“He’s already guessed most of it, and I don’t know much. If you’ll recall, you didn’t go into detail.” Her friend sighed. “You’re a very private person, Rose.”
“It’s one reason you and I get along so well.”
“Beth and I can come back—”
“No, enjoy the bougainvillea and the pool. Beth needs a break, and you and Sean have waited a long time for each other.”
Hannah hesitated, then said, “Beth’s hurting over Scott, but she’s doing her stiff-upper-lip thing. We’re having a good time. Devin and Toby are coming by to see her. You should see Devin—he’s getting downright buff. He’s determined to become a smoke jumper. It’s a long route but wherever it takes him, it’ll be better than where he’s been. He has his own apartment now. Toby’s doing well with his host family. He’s in mountain-biking heaven. I think he’ll stay and graduate out here.”
“Going out to California’s been good for all of you,” Rose said.
Hannah had become her brothers’ legal guardian after their mother died when they were ten and eleven and Hannah just twenty-one. Their father had been dead for years. She remembered their lives in the isolated hollow, just downriver from Bowie O’Rourke, better than Devin and Toby did.
“During the bar fight last year,” Rose said thoughtfully, “did you get the feeling Derek was deliberately trying to provoke Bowie?”
“Maybe. Bowie didn’t care. He wanted to shut Derek up.”
“How did Bowie take it when Lowell Whittaker tried to frame him for the pipe bombs?”
“Bowie just wants to get on with his life, Rose.”
“That’s what I thought.” She remained on her feet, restless. “Thanks. I didn’t mean to imply I suspect him of anything.”
“I’m sorry if I sound defensive.”
“Do you know what precipitated Nick coming out here?”
“No, but I can guess.”
“What? The investigation into Jasper Vanderhorn’s death? Did something come up after you and Sean got back last week and Nick decided to head to Vermont?”
“Not that I know of,” Hannah said. “Rose, I think Nick’s in Vermont because of you.”
She looked out the window but saw only her reflection against the black night. “Did he tell you that?”
“He didn’t have to.”
“Does Sean have any idea?”
“Not a clue.”
Rose could sense her friend’s smile but wasn’t smiling herself. “Please don’t do anything that would jeopardize their friendship on my account.”
“That’s not your problem. You have to figure out what you want.
And women, Rose thought, but now she made herself smile. “Does that mean the prospect of bicoastal living in Vermont and California doesn’t scare Sean?”
Hannah laughed softly. “Not in the least.”
“What about you, Hannah? Does it scare you?”
“It did for about five minutes. Sean and I can make this work,” her friend said. “I’ve never been so happy. I hope you can be happy, too, Rose. No one deserves it more.”
“Don’t worry about me.”
“Easier said than done. But you should go. You must be exhausted.”
“Thanks. Say goodbye to Sean for me.”
Nick had stretched out on the couch, leaning back against pillows he’d arranged behind him. “This’ll work. Hurts less to sit up, and I’ve got a strategic view of the door should anyone else pay you a visit.”
“You’re not armed.”
“I could go find your snow shovel,” he said lightly, then nodded to a pair of her shoes by the fire. “Or I could throw one of your shoes. What are those things?”
“Waterproof running shoes. They’re good in the snow.” She felt hot, but was amused. “I can wear starlet high heels, you know. Christian Louboutin, Manolo Blahnik, Jimmy Choo. I can’t buy them in Black Falls, but I get to Boston on a regular basis. I know what they are.”
“Can you walk in four-inch heels?”
“Not on my driveway in the snow, but I could manage quite nicely at a Beverly Hills cocktail party. In fact, I have. Sean took me once.”
Nick was clearly unimpressed, as well as skeptical. “You’ve never worn four-inch heels in your life.”
She grinned. “All right, two inches.”
“Where would you wear heels around here?”
“More places than you obviously think. For instance, there’s a dance at the lodge during winter fest.”
“Hell, shoot me now.”
“Why, Nick Martini, what a snob you are.” Rose lifted a log out of the woodbox. “I don’t care if you’re a hotshot smoke jumper, you’re actually more Beverly Hills these days. I can see you waltzing into some cocktail party with a babe on each arm.”
He settled deeper into the pillows. “I might have a few pictures of me just like that.”
She set the log on its end on the stone hearth and lifted the lid on the top of the stove. “If I’m just one of the guys—some mountain woman in sensible shoes—why did you sleep with me?”
“We needed each other that night.”
He spoke softly, his tone even and unemotional, as if he were stating a simple, indisputable fact. Rose dropped the log on the fire, almost choking it out, and reached for the poker. “I know why I needed you,” she said, shifting the log, rekindling the flames. “Why did you need me?”
“You just asked and answered your own question.” His voice was steady, and she could feel his eyes on her. “I needed you because you needed me.”
She shut the lid on the fire and returned the poker to its rack. “That’s it, huh?”
“That’s it.”
She dusted bits of wood off her hands and turned around, feeling an immediate jolt at the unbridled sexiness of the man on her couch. His dark eyes, his flat stomach and long, muscular legs. She felt the heat of the fire behind her and decided it wasn’t helping. Moving away from the woodstove, she pushed back a faint sense of irritation at herself that she was still attracted to him.
She sat in her favorite knitting-and-DVD-watching chair. “Then why are you here now?”
He grinned at her. “Because my head hurts.”
“In Vermont, Nick. Why are you in Vermont?”
He glanced at the fire blazing behind the glass doors of the woodstove. “Unfinished business.”
The dim light from a floor lamp by the couch caught the raw scrape on the side of his head. As tough and accustomed to pain as he was, he nonetheless looked a little ragged and hurt, and he had to have a screaming headache. Rose knew she’d gone too far as it was. Did she really want to go further and press him about what he meant by “unfinished business”?
She launched herself to her feet and marched down to her bedroom, flipped on the overhead and pulled open her closet. She dug out a pair of dressy black heels. She’d worn them to an event Sean had dragged her to in Beverly Hills last summer. Did they just prove Nick’s point? They were heels, but they weren’t four-inch or expensive.
She shoved them back into her closet. “What am I doing?”
But she dug out a pair of nude-colored sling-backs with two-inch heels. She’d worn them to A.J. and Lauren’s wedding five years ago. They weren’t even close to sexy. They were…utilitarian.
She caught a glimpse of herself in the full-length mirror on the inside of her closet door. She’d changed into jeans and a dark burgundy sweater for dinner with her brother and sister-in-law. She hadn’t fooled with her hair—it looked okay, maybe a little wild. Of course she’d worn boots. It was winter.
Definitely not starlet material.
It wasn’t as if no one in Black Falls was. Lauren was elegant and beautiful, always perfectly, if simply,
