Czytaj książkę: «Too Hot to Handle»

CHAPTER ONE

THE NOW FAMILIAR sound of the toaster popping up woke Merry from a dead sleep. She opened her eyes and immediately flinched from the brutal sunlight spearing between a gap in the curtains of the living room window.

“Are you sick of me yet?” she groaned, her voice muffled by the pillow. It was the same question she asked every morning. At some point the answer would be yes. But not today, thank God.

“Are you kidding?” Grace called from the kitchen. “If I kick you out, I lose more than half of the furniture in this place.”

“And one very intrusive sofa bed.”

“Not to mention my best friend.” Grace appeared next to the fold-out couch and held out a mug. “Coffee?”

“God, I love you,” Merry groaned.

“You’re using me for my coffee.”

“And your apartment.”

“Would you drop that?” Grace complained. “Anyway, you’re supposed to say you’re using me for my hot bod. It makes me feel beautiful.”

Merry sat up and dared a sip from the steaming mug before she shook her head. “No way. I don’t take sloppy seconds. And from what I can tell, Cole’s been using you up.”

Grace snorted. “Maybe. Or maybe I’ve been using him up.”

“Here I thought that limp of his was still left over from surgery.”

Grace had turned to walk away, but she spun back and leaned down to kiss Merry’s head. “All kidding aside, I’m glad you’re here. I mean that. I’ve missed you. Stay as long as you want. Six months. A year. It doesn’t matter.”

“Yeah, I want to sleep in your living room for a year,” Merry scoffed. But it was just a front. She’d happily sleep on the floor, just to have her friend back. They’d lived fifteen hundred miles apart for three years, and Merry had missed having her near. The living room was fine by her. She had no need for a big bed and a locking door. There were no men hanging around waiting for a shot at her. Hell, she’d given up masturbating half a year ago. Even her imagination had gone celibate, completely defeated by the unending dry spell. So she’d given in with a sigh and moved on to solving crossword puzzles on her phone.

“I’ll make breakfast,” she volunteered once she’d gotten a few more sips of coffee in her.

“I’ve got it already. Hand-toasted bagels. My specialty.”

Half an hour later, they were out the door. Merry dropped Grace off at the photography studio where she worked setting up location shoots and scouting for film companies. Then Merry drove out of Jackson and into the valley beyond.

She’d been here a week now, but the mountains still surprised her. No, surprised wasn’t the word. They overwhelmed her. Awed her. They made her feel tiny, and she liked that. Though she wasn’t model tall at five-seven, she felt too noticeable all the time. She wished she were little like Grace. Wished she could hide in a crowd instead of feeling big and awkward all the time. Mostly awkward. Her body was fine, but she didn’t know anything about clothes. She didn’t wear heels. Didn’t know what to do with makeup unless Grace was there to help. She was just the girl in jeans and a funny T-shirt who was hyperaware of the easy cuteness of the other women around her.

But none of that mattered anymore. This wasn’t Texas, where girls were born with perfectly coiffed hair and polished nails and the ability to walk in heels before they could crawl. This was Wyoming. And she worked in a ghost town.

Smiling, she turned her old sedan onto a ranch road and gravel pinged against the undercarriage. She couldn’t wear anything but jeans and T-shirts out here. Maybe that would change when she got the actual museum up and running, but for now her workplace was a ghost town. Literally. Her personal collection of broken-down, graying wood houses, waiting for her like an adventure every day.

Okay, the town didn’t belong to her, per se, but she still grinned when she briefly spotted the peak of the church steeple rising above a hill far ahead. The car dipped down into a valley again and the steeple disappeared.

The town didn’t belong to her, and she’d only been working there for a week, but she already loved it like mad. It was lonely. Some people might even call it sad. Just a scattered little group of eighteen buildings, half of them collapsing in on themselves, but Merry breathed a sigh of relief as she rounded the final curve and the town came into sight.

Providence, it had been called. And it was that and more for Merry.

It was providence that she’d found this job, here in this part of Wyoming when her best friend had moved here not nine months before. And it was amazing luck that she’d been hired after only a year of experience working in a small-town museum. She was a newbie, but the Providence Historical Trust had believed in her, and Merry was going to make them proud. She was going to make herself proud.

She pulled into one of the patches of bare, hardened ground at the edge of the narrow dirt road and stepped out of her car. The sound of her car door closing echoed across the meadow that stretched behind her. In front of her stood Providence, the buildings spaced along either side of a wide road that had been overtaken by grass and the occasional clump of sagebrush. Beyond the town, the hills rose up into patches of rustling green aspen.

Merry took a deep breath, inhaling air that was cleaner than any she’d ever breathed before. This was a good place to make a life for herself. She couldn’t fail here. She knew it. This tiny little dot of land in the middle of Wyoming was the most beautiful spot she’d ever seen. How could it be anything but good?

She shifted the bag she’d slung over her shoulder and started along the trail that cut through the grass.

Regardless of how much she loved Providence, failure wasn’t an option at this point, anyway. She was thirty years old. She’d been floating through life like a bit of dandelion fluff on the wind. Oh, she’d touched down occasionally. Held jobs for a year or two. Bank teller, sales support, blackjack dealer, dog walker. She’d even gone to school to learn to do hair, but the only thing good that had come out of that had been her friendship with Grace.

She was a jack of all trades, and while she hadn’t mastered anything, she was a hard worker. She wasn’t lazy. She wasn’t dumb. Even if her cousins had given her the nickname The Merry Slacker a few years before. Even if, when her mom had bought a new condo, she’d cautiously explained to Merry that it only had one bedroom, so she wouldn’t be able to take Merry in again.

That had hurt. Merry had moved in with her mom for a few months once, but that had been four years before. “What are you talking about?” she’d huffed, trying to hide her injury with irritation. “Why would you even say that?”

“I just thought you should know, sweetie. I won’t be much of a safety net anymore.” A safety net. As if Merry were a circus performer with a terrible track record.

Okay, maybe she’d also moved home a few times after college, but those had been short stays. And yes, she lived life one day at a time, unlike her cousins who were both attractive, driven and financially successful. Family gatherings were a little painful, but Merry could deal with it. What she couldn’t deal with was her newly hatched self-doubt. Hell, her mom had always been a free spirit, and now it seemed even she was expressing concern.

Squinting against the bright morning sun, Merry stepped over a tall purple wildflower she could never bring herself to step on, despite that it was smack in the middle of the trail.

Over the past year, what had started as a niggling worry had steadily grown into an irritation. A grain of sand beneath her skin. Slowly the minerals of anxiety and fear had begun to accumulate around it, just above her breastbone. Pressing. Displacing. Now it was like a stone she could feel every time she swallowed.

She’d always been happy. And she’d always assumed that someday she’d stumble onto that one good thing. The job that made work into a passion. The love that transformed her single life into something bursting with joy.

It hadn’t happened. Because things like that didn’t happen. She’d decided that attitude would only buy her more years of floating over life, mindless and untethered, tossed about, content to be lost.

Not anymore. Not this time. Not in Providence.

Merry walked confidently up the wooden steps that led to the surprisingly sturdy porch of the first little house. She opened the door and pretended she wasn’t doing a quick scan of the doorway for spiders before she stepped in.

Providence might look like eighteen dying buildings surrounded by weeds and harsh mountains, but she was going to make it into a destination. A fascinating tourist stop. A quaint little museum. She would do that. This town would be her triumph.

* * *

THIS TOWN WAS going to be her Waterloo.

Another week had passed, and Merry was losing her mind. The board of the Providence Historical Trust was made up of five lovely people who all happened to be over sixty years old. And two of them had been married to the benefactor of the trust, Gideon Bishop. Not at the same time, of course. One woman had been married to him for forty years, though there was a first wife before her somewhere. The third wife had only spent five years with him, but she’d been his wife when he’d died, which seemed to give her pride of place at the table. At least in her mind. The other three were men who each claimed to have been Gideon’s best friend at some point.

It could have been like a lovely family reunion when they met every other week. Instead it was like an episode of Passive Aggressive Theater. None of them could agree on anything, or even seem to remember the same event the same way.

“Please,” Merry begged for the third time that day. “I need to do something. Anything.”

Ex-Wife Jeanine nodded. “Well, there are those files.”

“Yes, I finished organizing them a week ago.”

“Ah,” Harry said, “You know what could be helpful? The Jackson Historical Society. I bet they’d have all sorts of pictures and stories and—”

“Yes,” Merry ground out, feeling guilty for cutting the old man off even before he finished his sentence. “I mean, of course. You pointed me in that direction last week. I already spent hours there, but it seems Gideon had finished up there. I couldn’t find anything new.”

“The library?” Third Wife Kristen suggested.

“That, too.” Merry tried to smile. “I’m working through all the books I could find on the history of the area, but—”

Levi Cannon slapped his hand down on the table so hard that Merry squeaked. “I’ve got it! Teton County Historical Society!”

Merry felt a little twinge of excitement. That was one place she hadn’t visited. But the excitement died like an ember swept up into the cool sky. “I’ll check it out. But…you brought me here to start a museum. To draw people to Providence. That’s what Gideon wanted, right? And that’s what I want, too. I can make copies of pictures and gather more information about the founders of the town and the flood that led to its destruction, but that’s not going to get people out there. I need to get the buildings restored. Grade the road. Build a parking area. We need to come up with plans. Hire workers. Do something.”

Third Wife Kristen cleared her throat and shot a look at Harry who looked at Levi.

“Well…” Levi said, then paused to pull a handkerchief from his pocket to swipe over his nape. “You see, there’s a bit of a problem.”

“Problem?” Merry felt a quick crawl of anxiety over her skin. It slipped down her arms and made her fingers tingle with the guilty suspicion that she wasn’t good enough. “What problem?” she asked. “Is it my résumé? I know I’ve only got two years of experience, but I promise you won’t find anyone more dedicated. I already love Providence like it was my own. If—”

“No, no,” Jeanine interrupted. “You were quite the bargain. We couldn’t possibly have afforded someone with more experience, what with the— Ouch!” Jeanine jumped and glared at Third Wife Kristen. “Did you kick me?”

“You’re being rude!”

But Merry didn’t mind. She was a bargain. Or a cheap knockoff of someone who really knew what they were doing. But she was too damn happy about being here to care.

“It was Levi’s idea!” Jeanine said on a rush.

“What was?” Merry asked as the others tried to shush the woman.

But Levi just sighed and scrubbed at his neck again before tucking the handkerchief away. “There’s a bit of a lawsuit.”

“A bit of one?”

“Well.” He folded his hands on the table. “Aside from the Providence town plot, Gideon left all the land to his grandson. The boy doesn’t want the town, but he’s fighting the trust, so the money is a little…tied up for a time.”

“How long of a time?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.

They all shifted in their seats and traded looks again. “We’re not exactly sure,” Jeanine finally admitted.

“But I don’t understand! You brought me out here to work!”

“Well, yes…” Jeanine offered a sympathetic smile. “Of course, but… We decided to hire you as more of a strategic move.”

Kristen snorted. “You decided!”

Jeanine glared at her. “The judge freed up a small amount of the trust for administrative costs. We decided our best move would be to go forward with Gideon’s plans, or at least give the appearance of doing so. It gives us a position of power. Possession is nine-tenths of the law and all that.”

“The appearance,” Merry murmured, too shocked to say more. The appearance. They hadn’t wanted her at all. This wasn’t her big chance to succeed. This was just a move in a legal battle.

Marvin, who up to this point hadn’t said a word to Merry, sat forward and cleared his throat. “None of this nonsense is your concern. You’re being paid. Let these idiots spin their wheels and you keep your head down and do what you can.”

“With what?” she snapped. “Tumbleweeds?”

“You’re the idiot, Marvin Black!” Kristen screeched. “You’re the one who planted this whole damn nonsense in Gideon’s head in the first place. All your big ideas about history and heritage!”

“Bah! If you can’t live on what he left you, then you’re nothing but a spendthrift floozy, anyway. Gideon wanted to build a legacy.”

“A legacy,” she scoffed. “More like a fool’s errand.”

“Well, if that’s the way you feel about it, what are you even doing here?”

Merry listened to them snipe at each other, but she didn’t really hear them. She was reeling. “What am I supposed to do?” she asked no one.

Levi answered. “We’ll try to get more funds released for you next month. In the meantime, you should definitely visit the county historical society. See what you find.” He patted her hand in dismissal, and Merry let herself be dismissed.

She stood and wandered out onto the front porch of the home where Gideon Bishop had lived his whole life. He’d died here, in Kristen’s loving arms, according to her, and he’d left behind a legacy that nobody much cared about. Gideon had only had one child. A son from his first marriage who had run off decades before. And then two grandsons he hadn’t spoken to in years. Gideon had ended up with more money than any one person could need, and he’d sunk everything into a stupid ghost town. Just like Merry.

But she’d misunderstood. She’d thought the trust had brought her here because they’d believed in her. She’d been surprised at the call. Overwhelmed, actually. And overjoyed. But in that moment she’d known that her passion had shown through and eclipsed the wild inconsistencies in her résumé. The letter she’d written had moved them, and they’d chosen her to bring Providence to life.

Or…they’d chosen her because she was the cheapest clearance item they could get away with passing off as legitimate in court. They hadn’t believed in her at all. She was a placeholder. And this would be another failure in her life.

Merry raced down the steps of the wide front porch and jumped into her car, wanting to escape before the tears fell. She almost made it, but the first fat drops slipped off her cheeks before she’d slammed the car door.

They hadn’t meant for her to succeed here. They hadn’t meant for her to do anything. “Those shitty old…coots.” God, she couldn’t even bring herself to call them something they really deserved. She wasn’t tough that way. She wasn’t hard enough. She was dandelion fluff, floating in the wind.

Angry at her own self-assessment, Merry threw the car into Reverse and hit the gas pedal. This was a good place to get her emotions out with a wild ride. After all, she was out in the middle of nowhere at the end of the dirt road. There was nothing out here except sagebrush and—

A hard clunk interrupted her daring thoughts and sent her stomach tumbling. She slammed on the brakes as her mind raced through all the possibilities. That hadn’t been sagebrush, but it had been solid. Not a sweet sheepdog or a barn cat or… She pulled forward a few feet and then scrambled out, her eyes flying over the dried-out grass at the edge of the yard.

The mailbox. The mailbox. Oh, shit. It was a white wooden number with the name Bishop spelled out in custom black letters across the top of the box. And now it was lying on the ground like the victim of an assassination.

Oh, God. She glanced toward the house. She couldn’t just leave it there. It would look as if she’d done it deliberately because they’d insulted her. And she couldn’t go back in and confess, because she’d left in a huff and their only apparent attachment to her was her cheap price tag.

“Oh, God!” The tears flowed freely now, inspired by panic and anger and the awful knowledge that she could feel as humiliated as she wanted but she couldn’t lose this job. She couldn’t.

Merry looked helplessly down at the mailbox, feeling as if she’d murdered some precious icon. The thick white post wasn’t broken. Maybe she could just stick it back in the ground. A glance at the house confirmed that no one else had left yet. They were probably still bickering over whether it had been dishonest to hire her for a job that didn’t exist.

A job that didn’t exist. The perfect job for a bit of fluff like her.

Rage pushed her past her guilt over the mailbox, and Merry bent down and wrapped her arms around the box, lifting it with a grunt of impatience. She slid it a few inches and fit the tip of the post into the hole. It dropped right in.

“Thank God.” After pressing down a little, she let it go…and watched the mailbox tilt toward the left. Crap. Merry wrapped her arms around it and straightened it again, then pulled down as hard as she could. She lifted her feet and let her body weight hang for just a second. This time, when she stepped back, it only tipped a tiny bit. Like the erection of a man just registering that you’d made a Star Wars joke in the middle of foreplay.

Not that that had ever happened to her.

Merry took a few more steps back, hands raised as if she could catch the mailbox if it fell. But it held steady, and with one last look at the house, she darted to her car and drove away.

But as she drove down the gravel road, watching dust billow behind her like a plume of guilt, Merry set her jaw and steeled her heart.

It didn’t matter why they’d hired her. It didn’t matter who they thought she was. She’d come here to make a place for herself, and that was what she was going to do.

* * *

SHANE HARCOURT WAS so damn tired he wasn’t sure he could make it up the front steps of the Stud Farm. Two weeks of carpentry work on a ranch in Lander, followed up by a week of fencing on the high plateau outside Big Piney, and he was dead on his feet and nearly weaving side to side as he opened the door and headed for his apartment.

Not for the first time, he thanked God that Cole had finally gotten back on his feet and out of Shane’s ground floor place. Shane couldn’t have trudged up to the second floor today. Not in this state. He watched his key disappear into the lock like he was watching the perfect porn movie. A beer. A hot shower. Bed. Then he planned to sleep for two days straight. Sheer pleasure.

He turned the key.

“Shane!”

Shane blinked at the idea of his neighbor Grace greeting him with such unbridled excitement. Frowning, he slowly turned around, hand still hopefully clasped to the doorknob.

“Hi!” a woman who was definitely not Grace said.

He took in the tall brunette in the Oscar the Grouch T-shirt and automatically touched the brim of his hat in greeting. “Morning,” he said.

“It’s afternoon now,” she answered.

“Is it?” He realized he was just standing there staring while she grinned at him. Her long dark hair framed a harmless round face and an open smile. “Do I know you?”

“Seriously? Wow. I’m kind of insulted.”

Shane’s brain scanned quickly through the past few sexual encounters he’d had, just in case. But there weren’t that many, and he was almost immediately sure he hadn’t slept with this girl. “Sorry?”

“Shane, I’m Merry.”

Mary? He stared.

“Merry Kade. Grace’s friend?”

“Oh,” he said. Then “Oh! Merry. Right. Hi.”

Her wide smile had faltered at some point, so Shane tried again. “It’s good to see you. Are you visiting?”

“No, I moved here. I’m living with Grace for a little while.”

“Oh, that’s nice. Good.” His eyes nearly crossed with exhaustion.

“Anyway, I’m glad you’re finally back. You’re a carpenter cowboy, right?”

“I’m just a carpenter, not a cowboy.”

“Sure you are.” She waved a hand up and down his body. “Look at those boots. And the hat.”

“Being a cowboy is a job. It’s got nothing to do with the boots.”

She looked pointedly at his Stetson.

“Or the hat,” he said wearily.

“Okay, but you are a carpenter.” When he nodded, her smile returned, lighting up her fresh face. “You’re just what I need!”

Too tired to bother with a sly reply, Shane just nodded. “Need some help with a bookshelf or something?”

She laughed so loudly that her voice rang through the entry. “Sure, something like that.”

He forced a smile. “Okay, I’ll come by later. Right now—” He held up a hand to stop the words forming on her lips. “Listen, I’ve been working twelve-hour days for two weeks. I would normally come over straightaway and assemble your shelf, but I’m swaying on my feet and my eyes can’t focus. All I can even consider is a microwave burrito, a quick shower and then ten hours of sleep. Actually scratch the shower. That’ll wait.”

Her eyes flickered down before she blinked a few times. “Sure. It’s no problem. The shelf can wait. You sleep. And eat. And shower.”

“Thanks, um…Merry. I’ll come over later.” He pushed through the door and nearly stumbled over a thick envelope that must have been slipped through the old mail slot that no one used anymore. When he spotted his lawyer’s name printed across the top, Shane picked it up and set it on a table to open later. He didn’t need to think about that bullshit right now. The only thing worse would be trying to navigate a conversation with his mother. He couldn’t think coherently about even the simplest thing, such as being polite to an acquaintance.

He turned, meaning to apologize to Merry before he closed the door, but she was gone, the only evidence she’d been there the sound of Grace’s door clicking shut.

“Shit.” He’d go over to Grace’s as soon as he’d showered tonight. But first… He locked the door, shucked off his boots, forgot about lunch and headed for bed to collapse.