A Cold Creek Secret

“Sorry to wake you but I haven’t been in to check on you for a couple of hours. I was just seeing if the dog needed to go out again.”

“Did you take her out in the night?”

He nodded. “She’s not too crazy about snow.”

“Oh, I know. Once in Chamonix she got lost in a snow drift. It was terrifying for both of us.”

She shouldn’t have said that, she realized at once. Maura Howard wasn’t the sort to visit exclusive ski resorts in the Swiss Alps, but Brant didn’t seem to blink an eye.

“I’m on my way to take care of the horses. I’ll put her out again before I leave and I’ll try not to lose her in the snow. How’s your head?”

“Better. The rest of me is a little achy but I’ll survive. Is it still storming?”

He nodded tersely as she sat up in bed and seemed intent on keeping his gaze fixed on some fixed spot in the distance as if he were standing at attention on parade somewhere. “We’ve had more than a foot and it’s still coming down.” He paused. “There’s a good chance you might be stuck here another day or two. It’s going to take at least that long for the plows to clear us out.”

“Oh, no!”

Though secretly relieved, she figured he expected the news to come as a shock, so she tried to employ her glaringly nonexistent acting skills. Then, pouring it on a little thicker, she stretched a little before tucking a wayward curl behind her ear.

She didn’t miss the way his pupils flared just a little, even as he pretended not to pay her any attention.

“I’m so sorry to be even more of an inconvenience to you, Major Western.”

“Around here I’m plain Brant.”

“Brant.” It was a strong, masculine name that somehow fit him perfectly.

“Thank you so much for bringing my luggage in. It was so kind of you.”

“No big deal. I thought you would feel more comfortable if you had your own things, especially since it looks like you’re going to be here another night.”

“I feel so foolish. If I’d only called Gwen before showing up on her doorstep like this, you wouldn’t be stuck with me now.”

“That was a pretty idiotic thing to do,” he agreed flatly. “What would have happened to you if you’d slid off in a spot in the canyon that wasn’t so close to any houses? You might have been stuck in the storm in your car all night and probably would have frozen to death before anybody found you.”

His bluntness grated and she almost glared but at the last minute she remembered she needed his help. Or maybe not. She needed a place to stay, but that didn’t necessarily mean she had to stay with him.

“I hate imposing on you,” she said as another idea suddenly occurred to her, one she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of the night before or this morning when she was mulling over her various options. “What if we called Gwen and asked her if I could stay at her house since she’s gone?”

“Great idea,” he said, with somewhat humiliating alacrity. “There’s only one problem with it. Gwen’s furnace went out the day she left. I’ve got a company coming out to replace it but they can’t make it to the ranch until later in the week. With the blizzard, it might even be next week before they come out. Occupied dwellings have precedence in weather like this so I’m afraid you’re stuck here until the storm clears.”

She tried to look appropriately upset by that news. At least his insistence on that particular point would give her a little breathing room to figure out how she could convince him to let her stay longer.

Four hours later, she was rethinking her entire strategy.

If she had to stay here until Marco’s wedding was over, she was very much afraid she would die of boredom.

She had never been very good with dead time. She liked to fill it with friends and shopping and trips to her favorite day spa. Okay, she had spent twenty-six years wading in shallow waters. She had no problem admitting it. She liked having fun and wasn’t very good at finding ways to entertain herself.

That particular task seemed especially challenging here at Western Sky. Major Western had very few books—most were in storage near his home base in Georgia, he had told her—and the DVD selection was limited. And of course the satellite television wasn’t working because too much snow had collected in the dish, blocking the receiver. Or at least that’s the explanation her host provided.

The house wasn’t wired to the Internet, since he was rarely here and didn’t use it much anyway.

She probably could have dashed off some texts and even an e-mail or two on her Smartphone, but she had made the conscious decision to turn it off. For now, she was Maura Howard. It might be a little tough selling that particular story if she had too much contact with the outside world.

Her host had made himself scarce most of the day, busy looking over ranch accounts or bringing in firewood or knocking ice out of the water troughs for the livestock.

She had a feeling he was avoiding her, though she wasn’t sure why, which left her with Simone for company.

Brant poked his head into the kitchen just after noon to tell her to help herself to whatever she wanted for lunch but that he had a bit of a crisis at Gwen’s cabin with frozen pipes since the furnace wasn’t working.

Mimi had settled on a solitary lunch of canned tomato soup that was actually quite tasty. After she washed and dried her bowl, marveling that there was a house in America which actually didn’t possess a dishwasher, she returned it to the rather dingy cupboard next to the sink and was suddenly hit by a brainstorm.

This was how she could convince Brant to let her stay.

A brilliant idea, if she did say so herself. Not bad for a shallow girl, she thought some time later as she surveyed the contents of every kitchen cupboard, jumbled on all the countertops.

She stood on a stepladder with a bucket of sudsy water in front of her as she scoured years of grease and dust from the top of his knotty pine cabinets.

Here was a little known secret the tabloids had never unearthed about Mimi Van Hoyt. They would probably have a field day if anyone ever discovered she liked to houseclean when she was bored or stressed.

Between boarding school stays, her father’s longterm housekeeper Gert used to give her little chores to do. Cleaning out a closet, organizing a drawer, polishing silver. Her father probably never would have allowed it if he’d known, but she and Gert had both been very good at keeping secrets from Werner Van Hoyt.

She had never understood why she enjoyed it so much and always been a little ashamed of what she considered a secret vice until one of her more insightful therapists had pointed out those hours spent with Gert at some mundane task or other were among the most consistent of her life. Perhaps cleaning her surroundings was her mental way of creating order out of the chaos that was her life amid her father’s multiple marriages and divorces.

Here in Major Western’s house, it was simply something to pass the time, she told herself, digging in a little harder on a particularly tough stain.

“What would you be doing?”

Mimi jerked her head around and found Major Western standing in the kitchen doorway watching her with an expression that seemed a complicated mix—somewhere between astonished and appalled.

Simone—exceptional watchdog that she was—awoke at his voice and jumped up from her spot on a half-circle rug by the sink. She yipped an eager greeting while Mimi flushed to the roots of her hair.

“Sorry. I was…bored.”

He gave her a skeptical look. “Bored. And so, out of the blue, you decided to wash out my kitchen cabinets.”

“Somebody needed to. You wouldn’t believe the grime on them.”

She winced as soon as the words escaped. Okay, that might not be the most tactful thing to mention to a man she was hoping would keep her around for a few days.

“You’ve been busy with your Army career, I’m sure,” she quickly amended. “I can only imagine how difficult it is to keep a place like this clean when you’re not here all the time.”

He looked both rueful and embarrassed as he moved farther into the kitchen and started taking off his winter gear.

“I’ve been renting it out on and off for the last few years and tenants don’t exactly keep the place in the best shape. I’m planning on having a crew come in after I return to Afghanistan to clean it all out and whip it into shape before I put it on the market.”

She paused her scrubbing, struck both that he had been in Afghanistan and that he would put such a wonderful house on the market. “Why would you sell this place? I can’t see much out there except snow right now but I would guess it’s a beautiful view. At least Gwen always raves about what inspiration she finds here for her work.”