, though, and there was a downright scalding happening where her skin touched his.
