Why?
He pulled up to the duplex and into the garage, got out, and headed inside, not waiting for Ty.
Who hustled in on his tail anyway.
“Okay, I let you simmer on the way home, but clearly that just built up a head of steam.”
Gage wrenched off his boots, pulled his fleece over his head, hung it on the entry hook, shucked off his snow pants, and headed up the stairs to their main floor.
“You can run, but you can’t hide!”
“Leave me alone.” Gage headed to the kitchen, opened the fridge. Stared inside, for what, he hadn’t a clue.
Mostly for the cool air that wafted over him.
He could nearly feel the way her hair sifted through his fingers, heard her tiny moan when he kissed her—
He slammed the fridge door.
“Dude—take a step back from the appliances,” Ty said, now coming up the stairs in his stocking feet. “Who was that girl? Because, I’m sorry, but you were a royal jerk.”
Gage’s mouth pressed tight, and he grabbed a bag of chips off the top of the fridge and headed into the family room, where he flopped onto the sofa. He picked up the remote. Maybe he’d find a decent western, something that might lull him to sleep without memories of Ella.
In his arms.
Block out the sound of her laughter. The shine in her eyes when he told her stories about the many peaks he’d torn up.
The taste of her lips on his.
He settled on a rerun of The Fugitive.
Ty opened the freezer and pulled out an ice pack, one of the many he kept frozen for his off-duty recuperation. He’d probably spend the evening with his leg up, the pack wrapped around his knee. Gage had noticed him starting to limp as they’d come out of Ella’s condo.
Ty retrieved a can of soda from the fridge, came over, and leaned against the edge of the other sofa. “She knew you, back—”
“Yeah.” Gage reached out, turned up the volume.
“Did you guys . . . ?”
“We barely knew each other. Skied together a few times. It was nothing.”
“So, how terrible would it be if I follow you back to Vermont?” His voice, soft over the flickering candlelight of their dinner table, a private space in the Outlaw resort.
“It didn’t look like nothing. She went white, you looked like you’d been hit by a truck.”
“She prosecuted the McMahon case against me.” He kept his voice light and stared at the screen as Harrison Ford did a header into a waterfall. Not unlike how he’d felt when he’d walked into the hearing to see Ella Blair, the girl he hadn’t forgotten, sitting in the counsel for the plaintiff’s side of the table.
“What?”
“She was a junior lawyer, but . . . yeah. She worked the case, got my manager to testify against me.”
He didn’t take his eyes off the screen as Ty slid into the sofa. “How?”
Gage glanced at him. “You just can’t let this go.”
Ty glanced at the television. “Can you?”
Gage took a long breath, saying nothing, not trusting himself with the emotion roiling through him.
Not when the woman could still take his heart from his chest and grind it into pieces.
Ty finally got up and headed upstairs to his bedroom.
Gage stared at the screen, watching a relentless Tommy Lee Jones drag the river for the body.
He cleaned out the bag of chips until he got only crumbs, then he got up and went to the fridge. After considering the beverage supply, he grabbed a bottled water and returned to the sofa.
On-screen, Harrison Ford was tracking down his friend, the one who would betray him.
Run away, dude.
Gage finally picked up the remote and flicked off the television, then stood in the darkness of the room.
No, maybe he couldn’t let it go. But it wasn’t his fault.
A guy just didn’t forget a girl like Ella Blair, no matter how hard he tried . . .
6
THREE YEARS AGO
Gage wasn’t sure how he’d gotten so lucky. One minute he’d been walking out to the pool deck, thinking he was meeting a fan for a quick autograph, and the next, he’d pulled beautiful Ella Blair out of the pool and into his life.
Yeah, he’d gone into the pool to rescue her, but being around her for the past three days made him feel as if he might still be gasping for breath.
First, the woman could shred the slope with her board. From tricks on the half-pipe to carving the snow to riding the powder, Ella strapped on and stayed in his line like nobody’s business.
She could compete on the freeriding tour if she wanted it enough. He couldn’t believe the way she’d carved her own line down the back bowl of Outlaw, even taking on the twenty-foot drop off Purgatory Ridge.
She belonged in competition instead of behind a law desk, but when they slowed down, rode up the chair lifts, or surrendered the hill for lunch and dinner, he could get lost in her stories of cases, her dream of fighting for the underdog. Apparently, although her family had money, she wanted to do something to help the downtrodden, the lost, the overwhelmed.