Sweet Laurel Falls

by RaeAnne Thayne

  “Nice night,” he said into the silence, after they passed a few houses on her street.

  Oh? She hadn’t noticed. She drew in a breath and tried to focus on the spill of stars and the huge full moon hovering above Woodrose Mountain, instead of this fierce attraction that seemed to grow with every step.

  “Spring is on its way, I guess. We’ve still got a few stray snowstorms left in the year, but I think the worst of winter is behind us.”

  She wasn’t sure she was ready for the change. Spring meant hope and life and new growth, things that represented the inexorable march of time. Like it or not, it was inevitable. Soon the sunny days would outnumber the snowy ones, the tourist season would ease and the mountains would turn emerald and new.

  Were they really talking about the weather, with all these currents that sparked and hissed between them? She racked her brain to come up with something else to say and blurted out the first thing that came to her mind.

  “What was in the little box you carried out of your father’s place?”

  He was quiet for a long moment, his gaze fixed on their route, and she wasn’t sure he was going to answer. Was that a rude question? No. Nosy, maybe, but not rude.

  “A few mementos of my mother’s, apparently. Journals and keepsakes. That’s what Harry said it was, anyway. I only had a brief glance at the contents before you and Sage came back. For all I know, maybe underneath the few things of my mother rest the still-beating hearts of all Harry’s business rivals.”

  Despite her scattered emotions, she had to laugh. “Look at that. You made a joke.”

  His mouth turned up at the edges. “I’ve still got a few jokes left in me.”

  “You always used to know how to make me laugh,” she said softly. “I’d forgotten that.”

  “Lately I seem to be remembering a whole slew of things that have slipped away over the years.”

  His words were pitched low, intense, and a subtle sense of intimacy seemed to wrap around them like tendrils of smoke.

  She knew she was being cowardly when she deliberately changed the subject. “When do you start work on the recreation center?”

  “Right away,” he answered. “The city council wants tentative plans within the next six weeks or so. I’m heading to Singapore this week and will work long-distance from there, then hit it hard when I return.”

  “This will be a really valuable addition to Hope’s Crossing.”

  “You think?”

  “Claire and the others at String Fever have tried to bring the town together through the Giving Hope Day and other fundraisers, but I’m not sure it’s been enough. When the tourists overwhelm the year-round residents by ten-to-one some winter weekends, it’s tough to form a community. A recreation center might be just the thing to help people connect with their neighbors.”

  “That’s a pretty heavy expectation to put into one building.”

  “I’m sure you’re up to the challenge,” she said.

  “I appreciate the vote of confidence,” he said with a half laugh, just as he realized with some surprise that they had already reached Sweet Laurel Falls.

  * * *

  THEY COULD HAVE WALKED in any direction. Was this a conscious choice on her part? She wasn’t sure, she only knew that the night she and Jack had walked here after Christmas seemed like the beginning of this sea change in their relationship.

  The warmer temperatures of the past week or so had begun to melt the ice. Already the water was beginning to make channels and rivulets over the face of it, and in some spots the ice had completely cracked away, shattered by warmth and the force of the current.

  She wasn’t quite ready to face how very much like that spill of water she felt, half-frozen but beginning the painful process of thawing. Layla was gone. She couldn’t change that, nor could she give such little honor to the memory of the vibrant girl her daughter had been by curling up and wishing to die along with her.

  She took a seat on the small bench near the bridge that spanned the creek and gave Puck the deceptive freedom to wander at the limits of his retractable leash, sniffing at every rock and tuft of grass peeking through the remaining patches of snow.

  She loved it here. The stars, the city, the sound of the trickling water. She inhaled the cool night air and tried to relax—an impossible effort, especially when Jack sat down beside her and stretched his long legs out. Loath to reveal just how much he unnerved her, she drew in a deep breath and worked hard to relax taut muscles.

  “So,” he said after an awkward moment. “How long do you think we should keep ignoring what happened before dinner?”

  “Oh, I was thinking ten or fifteen years ought to do it.”

  He gave a rough, surprised laugh, shifting to face her. “It seems only fair to tell you I’m more attracted to you than I ever was when I was a stupid teenage kid.”

  Her stomach muscles contracted as she remembered the heat of that moment in the kitchen and, worse, that stunning, irresistible tenderness.

  “Fair? What’s fair about telling me that?” she muttered. “What am I supposed to say?”

  In the full moonlight, his features looked vaguely saturnine. “You could tell me to go to hell. You could tell me not to waste my time or energy. You could tell me you were completely unmoved by what happened and it was like kissing that really ugly statue of Silas Van Duran in Miner’s Park.”

  Now, there was an idea. Though it would be a blatant lie, maybe that’s what it would take to discourage him, to keep him just beyond that nice, safe perimeter she had maintained since divorcing Chris Parker. The words wouldn’t come.

  “I can’t,” she whispered instead.

  “You can’t what? Tell me you didn’t enjoy that kiss? Or let me kiss you again?”

  Her heartbeat pounded a heady rhythm and she didn’t answer, only gazed at him in the light of the moon. It seemed the most natural thing in the world when he reached out and pulled her against him. He was warm in the cool of the night, and she wanted to burrow into him and never move. Jack was the most solid thing in her world right now. How had that possibly happened?

  “What are we going to do about this?” he murmured.

  “Why do we have to analyze it? Can’t you just kiss me?”

  He gave that rough laugh again that seemed to sizzle through her. “Why, yes. What an excellent idea.”

  His mouth descended and he tasted sweetly of chocolate and orange with the sultry undertone of wine, and she felt like that waterfall, with currents swirling warm and strong through her, breaking away the ice of the past year in great chunks.

  “I’ve been fighting this since I came back to town,” he murmured, his breath stirring her skin. “Damned if I can understand the pull you have over me.”

  Should she be flattered or insulted by that? “What can I say?” she shot back, her voice husky. “I’m a femme fatale and spend hours a day trying to come up with new ways to lure men into my clutches.”

  “Whatever you’re doing works, at least with this man. I haven’t been able to get you out of my head for weeks.”

  “I’ve been the same since you came back,” she admitted.

  He gazed at her for a moment, heat sizzling between them, then with a low sound he pulled her back into his arms.

  They kissed for a long time, there in the moonlight beside the waterfall, and Maura felt something else that had been missing for far too long.

  Peace.

  The yip of a dog finally brought her back to a sense of time and place, and she realized she was practically on Jack’s lap. Puck, on the other hand, sat some twenty feet away, the retractable-leash handle dangling in the dirt beside him.

  Had she really been so distracted by the kiss that she had completely let go of the leash, heedless of her responsibility to her pet? Sweet Laurel Creek wasn’t very deep or wide here, but if a tiny shih tzu like Puck were to fall in, it might as well be the mighty Missouri. Beyond that, the dog could have wandered off into the night and encountered all k
inds of dangers, and she would have been too busy making out with Jack to pay attention.

  Though she really, really didn’t want to, she managed to slide her mouth away from his.

  “Puck, come back here,” she ordered. “Right now.”

  The dog gave a quizzical look, as if he considered this a fun new game, and was gearing up to bolt, until Jack simply said, “Puck. Come.”

  The dog immediately scampered over to them, so close that Jack could scoop down and pick him up. He handed the dog to Maura, and she cuddled his cold little paws on her lap, suddenly grateful for the distance the dog provided.

  He sat back on the bench, though his fingers remained entwined with hers.

  “Logically, some part of me keeps telling me I should still be furious with you for keeping Sage from me all these years. When I think about everything I missed with her, I still sometimes want to pound my fist through a wall. But then the other part of me sees her now, pregnant and alone and facing all this uncertainty and all these painful choices, and I have to wonder how the hell you can even stand to look at me, knowing I left you to deal with everything by yourself.”

  She drew in a shuddering breath, stunned at the depth of emotion behind his words. “It’s done, Jack. We both made mistakes. For what it’s worth, I forgave you a long time ago for not…not loving me enough to stay.”

  He stared at her, and beneath her hand she could feel his heart beating strong and fast. “Not loving you enough? Is that what you thought? It killed me to leave. I punched in your number at least once a day that first month, but I always hung up before the call could go through.”

  “We would have been lousy together back then. Over the years, I’ve wondered what would have happened if you had ever returned my calls. You would have come back and insisted we do something stupid and shortsighted like get married, and we would have been miserable together. You would have dropped out of school to support us and probably gone into construction or something. You certainly never would have become an architect. Eventually you would have hated me for stealing that dream from you.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Anyway, we can’t go back and change anything. I’m not sure I would, even if I had the chance.”

  He was silent for a long time, petting Puck almost absently.

  “You know,” he finally said, “one of my first jobs out of graduate school involved a lot with this really spectacular view of the ocean near Monterey, but also an ugly, dilapidated building that had been built right after the Second World War. It was poorly planned and constructed with shoddy materials. We figured out right away the structure couldn’t be saved. But we also figured out the one good thing about the whole lot, besides the view, was the foundation. It was still sturdy and as strong as when it had been laid down decades ago. Do you know what we ended up doing?”

  “No.”

  “We tore the whole structure down and rebuilt something new and beautiful on the same foundation, a boutique hotel that consistently wins design and hospitality awards.”

  “Jack—”

  “I think we have something sturdy and strong here, Maura. I’d like to see what we could build on that foundation.”

  Panic began to filter through the soft haze of desire that surrounded them. She eased away from him a little on the bench.

  “Or we could forget tonight ever happened and go back to the wary sort of peace we’ve managed to achieve since you came back to Hope’s Crossing.”

  “Why would we want to do that?”

  She sighed, feeling like an idiot. “I can’t… I don’t do this well.” She gestured back and forth between the two of them.

  He raised an eyebrow. “From my perspective, you do it very well.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I’ve had two serious relationships in my life—what we had together all those years ago and then my marriage. I ended up making a mess of both of them.”

  “I can’t speak for your marriage, but you certainly didn’t do anything to mess up our relationship. We were both young and stupid. I blame that more than anything. How long have you been divorced again?”

  She sighed. “Officially, eight years. But our relationship was rocky long before then. His touring was hard on us, but more than that, I wasn’t the sort of wife I should have been, probably because…”

  She stopped, horrified that she had almost revealed to him that her marriage hadn’t worked out in part because some measure of her heart had always belonged to Jack.

  “Because?”

  “Chris and I were never a very good match,” she said, which was true enough. Just not the whole story. “Logically, we were perfect for each other. We both loved music and poetry and talking about books. He was so great with Sage that I really thought we could make it work, but…I guess our marriage was never strong enough to deal with all the challenges of his life as a musician. We didn’t have that strong foundation you were talking about.”

  She really didn’t want to talk about Chris right now—and not with Jack. “That’s not really the point here. We were…were talking about us.”

  “I would like there to be an us, Maura. I loved you once. Since I’ve been back, I’m beginning to remember all the reasons why.”

  She closed her eyes against the soft seduction of his voice, against the fierce need to lean into his words and into him. “It’s been twenty years. We’re totally different people. We’re kidding ourselves if we think we can just pick up where we left off, as if all those years and all the mistakes and all the…all the pain never happened.”

  “I don’t want to go back. What we had was exciting and wonderful, but you’re right, we’re different people. I’m not that moody kid with the mountain-size chip on my shoulder anymore. I’m a man who has suddenly realized he spent twenty years looking for something. It’s one hell of a kick in the teeth to find out what I needed was right here where I started.”

  She trembled, seduced by his words in spite of herself. “There’s the difference between us. I’m not looking for anything. I lost my daughter less than a year ago. My other daughter is in trouble in the most old-fashioned meaning of the phrase. I’m empty inside, Jack. This last year has been a fine and terrible hell I could never have imagined.”

  With the rapid-fire emotional swings of the past year, she could feel tears scorch her throat. She waited for them to pass, even as she recognized that tears only reinforced her point. “I’m still wildly attracted to you,” she finally said, after clearing them away. “That’s probably obvious. But I’m not sure I’m healthy enough to bring my best self to a relationship right now. It wouldn’t be fair to either of us.”

  “Okay. I can be flexible,” he said after a pause. “We don’t have to tangle ourselves in a relationship. How about just meaningless sex?”

  The words shocked a laugh out of her, and it took her a moment to realize that was what he had intended. She definitely was still an emotional train wreck if she could go from near tears to laughter and this wild heat in just a matter of seconds.

  She bumped her shoulder against his. “It wouldn’t be meaningless. I think we both know that.”

  Her words seemed to seethe and curl between them, and he said nothing for a long time, while the endless creek bubbled beyond them and the town lights glittered below and Puck snored softly in her lap.

  “I’m willing to give you time, Maura,” he finally said. “We’ve waited all these years. I can wait a little longer.”

  “Jack—”

  “Look, I told you I have to leave town next week for a job site in Singapore. I’ll be running back and forth for at least a month. Why don’t we put this discussion on hold for now and reassess when I get back?”

  She wanted to tell him there was no point. What would possibly change in a month? But then, if she had learned anything this past year, it was the inescapable fact that a person’s life could shift in an instant.

  “Yes,” she finally said. “Okay.”

  Puck’s paws had been
muddy, she realized, as Jack took her hand to help her from the bench. Her clothes were covered in mud now from having him on her lap, and Jack’s probably were too.

  Spring was like that. Muddy and messy and hard. Rather like life. But once you made it through the rough patches, it could also be sweet and beautiful. Could she and Jack find their way into the sunshine? For the first time in months, she wanted to find out.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  SHE REALLY DIDN’T WANT to be here.

  The third week in April, nearly a month after their dinner with Harry Lange and the night she had walked to Sweet Laurel Falls with Jack, Maura stood at a small, well-tended plot at the Hope’s Crossing cemetery. Whoever had selected this spot for a cemetery back in the town’s rough and wild mining days definitely had chosen wisely. On an easy, rolling foothill across from Woodrose Mountain, the cemetery was a place of quiet serenity, with a lovely view of the surrounding mountains and town.

  Around her stood family members and friends, gathered along with her to remember the one-year anniversary of Layla’s death. Nearly everyone Maura cared about was there. Her mother and sisters, April Herrera and a few of her other employees, some of Layla’s friends from school, just about all Maura’s friends from the book group.

  Katherine Thorne was there with Brodie and Evie, married just a few weeks. Taryn stood beside them using only a small cane for support, which Maura considered nothing short of a miracle, considering how badly injured Layla’s best friend had been in the accident.

  Even Harry Lange stood on the outskirts of the crowd, there but somehow separated from the press of people.

  Maura appreciated the outpouring of love and support. On some level it warmed her deeply to know so many people had cared about her daughter—and about those Layla had left behind.

  Over the past year, though, she had come to accept that the tangled path through loss and grief was mostly a solitary one. No one could help her find her way through the briars and over the rocky screes. Others might lend solace along the journey, but in the end, she—and everyone else who grieved—had to take each long, difficult step alone.