by Erin Wright
They stepped through the front door and Troy looked around quietly, assessing it. She felt defensive and opened her mouth to make apologies; to point out that finding an affordable apartment in Franklin was like finding a unicorn sitting on your front porch one morning, but before she could say any of that, Troy spoke. “I like the big windows,” he said, nodding toward the front room windows, with the ever-so-inspiring view of the parking lot below. “Lets in lots of light.” Even now, with the sun setting behind the Goldfork Mountains, there was still indirect light coming through, along with a front-row seat to a colorful sunset.
Those windows were the best feature of the apartment, and it struck Penny as so…Troy to look around and find the one believable compliment that he could give within seconds of walking in the front door. He was not only observant, he was kindhearted and thoughtful. No doubt he could tell from her body language that she was touchy about how little pride she could have in such a place, and so he did his best to put her at ease.
She wondered again if all men from Sawyer were this thoughtful and she’d just missed it all growing up, or if Troy was some sort of mutant, even among his fellow Sawyerites.
So she did what she always did to say thank you to a cute guy – she threw herself at him.
Not using words, of course – she was no dummy. She used her body, because everyone knew that what men prized more than anything else was sex. Raising up just a bit – he was so damn tall, even with her in her high heels! – she wound her arms around his neck and pulled him down to her. She felt the fire spread through her veins as he gave as good as he got, not a moment of hesitation. Their tongues twisted and wound themselves around the other’s as he thrust his hands into her hair, tilting her head so he could better access her mouth. She couldn’t breathe or think; she could only kiss and fall into his world and then she was the one tilting her head to the side so he could kiss his way down her neck and the flames were only licking higher and higher…
“Penny,” she heard, in some distant part of her mind, but it was far away and she instinctively knew she didn’t need to worry about it. “Penny.” It came again, and this time, the person meant business. She couldn’t ignore them.
Her eyes fluttered open and in a daze, she looked up at Troy. “Penny,” he whispered, stroking her cheek with his thumb. “So beautiful. So damn beautiful.”
And then he was walking out the front door and down the steps to the ground floor and driving away and…
She sagged against the open doorframe of the front door, watching the taillights disappear, more confused than she’d ever been in her life. Why was Troy leaving her? The warmth of his kisses, the fire that had been licking over her body, took a long, long while to dissipate. When it was finally gone and she could truly grasp what had just happened, she was caught between stunned and pissed off. Did he not like her? Did he not want her? He’d said that she was beautiful – was he just trying to placate her? Who gives a woman chocolates and flowers and takes them on an expensive date on a restored steam engine and kisses her like he’ll die without her…
And then walks away?
A cool night breeze swept up the stairs and across her body, finally pulling her the rest of the way out of her reverie. Numbly, she brushed her teeth, pulled on her PJs, and crawled into bed, staring up at the ceiling in the darkness.
If she lived to be 101, she would never, no never understand men, but especially men from Sawyer, Idaho.
Chapter 15
Troy
The Goldfork Mountains were always gorgeous, but this time of year was his favorite. Troy loved these mountains when they were dusted with snow, when they were bright with the golds and reds and browns of autumn, but he especially loved them when they were green and alive in the heat of summer. When Penny had told him she’d never gone hiking up in the Goldfork Mountains during any season of the year, he’d made the instant decision that this would be their very next date together.
How had she managed to live in the Long Valley area for so much of her life and yet never been up in the mountains? Where did she go to breathe?
He’d never understand women, not until the day he died.
Thank God he didn’t need to understand Penny to enjoy being around her. She was like a finely crafted mystery novel, where the mystery was never actually solved.
Speaking of breathing…
He could hear Penny’s breath coming in, in short gasps behind him, and he decided it was time for a stop at an overlook on the side of the trail. Give her a chance to rest up. Running her legs off wasn’t a real good way to convince her that hiking up in the mountains was a fun thing to do.
She came up and stood beside him, sucking in deep breaths. He held out the water nozzle for his CamelBak to her and after a moment’s hesitation, she reached out and began sucking down the cold water. Sparky, who’d been ranging further up the path, realized that they’d stopped without her, and with a whine, she headed back down to their side.
Poor girl. When Troy’d first stopped at the trailhead and gotten out, Sparky had stayed in the bed of the truck, whining, ears back, tail down. She looked supremely unhappy to be back in the same forests where Moose and Georgia had found her just months before. It’d taken some coaxing, helped along by the enticement of beef jerky, to get her to finally jump out. She still wasn’t thrilled by their choice in hiking paths, but she’d calmed down some. As long as Troy, and to a lesser extent Penny, was there, she was okay.
“I didn’t realize I was this out of shape,” Penny said ruefully, letting the hose to the water pouch drop. “Please tell me the air is thinner up here or something.”
He chuckled at that. “We are quite a bit higher up here than down in Franklin,” he reassured her. “This part of the trail is also damn steep. You’d have to be doing this almost daily to not be out of breath.”
“You’re not,” she said, and there was more than a hint of disgruntlement there. “You seem perfectly fine, and you’re carrying the water and the food!”
“I carry bags of flour around for a living,” he pointed out. “You carry a pen and a recorder. If I weren’t in better shape than you to begin with, I would be after a month. And the same would be true if we swapped jobs.”
She screwed up her mouth a bit at that, thinking it through. “Fair enough,” she conceded. “Still, I think I need to get my ass down to the gym more often.”
“Hmmm…” was all Troy said in response. Your ass looks mighty fine to me! was what he wanted to say, but it seemed…less than gentlemanly to mention that.
“Is that where Georgia and Moose got caught in the fire?” Penny asked, pointing to a craggy rock cliff in the mountainside further down the valley. The black burned ground was clearly visible, even from several miles away.
“That’s it. That’s also why Sparky isn’t happy.” Even now, the setter’s ears were pinned back a little and her nose was wiggling in the air. She could smell the ashes drifting on the light summer breeze, still around months later. If they hiked over to Eagle’s Nest, they’d probably find green growth poking up through the blackened landscape but from this distance, it just looked like a huge angry scar against the otherwise brilliant green of the pine forest.
“You sure have a better nose than I do,” Penny said as she petted the loyal dog. Instantly, the rigidity in Sparky’s body disappeared as she leaned against Penny’s legs, tongue lolling, soaking up the love. “I can’t even smell it; I can only see it. You lived through a hell of a lot.”
“And the fire wasn’t even…” He paused for a moment, almost saying, “the worst part for her” but luckily caught himself just in time. He knew he was getting more relaxed around Penny, but still, he couldn’t believe he almost made that mistake. Making an ass out of himself in front of her sure as hell wasn’t on his bucket list. “…How bad it got for her,” Troy finished instead.
If he ever met the former owner of Sparky, he wouldn’t be held responsible for his actions. Hell, an ass whooping as bad as
the ones the owner used to mete out to Sparky seemed like fair play to Troy. The asshole could see what it felt like to be beaten black and blue.
“I always thought my article might bring the old owner out of the woodwork,” Penny said with a disappointed sigh. “I was hoping he’d show back up, wanting to claim his dog back. Then you guys could throw his ass in jail.”
“Unfortunately, I can’t imagine he’d be that dumb. The owner of Sparky also caused that wildfire. No one would want to be on the hook for the bill for putting it out.”
“Dammit. You’re right. I was just hoping he could get arrested for animal abuse. I didn’t even think about the costs to fight the fire. He’s never going to show back up.” She sounded downright pissed off at the realization, and Troy could only nod in agreement. No matter how much it sucked, she was right.
He did smile a little at the fact, though, that they were both using the pronoun “he” without any real evidence that Sparky’s former owner was, in fact, a male. Troy simply couldn’t imagine a woman doing that kind of damage to a dog, and no doubt Penny saw it the same way.
Without even needing to talk about it, they began back up the path, this time with Penny leading the way. Troy’s gaze followed her long pale legs up to the fringe of her cut-off shorts. She had the nicest pair of legs and the curviest ass he’d ever been lucky enough to lay eyes on.
He gulped.
The palms of his hands began to sweat from the torture of seeing her right there and not reaching out to touch her curves.
He remembered then what his great-grandmother used to say at Christmastime when he was just a kid. They would hang up the bulbs together and then he’d want to bat at them or toss them around the house – he was a boy, after all – and she’d always say, “Perty, perty, but no, no,” as she firmly but kindly pulled the shiny balls out of his hands and hung them back up on the tree, usually a little higher than they’d been before. Grandma Horvath was no dummy.
It was that memory that flashed through his mind just now because it’s how he felt God was telling him to deal with Penny. Admire all you want, but hands off the goods, buster.
Huh. He wasn’t sure why God would be calling him buster, but that was apparently how it was playing out in his imagination, anyway.
The bottom line was, Penny was the real deal. She wasn’t a fling, she wasn’t something to keep him occupied until the right girl came along. She was it for him, and if he didn’t treat her with the respect she deserved by taking it slow, he could ruin it all.
So no matter what his dick was telling him to do or how much begging it was doing, he couldn’t listen to it. He had to stay the course. He had to convince her that she felt the same way about him, and then he could let his dick lead him around all he wanted.
“So have I told you about the latest brouhaha?” Penny asked over her shoulder, blonde hair swinging with every step. “My boss gave me the assignment this last week and I’m getting just as many phone calls from people telling me to drop the story as I am telling me to pursue it.”
“Really?” Troy said, so surprised that his gaze actually left the curve of Penny’s ass for a whole three seconds. Long Valley wasn’t normally a hotbed of discontent and anger. “What’s going on?”
“The county commissioners. They got the oh-so-brilliant idea that what we really need is a high-end ski resort just outside of Sawyer, up here in these mountains somewhere. Some developer’s put a bug in their ear about it, and it’s all that any of the businesses in Sawyer want to discuss. Except…” She paused for a moment. “Well, I guess it’s any of the businesses in Sawyer that could get a boost from tourism that care. I don’t suppose anyone out at the Horvath Mill has a strong opinion on the topic.”
“I don’t think so,” Troy said dryly.
“The last disastrous stab at this happened while I was in high school and then off to college, so I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it back then, but I’ve done a lot of research on it for this go-round and…well, I can see why there’s such a division. When the last set of developers ran up that huge bill with all of the local businesses and then declared bankruptcy, that caused its own round of bankruptcies. Did you know five businesses in the valley went under because of them?”
“No,” he said, surprised. He’d known that several hardware and lumber companies had shut down since they were the ones to get hit the hardest, but he hadn’t realized the total was that high.
The previous company, Goldstone LLC, had used their status as the new ski development in the area to get a bunch of local businesses to give them overly generous lines of credit. The ski resort was supposed to rival Sun Valley when done, and everyone had wanted a piece of the action. Since Troy was six years older than Penny and a lot more in tune with the local business scene than she’d been in high school, he’d heard all about it, and honestly, the reverberations were still being felt in the valley all these years later. People were a lot more skeptical about developers moving in from the outside, for starters.
Even more surprising was that this was being discussed and he hadn’t heard about it around the water cooler at work. Apparently Glenda was slacking on her self-appointed job to spread every bit of gossip as soon as she heard it.
“Stimson & Sons just barely reopened as Rustic Lumber Co this last year, of course, so I went down and interviewed the Stimsons first. They weren’t happy to hear about this, for sure. They were talking about how the county commissioners better ask for a construction bond before anything really gets started, or they’re going to be calling for some heads in the next election.”
“Hmmm…” Troy murmured, thinking that through. He wasn’t surprised to hear the Stimsons take it like that. They weren’t much for pulling punches, and if they had an opinion on a topic, then those opinions were voiced. The oldest boy, Phil, had absolutely no filter at all, from what Troy could tell.
“I went back to the county commissioners and told them what the Stimsons had said, and Commissioner Water just laughed at me. Told me the Stimsons were loud mouths, and they weren’t about to take their marching orders from that bunch.”
Troy chuckled a little at that. Commissioner Water was just as much of a loud mouth as the Stimsons were, so really, they just didn’t like each other ‘cause they tended to shout over the top of each other, neither of them any good at listening. People didn’t like other people who were too much like them.
It was why he and Penny got along so well. As far as Troy could tell, they had virtually nothing in common, which in his estimation, made them just about perfect for each other.
They hiked a little further along the trail in silence, hitting a patch of heavy woods, giving them a blessed respite from the burning sun. Even up here in the mountains, it had to be low 80s today, and doing the kind of exercise that they were, that easily made it a titch too warm for comfort.
“That’s it, Troy, I can’t stand it anymore!” Penny half shouted, coming to a stop and turning back on the trail to glare at him.
Shocked, he came to a complete standstill and stared at her, wide-eyed. She’d happened to stop right where the trail was sloping upwards and with her ahead of him, it made them eye to eye for once. At 6’5”, Troy didn’t find himself eye-to-eye with people very often, and that, along with the out-of-the-blue anger from Penny, was making him feel more than a little discombobulated.
“What?” he finally said. She was breathing heavily from their strenuous hike which made her perfectly proportioned chest heave in time with each breath. It was…distracting, to say the least, especially since he couldn’t even remember the last time he’d gotten any, and he began blinking a few times, trying to clear the lust away enough to hear what she was saying, forcing his eyes up to her face instead.
“…never talk to me.” She folded her arms across that delectable chest and glared at him.
Shit. He’d missed something important. Based on her anger level, something very important.
Welp, there was no way but forward
.
“Who doesn’t talk to you?” he finally asked after scrambling through his memory, trying to see if he could remember what she’d been saying, and coming up with absolutely nothing. She’d yelled at him out of the blue, and then her chest had been moving up and down rhythmically, and then she’d been talking about people not talking.
Her face reddened. “You!” she shouted. “You don’t talk to me!”
Just then, Sparky came darting out of the bushes where she’d probably been trying to score a bunny rabbit or something, and sat down on the dusty trail, whining as she looked back and forth between them.
“It’s okay,” they both said at the same time, leaning towards Sparky to pet her and calm her down. Troy jerked back at the death glare Penny was giving him, and decided to let her pet the setter. He needed every bit of brain power he could muster that wasn’t being sidetracked by long legs or delicious chests to concentrate on whatever it was that was making Penny pissed.
“We were talking right now,” he pointed out logically. “The ski resort? The Stimsons—”
“No, I was talking. You’ve said ‘Not really,’ ‘No,’ and in a real torrent of words, ‘Hmmm…’ I knew you were shy from the beginning. I thought it was cute that you were so shy, honestly. Tall, blonde, mysterious…what wasn’t to like? But it’s been months, Troy, months, and all I ever get out of you are three-word sentences, if I’m lucky. I thought you’d eventually open up and start talking to me when you got more comfortable around me, but I’m starting to realize that was a fool’s dream.”
It was just about then that he started to get angry in return. “Now hang on a minute!” he challenged her. “You like to talk; I like to listen. Why mess with a good thing?”
“Because I can’t date a stranger, that’s why!” she shot back. “And that’s what you are to me right now. A stranger. I know all of my own thoughts already, Troy. I don’t need to hear myself say them out loud in order to know what they are, but what I really want is to hear your thoughts. What do you think about a ski resort being opened up just outside of Sawyer? I have no idea. You aren’t telling me.”
