by Stacy Finz
Sloane smirked. “You two are a little old for doing the roommate thing. Seriously, Aidan, why do you always have to be so nice?”
“It seemed unfair for me to take the only decent rental in Nugget just so I could plant my ass here a few days a week.”
“It was the right thing to do, bro.” Brady backed him up. “And I think Dana is trying to impress you with them tight jeans.”
They weren’t any tighter than Sloane’s; they just looked a hell of a lot better on Dana. “That’s the way they wear ’em these days, Grandpa. If you don’t believe me, ask your fiancée.”
“Not Dana. Every time I’ve ever seen her, she’s been in one of those dress-for-success suits with the little scarf deal tied around her neck.”
Sloane glared at Brady. “I didn’t realize you were paying so much attention to Dana Calloway.”
He pulled her up from the floor and kissed her. “Nah, only you, sweetness.”
“Maybe you two ought to get a room,” Aidan said and rolled his eyes.
Sloane ignored him. “You think it’ll be weird? You don’t even know her.”
“It’s just temporary until she gets her place back.” Or until one of them found a new living situation. “Why, is there something you’re not telling me about her?”
“I don’t know anything about Dana other than that she and Carol are the go-to real estate people around here. She doesn’t seem to get involved with town stuff . . . keeps to herself, mostly.”
“Griffin used to date her,” Brady said. “I could ask him if you want.”
Before coming to Nugget, Brady had had a brush with a stalker. Aidan knew that made him hypercareful.
“Nah, she seems fine to me.” So she’d dated Griffin, Nugget’s resident billionaire. Aidan found that interesting. “And like I said, I’ll mostly be living at the firehouse. We’ll rarely see each other.”
“And when you need alone time, you can always come to us,” Sloane said. “Oh, and by the way, Sue left a message for you. Something about how you guys keep missing each other and she thought she’d have better luck finding you at our house.” She lifted her brows in question. The silent message: What’s so important?
“We touched base,” he said, hoping to leave it at that.
“And?”
“She’s getting married next weekend.” Aidan watched his sister’s mouth drop open.
* * *
The house seemed darker than usual. “Mom, you home?”
“In here.”
Dana followed the faint voice into the den. “Why do you have all the lights out?”
Her mother just shrugged and muted the sound on the television. The air smelled stale. Dana opened a few windows.
“The air conditioner is on.” Betty got out of her wing chair, went to the thermostat, and switched off the cooler. Only fifty-eight years old, she’d gone completely gray, her once lithe frame stooped over like an old woman’s.
“Dad still at the factory?” It was six; he should’ve been home by now.
“Fourth of July.”
Dana had forgotten the holiday was just a week away. Calloway Confections was famous for its seasonal red, white, and blue chocolate stars. Cadbury might have the lock on chocolate Easter eggs, Hershey on Christmas Kisses, but only Calloway did the Independence Day stars. This time of year, her father worked overtime to make sure the stores were stocked.
Dana used to love going to the factory with her father, where she would spend hours in the observation room with her face pressed against the glass, watching hundreds of chocolate candies, toffees, and caramels roll from conveyor belts into the old-timey tins that had become Calloway’s signature. Her great-grandfather had founded the company, and since her father had taken over the reins, Mars, Hershey, and Nestlé all had come calling. Next to them, Calloway was small potatoes with limited distribution—just the West and Southwest. But the name had become synonymous with quality, and Goliaths like Hershey wanted to add it to their list of luxury candy brands.
Dana had pleaded with her parents to sell, take the money and move away. Away from the river and the memories and this house, once the happiest of places, now a mausoleum.
“Aren’t you going to ask about my meeting . . . where I’ll live?”
Her mother had returned to the chair and unmuted the sound on the TV. “Of course, dear.”
Dana grabbed the remote and turned the television off. “The contractors say it’ll take a year to rebuild. But they also have some wonderful ideas of how I can add a second story and reconfigure the main floor to have a bigger kitchen and a great room. It’ll really increase the resale value.”
“That’s certainly something positive.” Betty gazed out the window into the distance.
“In the meantime, I’m sharing a house with a local firefighter,” Dana said, but her mother was no longer listening. She’d slipped into Never-never Land.
Dana presumed that wherever that was, Paul was there too. Her father at least pretended to be present. She supposed he had to emerge from the grief that gripped both her parents like a fist long enough each day to run his company. He’d been the one she’d called the night of the fire, hoping he’d come get her from the Lumber Baron. But he’d simply told her to sleep tight and things would be better in the morning. Sometimes she wondered whether her parents would even have shown up to claim her body if she had died in the fire.
“I’m taking a swim,” Dana said. It was ninety degrees in Reno.
She climbed the long staircase to her old bedroom and pawed through her chest of drawers, looking for a swimsuit, planning to take one back with her to Nugget, along with whatever clothing she found that still fit her. Most of it was stuff from high school that she’d left behind when she’d gone to USC. Like everything else in the nearly nine-thousand-square-foot brick behemoth, nothing had been touched since Paul’s death. Her room looked exactly the same as when she’d left it. Thank God Sally still came every day or the place would be covered in dust and cobwebs, like Satis House in Great Expectations.
At the back of one of the drawers, she found a one-piece, stripped, and shimmied into it. It was snug, the bottom wedging up her butt, but no one would see her. Jogging back down the stairs, she went through the sunroom, threw the doors open, and closed the screens. The house needed light and fresh air. From the casita she grabbed a fluffy towel, threw it on a deck chair, and did a high dive from the board into the water, staying under for as long as she could hold her breath. It felt so cool that she wished she could stay beneath the surface forever.
After running around Reno most of the afternoon, buying a new phone, mattress, clothes, makeup, and other necessities she’d lost in the fire, she’d been ready to collapse from heat exhaustion. She would’ve stayed the night here, in her old bed, and headed back to Nugget first thing in the morning, but the oppressiveness squeezed her like a vice. Watching her mother, a woman once so alive, sit in front of the television, catatonic . . . it was too much.
She swam a few laps, got out, and toweled off. Instead of going in the house with her wet suit on, she took it off in the casita, hung it on a hook to dry, wrapped herself in the towel, and went back to her room to dress. She rummaged through her closet and found a couple of pairs of old pants and shirts she could at least use for painting and hanging around the house. In the drawers she found a few nightshirts and a silky robe she’d forgotten about. Now that she’d be living with Aidan, her sleepwear would need to be modest. It wasn’t that she walked around in the buff, but nothing like the see-through nightgown she’d had on the previous night when he’d seen her underwear and God knew what else.
Her face flushed just thinking about it. It was ridiculous, but Dana felt twice as embarrassed because Aidan was so insanely good-looking. She wondered what his ex was like and why they’d broken up. Clearly it had been serious if they’d been living together.
Dana pulled down a duffel from the top of her closet, packed the clothes she planned to take, and carried i
t down the stairs.
“Are you leaving, Dana?” Her mother came into the hallway.
“Yes. I have a forty-five-minute drive and want to get to Nugget before it’s dark.”
“What do you have there?” Betty eyed the duffel bag.
“Just some old clothes I found to hold me over until I can replace everything I lost in the fire.”
“Nothing of Paul’s, right?”
“No, Mom, nothing of Paul’s.”
“Okay, dear, have a good trip home.”
Dana didn’t bother to remind her that she no longer had a home. “I love you, Mom. Tell Dad I’m sorry I missed seeing him.”
But she had already drifted back into the den, probably to watch her programs.
Dana loaded the single piece of luggage into the back of her Outback and drove past the Riverwalk, where a smattering of people were taking advantage of the fading daylight on the beach. It was all so picturesque, with the old buildings in the foreground and the newer restaurants, boutiques, and gazebos that dotted the river’s edge. She still remembered that day fifteen years ago as vividly as she saw it now. It hadn’t had the glitzy businesses back then, but the beach was just as crowded. Paul hadn’t died there—that had come later—but it was where it had all started.
She tried to shove the memories away, maneuvered a few city streets before hopping on the highway to Nugget. Moving to the small railroad town had been a fortuitous accident. After college she’d relocated to Lake Tahoe, close enough to her parents to check in on them yet far enough so she wouldn’t be consumed by their dejection. She got her real estate license, started selling homes, and fell hard for a local developer, who later jilted her for the wife of his partner, a woman he’d secretly loved for more than a decade and had conveniently forgotten to tell Dana about.
As an antidote, she buried herself in work. One of her clients, frustrated by Tahoe’s exorbitant prices, had seen an ad for Sierra Heights and wanted to know more about Nugget. The town was only a forty-minute drive from Tahoe and had its own lakes, rivers, and plenty of outdoor recreation. What it didn’t have was high-end casinos, fancy shops, and trendy restaurants. The homes in Nugget, though, were half the price. She wound up selling the client a house in Sierra Heights, meeting Carol, and agreeing to become her partner at Nugget Realty and Associates. Carol, a broker, owned the agency but wanted to spend more time with her family. Dana needed a fresh start and saw Nugget as a burgeoning real-estate market with the perfect opportunity to make her mark—and her fortune.
And to prove it had been the right decision, Griffin had given her all the listings for the homes in Sierra Heights, a development he’d bought out of bankruptcy as an investment. They’d begun mixing business with pleasure, and this time she thought Griffin could be the real deal, only to find out he was obsessed with Lina. As far as breaking up with her, Griff had been a lot more of a gentleman than Tim, who’d unceremoniously dumped her as soon as the other woman had become available.
That was when Dana started examining her life and saw a disturbing pattern. Since her childhood, she’d always been second runner-up. To her parents, Paul had always come first. And after he’d died, she’d moved from second place in their eyes to nonexistent. The same had happened with Tim and Griffin as soon as they could be with the women they really wanted. Even in college, she’d been repeatedly passed over by men, by teachers, by employers, by opportunities that came her way and inevitably landed in someone else’s lap.
She’d responded to the epiphany by applying herself even harder to her career—the one place where she could come in first. In Plumas County she ranked number one in sales as compared to the other agents, and if this year’s numbers surpassed last year’s, she’d continue to lead. She might not be rich, but she’d at least found an area of her life where she could finish on top.
By the time she pulled into the Lumber Baron parking lot, the sun had fallen behind the mountains and her stomach was growling. She probably should’ve grabbed something in Reno. She glanced across the square to the Ponderosa with reservations. The bottom line: She didn’t like eating alone in restaurants. Intellectually, she knew it was silly. Lots of people—male and female, single and married—went to cafés, movies, even bars alone. Just not her.
But if she didn’t want to go hungry she had no choice. The inn didn’t have room service, only breakfast and wine and cheese in the afternoon, which she’d already missed. She decided to leave her things in the car and stroll over to the restaurant, which also had a bar and, of all things, a bowling alley. The dining room was quite nice and the food decent. She’d taken many a client there for lunch and dinner.
It wasn’t until she was seated that she noticed Griffin and Lina in a booth toward the back and silently groaned. They waved to her and she wanted to disappear through the floorboards. To make matters worse, Griffin motioned for her to come join them. As if that was going to happen. Uh-uh, no way. She pretended to take a call on her new phone, hoping he’d think she was doing business or meeting someone. But no such luck. He got up and loitered next to her table until she finished her fake call.
Dana plastered on as pleasant a smile as she could muster. Griffin was still her most important client, after all. “Hi.”
“Lina and I want you to come sit with us.” He may as well have said, Lina and I think you’re pitiful.
“Actually, I’m—”
“Hey,” a deep voice rumbled behind her, and the next thing she knew, Aidan was pulling out the chair across from her.
If he hadn’t just saved her from telling a mondo lie, she would have thought he was damned presumptuous for helping himself to her table. Correction: She still thought Aidan was damned presumptuous but was inordinately thankful that he’d gotten her out of a jam. The last thing she wanted to do was break bread with Lina Shepard.
“I didn’t realize you had company.” Griffin smiled like he thought she and Aidan were on a date. Fine, let him think what he wanted.
“Have you met Aidan?” She knew he had, but it made her feel less gawky to pretend he hadn’t.
“Yeah, of course. How you doing, Aidan? How’s the new job?”
“All good.” Aidan got up and shook Griff’s hand.
“I gotta get back.” He nudged his head toward his table, and Dana watched Aidan follow Griff’s direction and give Lina a long, appreciative look. Great.
After Griff left, Aidan buried his face in the menu. “What are you getting? Maybe we should share a few things.”
She didn’t know yet what she wanted to order. But for him, she highly recommended the humble pie.
Chapter 4
Crap. Maybe he’d interrupted something he shouldn’t have. But by the time Aidan saw Griffin, it had been too late. He had already started toward Dana’s table. When he’d come in, the restaurant had been crowded, and he hadn’t wanted to sit at the bar. And there was Dana with a whole table to herself.
He gazed at her over the top of his menu. She really was very pretty. Different from Sue, with her compact body, dark hair, and amber eyes. Sue was tall and voluptuous with auburn hair—and great legs that went on forever.
“You finish your errands?”
“Mm-hmm.” She had her eyes glued to the menu, like it held the secrets of life.
“In Reno?”
She put the menu down. “I got a phone at Costco and paint for the house at the hardware store.”
Aidan eyed her new phone. “Give me your number.” Pulling out his, he programmed in her digits. “Here’s mine.”
“Uh . . . okay . . . I guess it would be prudent in case of an emergency.” She plugged in the numbers he gave her.
A waitress came to take their orders and both of them put their phones away. Dana got a salad and Aidan went for a steak with all the fixings, a side of onion rings, and a plate of nachos for the table.
Dana lifted her brows. “You must be hungry.”
“I didn’t eat much today. The nachos are for both of us to share,”
he said defensively. “Tell me about yourself.”
“Like what? You already know I’m a real estate agent and that my house burned down.”
“Like are you from here, what are your hobbies, your favorite TV shows? It’s called a conversation.”
“I’m from Reno and I don’t have any hobbies or favorite TV shows. How about you?”
Who didn’t have hobbies or favorite shows? Fine, he’d break the ice. “I’m from Chicago, where I was a firefighter and an arson investigator. I like football and baseball and just about any other sport you can think of.”
“Why did you leave Chicago?”
Their drinks came and he took a swig of his beer. Some kind of microbrew from around here. Good stuff. “I came to visit my sister in February and fell in love with the place. All the wide-open spaces, the mountains, the fresh air. A job opened up with Cal Fire and my sister put in a good word for me. Here I am.” It wasn’t the whole truth but close enough.
“You must be tight with Sloane.”
“I am with all my siblings.”
“How many more do you have?” She sipped her iced tea. Nice lips, he noted.
“Two brothers. I’m the oldest, Sloane’s the baby. My brothers and dad are also firefighters. How about you? Sisters? Brothers?”
“I had a younger brother . . . Paul. He died when I was fifteen.”
“I’m sorry, Dana. That’s tough. Was he sick?”
“No, he drowned . . . well, sort of.”
He waited for her to finish.
“It’s called ‘secondary drowning.’” She paused, like she was trying to come up with the best way to explain it.
“I know what it is.” He’d never actually had a case but had been warned about it in training. “How did it happen?”
“We were tubing in the Truckee River, near where we lived. Paul went out farther than he should have and his tube got caught up on a rock. He wiggled out of the tube to pry it loose and got caught up in the current, which dragged him under. Luckily, another tuber pulled him out and got him to shore, where he coughed up a lot of water. After a short rest he seemed fine, even went back in the river for a little while.”
