Second Chances (Nugget Romance 3)

by Stacy Finz

  “You together now?” At least if he turned the conversation to her, she wouldn’t ask a lot of nosy questions.

  “We’re working on it,” she said, lathering up his hair while his head rested against the cool porcelain bowl. “Are you okay, Colin?”

  “How did her meeting go?” was all he said.

  “Good. She just texted me. He wants all kinds of financial information, which Harlee rushed home to try to throw together. She doesn’t have a lot of it. But he says he wants to buy DataDate and turn it into a phone app.”

  Colin lifted his soapy head. “Seriously?”

  “I know, right?” She pushed his head back down for rinsing. “He even wants her to move to Dallas and consult on getting the program up and running. You can’t let her go, Colin.”

  For her sake, how could he possibly ask her to stay? “It sounds like a good job . . . you know, until she can get a newspaper gig.”

  “Okay, you’re going to think this sounds totally self-serving, but I swear it’s not. She belongs here, Colin. With you. I know she loves you and she loves this town. All that’s missing is a job. She hasn’t even applied at the Reno paper or tried freelancing.”

  “It would never work, Darla. Trust me on that.”

  “Why not?” Darla put her hands on her hips. “Why can’t it work? I can’t get a straight answer out of her. All I know is one day you two are happy as clams, the next you’re broken up. What don’t I know here?”

  Screw it, Colin thought. “I have a past, Darla. An ugly one.”

  Darla shut off the water and stared down at him. “She did one of those background checks on you, didn’t she? She did one on Wyatt too.”

  Colin didn’t say anything. He just wanted Darla to move his haircut along.

  Darla didn’t seem much in a hurry, though. “What did she find out?” When he didn’t answer, she pressed. “Come on, it can’t be that ugly. You may be a little strange, but you’re a good person, Colin.”

  “I went to prison when I was seventeen for driving the getaway car during a liquor store holdup in which three people were murdered.” He waited for that to sink in and said, “I thought I was driving us to get beer. Apparently the kids I was with had different plans. I didn’t even know they had guns.”

  “My God, Colin.” Darla kept watching him, not quite sure what to make of his admission. “Didn’t your lawyer tell the police that you didn’t know?”

  “She did, but no one believed me. So you can see why I wouldn’t be the right kind of guy for Harlee.”

  Darla moved him to her barber chair and quietly started trimming his hair. Colin could see her digesting the information he’d sprung on her. Measuring it in her head. Maybe now that Darla knew, she didn’t feel safe with him.

  But then she did the damnedest thing. Darla spun his chair around and gave him a big hug. “Don’t you say that, Colin Burke. You’re a good man. And I believe you. Every word. Does Harlee realize that you weren’t involved—that you were railroaded?”

  “She believes me. That’s not what’s at issue.”

  Darla weighed that too. “You should’ve told her,” she finally said. “She deserved to know. But why can’t you just talk it out?”

  “It’s more complicated than that. And Darla, I would appreciate it if you didn’t blab what I told you all over town.” He still had to live here.

  “I won’t,” she said. “So if this Bix guy buys DataDate, you’ll just let her go? Let her walk away forever?”

  “I’m no good for her, Darla.”

  Harlee might have every reason to despise Colin for keeping his past from her. Eventually, though, Colin knew she’d forgive him. But she’d never get over having a man with a sheet. Despite having paid his debt to society, he’d always be viewed with mistrust. And so would the company he kept. It was enough that he’d ruined his own life; he wasn’t about to ruin hers too.

  After his haircut, Colin made his way back to Grizzly Peak, passing Griffin on Main Street. Both backed up so they were side by side and rolled down their windows.

  “You doing okay, man?” Griffin asked, leaning his head out into the cold.

  “Yep.” Apparently Colin and Harlee’s breakup was front page news.

  “You want to come over for a beer? Commiserate?”

  Colin guessed that Griff and Lina were still on the outs. “I’ll take a rain check, if you don’t mind.”

  “Sure thing,” Griffin said. “Hey, it gets better with time.”

  “Has it for you?”

  “Nah. But I keep hoping it will.”

  Colin didn’t think it ever would for him. That’s why he changed the subject. “How’s business?”

  “I’m almost ready to open the Gas and Go, got a couple custom bikes in the works, and have two more houses in Sierra Heights in escrow. That Sam may seem a little flaky, but she’s great at spreading the word. Any Lumber Baron guest with deep pockets, she sends my way. Two of them were looking for vacation homes.”

  It was just a dent, considering that Griffin still had something like seventy vacant houses left to sell. But Colin figured that as rich as Griffin was, he could probably afford to sit on them. Although you’d never know the guy was wealthy; he acted like the rest of Nugget’s mostly blue-collar residents. That’s what Colin had come to like about him so much.

  “Nice,” he said. “It’ll be good when the Gas and Go reopens—save everyone a trip to Graeagle.”

  “Yup.” Griff split a grin. “That’s what everyone says.”

  “I’ll catch you later.” Colin continued up the hill, passing Harlee’s cabin on the way home.

  He saw her Pathfinder parked in the driveway and assumed she was inside, busy preparing a financial prospectus. He could’ve helped with that, having done it for his furniture company and carpentry business.

  Instead he kept going, pulling into his driveway only to find Al’s Crown Vic taking up space next to the garage. The parole officer leaned against his car, seemingly immune to the cold, playing fetch with Max. Colin knew the dog made regular visits to Harlee’s house when he wasn’t home. Sometimes he could even smell her perfume on the shepherd.

  He pulled up alongside Al’s cruiser and opened his door. “Hey.”

  Al didn’t say anything, just motioned that they should go inside.

  Colin led the way. So much for the old expression that lightning never strikes twice . . .

  A week after Bix returned to Texas, Harlee accepted his deal. He’d offered a good price for DataDate, not enough to make her independently wealthy, but a sufficient amount to pay off her debt and keep her going for a while. Everyone, including Brad, thought she’d be a fool not to take it. Bix’s proposal that she work for the company was still on the table, but that decision would be determined by one person. And today was the day.

  All morning she’d been unable to concentrate on anything other than listening for the sharp tone of her cell phone. That, and listening for Colin’s truck. According to her count, he’d made the trip on Grizzly Peak three times—once to leave and then return and then to leave again. Each time she heard the crunch of gravel underneath his steel-studded tires, her longing for him grew more unbearable. Over the last couple of days, she’d considered going to him. To say what, she wasn’t completely sure. In the end, though, she’d determined that there was no hope for them.

  Colin had never asked her to be a permanent part of his life. A man who kept secrets wasn’t a man who could commit. If he was, he would’ve tried harder to work this out with her.

  Darla had relentlessly begged Harlee to forgive him. But just because she and Wyatt were able to patch up their differences, didn’t mean the same could be said for Harlee and Colin. Too much deceit. His deceit.

  She was still reeling from the fact that Colin had divulged the situation to Darla. The shootings. The prison sentence. All of it.

  If only he had done that with Harlee months ago.

  She stuck her head in the refrigerator, not really hungry
but needing something to do to pass the time. It struck Harlee that she’d spent a great deal of her career waiting for the phone to ring. Waiting for the mayor to call with a quote, or a police spokesman with pertinent information, or a witness who could give crucial details to flesh out her story. And here she was, waiting again.

  She shut the refrigerator door and flipped on the TV. Nothing but daytime soaps and talk shows, so she turned the set back off. She supposed she could start packing, because no matter what today’s outcome brought, she’d be leaving. Either for Seattle or Dallas.

  Out the window, she gazed up at the snow-covered Sierra mountain range. The view always managed to take her breath away. And the dense thicket of pines, dusted in white, reminded her of fairy-tale Christmases. God, she would miss this place. After she’d lost her job, Nugget had been her salvation. Not just the scenery and the fresh smells of frost and sap and clean air, but the people. Especially Griffin and Darla. What would she do without Darla?

  She’d miss Emily and Clay’s wedding and Maddy and Rhys’s baby, which would break her heart.

  There was always email, she supposed, and Skype and the good old telephone. And on holidays and vacations she’d come back to visit. Perhaps her friends would come to see her too. Both Seattle and Dallas were easily accessible. The move was the best possible solution, she told herself. Nugget, after all, had always been intended as a temporary stopping place to regroup. She now had the money to pay off her bills and start over. And she fervently prayed that it would be in journalism. But beggars couldn’t be choosers and Bix paid well. At least while she worked for him getting the DataDate app off the ground, she could apply at the area’s two big newspapers. She would be right there to make a pest of herself.

  At the kitchen table she pulled up a chair, silently implored the phone to ring, and sifted through a stack of Nugget Tribunes that had been sitting there for days. As usual the paper was thin on news, but chock-full of ads. No wonder those jerk-off Addisons wanted to buy it. With a few tweaks, like cutting out print, paper, and distribution costs by making the paper a digital-only product, the Trib could be a potential goldmine. Of course it would depend on whether local advertisers and readers were ready for an online newspaper. But Harlee had seen plenty of townsfolk reading on their tablets, smartphones, and laptops. Nugget might not be the Athens of the West, but it seemed to have embraced technology just fine.

  The paper would probably attract more readers online, especially people from out of the area who had vacation homes here or just wanted to know what was going on in their neighboring town. And if there were actual stories in the paper, like updates on what city hall, the school board, and the county board of supervisors were up to, more people might actually read the Trib. She wondered if the Addisons, who last she’d heard were in escrow to buy the newspaper, had made similar observations.

  The phone rang, startling Harlee out of her reverie, and she grabbed it, taking in a breath before she answered.

  “Hello.”

  “Harlee, it’s Jerry. If you want the job, it’s yours.”

  When she’d called a week earlier, right after she’d met with Bix, Jerry had told her there was a chance of an opening. A Seattle Times reporter had been offered a higher-paying position as chief of communications at a local agency. Management at the Times had been in negotiations with the reporter, but apparently she’d taken the other job.

  “I don’t need to come in for an interview, take a drug test or anything?” Harlee couldn’t believe it could be this easy.

  “You can take the drug test in California. HR will send you a list of clinics we use and a bunch of other crap paperwork you need to fill out. As for the interview, you’ll be getting a call from the metro editor in a few hours. Don’t worry about his call. It’s pretty much meaningless, since I’m firing his ass in a few days. I think the guy’s retarded.”

  Harlee didn’t have the guts to tell him that the correct term was “developmentally disabled,” which described most newspaper management, except, of course, Jerry.

  “And, Legs, bring an umbrella. It rains about 150 days out of the year here.”

  “Okay,” she said, baffled. “Am I just supposed to show up? This is it? I don’t even know what my salary will be.”

  “I’ll pay you a hundred bucks over scale. That’s the best I can do. HR will work out the rest, including your start time. Someone will call you to set up your move and an advance flight to find a place to live. That work?”

  “What is top scale there?” Not like it mattered, since it was the only journalism job being offered to her.

  “Same as the Call’s,” he said. Not bad, since Seattle’s cost of living had to be way less than San Francisco’s. “Four weeks of vacation a year. General assignment reporters are required to work some nights and some weekends. But you don’t give a crap about that.”

  No, she didn’t. She’d be single in Seattle. No friends. Nowhere to go.

  “Thank you, Jerry. I really appreciate you believing—”

  Before she could finish, Jerry said, “Gotta go. See you in a few weeks,” and hung up.

  And just like that Harlee was back in the game. She’d done it. She’d gotten a great job at a great newspaper, working for a great editor in a great city. More than she could ever have hoped for. So why did she feel like something was gnawing at the pit of her stomach? And even sadder than when she’d been fired from the Call.

  It was just nerves, she told herself, and tried to psych herself up for the move.

  Seattle!

  Job!

  Yay!

  But it still wasn’t working.

  Chapter 25

  One week later, Harlee maneuvered her rolling carry-on through Reno-Tahoe International. She needed to find an apartment in Seattle, stat. Jerry wanted her to start as soon as possible. The moving company was coming in six days and she still hadn’t packed.

  The move was happening so fast—maybe too fast—that Harlee could barely catch her breath. The whole thing felt a little like déjà vu. Only five months earlier, she’d impulsively hitched a U-Haul to the back of her Mini Cooper and made the trek to Nugget. Now she was doing it all over again. At least this time, the Seattle Times was footing the bill.

  Shortly after Jerry had offered her the job, she’d hit the Seattle classifieds online and set up a bunch of appointments to see apartments in Queen Anne, a neighborhood of mostly young singles. Today, if all went well, she planned to plunk down a deposit on something, stop in at the newsroom to shake a few hands and meet a few people, and fly home to ready for the move.

  Harvey and Leigh had promised to deliver the furniture she’d stowed in their garage and stay in Nugget a few days to help box up her belongings. People had already started a slow trickle through her cabin to wish her well. And Darla planned a big send-off bash at the Ponderosa.

  But there hadn’t been a sound out of Colin. The fact that everyone in town knew she was leaving and he hadn’t said so much as congratulations, solidified her belief that a serious relationship between them had never been in his plans. Just a winter fling. Still, the possibility of never seeing him again, never feeling his arms around her, made her ache so desperately that she’d had to stop herself a dozen times from going to him.

  Seattle was the right thing to do. At least that’s what she told herself. She intended to bury herself in the job, break big stories, and make the Call sorry for sacking her. And in no time at all she’d forget Colin Burke. Except for she knew she wouldn’t. She’d never forget him.

  Ever.

  Sometimes she woke up in the middle of the night, regretting that she’d looked up his damned tattoo or his prison record. It made her wonder how many other women’s lives she’d ruined the same way. She used to think that information was power; now she wasn’t so sure. Maybe if Harlee had minded her own business, she and Colin would still be together. Well, hindsight was twenty-twenty.

  She found a Starbucks and waited in the long line, thinking
that at least in Seattle there would be good coffee. After getting her latte, she wended her way to the gate, grabbed a seat, and tried to distract herself with the sights and sounds of the airport. It seemed like the whole world planned to travel today. Families and business people, tugging their suitcases and overnight bags, clogged the terminal.

  Harlee watched as one irritated traveler looked ready to throw a temper tantrum because she didn’t like her seat assignment. Even from the sidelines, Harlee could tell the woman was higher maintenance than a toy poodle, and prayed she wouldn’t have to sit next to her.

  The call came for first-class passengers to board the plane. Harlee got her ticket out of her purse and joined the economy-class hordes elbowing for priority. As everyone else did, she worried that all the overhead space would be taken before she could claim a seat.

  In the distance, a man jogged toward the gate. He looked so much like Colin, Harlee did a double take. Like the time in the square, she was still seeing visions of him everywhere. At the Nugget Market. The Bun Boy. Main Street. Sometimes she conjured him out of thin air.

  Ridiculous, because the one thing Harlee could be sure of was that Colin wouldn’t step foot in a packed airport. Not with his demophobia.

  She turned away, trying desperately to block Colin from her cranium, and waited for her section to be called. People rudely tried to cut in before their turns. This is why she hated airports and flying. The couple next to her stuffed airport sandwiches into their knapsacks, making her kick herself for not doing the same. Maybe, if she was lucky, there would be pretzels or peanuts on the flight.

  A jostling from the tide of people made her lose balance, and in her haste to keep from falling she clutched the person next to her. When she looked up, it was him.

  Colin.

  Suspended in time, they stood stock-still, staring at each other. All around them babies cried, people pushed luggage, and muffled voices came over the loudspeaker. But for her, there was only him.