Christmas In Snowflake Canyon

“Mother, I’ll be going to the center tomorrow, too. And the day after that.”

“Every day?”

Laura obviously didn’t quite grasp the concept of a commuted sentence. “I have a hundred hours of community service to complete in only a few weeks. Yes, I’ll probably be going every day between now and Christmas.”

“This is what happens when you decided not to have your father represent you. He could have had the whole misunderstanding thrown out.”

Like Charlie’s little “misunderstanding” that had killed one girl and severely injured another? William had been helpless to fix that situation. Charlie had taken full responsibility for his actions and had come out of his time in youth corrections a different young man, no longer sullen and angry.

“It’s done now,” she said. “I’m sorry, Mother, but I really need to go or I’ll be late for my first day.”

“Well, will you come back to the house instead of staying in this horrible place? Then I would at least have a chance to catch up with you in the evenings.”

Again, her mother saw what she wanted to.

“I can’t. My evenings will be spent here, trying to do what I can to prepare this house for sale. Dad didn’t give me any other choice.”

“He has your best interests at heart, my dear. You know that, don’t you?”

“He might have thought he did. We have differing opinions on what the best thing for me might be.”

Not that anything was new there. Her father had notoriously found her lacking in just about every arena. He thought she had been wasting her time to obtain a degree in interior design, nor could he see any point in the sewing she had always loved or the riding lessons she tolerated.

The only time either of her parents seemed to approve of her had been during her engagement.

“Will you at least go to dinner with us this weekend? With Charlie back in California for his finals week, the house is too quiet.”

“I’ll try,” she promised. She ushered her mother out with a kiss on the cheek and firmly closed the door, practically in her face.

After Laura drove away, Genevieve hurriedly grabbed one of the totes she loved to make and headed out the door, fighting down a whirl of butterflies in her stomach.

For two days, she had been having second—and third and fourth and sixtieth—thoughts about this community-service assignment with A Warrior’s Hope. She couldn’t think of a job less suited to her limited skill set than helping wounded veterans. What did she know about their world? Next to nothing. Most likely, she would end up saying something stupid and offensive and none of them would want anything to do with her.

A hundred hours could turn into a lifetime if she screwed this up.

By the time she drove into the parking lot of the Hope’s Crossing Recreation Center in Silver Strike Canyon, the butterflies were in full-fledged stampede mode.

She was five minutes early, she saw with relief as she climbed out of her SUV and walked into the building.

Construction on the recreation center had been under way during her last visit home for Pearl’s funeral. The building was really quite lovely, designed by world-renowned architect Jackson Lange. Created of stone, cedar planks and plenty of glass, the sprawling structure complemented the mountainous setting well for being so large.

It also appeared to be busy. The parking lot was filled with several dozen cars, which she considered quite impressive for a weekday morning in December.

She wasn’t exactly sure how A Warrior’s Hope fit into the picture, but she supposed she had a hundred hours to figure that out.

The butterflies went into swarm-mode as she walked through the front doors into a lobby that wouldn’t have looked out of place in one of the hotels at the ski resort.

She stood for a moment just inside the sliding glass doors, hating these nerves zinging through her. Spying a sign that read A Warrior’s Hope at one desk, she drew in a steady breath in an effort to conceal her anxiety and approached.

The woman seated behind the computer was younger than Genevieve and busy on a phone call that seemed to revolve around airline arrangements. She held up a finger in a universal bid for patience and finished her call.

“Sorry,” she said when she replaced the phone receiver on the cradle. “I’ve been trying to reach the airline for days to make sure they know we need special arrangements to transport some medical equipment when our new guys arrive next week.”

“Ah.” Gen wasn’t quite sure what else to say. “I’m Genevieve Beaumont. I believe you were expecting me.”

The woman looked blank for a moment then her face lit up. “Oh! You’re one of the community-service people. Spence said you were coming today. Our computers have been down. No internet, no email, and wouldn’t you know, our IT guy is on vacation. I’ve been so crazy trying to track down somebody else to help I forgot you were coming. I’m Chelsea Palmer. I’m the administrative assistant to Eden Davis, the director of A Warrior’s Hope.”

“Hi, Chelsea.”

She didn’t recognize the young woman and couldn’t see any evidence Chelsea knew her—or of her—either.

“I don’t suppose you know anything about computers, do you?” the woman asked hopefully.

Gen gave a short laugh. “On a good day, I can usually figure out how to turn them on but that’s the extent of my technical abilities. And sometimes I can’t even do that.”

Chelsea gave her a friendly smile. She was quite pretty, though she wore a particularly unattractive shade of yellow. She could also use a little more subtlety in her makeup.

Gen certainly wasn’t going to tell her that. Instead, she would relish the promise of that friendly smile. Around Hope’s Crossing, she found it refreshing when people didn’t know who she was. Here, many saw her as snobbish and cold. She had no idea how to thaw those perceptions.

She had loved that about living in Paris, where her friends didn’t care about her family, her connections, her past.

“Thanks anyway,” Chelsea said. “I’ll figure something out. My ex-boyfriend works in IT up at the resort. He agreed to come take a look at things.”

“Even though he’s an ex?” She hadn’t spoken with Sawyer since the day she threw his ring back at him.

“I know, right? But we left things on pretty good terms. He’s not a bad guy.... He was only a little more interested in his video games than me, you know? I decided that wasn’t for me.”

“Understandable.”

Chelsea’s gaze shifted over Gen’s shoulder and her face lit up. “Hey, Dylan! Eden said you would be stopping in this morning.”

“And here I am. Hi. Chelsea, right?”

“One two-second conversation in line at the grocery store and you remembered my name.”

Gen didn’t like the way all her warm feelings toward the other woman trickled away. Friends weren’t that easy to come by here in Hope’s Crossing. She certainly couldn’t throw one away because she was feeling unreasonably territorial toward Dylan, even if she had been the one shackled to the man.

She didn’t blame Chelsea for that little moment of flirtatiousness. Dylan still needed a haircut. Regardless, he looked quite delicious. Even the black eye patch only made him more attractive somehow, probably because the eye not concealed behind it looked strikingly blue in contrast.

She thought of that moment when she had nearly fallen on the ice a few days earlier, when he had caught her and held her against his chest for a heartbeat.

And then the humiliation of his words, basically accusing her of being so shallow she recoiled in disgust when he touched her, which was so not true.

“Genevieve.” He again said her name as her Parisian friends did and for some strange reason she found the musical syllables incredibly sexy spoken in that gruff voice.

“Is that how you say your name?” Chelsea asked in surprise. “I though it was Gen-e-vieve.”

She managed to tamp down the inappropriate reaction to the man. “Either way works,” she said to Chelsea. “Or you could simply call me Gen.”