CHAPTER FOURTEEN
EVERYTHING SEEMED TO BE falling into place. Well, nearly everything. Tuesday night, four days after Alex opened her restaurant, Sam turned onto his street just as the sun sank down behind the mountains. He was starving and exhausted but also filled with a great sense of achievement.
The recreation-center work was ahead of schedule, on schedule to be finished on time for the Giving Hope Day. His four-man crew from Denver had been working double shifts to finish the job, in addition to six temporary workers he had hired on to help.
Like Alex’s restaurant, the work had been nearly done at the rec center before he had been hired on. He felt a little like a cleanup batter in baseball. His job had been to come in and wrap up all the little details—finishing the trim in a few rooms, hanging some doors, putting in cabinets for the administrative offices.
The town leaders, through a generous grant from Harry Lange, had spared no expense on the facility. From the exterior landscaping to the enormous exercise facility to the meeting rooms spread throughout, the building seemed to be a labor of love.
The vast indoor pool, especially, with those full-length windows overlooking Silver Strike Canyon, should be a huge hit during the long high-mountain winters when it was finished.
Ethan would love it and Sam had found unique satisfaction working on something he and his son and the rest of their adopted town could enjoy for years to come.
He smiled thinking of his son. He had ended up staying at his brother’s house in Denver all weekend, helping Nicky with a few last-minute repairs on his house in preparation for renting it out while they were in Europe.
Ethan had helped him, proud as punch to wear his miniature tool belt. This morning when he left to drive back to Hope’s Crossing, he put the pickup in gear and started to hit the gas to back out of the driveway and heard a noise coming from the backseat of his king cab.
Upon investigation, he found Ethan hiding under a jacket he had tossed on the backseat.
“I miss you, Dad. Why can’t I come with you now? We’re not doing anything in school but dumb stuff like Field Day and cleaning out our desks.”
He had hugged his son. “Two more weeks, kid. We can both make it, can’t we?”
As much as he missed his son, he needed a few more weeks to ready everything. He had spent his lunch hours looking into possible summer day-care situations that might work for his extended hours. Ideally, he would like to hire a housekeeper-slash-nanny—but until he had time to whip the house into shape, he wasn’t sure he could find anybody willing to work in a construction zone.
He had finally managed to get Ethan back into his brother’s house for breakfast and school before making the long drive here to the recreation center.
Now he had a full evening of work to make sure his son had a place to sleep where the ceiling wouldn’t fall in on him during the night.
Both of them deserved to have a little stability, especially after the chaos of the past few months.
He was so busy thinking about the tasks ahead of him for the coming evening that he completely missed the visitor waiting for him on his front porch until he started to climb the steps.
Some ex-soldier he was. Out in the field, that could have been a deadly mistake.
He actually had two visitors, he realized. A long-limbed dog with fur the color of fine Belgian chocolate sat waiting for him on the top step, tongue lolling out and tail sweeping across the wooden slats of the porch floor.
If Leo was here, Alexandra had to be, too. His heartbeat kicked up, much to his dismay. He had missed her these past few days, as ridiculous as that seemed. He looked farther on to the shadows and found her curled up on his porch swing, sound asleep.
Apparently she was working overtime, as well. She looked comfortable, with her face pressed into the pillow and one hand tucked under her cheek. She was more relaxed than he had ever seen her, soft and warm and lovely.
He remembered what her friend Claire had said.
She likes to think she’s tough, bold.... She just might be the most vulnerable person I know, with the biggest heart.
She probably wouldn’t appreciate him seeing her like this but he couldn’t bring himself to wake her, not when she had that smudge of exhaustion under her eyes.
If the swing had been a little bigger, he would have climbed on there with her. Instead, he leaned a hip against the porch railing and reached a hand down to pet her dog, aware of a rare and precious contentment seeping through him.
She didn’t sleep for long, much to his disappointment. Maybe she sensed his presence or maybe she simply had too much energy coiled up in that compact frame to sleep soundly in these conditions.
After a few moments, her eyelids began to flutter. She came to full consciousness in an instant. One minute she was breathing deeply, the next she jerked upright and scrubbed at her face.