Hold Me

“Good to know. Does that mean you also open instruction manuals?”

He hesitated just long enough for her to start laughing.

“I didn’t think so,” she said. “What is it with men and instructions? Or asking for directions?”

“We don’t like to admit when we don’t know something.”

“Ridiculous. No one knows everything.”

“We can try.”

No surprise there, she thought. Bravado seemed to go hand in hand with being male. Another reason she’d had so much trouble finding the right one. She wanted an absence of bravado and minimal ego. When emotions got riled, the opposite sex could be counted on to act crazy, and there was no place for crazy in her life.

“Are you going to have a problem taking instructions from me?” she asked. “Because if you are, we need to get that taken care of right this minute. I can arm wrestle you into submission, if necessary.”

Kipling laughed. “I doubt that.”

“Be careful with your assumptions. My grandma taught me a lot of dirty tricks. I know places to dig in a knuckle and make a grown man scream like a little girl. And not in a happy way.”

“There’s a happy way to scream like a little girl?”

She wrinkled her nose. “I’ve had to use that threat before, and some men think I’m talking about sex. I’m not.”

His gaze settled on her face. “Interesting.”

“So, am I going to have a problem with you?”

“No.”

“Then this will be a good summer. I’ve never had a job in California before. I’m looking forward to getting to know the area.”

“The town is a little strange.”

“In what way?”

He sat easily in his chair. There was no squirming, no sense that he wanted to be somewhere else. He had patience, she thought. He would have to. Waiting out bad weather, waiting out the seasons. Needing conditions to be right.

Kipling Gilmore had won big at the Sochi Olympics, then disaster had struck a few months later. She wasn’t one to follow sports, so she didn’t know many of the details. Obviously, he’d recovered enough to take the job of heading the Fool’s Gold search and rescue team. She wondered if he’d had trouble adjusting to regular life.

She knew it could be difficult for those cursed with fame to try to live like ordinary mortals.

“Everybody here knows everybody’s business,” he said.

Right. She’d asked him about the town. “That’s not uncommon for small towns.”

“Yeah, but it’s different here. People here are more involved. We’ll talk in a couple of weeks and see what you think. The festivals are interesting, and you don’t have to lock your doors at night. If you live near the center of town, you don’t need a car very often.”

“Sounds nice.” Despite having her home base in Austin, she wasn’t really a big-city girl. She preferred the eccentricities of a small town.

“Have you met Mayor Marsha yet?” Kipling asked.

Destiny shook her head. “No. She hired me, but it was all done through my boss. I have a meeting with her later today.”

Amusement returned to his eyes. “I’ll be there, too. I think you’re going to like her. She’s California’s longest-serving mayor. She looks like a sweet old lady, but she’s actually pretty tough and keeps firm control over her town. She gets things done, and sometimes I’ve left wondering what just happened.”

Qualities she could totally get behind. “I like her already.”

“I thought you might.” He stood. “Welcome to Fool’s Gold, Destiny.”

She rose, as well. “Thank you.”

As he left her office, she let her gaze drift over his body. He was in great shape, she thought, admitting he was just charming enough to make her wonder if there was any potential there.

She shook her head, because she already knew the answer, and it was no. No way, no how. She wanted ordinary. Regular. The kind of man who understood that life was best lived quietly. Kipling, aka G-Force, had roared down a mountain at who knew what speed. He was a thrill seeker at heart, which meant not for her.

She would simply keep looking. Because the man of her very own calm, rational dreams was out there, and one day she would find him.

* * *

KIPLING CROSSED THE STREET. As he waited for one of the few traffic lights in Fool’s Gold to change to green, he glanced up at the mountains. Now that it was late spring, he could look at them and not feel anything. The only remaining snow was up at elevations that didn’t allow for skiing. So there was no sense of loss, no reminder that he would never again be able to fight the mountain and win. That the sense of flying on snow was lost forever.

He knew what his friends would say, what the doctors would tell him. That he was damned lucky to have made as much of a recovery as he had. That he could walk and that was its own miracle. Anything else was gravy.

Kipling heard the words. On his good days he even believed them. But the rest of the time, he avoided thinking about what had been lost. When it got bad, he simply stopped looking at the mountains.

The light changed, and he crossed the street. As he walked he considered the fact that it might have been easier to simply find a job somewhere there weren’t mountains. There were flat places. Maybe in the Midwest or Florida. Only he couldn’t imagine what that must be like. To look up and see nothing but sky. He might have an uneasy relationship with the mountains; he might equally love and hate them, but there was no way he could be away from them. They were a part of him. It would be easier to cut off an arm than live without them.

“Hey, Kipling.”

He waved automatically at the woman pushing a stroller who had greeted him. Fool’s Gold was a friendly kind of place. Where neighbors knew each other and tourists were welcomed as much for their presence as the money they brought with them.

He was used to people he’d never met knowing who he was. That came with the celebrity he had been. Only being in Fool’s Gold was different. More intense, maybe. This town wasn’t just a place. It was a living, breathing essence.

He shook his head, wondering where all that had come from. He didn’t usually think too much about things. He was a doer, preferring to move than sit still. Which had made his recovery a particular brand of hell. But that was behind him now. Except for the scars, the limp and the dull aches that would be with him always, he was healed. And walking.

He headed into his offices at the corner of Eighth Street and Frank Lane, right by one of the fire stations and the police station. No one was going to break in, he thought with a grin. Or party too hard in this neighborhood.

As he unlocked the front door and stepped inside, he reminded himself that years ago he would have chafed at being so close to any kind of authority. That he’d believed that with the ability to fly down a mountain came the right to party as hard as he wanted, and damn the consequences. As long as he beat the clock by even a thousandth of a second, he was a god. At least until the next race.

But time had a way of maturing people. He’d been dragged kicking and screaming into adulthood, and here he was, running the town’s search and rescue program. Who would have guessed?

And while his younger self would have mocked authority, even as a kid he’d respected the mountains and those who saved those unfortunate or stupid enough to get themselves lost. He’d been caught in an avalanche once. The local ski patrol had saved his ass.

He’d always been lucky, he thought. Until last summer when he’d had his crash. He’d known one day his luck would run out, and he accepted that it had. Now he was onto another chapter in his life. He had a problem, and he’d fixed it. That was what he liked to do. And in this job, there was going to be plenty of fixing. Or finding.

He walked to his desk and turned on his computer. The office was new enough that he could still smell the fresh paint, and the plants that had been delivered as a sort of welcome were still alive. Kipling considered himself more of a people person than a plant person. Eventually, there would be staff, and he could rope one of them into watering and feeding the plants.

He turned his chair so he could study the huge map that dominated the main wall. It showed the fifty or so square miles around Fool’s Gold. There were vineyards to the west, and the road to Sacramento went south. So his main area of concern was east and north. The rugged mountains of the Sierra Nevada rose up quickly. There were a thousand ways to get lost out there, and he was confident tourists and locals alike would find every one of them.