Willowleaf Lane

“I just knew you’d love it!”

She touched his arm in a way he definitely recognized as flirtatious. He glanced down at her hand against his sleeve, the nails pink, sharp and glossy. Unbidden, he had a sudden image of Charlotte Caine’s hands, competent, a little callused, with her nails short and unpainted.

She had made all the fudge in the store. Peyton had told him as much when she had rather grudgingly shared a couple samples with him.

He forced away thoughts of Charlotte. “You must have good instincts,” he said in reply to Jill.

“I hope so. Without good instincts, I wouldn’t be able to do my job, would I?”

He didn’t know a blasted thing about being a real estate agent and had no desire to learn. Of course, he didn’t know the first damn thing about being the director of a community recreation center either, yet here he was, preparing to take on the job.

“Can you see if they’ll consider a short-term lease? I only want six months. And how soon can we move in?”

He wasn’t even sure if he—or Peyton—would make it that long, but he had committed to six months and intended to stick to his contract with Harry.

“I’ll speak to the owner, see if I can negotiate a little, and bring you back a lease agreement to sign in a few hours. You could be in this little gem by bedtime.”

“I still don’t see what’s wrong with staying at the lodge,” Peyton muttered.

What he wouldn’t give to have her carry on a halfway civil conversation with him. Of course she preferred the luxurious accommodations at the Silver Strike Lodge. But he had a feeling Harry wouldn’t be too thrilled about extending their stay indefinitely in rooms that generally went for several hundred dollars a night.

“We’re not spending the next six months in a hotel. We need a real house.”

“We have a real house. In Portland.”

By the time those six months were up, she was going to make him crazy. “Which will still be there when we’re finished here in Hope’s Crossing. Meantime, we need a kitchen, outdoor space, room for a housekeeper.”

“Babysitter, you mean.”

This was another argument he didn’t want to debate with her again so he decided to ignore the comment for now. “This works better than any of the others we looked at, don’t you think?”

“I guess.”

That was as ringing an endorsement as he was likely to get from her. “We’re in,” he said to Jill. “Give me a call after you talk to the property management company.”

“I will. I have your number. And you have mine, right?”

“I’m sure I can find it somewhere.” He managed a polite smile and hoped she understood he didn’t intend to call her about anything but his real estate needs—which, after signing this lease, would be nonexistent.

He ushered Peyton out to the Range Rover he had picked up to replace the sports car he drove in Oregon. As he backed out of the driveway and turned in the direction of the canyon mouth, he was struck by the charming view—the colorful houses nestled in trees as they climbed the foothills, the picturesque downtown with its historic architecture, the grand rugged mountains standing sentinel over the valley.

He certainly didn’t remember Hope’s Crossing ever being so appealing when he was living with his mother in that tiny dilapidated house a few blocks off Main Street that probably hadn’t been painted since his grandfather had died twenty years before Spence was born.

Kids could certainly be self-absorbed and he had been no different. Like Peyton, he had spent his days in a cloud of discontent, hating just about everything in his life except football and baseball. The town and its inhabitants had been part of that. He had convinced himself he couldn’t wait to leave, but when he looked back now, he realized he had never really hated Hope’s Crossing.

For every snobby cheerleader mom who thought he was going to impregnate her daughter just by looking at her, there had been others who had seen beyond the mended clothes, the threadbare shoes, the haircut he usually tried to manage himself—until he took a job in high school to pay for little luxuries like a decent razor and a letterman’s jacket.

Dermot Caine, for instance.

He smiled as he drove back toward the canyon, though it was tinged with a shadow of guilt. Now there was someone he should have remained in contact with over the years. Dermot had always been kind. Hell, he had given Billie Gregory a job when no one else would and had kept her on even when she showed up half the time blitzed, when she bothered to show up at all.

Thinking of Dermot inevitably led his thoughts to Charlotte. He remembered again that shock when she had identified herself at the candy store.

Charlotte Caine. He couldn’t get over how she had changed. All that gold hair shot through with hints of red, the big blue eyes, the sexy, curvy figure he could see beneath the apron she wore.

Was she anything at all like he remembered?

When he had known her before, she had been more than a little overweight and had hidden those stunning eyes behind big thick-framed glasses. While she could have moments of quick wit and she was as kind as her father, she could also be painfully shy.

If he remembered correctly, she had been a couple or three years behind him in school though she was four years younger. She had been ahead a grade and he had been behind because of the dark time after his father had died when he was eight, when Billie had gone off the deep end and dragged him aimlessly around the country from flophouse to homeless shelter to the backseat of her car.

He had hated being older than everybody else but still struggled in school—with English class, especially. He had never been a very big reader until long road trips with the Pioneers when he had little else to do. Charlotte, on the other hand, could have been an English teacher herself, even at twelve. She knew her stuff and he had been savvy enough to take advantage of the generous help she offered him.

He would venture to say, Charlotte Caine had been the only reason he had been able to keep his grades up high enough to allow him to participate in school sports.

In a roundabout way, he supposed he had her to thank for his whole career with the Pioneers—which didn’t explain the instant attraction that had been simmering in his gut since the moment he had walked into that candy store and saw her standing behind the counter looking fresh and lovely.

What was wrong with him? He didn’t have time for this. Harry Lange had offered him one chance at redemption, one chance to move beyond the demoralizing isolation of the past year and prove he was more than lousy headlines.

He couldn’t screw this up. He needed to focus on repairing his damaged reputation, not on Charlotte Caine, no matter how much she had changed.

* * *

THIS WAS THE hardest thing she had to face.

Other people had their Rubicons, their Pikes Peaks. She had her dad’s café.

As she walked from Sugar Rush down the street and around the corner to Center of Hope Café after work, her stomach rumbled in anticipation. She swore she could already smell delicious things sidling through the air, tempting and seductive.

Yeah, she worked all day in a candy store, surrounded by chocolates and caramels and toffee, but there she could resist temptation. It was her business and she certainly wanted to produce a delicious product but she supposed it was a little like being the teetotaling owner of a distillery. She didn’t mind a little fudge in moderation once in a while but she never had a desire to stuff herself until she was sick.

This, though. The gnawing craving for some of her father’s comfort food sometimes kept her up at night.

Gooey rich macaroni and cheese. Shepherd’s pie, with thick roast beef and creamy mashed potatoes coating the top like a hard snowfall on the surrounding mountains. Cinnamon-laced apple pie with Pop’s famous homemade vanilla ice cream.

Her dad’s café specialized in the kind of food that numbed and sedated, that soothed hunger pangs and heartache in equal measure.

Despite eighteen months of struggling to change a lifelong addiction to it, whenever she stumbled over one of life’s inevitable bumpy patches, she still craved a hit of Pop’s cooking like a junkie needed crack cocaine.

She knew why. She knew the food at the café represented more than just butter-laden calories. It was her mother waiting for her with a warm towel fresh from the dryer at the end of a rainy walk home from the school bus. It was Pop snuggling her on his lap for a bedtime story, his whiskers tickling her neck. It was summer nights spent sleeping in the tree house with her brothers behind their home while crickets and frogs filled the night with song.

Pop’s food was like home, or at least the home she remembered before the winter she turned ten, when everything changed forever.

On days like this, with her emotions in chaos, she wanted nothing more than to be snugged up against the counter at the diner, burying every concern and feeling of inadequacy under calories.

Drat Spencer Gregory anyway. He had no business coming back to town and leaving her so shaken, filled with dismay and memories and the echo of old pain.

Lasagna. Wouldn’t a big plate of lasagna, dripping with cheese, hit the spot right about now? She bet Pop had some hot and ready. She only had to say the word.