Above It All (Eureka, Colorado Book 4) (Contemporary Romance)

by Cindy Myers

  Mindy began to help, then her phone rang, the strains of “Bad Romance” overly loud in the Wednesday afternoon stillness. She jerked the phone from the front pocket of her jeans and frowned at the screen. Travis. She silenced the cell and slid the phone away once more.

  “Take your call; I don’t mind,” Shelly said as she wiped crumbs from the island.

  “It wasn’t anyone I wanted to talk to.” Travis’s attitude that he was the one in charge of this book project annoyed her. After all, her name would be on the cover of the book, in nice big type. The agent she had hired had made sure of that. Travis was only “with Travis Rowell,” in a much smaller font. His job was to help her with the writing, not to boss her around.

  The phone rang again, harsh and insistent. “Sounds like whoever it is won’t take no for an answer,” Shelly said.

  “It’s Travis,” Mindy admitted. “I guess I’d better answer it.”

  “He does strike me as the persistent type.” She opened the oven to check the cookies, humming a little under her breath.

  Honestly, she was the perfect picture of a domestic Madonna. She could do commercials for Betty Crocker or something. “Are you always so calm about everything?” Mindy asked.

  “You know that’s not true. I wasn’t exactly calm the other night in the saloon.”

  Mindy grimaced, fighting the pinch of guilt at the back of her throat. She’d been annoyed with Shelly when she’d visited the bank that day, annoyed that her sister was ignoring her and shutting her out. Here in this kitchen, with the smell of freshly baked cookies filling her with sweet memories of their childhood closeness, her anger felt out of place. Even wrong.

  “I’m calm because I’m happy,” Shelly said. “I’m exactly where I want to be, doing exactly what I want to do.”

  How could someone who was only thirty years old be so settled in life? The idea struck Mindy as absurd—and a little frightening. Might as well dig a grave and lie down in it if you abandoned all ambition at such a young age. But no denying, her sister seemed happy and content.

  “You’d better call Travis,” Shelly said. “He’ll keep bothering you if you don’t.”

  Mindy went into the living room. Charlie had taken the boys to the art classes in the park. Her two nephews were turning out to be quite the little artists. Mindy had never spent much time around kids, but Cam and Theo were actually a lot of fun. They, at least, didn’t question her motives or look at her with disapproval. And she got a kick out of them calling her Aunt Mindy.

  The phone went off again as she stepped into the empty room. “Hello?” she said, silencing the driving beat of the Lady Gaga hit.

  “About time.” Travis’s nasal drawl filled her ear. “Where have you been? I haven’t heard a word out of you for days.”

  “I’ve been doing what you said I should do. I’ve been spending time with my sister.”

  “Good. What have you got for me? Lotsa juicy quotes, I hope.”

  She glanced over her shoulder, toward the kitchen. Shelly was taking a sheet of cookies out of the oven.

  “Well? Do you have anything good?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I get it. You can’t talk now. The wrong person might hear. Meet me at my hotel room. We’ll have privacy there.”

  There he went, ordering her around again, like he was in charge. “I can’t meet you right now,” she said. “I’m busy.”

  “Doing what?”

  She started to tell him it was none of his business, but instead she said, “We’re baking cookies.”

  “Baking cookies?” He laughed so loud she had to hold the phone away from her ear. “For real?”

  “Yes, for real. Why is that so funny?”

  “You don’t strike me as the cookie-baking type.”

  She probably wouldn’t have described herself as the cookie-baking type either, but coming from him the words sounded like an insult. “There are a lot of things you don’t know about me,” she said.

  “And I’m grateful for that, believe me. All I care about is your sister’s story. So meet me at my room in half an hour and let’s get on with it.” He sounded annoyed now, even more impatient than usual.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she asked. “Why are you in such a bad mood?”

  “The sooner I get the material I need to put together a rough draft of this manuscript, the sooner we can both leave this town,” he said.

  “I’m writing this book, not you,” she reminded him.

  “Whatever. I’m in Room 216, at the Eureka Motel, in case you’ve forgotten. See you.”

  He hung up before she could protest further. She slipped the phone back into her pocket and returned to the kitchen.

  “Everything okay?” Shelly looked up from transferring a batch of cookies to the cooling rack.

  “Travis wants to meet.” She didn’t say “to talk about the book.” No sense upsetting the tenuous truce the sisters had forged.

  “You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” Shelly said.

  The words, and the concerned tone in which they were delivered, thrust Mindy back to a summer afternoon when she was twelve, and Shelly was seventeen. They’d been baking cookies then, too, and Mindy had confided that she’d been invited to the birthday party of a girl she didn’t like.

  Shelly’s sympathy that afternoon had given Mindy the courage to tell her mother she didn’t want to go to the party, but Sandy made her go anyway. The birthday girl was the daughter of the man who owned the bank in their small town, and it wouldn’t do to risk insulting the family.

  Mindy opened her mouth to remind Shelly of these long-ago events when the back door burst open and Cameron rushed in, waving a piece of paper like a flag, the colors on the page glinting purple and green and yellow in the overhead fluorescent light. “Mom, look what we made!” he shouted.

  “We each did one.” Theo ran in after his brother and stood, bouncing up and down with excitement. With his brown curls and round, ruddy cheeks, he most resembled his mountain-man father, while Cameron had his mother’s blue eyes and more angular features. “They’re nature colleges.”

  “Collages,” Cameron said. “With leaves and flowers and stuff.”

  “They’re beautiful,” Shelly said, admiring each boy’s work.

  “Hmmm, what smells so good?” Charlie kissed his wife’s cheek and nodded to Mindy. He was friendly to her, but he kept his distance, as if he wasn’t quite sure what to make of her. Mindy wondered what Shelly had told her husband about her.

  “Cookies!” Theo announced, and stood on tiptoe to admire the cooling sweets.

  “Wash your hands first, then you can tell me all about your afternoon,” Shelly said.

  “I’ll take these and put them on the bulletin board.” Charlie took the pictures from his sons, then reached over and swiped a cookie from the rack. Laughing, he dodged Shelly’s swatting hand and headed for the large corkboard in the den where they displayed a rotating selection of the boys’ artwork and school papers.

  “Come on now.” Shelly ushered the boys toward the downstairs bathroom. “Where did collect the items for your collages?”

  Mindy stood in the middle of the empty kitchen for a moment, feeling hollowed out with longing for something she couldn’t even name. The things Shelly had—husband, children, home—weren’t things she’d even wanted before, but standing here now in her sister’s kitchen, surrounded by such tender treasures, the ache for them threatened to overwhelm her.

  She had to get away—from this feeling, and from the memories that made it hard to think straight. She fled out the front door, to her car, pausing only to grab her purse and keys from the living room chair where she’d dropped them earlier.

  Chapter 14

  Ten minutes after leaving Shelly’s house, Mindy knocked on the door of Travis’s hotel room. He answered with a beer in one hand, a slice of pizza in the other. “You’re just in time for dinner,” he said. “Help yourself.” He motioned to the pizza box and six-pack o
n the table by the window.

  It wasn’t homemade cookies and Shelly’s elk stew, but maybe he was right. Maybe she’d always been more of a cheap-beer-and-takeout-pizza kind of girl.

  “So, you’ve been spending a lot of time with your sister.” He sat on the side of the bed and motioned for her to take the only chair. “That’s good. Is she talking to you?”

  “Some.”

  “You’ve been recording these conversations, I hope.”

  “Some.” She twisted the cap off the beer and took a long drink, delaying telling him more. She’d had the recorder running while they baked, and before that when Shelly had come to her room and asked for help with the play.

  “Then let’s hear it.” He held out one hand and snapped his fingers, a gesture she’d grown to loathe during a brief stint as a cocktail waitress at a Dallas steakhouse that catered to high rollers. Men with money, not manners, the woman who trained Mindy had told her her first day on the job. Nothing Mindy had seen had proved the woman wrong.

  “Are you sure this is legal—recording someone secretly like this?” she asked.

  “The government does it all the time,” he said.

  “I mean it, Travis. I don’t want to end up getting sued.”

  “You won’t get sued. The publisher has rooms full of lawyers to make sure that doesn’t happen. Besides, all we’re going to do is say that Shelly said these things to you—her sister. The recordings are just backup. Proof, if anyone—including Shelly—says otherwise. So, what did you get?”

  “She talked about how she met her husband.”

  His expression brightened. “That’s great. Readers will love that.”

  “But she thought she was just talking to me,” Mindy said. “Not a bunch of readers.”

  “And like I told you already, the book is about you and your relationship to your sister, so those kinds of conversations are fair game. Think of it this way. Suppose you had a conversation with your sister, then you went upstairs and wrote down everything you remembered in your diary. Then, when you sit down to write your book, you consult your diary to refresh your memory. This is just like this.”

  Except it wasn’t like that—not really. But Travis wasn’t going to listen to any argument she made about the rightness or wrongness of recording Shelly without her knowledge. And this wasn’t really about legalities anyway, not really. “I’m not ready for you to hear it,” she said. “Not yet.” She hugged her arms across her chest and stared at her knees.

  “Is it because there’s something embarrassing in your conversation?” He set aside the crust of pizza and raised his right hand, like a man swearing in court. “I promise to keep everything confidential. Think of me like a priest, or a doctor.”

  “I’m having second thoughts about doing things this way,” she blurted. “Shelly already thinks I’m just interested in using her. If she finds out I’m taping her that will only prove she’s right.”

  “Whoa! Am I hearing you right? Since when are you so concerned about what Shelly thinks of you?”

  Since Shelly had reminded her of how close they’d once been. When she was small, and right up until Shelly had gone away to college, really, her older sister had been the one person Mindy knew deep down that she could count on. While her mother and father were too focused on who they could impress or how much attention they could attract to Shelly, Shelly herself had been the one to worry about Mindy—what she was doing, how she was feeling.

  It had been a long time since Mindy had allowed herself to think about how big a hole Shelly had left in her life when she broke off contact with the family, but these past few days, living in Shelly’s house, being drawn in as a part of her family, Mindy had realized how much she’d missed the bond they had once had.

  “Didn’t you tell me you didn’t owe your sister anything, since she’d turned her back on you years ago?” Travis asked. “Everybody knows her story; this is your chance to tell your side of things. To show people that Baby Shelly isn’t the saint they all think she is.”

  She winced. She’d said all those things. And she’d meant them at the time. But now she wasn’t so sure. “I think the book would be a lot better if we convinced Shelly to cooperate with us,” she said. “I’m sure I can persuade her. I just need a little more time.”

  “In case you’ve forgotten, we have this thing called a deadline,” he said. “If we don’t turn in a manuscript by then, the publisher could make us return the advance—which I’m willing to bet you already spent.”

  Her cheeks felt hot. “I had to pay my way here, and then I had other expenses.” She’d been behind on all her bills and had run up some pretty steep credit card charges in the months before the book deal came through. By the time her half of the advance money arrived, less her agent’s fifteen percent, she’d needed most of the money to get her out of hock to her creditors. There hadn’t really been much left over.

  “Believe me, sweet cheeks, I know,” Travis said. “You and I are in the same leaking financial boat, which is why we have to take whatever we can get and run with it.”

  She glanced toward her purse, where she’d stashed the recorder. “Maybe I should listen to it on my own, and pick out the parts we should use.”

  “Better if you leave that to a professional,” he said. “Trust me, I know what the public is interested in.” He leaned forward and picked up her purse. “Is the recorder in here?”

  “Travis, give that back!”

  But he’d already pulled out the little recorder. He clicked a button. “Three hours. You’ve been busy. There ought to be a lot in here we can use.” He pulled out his notebook and switched on the machine. Mindy’s voice, higher and twangier than she imagined herself sounding, said, “What do you think of this color?”

  She pulled her knees to her chest, her heels hooked on the edge of the chair, arms wrapped around her shins, and listened, half sick to her stomach, as Travis replayed the sisters’ conversation, fast-forwarding past long silences or inconsequential chitchat.

  “This is great,” he said, scribbling furiously in his notebook. “All this stuff about her feelings toward her family is priceless. And that bit where you did the interview for her when you were kids? That’s the kind of inside information readers will love.”

  She rested her chin on her knees and said nothing. Would Shelly ever forgive her for this? Not to mention how pissed off their mother would be when she found out. Sandy wouldn’t like the world to know how much her older daughter resented her.

  At last, Travis switched off the recorder. “You did a great job,” he said. He held the little device out to her. “Take this back and see if you can get her to tell you what she did after she left home, but before she got married. Oh, and ask her if she does anything to commemorate her rescue each year. You know—private rituals or anything. Readers would eat that up.”

  She folded her arms across her chest, refusing to take the recorder from him. “If it’s private, maybe we shouldn’t tell everyone,” she said.

  “Listen to you.” He opened her purse and dropped in the recorder. “You’re the one who wanted to write this book, remember?”

  She nodded.

  “And why did you want to do that?”

  “I needed the money.”

  “And?”

  “What?” She lifted her head and looked him in the eye. “You don’t think money is a good enough reason?”

  “Money is a good reason, but it’s never just about money. There’s always an ‘and.’ ”

  He thought he was so smart. As if a journalism degree made him an expert on human psychology. “I wanted people to know that what happened to Shelly wasn’t just about her,” she said. “That it affected me, too. That I lived my whole life in the shadow of something that happened before I was even born.”

  Travis snatched up his notebook from the bed beside him and began writing. “This is terrific stuff. We’ll definitely put this in the book.”

  She sat up straighter and put her
feet on the floor. “So you don’t think I’m being greedy?”

  “Not at all. You’ve suffered, too, and people need to hear your side of things. Plus, the money you’ll make from this book will give you the freedom to do whatever you want.”

  “Yeah.” He was right. This book was really her big chance. Maybe her only chance.

  He leaned forward and put a hand on her arm. He wasn’t being fresh or anything—it was more of a brotherly gesture. “The secret to life, Mindy, is to decide what you really want, and go after it with everything you’ve got. You’re doing that, and I admire you for it.”

  “I guess I am.” She took a deep breath and nodded. “Shelly always said she wanted the best for me. So she’ll understand about the book. Maybe not right away, but eventually.”

  “Of course she will. It’s clear from these recordings how much she cares about you.”

  “Yeah.” Shelly did love her. That realization surprised Mindy. She hadn’t expected to find out that Shelly still cared, after so much time apart. Even more surprising was how much she loved Shelly. Once she’d scraped away all the layers of anger and resentment, what remained was that little glow of love, like an ember from an old campfire that refused to go out.

  “I don’t like this one bit.” Daisy dropped into a lawn chair next to Bob, who cradled a rifle across his chest and squinted over the pasture, toward the goats clipping weeds at the edge of the woods.

  “A lesser man might take that comment personally,” he said. He plucked a travel mug from the cup holder on the arm of the chair and sipped. He’d sworn to Daisy that the cup contained only coffee, but she wouldn’t have put it past him to add a shot of something stronger.

  “I’m grateful for all the help you’ve given me,” she said, trying for a softer tone. After all, he’d helped her negotiate the paperwork to file her claim with the Department of Wildlife, and he’d collected the rubber bullets the wildlife officer had said “should” scare away the bear. No more goats had gone missing in the two days since the first attack, but Bob had shown her signs that the bears had been in the area—big clumps of droppings, and black fur caught in the barbed-wire fencing.