He looked at the other photograph and sighed. Mt. Everest stood there in all its stark beauty, with the trademark plume of white cloud adorning its summit. He supposed pitting himself against it had been inevitable. He'd been awash in a particularly satisfying rush of making a fortune when a buddy had dropped a picture of a mountain on his desk and dared him to climb it.
Everest.
Why not?
Well, there had been plenty of reasons why not, but he'd ignored them. He'd packed up his office, packed up his place in the city, closed up his house in Maine, and moved to Utah. He'd hired a trainer and used both the desert and the mountains to physically make himself into a kind of climbing animal he'd never been before, even with the impossible heights and sheer rock faces he'd managed in his past.
But it hadn't come without cost. He'd missed his sister's wedding in January because he'd gone the extra mile (well, extra three hundred to be exact) and hiked in to Everest base camp instead of flying in like the rest of his team. He'd been determined to make the summit and was willing to do whatever it took to get there. He was not a man accustomed to losing.
He stared hard at the picture on his fridge. He had no trouble locating the precise point at which he'd begun to wonder if the altitude had fried his brain. It had to have been the lack of oxygen. One didn't hear voices at 27,000 feet, did one?
Thomas, there's more to life than climbing. Turn around and go home.
He shook his head at the memory. Five hundred feet from the summit, five hundred feet from conquering the most impossible challenge of his life, and he'd begun to hear voices. It had probably been his late grandmother haunting him. She had never minded a good hike now and then, but she never would have approved of him climbing to the top of the world.
Of course, he'd ignored the voice and gone on to make the summit, just as he'd planned. Anything else would have been unthinkable. But the rush he'd expected to feel, the feeling of triumph, the bone-deep satisfaction he'd anticipated had been missing.
There was more to life than climbing?
He scowled as he turned back to the stove. What the hell was that supposed to mean? That conquering challenges wasn't everything? That there was more to life than achieving goals? That making a fortune, climbing peaks, being the best wasn't all there was?
He couldn't deny that something along those lines had begun to occur to him as he built his house. When he'd been working on the kitchen, he'd imagined it serving a wife and children, being filled to the brim with family on holidays and birthdays, full of laughter and conversation. When he'd worked on the bedrooms, he'd taken special care to see they were strong and sound, so they would safely shelter children in the future. The master bedroom had been made with a woman's comfort in mind, as a retreat from the rest of the house. The house was full of nooks and crannies just perfect for children to use in playing their games of hide-and-seek. Thomas had three sisters, and he had very fond memories of doing the like with them.
All of which had very little to do with making millions of dollars or climbing mountains that were capable of killing even the most skilled.
And it was those kinds of thoughts that had led him to continued speculation during the ensuing months about the adverse effects of altitude on his common sense.
The phone rang, and he jumped in spite of himself. Maybe he wasn't sleeping enough. Yeah, that was it. He needed more sleep. He'd get some, just as soon as he got off the phone with whoever was calling to make his last day at home hell. It was probably his dad, trying to talk him out of his current obsession, which in light of his usual obsessions, seemed fairly tame.
His father hadn't done much more than roll his eyes when Thomas had bought the castle. The grumbling had begun when Thomas had sent his sister to investigate the site, and she'd wound up marrying a Brit. The true roaring had ensued when John McKinnon had learned that Thomas, too, intended to cross the Atlantic. Not even assuring his dad it was just a year-long do-it-yourself project had soothed him. His father was convinced he had lost it.
Thomas wasn't so sure his dad was wrong.
The phone continued to ring. Thomas turned off the fire under his meal, then grabbed the phone.
"What?" he demanded.
"Well," a sultry feminine voice drawled, "isn't that a pleasant greeting."
Ah, Tiffany Amber Davidson, the beginning of his love life's downfall. Not that it had been much of a love life to begin with, but she'd certainly decimated what there'd been of it.
Damn, this was all he needed. When compared to what he was certain would be a very unpleasant few minutes with this woman, listening to his dad gripe at him sounded like a vacation. If he'd only known a year ago where a simple smile in Tiffany's very expensive direction would have led him, he would have kept frowning.
"Tiffany," he said, "I told you—"
Her sigh was a thing of beauty. Thomas found himself almost in awe of the subtle shades and nuances of disappointment, despair, and guilt-inducing reproach that layered a simple exhalation of breath. A lesser man would have been moved.
"Thomas, can't we let bygones be bygones?"
"Sure," he said easily. "It's gone. Let's leave it there."
"No," she said, sounding as if it was an enormous effort to be patient. "I mean, let's start again."
"Where? When?" he asked politely. 'Two months ago? On that particular afternoon in June? Should it be before or
