Christmas In Snowflake Canyon Read online

  This was completely ridiculous. She was crushing on Dylan Caine—shaggy, cranky, damaged Dylan Caine. He was the exact opposite of the sleek, polished men she usually dated. Men like Sawyer, who used to put almost as much care and attention into his wardrobe and appearance as she did.

  Maybe that was what drew her to Dylan, that he was so very different from her norm. He had done things she couldn’t begin to imagine. He was tough, hard. Genuine. Unlike Sawyer, who had dreams of following in his father’s congressional aspirations, Dylan was the sort of man who could never be a politician because he would say just what he thought, to hell with the consequences.

  “Is he always so…abrupt?” she asked his sister now.

  Charlotte watched after her brother. “I can’t believe he made it this long, if you want the truth. I honestly thought he would be climbing the walls after the first hour. Was he a bear all day?”

  Gen thought of that moment when he had stomped outside to gather more pine boughs. He had been gone a long time, so long she had been ready to go search for him in case he’d fallen in the river, when he returned with his arms full of greenery. After that, he had been more relaxed and comfortable, as if those few moments out in nature had centered him or something.

  “He had his moments,” she said. “I think mostly we managed to tolerate each other. He let me jabber on about whatever, inanities, really, though every once in a while I let him slip into those brooding silences of his.”

  His sister gave a surprised-sounding laugh. “How thoughtful of you.”

  Gen shrugged. “I figured it was the least I could do for a returning war hero and all.”

  When Charlotte laughed again, Gen wanted to bask in the warmth of it. She liked the other woman. In their interactions that day, she had been kind to her, even though Gen could tell she had great reservations about Genevieve’s ability to contribute to A Warrior’s Hope.

  As far as she remembered, Charlotte had never been outright rude to her but she was usually cool—probably because Genevieve had never been particularly nice to her.

  She thought of Natalie suddenly and the gulf between them now and felt a wave of loneliness. She had a few close female friends in Paris and she missed them fiercely.

  She pushed it away. Once she straightened out her life and sold the house, she could return to Paris and her friends there.

  “The problem is,” Charlotte answered thoughtfully, “I think we’ve all indulged those brooding silences for too long, until now Dylan is more comfortable with his own company than engaging in polite conversation. He prefers to hide away at this dilapidated old cabin up in Snowflake Canyon where he doesn’t have to talk—or listen—to anyone.”

  Gen didn’t want to contradict his sister but she wasn’t sure that was true. When she thought about it, Dylan seemed to want her to keep talking. In a strange sort of way, he had almost seemed…soothed while he listened to her ramble on about living in Le Marais: her favorite candlelit bistro, the pâtisserie she loved, the best museums.

  When she ran out of things to talk about and lapsed into silence while they worked, he would target a wellplaced question about other countries in Europe she had visited, people she knew there, her plans for Pearl’s house, and she would start up again.

  Her throat hurt from all that talking, but she was pretty sure he had enjoyed listening to her more than he probably would admit. He had smiled several times and had even chuckled a time or two at one of her stories involving her elderly neighbor and the very large dog who shared her very small flat.

  “I’m really hoping that being forced to work at A Warrior’s Hope will, I don’t know, help drag him out of himself, you know?”

  Again, she didn’t want to contradict his sister after really only a day spent in the man’s company, but she knew a little about interfering family members. “I’m sure you have good intentions and want to help him. But really, if he enjoys being on his own in Snowflake Canyon and isn’t hurting anybody by it, that’s his call, isn’t it?”

  Charlotte blinked a little and Gen wished she hadn’t said anything. She didn’t want to ruin any chance she might have of a friendship with Charlotte. After a moment, the other woman’s expression turned pensive.

  “That’s exactly what he says.”

  “He should know, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose you’re right. I just can’t imagine he’s happy up there.”

  “Again, his call.”

  “You might be right,” Charlotte said. “It’s never easy watching someone you care about make choices you can’t accept are good for him.”

  Was that how her parents felt? Were they acting out of a position of concern and not manipulation? She wasn’t quite ready to accept that yet.

  “Do you have a place to store all these empty boxes?” she asked.

  “I was going to have a couple of the guys carry them back to the storage room in the main building, but we might as well take care of it. Do you mind helping me haul them back before you take off?”

  “The carts should be down here somewhere. We can probably get them all in one trip.”

  Together, she and Charlotte loaded the empty boxes onto the two utility carts.

  “Thank you again for all your hard work,” Charlotte said after they pulled the carts back to the recreation center and stacked the empty boxes in the storage room.

  She had accepted early in the day that her sweater was likely ruined. It was too bad, too, as it was one of her favorites. She supposed that served her right for ever being silly enough to think she could wear peach cashmere to work.

  “I’m thrilled with the way the cabins look,” the other woman said. “It’s so much better than I ever imagined.” “You’re welcome. Decorating is right up my alley. It’s too bad you don’t have a hundred more. That would probably fill the rest of the hours, wouldn’t it?” Charlotte laughed and Gen thought how pretty she was now that she had lost all that weight. No wonder

  Smokin’ Hot Spence Gregory was dating her.

  As soon as the thought flitted across her brain, she felt vaguely ashamed of herself for focusing on the superficial. She needed to train herself to look beyond appearances. Really, Charlotte had always been quite lovely, for a large girl.

  “I’m afraid you’ve met and exceeded all our decorating needs. I’m sure we can find plenty of other things to keep you busy, and very few of them should be completely miserable.”

  “Something to look forward to,” Genevieve said with a smile, picking up her purse. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” She was almost to the door when Charlotte called her back. “Do you have plans tonight? I’m getting together with some friends for dinner. You could join us if you want.”

  For a moment, she didn’t know what to say. She was a little embarrassed at how excited she was by the invitation. She thought of all those lovely long lunches in Paris when she and her friends would talk about food and fashion, history and even a little politics.

  She found it difficult to come up with the perfect balance in her response. She didn’t want to come across as giddily overenthusiastic, but she didn’t want to be a snotty bitch, either.

  Apparently, she mulled it too long. At her lingering silence, Charlotte’s friendly smile slid away. “Well, if you want to come, we’re meeting at Brazen, the new restaurant that opened this summer in the old firehouse at the top of Main Street.”

  “Brazen.” Alex McKnight’s restaurant. All her good feelings dissolved.

  “Have you been there? The food is fantastic and the ambience is wonderful, with gorgeous views of downtown.”

  Alex would be there, and perhaps even her sister Maura. Maura’s daughter, Sage, might even show up. The McKnights tended to run in packs.

  Every time she thought about the family, she had a sick, greasy feeling in her stomach—part anger, part shame. She had treated them horribly. She knew that.

  She had been cold and downright mean, and she knew her mother had been worse.

  Still, s
he couldn’t help wondering if they had all been laughing at her behind her back for being so stupid she didn’t know her fiancé was sleeping around during her entire engagement, with one of the McKnights and with many others.

  “I’m sorry. I can’t tonight. Maybe another time.”

  “Sure. It was last-minute anyway. I’m sure we’ll have another chance.”

  She wanted to say yes. She would like to be friends with Charlotte—and not because she had developed a serious crush on the woman’s brother. She liked her, and heaven knew, she could use a friend in Hope’s Crossing since it appeared all her old crowd didn’t have room for her anymore in their busy lives.

  As much as she would like to go to dinner with Charlotte tonight, Gen knew she couldn’t. Sometimes, the past dug in with sharp claws and wouldn’t let go, no matter how hard a person tried to pry it loose.

  he would rather be tortured than admit it, but by the afternoon of his second day working for A Warrior’s Hope, Dylan almost wished he had a few more ornaments to hang.

  Instead, he was in a large storage room behind the building with Mac Scanlan, the program director for the organization, trying to organize and inventory the huge volume of equipment, much of it apparently donated.

  He didn’t mind the work so much as the company. Mac seemed like a decent enough guy for a United States Navy combat diver, but he was chatty as hell.

  Where Dylan hadn’t minded Genevieve’s prattle the day before—okay, he had actually enjoyed some of it— Mac was driving him crazy, asking questions about his deployments, his injuries and his recovery process.

  Though he didn’t give many precise details, Dylan picked up that he had lost the use of his legs during a covert operation during Gulf One when an underwater explosive had detonated at the wrong moment.

  “That looks like all the regular skis,” he said shortly after they had tallied a vast collection, some new and apparently donated by Brodie Thorne’s sportinggoods store and some really nice gently used high-dollar equipment donated by people in town. “You’ve got enough here to open a ski swap.”

  “Good to have options so we can fit all sizes and abilities,” Mac said. “Growing up here, you’ve probably got skis of your own, don’t you?”

  “Somewhere at my pop’s house. I haven’t been up in a few years.”

  “You’re coming with us next week, though, aren’t you? We plan to hit the slopes at least a couple times.” The guy was relentless about encouraging Dylan to participate in the activities of A Warrior’s Hope.

  “I’ll cross that bridge.”

  “No reason you can’t ski one-handed,” Mac said.

  “Hell, I can do it with no legs. I’ve got a little ski seat I sit on. It’s boss. Or you could snowboard. You can probably rip it up on a board.”

  He had never had much patience for snowboarding. Maybe he was a snob because he had always liked the purity of skiing, but he might have to reconsider.

  “Yeah, maybe,” he answered, which had become his answer to everything Mac threw at him.

  For the past two hours, the man had seemed determined to wrest more out of him than a couple of syllables at a time and Dylan had become equally determined not to let him.

  In the midst of the battle of wills, all he could think about was how much he had actually enjoyed the day before with Genevieve.

  She had yammered on just as much as Mac and about far more ridiculous things. If he ever went to Paris, he wouldn’t need to read a guidebook. She had told him more than a guy would ever have to know. Hell, he even knew exactly which shops sold her favorite scarves and which tried to pass off knockoffs from China as genuine antique Lyonnaise silk.

  For some reason, he had enjoyed listening to her far more than he did being smacked in the face with all the things he couldn’t do anymore.

  The room was filled to the brim with sports equipment. Baseball bats, tennis racquets, climbing gear, canoes. Much of it was designed for use by people with various physical limitations.

  He hated those adaptations.

  All he could see when he looked at the rows of skis, the golf clubs, the fishing poles were all the things he had left behind. He wanted his old life back, when he could grab a fly rod any damn time he felt like it and head for a nearby trout stream to be alone with the current and the fish and his thoughts.

  “You live in one of the most gorgeous places I’ve ever been, and that’s saying something,” Mac was saying. “What kinds of things do you like to do for fun?”

  The man just wouldn’t let up.

  “Oh, you know. This and that,” he said shortly. Right now he didn’t do much, mostly puttered around his land in Snowflake Canyon, messing with the tractor, repairing the chicken coop that had been there when he moved in, tossing a stick one-handed for Tucker when they were both in the mood.

  “After I was hurt, I spent the first five years in a bottle,” Mac said into the silence. “Didn’t want to do a damn thing.”

  Dylan tensed. Apparently the program director had been talking to Charlotte, who seemed to think he was turning into some self-pitying alcoholic. He wasn’t. He knew when to stop and forced himself to do it, even when he didn’t want to.

  “That can happen,” he said, hoping that would be the end of it.

  It wasn’t.

  “One night I went out for a drive while I was loaded and crashed this really sweet van with hand controls the VA bought for me. Ended up with a broken arm and some cuts and bruises, but I was lucky I didn’t kill anybody else. Nothing like wrapping a van around a tree to sober you up fast. I realized while I was stuck in the wreckage waiting for the fire department to cut me out that I wasn’t ready to go. I could still think and talk and breathe, so why the hell was I feeling so sorry for myself? I went to AA, cleaned up my act, went back to school on the government’s dime. Five years ago I met the love of my life, Luisa. She was a nurse at the VA and still has the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen. I told her so, she went out with me and we’ve been married for four years. She had a couple kids with her first husband who died a few years before I met her, so now I get to be a dad, too. Funny how life works out, isn’t it?”

  “Hilarious,” Dylan muttered.

  “It’s been a great ride, man. I wouldn’t change a thing.”

  He didn’t believe that for a second. If Mac had a chance to go back to the moment before that underwater bomb exploded, Dylan didn’t doubt he would do it in a heartbeat.

  Just as Dylan would give anything to go back and redo a few of his own decisions the day his world changed.

  “How’s it going in here?”

  He looked up to see Eden Davis in the doorway. “We’re just about wrapping up the inventory,” Mac said. “I wanted to check the snowshoes you were telling me about. I think that’s about all I have left.”

  “Think you can handle that yourself?”

  “I should be able to.”

  “Great. I need to steal Dylan for a minute,” she said.

  “We just finished buying the grocery staples to supply the cabins, and I think Genevieve could use some help sorting them and stocking the cupboards.” He wasn’t sure he really trusted himself to be alone with Gen in the cabins again. On the other hand, it beat the hell out of the alternative.

  “You’re the boss,” he said.

  “We took everything to the cabin closest to this building. You’ll find her.”

  “Sure.”

  He headed down the trail through a light, pretty snowfall that gently landed on the pines, trying to tell himself his little surge of excitement was due to the reprieve Eden had granted him from listening to more of Mac’s stories. It couldn’t have anything to do with Genevieve.

  He rapped on the door of the cabin, though he wasn’t really sure why, since she didn’t live there, then pushed open the door when she bade him come in.

  “Oh. Dylan. Hi.”

  He registered how lovely she looked today, in a far more practical cotton shirt than the fuzzy peac
h sweater she had worn the day before. He had seen her only briefly that morning when they had both picked up their ID badges from the front desk, before Eden sent them in different directions.

  Somehow he had forgotten that silky fall of hair; her soft mouth; the high, elegant cheekbones.

  He forced himself not to stare, looking instead at the boxes and bags of groceries that covered just about every inch of the cabin.

  “That would be a little food.”

  She tucked an errant strand of hair behind her ear with a frazzled sort of gesture. “I know, right? We filled three carts and spent a small fortune. You would not believe the price of milk these days.”

  “I do drink milk occasionally,” he murmured. “Since I don’t currently have a cow, I do have to purchase it.” “Oh. Of course. I guess I’m still thinking in liters and euros instead of gallons and dollars. It’s hard to make the translations in my head.”

  “Understandable.” He looked around at the bags of groceries. “So what is the plan here?”

  “We bought the same thing for each cabin—cold cereal, snacks, that kind of thing. We’ll have to divide everything evenly and then put it all away in the cabins.” He could think of worse tasks. Inventorying recreational equipment, for instance. “Let’s unload everything onto the table and the bar and group the items together, then we can divvy things up into a couple empty boxes for each cabin.”

  “That’s exactly what I was thinking. I hope we’ve got enough boxes.”

  They set to work stacking piles of items together. When six boxes were emptied, he set them along one wall and started dispersing one of each item to the boxes.

  She didn’t seem as talkative today. He missed her chatter, though he would rather be dragged behind a pair of those skis than admit it.

  “Eden said we don’t have to come in tomorrow,” she said after several moments. “That will be nice. I have a million things to do, including a trip to the hardware store that will probably take me hours. I have so many things to buy for the house.”

  Here was the chatter he had missed.

  “Oh?”

  “I’m hoping to get some of the wallpaper down tomorrow and start painting. We’ll see if I make it that far since it’s my only day off for a while. Eden told me to expect a crazy day on Monday, shuttling the new guests here from Denver and helping them settle in. She said expect a ten-hour day.”