“Wait a minute,” he called out. “You can’t just leave. We were having a conversation here.”
Was that what he called it? She smiled. “I thought we were done.”
“What time am I picking you up tomorrow night?”
Oh, she really, really liked a man who took the initiative.
“I’m working tomorrow night until nine.”
“Perfect. I’ll probably be busy here until late and will need to unwind a little before I head to the hotel.”
“Do you play pool, Army Ranger Delgado?”
“I’ve been known to chalk a few cues in my time.”
“Great. Why don’t I meet you at The Speckled Lizard? It’s on Front Street, two blocks west of the center block of Main Street. It’s one of the few places that stays open late on a Thursday night during the off-season.”
“I’ll see you then. Tomorrow, twenty-two hundred, Speckled Lizard. It’s a date.”
She smiled and headed out the door, anticipation winging through her.
All in all, she was very glad she hadn’t hit him with a two-by-four.
CHAPTER TWO
SAM WATCHED BRODIE’S CHEF walk down the hill toward town swinging a picnic basket at her side, her blond curls bouncing behind her as she walked.
His heartbeat was still racing and he didn’t know what the hell just happened there. Right now, he felt as if he’d just spent the past thirty minutes tumbling around in a cement mixer.
This surge of adrenaline and anticipation and life churning inside him was unfamiliar, uncharted territory.
When he walked into this old firehouse, he certainly never expected to stumble across a woman like her, brash, funny, brimming with energy.
What was it about her? She was beautiful, yes, with those huge green eyes and the endless spill of hair, but he knew plenty of beautiful women.
Though he continued to insist it wasn’t necessary, Nicky’s wife, Cheri, was always trying to hook him up with some friend of hers or other. For a stay-at-home mother, his sister-in-law seemed to know an unusually large number of lovely women, many from her previous job as a public-relations executive.
While he might have been attracted to a few of those women Cheri had found for him, none of them had ignited these wild sparks that still snapped and buzzed through him, even after Alex McKnight had turned down a side street and disappeared from view.
He would have to tread carefully here. The situation had the potential to spawn a whole morass of complications.
For the next month, he would have to work closely with her on the Brazen project. She was the chef, after all. Not only that, he knew from conversations with Brodie that Alex was good friends with Brodie’s wife, Evie.
His whole life hinged on making a success of this project, on finishing the work on budget and on time and on doing a good enough job that Brodie would continue to contract with him and would recommend him to his friends around Hope’s Crossing.
Sam couldn’t afford to screw things up.
He looked at the scene below him, the neatly quaint downtown with its wide streets and graceful old historic buildings, the rows of established clapboard houses mingling with higher-end log homes.
Colorful spring blooms already burst out in patches, and the trees leading down the street had new pale green buds on them. He could imagine the place would be spectacular in the summer, with those raw, rugged mountains looming as a backdrop.
He breathed in the high mountain air. It seemed sweeter here, though he knew that was probably just the abundance of pine and fir trees around, sending out their citrusy fragrance.
This was the new start he wanted, that he needed, and he couldn’t afford to screw up his chances of making a life here.
A couple kids rode down the hill on bicycles, legs sticking out as they let gravity take over and flew past him, their laughter ringing loudly.
Across the street, an older lady with snow-white hair tended to flowers in a box hanging from her porch railing, and farther down from that, a couple people stood talking beside a mailbox.
It looked peaceful, comfortable. Perfect.
A few weeks ago, he had come up from Denver to check things out. From the moment he had driven into the city limits, he had felt the tension in his shoulders relax, the dark edges retreat.
He wasn’t naive enough to think trouble couldn’t find him here. While the surface of Hope’s Crossing might look like something out of a Norman Rockwell illustration, the reality was never as ideal.
After all, he had met Brodie at the Denver Children’s Hospital when Sam had been working on renovations to an office suite there at the same time Brodie’s teenage daughter was a patient, after she had suffered a terrible accident here in Hope’s Crossing.
Bad things happened in small towns just as easily as big cities like Denver. Marriages still fell apart, plenty of kids dabbled in drugs and alcohol, people still got cancer and died.