Sweet Laurel Falls

by RaeAnne Thayne

  Christmas morning, three days earlier, had been particularly poignant. She and Sage had both put on cheerful faces as they’d opened their gifts to each other, but she could tell her daughter was feeling the same ache.

  Christmas night they had gone to the noisy, crowded McKnight party at Mary Ella’s, where all her siblings gathered with their families. Claire and Riley had been there with Owen and Macy, Angie and Jim, of course, with their children, and Alex. Even her sister Rose had driven out with her family from Utah in the middle of a snowstorm in order to make it back to Hope’s Crossing to spend Christmas in Mary Ella’s small house.

  She suspected Rose and Michael had come for her sake, to lend emotional support on her first Christmas without Layla. While she had been touched at the gesture and happy to see her just-older sister, she had thought a few times that the avalanche of concern just kept piling on.

  She touched the edge of a place setting and straightened the silverware a little, remembering how when she and Sage had returned home from the noise and craziness of the family gathering, they had sat here in the living room by the fire, watching the lights twinkle on the tree, snowflakes gently falling and the little shih tzu puppy wrestling with a leftover ribbon. She had been able to hold it together, until she’d looked over and seen tears trickling down Sage’s cheeks.

  “I miss her,” Sage had said softly. “Sometimes I miss her so much I don’t think I can bear it.”

  “Oh, honey. I know,” she had said. What else could she say? She knew from experience no words were adequate to soothe this pain, so she had held Sage and the two of them had cried that they would share no more Christmases with Layla.

  Today Sage hadn’t had time to grieve for her sister, too busy shopping and cleaning and cooking. Maura was glad for that, even if Sage was doing all this work for her father. Jack was due to arrive in half an hour for one last evening with his daughter before he left in the morning to return to the coast.

  One more day and he would be gone. She had hardly seen him since that first morning after he’d arrived in town, just brief moments when he’d picked up or dropped off Sage on their way to some outing. This would be the longest time she had spent in his company since their ill-fated breakfast at the Center of Hope Café.

  If she had her choice, she would have tried to get out of this dinner and let Sage have a quiet evening with her father. What could she do, though? Sage had asked her to stay, and she couldn’t find a decent excuse to refuse.

  Maybe after he left, she would be able to breathe again.

  She looked around the beautifully presented dining table again, but couldn’t see anything out of place.

  “So put me to work. What can I help you do?” she asked.

  Sage shook her head. “Nothing! Absolutely nothing. You’ve been working at the store all day. Jack won’t be here for forty-five minutes. You can go take a nap or read a book or play with Puck—whatever you want, as long as it’s something relaxing, not working here in the kitchen with me. This is my gift to the both of you. My parents.”

  Okay, she probably shouldn’t feel so squeamish about being lumped into that category with him. It was the truth, after all, but considering herself a co-parent with Jack still felt so strange after all these years on her own.

  “Are you sure? I don’t mind helping.”

  “Positive. Everything’s under control. Why don’t you go take a soak in the hot tub?” Sage suggested.

  The idea had instant appeal. The hot tub on the edge of her patio overlooking Woodrose Mountain was her one indulgence, especially on winter nights with the snow falling gently on her face. “I wouldn’t feel right leaving you in here to do all the work.”

  “Mom, go!” Sage ordered. “I’m serious. You’ll only be in the way. I’ve got this.”

  She wanted to argue but saw the futility of it. A soak actually would be perfect and might soothe her psyche a bit, give her a little inner peace to handle the ordeal of the next few hours.

  “Okay. I won’t be long.”

  “Take your time,” Sage said.

  Maura finally surrendered and hurried into her bedroom to change into her swimming suit, and grab a towel and the book she was currently reading for the January book club meeting.

  She hadn’t shoveled the path to the hot tub since the last storm, and the two inches of new snow froze her toes in her flip-flops. But she danced quickly through it and worked the lid off, then slid into the always-hot water with a sigh of pure bliss.

  Oh, she had needed this, she admitted. The stress of the holidays had just about done her in. She should make time to come out here every night, instead of saving it for a once- or twice-weekly treat.

  When Chris lived here with them, he had put the hot tub in the backyard to soak sore muscles after a day on the slopes. After the divorce, it had become her escape from dealing all day with two girls by herself. Once they were in bed, she used to love coming out here to gaze up at the stars and read a book and feel like herself again, a woman with dreams and regrets, instead of only someone’s mother.

  Tonight she decided not to bother with her book after all and left it on the edge of the hot tub. She turned the jets on High, leaned her head back and lifted her face to the cold night air.

  She just might have dozed off from weeks of jagged sleep. She dreamed of Jack, of their first time together, on a blanket high up Silver Strike Canyon. Of tangled limbs and mouths, of two painfully awkward adolescents trying to work their way through the emotions and the heat and intensity that had built up over their weeks together, while the river bubbled beside them and a red-tailed hawk cried somewhere overhead.

  After about twenty minutes, the sound of a barking dog in the distance yanked her back to the reality of a winter’s evening. She hadn’t been asleep long. Maybe even not fully asleep at all. Her fingers and toes were shriveled, but the rest of her was a big, loose ball of relaxation. She probably should go back into the house, even though she didn’t want to let go of the sweetness of that dream.

  She rose, turned off the hot tub jets and reached for her towel—just in time to see the very grown-up version of that boy standing at the window inside, looking out at her through the frost-etched glass.

  Heedless of the plumes of steam that curled and caressed around her, she froze while a heat that had nothing to do with the water temperature seeped through her. She remembered that dream, remembered the heat and wonder of being with him.

  After a long, charged moment, she managed to shake off the clinging tendrils of the past and turned away. She wrapped the towel quickly around her, hit the button to close the hot tub’s automatic cover, then slipped her feet into her cold flip-flops for the trip through the snow back to the house. Her face was more hot than the rest of her now, but at least she had private access to her bedroom from here, and wouldn’t have to drip her way through the rest of the house and risk encountering him in her swimming suit.

  More than she already had through the window, anyway.

  Drat the man for coming early.

  After a quick shower to rinse off the hot-tub chemicals and the rest of her embarrassment, Maura threw on a pair of soft gray slacks and her favorite wine-colored tailored shirt, along with a necklace set Claire had made her out of turquoise-and-burgundy glass beads artfully strung on coiled silver wire.

  She wasn’t dressing up, she told herself as she touched up her makeup and quickly took a flatiron to her hair—she was only trying to look nice. Okay, and maybe stalling as long as she could here in the safety of her room. Finally she forced herself to give one last look in the mirror, took a deep breath and walked into the kitchen.

  She found Jack standing at her kitchen island wearing an apron that read Hope’s Crossing Chili Cookoff: We’re Smokin’ Hot. His long, artistic architect’s hands were shredding lettuce into a bowl, while Puck curled up at his feet.

  Sage was on the other side of the island, smashing potatoes in her grandmother’s old mustard-colored earthenware bowl. Sh
e raised an eyebrow with a sweeping gesture toward the entirely too appealing man across the island. “Okay, explain to me why you basically barred me from the kitchen earlier but here Jack is, looking quite at home in my favorite apron?”

  Sage shrugged. “He insisted on helping.”

  “So did I,” Maura complained. “You wouldn’t let me do a thing.”

  “I guess you’re not as persuasive as I can be,” Jack said.

  Oh, she was quite sure of that. “I could have done the salad,” she muttered, embarrassed all over again that he had caught her dozing in the hot tub while Sage was in here working by herself.

  “It’s done now,” Jack said. “Shall I set this out?”

  “Yes. Everything else is ready, I think. Mom, do you want to put Puck in my room?”

  “Sure. I would hate to think I didn’t do my part,” she said drily. “Come here, dude. Time to be banished.”

  The little dog cocked his furry face and gave her the canine equivalent of a pout as she scooped him up. The two of them had reached an accord of sorts. He mostly stayed out of her way, maybe sensing that her heart wasn’t open to him right now. She didn’t mind his temporary presence in the house, especially as Sage enjoyed him so much and had stayed true to her promise to take care of him.

  Maura carried him down the hall, refusing to acknowledge the comfort she found in the small, warm weight in her arms. Puck whined a little when she set him down on the brightly colored area rug in Sage’s room, unhappy with being excluded from the evening’s festivities.

  “Cry me a river, kid. You’re the lucky one. I’d much rather stay in here with you,” she muttered.

  “Everything’s ready, Mom,” Sage called out.

  Yeah. She would definitely prefer to hide out here with the little dog. “Sorry. It’s only for a while. I’ll let you out again after dinner,” she promised.

  Puck must have sensed she meant business and accepted his fate with equanimity. As she closed the door, he was circling the floor a few times, preparing to settle in.

  Back in the kitchen, she found Jack had taken off the apron. He looked impossibly gorgeous in a tawny fisherman’s sweater and jeans, and her stomach did a long, slow churn, an unwelcome warmth seeping into places that had been cold and empty for a long time.

  She didn’t want this. Drat the man, anyway. She wasn’t ready for heat and hunger and life again.

  “What’s the matter? Did I forget to set something out?” Sage asked anxiously.

  Maura realized she was frowning and quickly smoothed out her features. It wasn’t Sage’s fault she was having this blasted reaction to the presence of an entirely too sexy man. No matter her unease around Jack, she refused to ruin all her daughter’s culinary efforts.

  “Nothing’s wrong, honey. I was just thinking this is bigger than the spread your grandmother put on for Christmas dinner.”

  “Not quite.”

  “It looks great from here,” Jack assured her. Sage beamed at him, though Maura couldn’t help but notice the lingering shadows under her daughter’s eyes, which didn’t seem to disappear no matter how much Sage slept.

  They sat down and began to dish up the bounteous feast. At first, the conversation seemed to sputter and fizzle like an improperly laid-out fire, but Sage did her best to add tinder and kindling.

  “Jack designed an office tower in Singapore. He’s going there in a few months when they start building it. Isn’t that awesome!” she exclaimed.

  “Awesome,” Maura murmured.

  He raised an eyebrow but didn’t comment.

  “Where’s the coolest place you’ve designed a building?” Sage pressed.

  “Cool? That’s relative. I designed a high-rise apartment building in Seoul last year. That was interesting. But I don’t take on any project unless I think it’s cool in some way. I would be bored otherwise.”

  Maura studied him, trying to reconcile this confident man with the passionate boy she remembered. “You’ve accomplished everything you talked about doing.”

  She raised her glass of ginger ale, and he lifted his own to clink it against hers and then Sage’s.

  “Funny thing about this business, though. There’s always another mountain.”

  “What’s your next summit?” She genuinely wanted to know, she realized. When was the last time she had been curious about anything?

  He hesitated for a moment, twisting the stem of his wineglass between his fingers. “You’re going to wonder if I’m crazy. No, scratch that. No wondering about it. I am crazy. I don’t know why I’m even considering it.”

  “What?”

  “The town is considering bonding for a new all-season recreation center up above the reservoir.”

  Sage’s eyes widened. “This town? Hope’s Crossing?”

  He nodded. “My, uh, Harry told me about it when I went to visit him in the hospital after he fell in the store.”

  He went to visit his father? Maura stared, caught off guard. If he’d just told them he had swum across the icy waters of Silver Strike Reservoir that morning, she wouldn’t have been more surprised.

  “What is Harry’s involvement?” Maura asked.

  “It’s his land, if you can believe that. He’s considering donating it to the city for the facility.”

  Okay, that was even more shocking than the idea of Jack going to visit his father in the hospital. Harry didn’t do anything out of the goodness of his heart, simply because he didn’t have a heart and whatever he had that might resemble one wasn’t at all good. He was a man who didn’t make a move unless he could find some way to squeeze a dollar out of it, and he was famously antiphilanthropic.

  She studied Jack. “You’re actually considering this? Doing something for the benefit of a town you despise?”

  “I don’t hate the whole town. I never did.”

  “No. Just all the people who live in it.”

  “That’s a bit of an exaggeration, don’t you think?”

  Was it? He had seen cruelty and inequality all around him, especially in the way some people treated his mother’s mental illness.

  “Anyway, I can’t say I’ve been miserable during the time I’ve spent in Hope’s Crossing these last few weeks. For the most part, people have been very welcoming. The B and B even left me a present with my muffins on Christmas morning.”

  She smiled. “Let me guess. A scarf. Lucy’s mother is a prodigious knitter.”

  “It’s a very nice scarf and will definitely be just the ticket during our chilly Bay Area summer mornings when the fog rolls in.”

  She tried to imagine him in his natural milieu of San Francisco. Where did he live in the city? she wondered. Riley had lived in Oakland for years and had only returned to be the Hope’s Crossing police chief the year before.

  Maura had gone to visit him with her girls several years ago and done all the tourist things—the cable cars, walking across the Golden Gate Bridge, visiting the sea lions on the wharf. They might have even passed by Jack’s office.

  “Hope’s Crossing is a nice town,” she said after a moment. “I think if you spent a little more time here, you might see that. We even have our own Angel of Hope.”

  “Angel of Hope?”

  “It’s actually pretty cool,” Sage said. “Somebody goes around secretly doing good works for people. And not little things either. Major stuff. Taryn Thorne, one of the other kids injured in Layla’s car accident, got a video game system from the Angel, the kind where you don’t need a remote. They’re not cheap. And my friend Brooke’s mom had all her utilities secretly paid while she was going through a divorce.”

  He looked intrigued. “And you don’t know who’s doing all the good works?”

  “There are a million theories buzzing around town,” Maura said. “Some completely unbelievable. Personally, I think not knowing is a big part of the excitement.”

  “We had a visit from the Angel,” Sage said. “After Layla died, somebody left an envelope with money in it on the doorstep with
a note that we could use it for funeral expenses or find some other way to honor her life. Mom and I agreed to donate it to Habitat for Humanity. They’ve got a housing development going up west of town.”

  “Really? In Hope’s Crossing, along with the million-dollar ski lodges up the canyon?”

  “A community can’t survive with only vacation homes. We need year-round residents and they need to be able to afford housing,” Maura said. It was one of her pet issues and hit very close to home. Too many of the old-timers had been forced out of their homes because they could no longer afford property tax once valuations started going sky-high after the ski resort was built.

  “We volunteer to help build whenever we can,” Sage said. Her daughter was barely picking at the delicious meal, Maura noticed. She had eaten only a little of the pork and a few of the potatoes she had spent so much time mashing.

  Maybe she was too excited at having her father there, or maybe she hadn’t quite beaten the flu she seemed to have picked up since she had been home.

  “If you take the project in Hope’s Crossing, would that mean you would have to commute from California?” Sage asked.

  “I don’t know whether I’m even going to submit a proposal,” he said. “Even if I do, there’s no guarantee I would be awarded the project.”

  “Oh, sure. That makes sense.” Sage poked at her food, dragging her fork into little ski trails through her mashed potatoes. She gazed down at her plate and spoke in a deceptively casual voice. “Since you’re leaving tomorrow, I was, uh, just wondering when I would see you again.”

  “We’ll work something out,” Jack said quietly. “You’re not getting rid of me now.”

  Maura set her own fork down, not hungry anymore. Good thing Jack had a healthy appetite, or all of Sage’s hard work would have been for nothing.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  DURING THE REST OF THE MEAL, they talked about Sage’s studies and Jack’s projects. It wasn’t as awkward as Maura had feared, but she couldn’t ignore the little twang of tension between her and Jack, and the small sizzle of awareness.