Willowleaf Lane

“Yet another skill I haven’t quite mastered with one hand and one eye.”

He could do plenty of things if he would only wear the prosthesis. She knew most of his rehab had been aimed at helping him adapt to his new reality. Since his return to Hope’s Crossing, he seemed to have resorted to only figuring out how to open another whiskey bottle.

“You will,” she answered calmly.

He didn’t answer, just gazed out at the water.

Her stomach grumbled again and she sighed. “We should probably head back.”

“Yeah. Before the mosquitoes eat us alive. It’s a little tough for me to scratch these days. Hey, how do you get a one-armed man out of a tree?”

He didn’t wait for her to answer. “You wave at him.”

He seemed to think that was hilarious and was still giving that hard-sounding laugh as he turned down the trail toward his house.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE NEXT MORNING, the sun was barely a pink rim along the black silhouette of the mountains when Charlotte laced up her tennis shoes in her entryway.

Every morning it was the same. She had to force herself out of bed when what she really wanted was to curl up under her nice warm blankets, hit the Snooze on her alarm clock and capture a few more moments of bliss.

Instead, here she was in her oh-so-flattering reflective performance capris and T-shirt, no makeup, her hair yanked back into a ponytail.

She rotated her head a few times, then her shoulders to work out some of the kinks before opening the door and pushing herself outside.

Rain or shine she ran, either here or on her treadmill at home or, when she really needed motivation, at the gym.

She felt no small amount of pride at how far she had come. Even walking had felt like torture when she first started on this journey more than a year ago. With all the extra pounds she had been packing around, it had taken all her strength and will to complete a mile and a half in an hour. She had finished with twitching thigh muscles, achy calves and complete exhaustion.

After about three months of making herself walk an hour a day and increasing her pace so she was covering three to four miles, she had begun to add intervals to her workout using her cell phone as a timer, one minute of running for every two minutes she walked at a regular pace, until eventually she was jogging most of the time.

Together with a far healthier diet than the fast food and her father’s café delights she had existed on, the numbers started dropping on her scale and her clothes began to hang much looser.

After the first few moments, she discovered she actually enjoyed working out. She enjoyed being in the fresh air and the wind, and she liked taking a moment to ponder and meditate as she jogged through her beautiful surroundings. She especially savored the feeling of knowing she was doing something good and right for herself, that she was trying to repair bad habits of a lifetime.

It wasn’t yet 6:00 a.m. and most of Hope’s Crossing still slept. Here and there, a few lights were on and she could see glimpses of people moving behind curtains, the flicker of a television screen at one house, a car backing out of a driveway at another.

Even in July, the high altitude air was crisp. Tourists in her store often remarked at the temperature span. It could be mid-eighties in the afternoon but drop to just above freezing in the hours before dawn. That was good chocolate-dipping temperature. In a short time, her employees would be busy creating delicious things to sell at Sugar Rush.

She ran down the hill, past Alex’s restaurant in a renovated old fire station, then took a side street and circled around back up toward Sweet Laurel Falls.

By the time she finished the first mile, she forgot about how badly she hated working out. Who wouldn’t love this surge of endorphins, the invigorating wind in her face?

She waved to a few people she knew: Lori Kaplan, who worked the early shift in the housekeeping department at the hotel; Errol Angelo, who drove a delivery truck to Denver every morning; Linda Ng, working in her garden early. She was either trying to beat the heat of the day later or trying to get in some work before her four young children awoke and ran her ragged.

By the time Charlotte headed toward home an hour later, many more houses glowed with warm light and the sun was cresting the mountains. She would have to hurry to make it to work on time. That almond fudge wasn’t going to make itself.

Finally, muscles humming pleasantly, she turned onto Willowleaf Lane, still three blocks from her house.

Another early morning jogger ran ahead of her. He must have turned from the other direction, coming down from the bruising route up Woodrose Mountain where steep trails crisscrossed beautiful alpine terrain and offered a splendid view of the valley below.

While she did run there when she had a lot more time and energy, she preferred taking her mountain bike for those trails to cover more terrain.

She didn’t recognize the guy from the back, which wasn’t unusual. While she would venture to say she knew most of the locals, besides the ever-present tourists, Hope’s Crossing had many vacation homes and condos owned by people who only visited a few weeks a year. It was tough to build a community under those circumstances but somehow the town managed it.

She lifted the water bottle she carried at the small of her back and took a sip, her eyes on the fine physical display a half block ahead of her.

The guy was built. His legs were corded with muscle, she could tell even from here, and the soft gray T-shirt he wore molded to wide shoulders, a slim waist, tight butt....

The tingle of awareness disconcerted her, even though she had to admit she enjoyed the little spice of pleasure it gave her in the gorgeous morning.

Still, she really needed to start dating more if she could ogle a stranger jogging down the street.

It was all she could do to keep pace with him, though she was a hundred feet behind, and she was breathing hard by the time they reached her block. To her surprise, the guy headed into a house on the corner.

He must be renting the Telford place. Good. It would be nice to see someone living there again. Empty houses were never good for a neighborhood and the house had sat vacant for six months. Likely due to the soft long-term luxury rental market she had heard Jill Sellers complain about a few weeks earlier when she had stopped into Sugar Rush for more of the custom-wrapped chocolates she handed out to her clients.

As she approached the edge of the property, she noticed the man had stopped near the porch steps for some after-run stretching. She wondered idly if there was a Mrs. Studly Jogger. Not that it was any of her business.

Just as she reached the mailbox, he turned his face in her direction and she felt as if one of those early morning gardeners had just swung a shovel hard into her stomach.

Spence Gregory. Here. On Willowleaf Lane, in all his sweaty, muscled glory.

That thought barely had time to register—along with the far more horrifying realization that he must be the one renting the Telford house—before her feet became as tangled up as her brain.

She wasn’t quite sure how it happened, only that she hadn’t been paying a bit of attention to where she was running. She must have stepped off the curb or something. How fitting. One moment she was running along minding her own business, admiring a well-built man who just happened to cross her path, the next she was lying in the gutter.

Pain exploded from her ankle, racing up her leg with hot, angry ferocity, but it was nothing compared to the sheer, raw humiliation of tripping over her two feet, right in front of Spencer Gregory.

She wanted to die. She wanted to slither down that storm grate and just disappear.

Spence.

Of all people.

Fudge.

She could only pray he hadn’t noticed the idiot woman who had just made a fool of herself in front of him. That fleeting forlorn hope was dashed when she spied him trotting toward her, concern on his features.

“Oh, wow. Are you okay? That was quite a tumble.”

No, she wasn’t okay. She was mortified. Even worse, this was far from the first time she had ever made a fool of herself around him. The reminder of all her other little humiliations seemed to parade across her memory in all their delightful glory.

How many times had she tripped up the stairs at Hope’s Crossing High School when he said hello to her on his way down the other way? Or spilled her drink when he slid into the booth across from her at Center of Hope Café?

Once, she had ridden her bicycle into a fence just because he had happened to drive past and wave at her.

She wasn’t normally a graceless person. Witness that she’d been working out for more than a year without incident until this morning.