by Jill Shalvis
“We both know what she was doing. She wanted to see the last place Ashley had been.”
“Well she didn’t. She didn’t get more than halfway up there.”
“She will,” Aidan said with certainty. Lily was tough to the very bone, and she didn’t give up. At least the old Lily wouldn’t have given up. “What I don’t get is why Cedar Ridge now, after all this time?”
“Now, see, if you followed Buzzfeed you’d know why,” Gray said smugly, licking residual chocolate from his fingers.
“What’s Buzzfeed?”
Gray shook his head. “One of these days you need to do something on your iPad other than watch porn. Lily was working at some fancy spa in San Diego where the rich and famous go, not just for hair but stuff like Botox and chemical peels too.”
“What the hell is a chemical peel?”
Gray shrugged. “Beats me, but they do it, all far away from the Hollywood eye. Lily had worked her way up from cosmetologist to assistant manager. Then it got out that some celebrity client used hair extensions or some such shit like that, which was a problem because she’s in all these shampoo commercials. Word is that Lily leaked it.”
“She lost her job over hair extensions?”
“That celebrity’s kinda known for her soft tresses. The news that her hair isn’t real has the potential to backfire for both her and the salon, which lost a lot of credibility.”
Aidan went brows up. “Tresses?”
“Shut up,” Gray said. “I’m married. I know shit like the word tresses. And yeah, Lily got canned. Not only that, she was blacklisted over it. Seems that Hollywood’s got a long reach. Anyway, she needs this job. She’s got a bunch of resumes and feelers out, but so far no one’s willing to touch her. And Jonathan said it’s only a temp thing, until Cassandra has her baby and finishes her maternity leave.”
“That’s such bullshit, Lily’d never do something like that.”
Gray shrugged.
Aidan stuffed in the last bite of his sandwich, thinking about Lily and how she must feel. “Anything else I should know about?”
“Yep. Shelly’s in your bed.”
Aidan nearly choked. “And you’re just now telling me this?”
Gray shrugged, snatched another brownie, and headed for the door. “She’s sleeping.”
Shelly was a local bartender and had been on their S&R team for a while until she’d broken her ankle last year. She and Aidan were long-running friends with benefits minus the friends part. They were also on-again off-again, currently mostly off.
He had no idea why she’d be here now, but he could guess. Kicking Gray out, he headed down the hall. Maybe sex with Shelly and eight straight hours of sleep was just what he needed.
He opened his door and stopped in the doorway.
Wearing nothing but his sheets, Shelly sat up in the center of his bed with a come-hither smile. “I forgot why I was mad at you,” she murmured.
“Because I work too much,” he said.
“Oh, yeah.” She affected a pout. “Seems silly now, though, doesn’t it? I read about that search and rescue of the little girl you saved from the river last week. You jumped off the bridge like it was nothing. It was … amazing,” she said a little breathlessly. “I think I need to be searched and rescued too.”
Telling himself he was game, he kicked off his shoes and pulled off his shirt, and then hesitated, suddenly feeling the need to stall. “Let me take a shower first.”
She got up on her knees and crawled toward him, hooking a finger in the waistband of his pants and reeling him in. “Search and rescue me first,” she whispered breathlessly, “then shower.”
Thinking that should be sexy as hell, he bent to kiss her, but … couldn’t. “Shit,” he said.
Shelly stared at him and then got off the bed. She bent for her clothes, pulling them on in jerky movements. “You know,” she said, no longer breathless, “if you weren’t in the mood, you should’ve answered my text.”
He pulled out his phone for the first time in hours and indeed found her unread text. “Shit,” he said again.
“You’re a jackass, you know that?”
Aidan scrubbed a hand down his face. Lily hadn’t even been back in town twenty-four hours, and she was already screwing with his head. As much as he wanted to get laid, all he could see were her moss-green eyes when he closed his own. “I’m sorry, Shelly.”
She looked shocked. “Good-bye sorry, you mean?”
He couldn’t believe he was going to do this, turn away a sure thing with no strings attached. “Yeah. This isn’t working for me.”
Shelly paused. “Let me get this straight—all the casual, easy sex isn’t working out for you?”
“No,” he said. “It’s not.”
She was looking and sounding pissy now. “Your job is your life, Aidan, and I get that. You’ve said you don’t have time for a real relationship, and I get that too. I don’t want one either. But I do want honesty. I deserve that much.”
She was right about his job being his life. But he also did want a real relationship … someday. And though they were compatible in a lot of ways, Shelly wasn’t the one he wanted a relationship with.
Just as he wasn’t the one for her either.
“You do deserve honesty,” he said. “And okay, yeah, this is about more than my work, but I don’t know what exactly it is. That’s the truth,” he said when she gave him a skeptical look.
She stared at him, the temper still clear in her eyes. “You’re funny and hot and magic in bed, but I don’t play second fiddle, Aidan. Not even for you.” She slipped into her sandals and headed toward the door. “You’re going to miss me, you know.”
But when she was gone and he looked at his empty bed, he felt nothing but a little ping of relief that he could have the entire thing to himself.
Chapter 7
The next day, Lily woke up early because her toes were missing. When she cleared the cobwebs from her brain, she realized she was still in possession of ten toes—they were just frozen. Overnight, the temps had dropped, and she could in fact see her own breath inside her apartment.
Damn. It’d been a long time since she’d experienced the fifty-degree drop between night and day that Colorado called normal. Huddling under the covers, she wished for a magic blanket warmer. Or a really warm man.
The image that came to her wasn’t her usual fantasy of Channing Tatum and Chris Hemsworth.
It was even more embarrassing.
Aidan. Naked. Heated. Willing and able to share that heat …
Gah.
She grabbed her phone and distracted herself with her daily morning chore—checking her email for a response to one of her resumes. Any response at all would do. But, like yesterday and all the days before that, she had zip.
Sucking in a breath, she braced herself for the rush of cold before sliding out of bed. The early light drew her to the window, where the mountains backdropping the resort seemed to mock her.
She yanked the shade down.
Yesterday she’d unloaded her suitcases from her car but hadn’t unpacked. So she dug through them until she found a sweatshirt and pulled that on over her PJs. She added wool socks and then stood in the middle of her apartment hugging herself. There was no central heater in the place, just a woodstove.
With no wood.
The welcome letter on the counter read:
Utilities come with the rent. The stacked wood by the dumpsters is free. So is the Internet.
We hope you’ll take advantage of some of the recreation the resort offers this summer season; biking, climbing, rafting, kayaking, a ropes course … the sky’s the limit.
Enjoy your stay.
That would be easier to do if she were back in San Diego, where it didn’t get cold at night. Or ever. Where she could insulate herself from her past with a nice, solid thousand miles between herself and Cedar Ridge with all its memories.
Including Aidan Kincaid.
Shivering again, she
stomped into her Uggs. Then she opened her front door to peer out and see how far away the woodpile was. At least a hundred feet away off to the left, she discovered, next to two large dumpsters. She looked down at herself; oversized sweatshirt, hood up, PJ shorts in pink plaid with KISS IT on her butt, wool knee socks, and her Uggs. Own it, she decided, and ran down the stairs to the woodpile.
The first piece weighed far more than she remembered it would. She grabbed two more pieces and then the worst possible thing happened.
Something slithered out from behind one of the logs in her hands. At the way she screamed, one might assume that a bear had come trolling along looking to eat her up. But no, not a bear.
Worse.
It was a snake, and it touched her arm.
Tossing the wood away from herself, Lily gave another scream and did the snake dance, the one that looked like maybe she was having a seizure. This lasted a full minute before she got ahold of herself.
Torn between the snake willies and possible humiliation if anyone saw her, she decided humiliation was worse and forced herself to calmly smooth down her clothes. Nope, nothing to see here … Casually she turned to send a glare to the snake.
It was gone.
Well, crap. Because now she had a bigger problem. How could she pick up the wood now knowing that the mofo was hiding in there, watching her from obsidian eyes, waiting for his big moment to give her another heart attack.
She kicked one of the logs. Nothing. Okay then, she thought, and gingerly picked it up. And then another, carefully stacking them in her arms as if they were fully locked and loaded bombs. “He’s long gone,” she whispered to herself as she headed to the stairs. “He went on vacay. Somewhere warm.”
A lie, as it turned out, because the thing dropped from the wood in her arms and slithered across her boots.
Game over.
She screamed even louder than before, tossed the wood, and started to run away, her feet scrambling like a cat on linoleum.
“Lily.”
She jerked to a halt in shock. No. But sure enough when she turned around, there Aidan stood in the parking lot, framed by the morning light and looking gorgeous, the bastard. He wore dark sunglasses and a long-sleeved Henley with a Cedar Ridge Resort emblem on one pec. And his faded jeans, low slung on his hips, had a rip in one knee that she’d bet was genuine and not manufactured that way. Leaning back on his truck, arms casually crossed, he seemed amused by her snake dance, but not particularly happy to see her.
Well, the feeling was entirely mutual, she thought grimly.
“Need a snake inspection?” he asked.
Yes. If she was being honest, she wanted a serious snake inspection and also, at least in her dreams, she wanted it to involve his hands on her. All over her—Gah. “No.”
At her emphatic tone, he went brows up.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, not having to fake the irritation in her voice. She was irritated, starting to sweat, and—dammit—also a little turned on. Stupid sexy guy jeans.
“I was on my way to my office,” he said.
She slid a look at the resort’s office building and met his gaze again. “You work here too?”
“I help Gray run the place.”
This was curious. “You used to say you’d join your father’s business when you were cold and dead. Or when he was cold and dead,” she said, “whichever came last.”
He lifted a broad shoulder. “Things change.”
That simmered between them for a moment, past and present commingling uncomfortably.
“You find what you were looking for up there on the mountain yesterday?” he asked casually.
What was it about him that made her want to both kiss him and yell at him at the same time? Because once upon a time you wanted him and he … wanted your sister. Oh, yeah, it was all coming back to her now, and her spine snapped straighter. “I told you,” she said. “I was just trying to get my sea legs.”
He wasn’t polite enough to just nod and let her have the lie. Instead he called her out on it. “Or you were thinking of Ashley,” he said with a gentle directness that nearly broke her.
She paused a moment to swallow hard. “I guess I just wanted to say good-bye,” she finally said.
His expression tightened a little at this. “You were going to free-climb the face?”
“No. I’m not in any sort of climbing shape,” she said. “Nor used to the altitude either. I was just going to hike to the top. But as it turns out, I’m not in shape for that either.”
He studied her a long moment. “I’m surprised.”
She wasn’t sure how to take that. “I’ve been stress eating and not exercising like I should—”
“No,” he said. “I meant I’m surprised you’re back. When you left, you vowed to never return.”
Oh. That. “Things change,” she parried softly. Back then she’d lived for the outdoors, suffering through school and work, counting the minutes until she could escape. In the winter she’d been required to be on the ski team for the resort her father managed—not as fun as it might seem. In fact, it’d been brutally competitive and incredibly demanding, to the point that she’d had no life.
But in the off-season, she’d been free.
So she’d hiked and had discovered her first real joy—being alone on the mountain. She’d quickly gotten bored with the trails and had begun challenging herself with rock climbing instead, using no ropes just her fingers, toes, and wits, until there’d been no place on or near Cedar Ridge that she hadn’t explored, including the aptly named Dead Man’s Cliff.
Looking back on it now, it was a miracle that she’d lived to tell the tale. But she hadn’t been the only one enjoying her solitude.
She’d often come across Aidan out there. In fact, if anyone had known that terrain better than she did, it was him. After that night at the summer festival, she’d thought that maybe they’d explore the mountain together.
And then each other.
But then Ashley had claimed him first, and he was the one thing Lily had hoped to never compete with her sister for. Especially after she’d died.
Aidan was watching her from those dark glasses, thoughts hidden, though she had the feeling her own thoughts were as clear to him as crystal. “Tell me about the resort,” she said, before he could ask her any questions.
He shrugged. “Not much to tell. Gray took over the management. It took a few years, but he runs a good ship and we turned it around.”
“We?” she asked.
He smiled grimly. “Turns out we Kincaids are good at pulling ourselves out of the gutter. We’re like cats, nine lives and all that.”
“And good at landing on your feet,” she said.
He bowed his head in silent agreement.
“You’re a busy guy,” she said. “Firefighting, and the resort.”
“And Search and Rescue.”
It all made perfect sense for him. He’d always been at his best on the mountain, and that he’d made a real life for himself on it in every way gave her both a sense of pleasure for him and an ache for herself, one she couldn’t put her finger on. “And the other Musketeers?” she asked, referring to his half siblings, Hudson and Jacob, and their reputation for trouble.
Aidan smirked at the “Musketeers” and said, “Hudson works ski patrol in the winter and works with me at S&R as well. And he’s a cop in the off-season—”
She laughed, she couldn’t help it. Hudson, the scourge of Cedar Ridge, becoming a cop of all things.
And Aidan actually flashed a grin as well. “Yeah, I know. Go figure, Hud on the right side of the law. He takes a lot of shit for that. I think he likes it.”