Ruthless

by Lisa Jackson

“You know Doel,” Constance put in. She rolled her eyes expressively. “He’s become one of those Hollywood types who demand their privacy.”

  Melanie had to bite her tongue to keep from saying something she’d probably regret. Her hands trembled as she set down her cup. Gavin had always created a sensation, probably always would. She’d have to get used to it. And she’d have to forget that there had ever been anything between them.

  But the fact that he was back—here—caused her heart to thump crazily. Not that it mattered, she told herself. What Gavin did with his life was his business. Period. Except, of course, when it came to news. And though she was loath to admit it, Gavin Doel was news—big news—in Taylor’s Crossing. The epitome of “local boy does good.”

  Sidestepping the tightly packed desks in the newsroom, Jan threaded her way to Melanie’s work area. “Can you believe it?”

  “Hard to, isn’t it?” she murmured, wishing the subject of Gavin Doel would just go away.

  “Oh, come on. This is big, Mel. A real coup!”

  “I know. But we’ve heard this all before. Someone’s always going to reopen the resort.”

  “This is a done deal.”

  Melanie’s heart sank. She’d hoped that, once again, the rumors surrounding Ridge Lodge were nothing more than idle speculation—at least as far as Gavin was concerned. Melanie welcomed the thought of the lodge opening, but why did Gavin have to be involved?

  Jan wrinkled her nose thoughtfully. “I just got off the phone with Doel’s partner, what’s his name—” she glanced at her notes “—Rich Johanson. He said Doel would meet me tomorrow at nine at the main lodge!” Opening her hands in front of her, she added dramatically, “I can see it now, a full-page spread on the lodge, interviews with Gavin Doel and maybe a series of articles about the man, his personal and professional life—”

  “Don’t you think you’re pushing things a bit?” Melanie cut in a little desperately. Few people had been with the paper long enough to know about her romance with Gavin, and she intended to keep it that way. “Constance just told us how private he is—”

  “But he’ll need the publicity if the ski lodge is to reopen for the season. And we all know how Brian feels about this story—he can’t wait!”

  Brian Michaels was the editor-in-chief of the paper.

  “He’ll want to run with this one. Now,” Jan said, chewing on her lower lip, “we’ll need background information and photos. Then, tomorrow, when we’re at the lodge—”

  “We’re?” Melanie repeated, reaching for her Garfield coffee cup again. She took a sip of lukewarm coffee as her heart kicked into double time.

  “Yes—us,” Jan replied as if Melanie had developed some sort of hearing problem. “You and me. I need you for the shoot.”

  This was too much. Despite her professionalism, Melanie wasn’t ready to come face-to-face with Gavin. Not after the way they’d parted. He’d asked her to wait for him and she’d vowed that she would. But she hadn’t. In fact, within the month she’d married Neil Brooks. “Can’t Geri do the shoot?” she asked.

  “She starts vacation tomorrow, remember?” Jan shoved a stack of photographs out of the way and plopped onto the corner of Melanie’s desk. Crossing her legs, she leaned over Melanie’s in-basket. “Don’t you want a chance to photograph one of the most gorgeous men in skiing history?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Melanie dodged that one. There wasn’t any reason to tell Jan all about her past—a past she’d rather forget. At least not yet. “I’ve heard he’s not too friendly with photographers.”

  “Too many paparazzi,” Jan surmised, waving off the statement as if it were a bothersome mosquito. “But that’s what he gets for going out with all those famous models. It comes with the territory.” She leaned closer. “Confidentially, this paper needs the kind of shot in the arm that Gavin Doel’s fame and notoriety could give it. I don’t have to tell you that the Trib’s in a world of hurt.”

  Guy, who had wandered over from the copy machine, glanced over his shoulder. “Do you think he brought any of his girlfriends back with him? I’d love to meet Gillian Sentra or Aimee LaRoux.”

  “You and the rest of the male population,” Jan replied dryly.

  Melanie’s heart wrenched, but she ignored the familiar pain.

  “I don’t think there’ll be any women with him,” Constance said from her desk. “He hasn’t been seen with anyone since he broke his leg in that fall last spring. The way I understand it, he’s become a recluse.”

  “But not a monk, I’ll bet,” Guy joked. “Doel’s always surrounded by gorgeous women. Anyway, Melanie’s right—the guy’s just not all that friendly with the press. I can’t believe he’s going along with the interview.”

  “Well,” Jan said, “I didn’t actually talk to Doel himself. But Johanson says he’ll be there.” Jan checked her watch and glowered at the display. “Look, I’ve got to run. I want to tell Brian about the interview.”

  “He’ll be ecstatic,” Melanie predicted sarcastically. Since the rumors had sprung up that Ridge Lodge was reopening, the editor-in-chief had been busy coming up with articles about the lodge—its economic impact on the community, the environmental issues, the fad; that one of the most famous skiers in America had returned to his small home town. Yes, Gavin was big news, and the Tribune needed all the big news it could get.

  Jan’s brown eyes slitted suspiciously. “You know, Melanie, everyone in Taylor’s Crossing’s thrilled about this—except for you, maybe.”

  “I’m all in favor of Ridge reopening,” Melanie said, taking another gulp of her coffee and frowning at the bitter taste. She shoved her cup aside, sloshing coffee on some papers scattered across her desk. Sopping the mess with a tissue, she muttered, “Smooth move,” under her breath and avoided Jan’s curious gaze.

  “So what’s the problem?” Jan persisted.

  “No problem,” Melanie lied, tossing the soppy paper towel into her wastebasket. “I just hope that it all works out. It would be a shame if Ridge Lodge reopened only to close again in a year or two.”

  “No way—not if Doel’s behind it! I swear, that man has the Midas touch.” Jan slung the strap of her bag over her shoulder just as Brian Michaels shoved open the door to his glassed-in editor’s office and made a beeline for her desk. A short, lean man with prematurely gray hair and contacts that tinted his eyes a darker shade of blue, he dodged desks, glowing computers and overflowing wastebaskets on his way toward the photography section.

  “You got the Doel interview?” he asked Jan.

  “Yep.” Jan explained about her conversation with Gavin’s partner, and Brian was so pleased he managed a nervous smile.

  “Good. Good. We’ll do a story in next week’s issue, then follow up with articles between now and ski season.” Tugging thoughtfully at his tie, he glanced at Melanie. “Dig out any old pictures we have of Doel. Go back ten years or so—when he was on the ski team for the high school, then the Olympic team. And find everything you can on his professional career and personal life. And I mean everything.” He swung his gaze back to Jan. “And you talk to the sports page editor, see what he’s got on file and double-check with Constance, see if he’s up to anything interesting personally. It doesn’t really matter if it’s now or in the past. Don’t forget to rehash the accident where he broke his leg—poor son of a bitch probably lost his career on that run.”

  For a split second, Melanie thought she saw a glimmer of satisfaction in Brian’s tinted eyes. But it quickly disappeared as he continued. “And check into his love life before he left town, that sort of thing.”

  Melanie’s heart turned stone-cold.

  “Will do,” Jan said, then frowned at Melanie, who was standing stock-still. Jan pursed her lips as she glanced at her watch again. “I’ve really got to get moving—the park dedication’s in less than an hour. I’ll meet you up at the lodge tomorrow morning.”

  Unless I chicken out, Melanie thought grimly
as Brian and Jan went their separate ways. So she had to face Gavin again. She felt a premonition of disaster but squared her shoulders. The past was ancient history. There wasn’t any reason Gavin would drag it up.

  Even so, her stomach tightened at the thought. How could she ever explain why she’d left him so suddenly? Why she’d married Neil? Even if she could say all the right words, it was better he never knew.

  She wasn’t looking forward to tomorrow in the least, she thought grimly. The last person she wanted to see was Gavin Doel.

  * * *

  “I want it off. Today!” Gavin thundered, glaring darkly at the cast surrounding the lower half of his left leg.

  “Just another couple of days.” Dr. Hodges, who looked barely out of his teens, tented his hands under his chin and shook his head. He sat behind a bleached oak desk in his Portland sports clinic, trying to look fatherly while gently rebuffing Gavin as if he were a recalcitrant child. “If you want to race professionally again—”

  “I do.”

  “Then let’s not push it, shall we?”

  Gavin clamped his mouth shut. He wanted to scream—to rant and rave—but knew there was no reason. The young sandy-haired doctor knew his business. “I’ve got work to do.”

  “The lodge?”

  “The lodge,” Gavin agreed.

  “Even when you get the cast off, you’ll have to be careful.”

  “I’m tired of being careful.”

  “I know.”

  Gavin rubbed an impatient hand around his neck. He hated being idle, hated worse the fact that he’d been sidelined from the sport he loved, but at least he had the resort to keep him busy. Though his feelings about returning to Taylor’s Crossing were ambivalent, he was committed to making Ridge Resort the premier ski resort in the Pacific Northwest.

  “Come back in on Friday. I’ll check the X rays again and then, if the fracture has healed, you can go to a walking cast and no crutches. With physical therapy, you should be back on the slopes by December.”

  “This is September. It’s already been over six months.”

  “That’s because you rushed it before,” Hodges said with measured patience. “That hairline fracture above your ankle happened during the spring season and you reinjured it early this summer when you wouldn’t slow down. So now you have to pay the price.”

  Gavin didn’t need to be reminded. He shoved his hands through his hair in frustration. “Shit,” he muttered to himself. Then, more loudly, “Okay, you’ve made your point.”

  “Friday, then?”

  “Friday.” Helping himself up with his crutches, he started for the door. He made his way through the white labyrinthine corridors to the reception area. He passed by posters of the skeletal system, the neurological system, the human eye and heart, but he barely noticed. He was too wrapped up with the fragility of the human ankle—his damned ankle.

  And now he had to drive nearly three hundred miles back to Taylor’s Crossing, a town he despised. He would have picked any other location in the Cascades for his resort, but Taylor’s Crossing, his partner had assured him, was perfect. The price was right, the location ideal. If only Gavin could get over his past and everything the town represented.

  Melanie.

  Uttering an oath at himself, he shouldered open the door and hobbled across the parking lot to his truck. He shoved his crutches inside and climbed behind the wheel. As he flicked on the ignition, he told himself yet again to forget her. She was out of his life—had been for eight or nine years.

  She was married to wealth and probably had a couple of kids by now. Scowling, he threw the truck into reverse, then peeled out of the lot. He didn’t want to drive back to Taylor’s Crossing tonight, would rather stay in Portland until Friday, when the cast had better come off.

  Portland held no bittersweet memories for him. Taylor’s Crossing was packed with them. Nonetheless, he headed east, back to Mount Prosperity, where so many memories of Melanie still lingered in the shadowy corners of Ridge Lodge.

  * * *

  At five-thirty, Melanie ignored the headache pounding behind her eyes, stuffed her camera into her bag, snagged her jacket from the closet and headed out of the newsroom. The afternoon had flown by and she hadn’t had a chance to dig through the files of past issues and dredge up pictures and information on Gavin. She was glad. She’d heard enough about him for one day, been reminded of him more times than she wanted to count, An invisible, bittersweet cloud of nostalgia had been her companion all afternoon. Seeing pictures of him would only intensify those feelings.

  She would save the thrilling task of wading through Gavin’s award-strewn past for tomorrow.

  Tomorrow. She hardly dared think about it. What would she say to Gavin again? What would she do? How could she possibly focus a camera on his handsome features and not feel a pang of regret for a past they hadn’t shared, a future they would never face together, a baby who had never been born?

  “Stop it,” she chastised herself angrily, shoving open the door.

  A wall of late summer heat met her as she walked out onto the dusty streets. A few dry leaves skittered between the parking meters lining the sidewalk. Melanie climbed into the sunbaked interior of her old Volkswagen, rolled down the window and headed east, through the heart of town, past a hodgepodge of shops toward the outskirts, where she lived in the log cabin her great-grandfather had built nearly a hundred years before, the home she’d left eight years ago.

  She might not have returned except that her father’s illness coincided with her divorce. She’d come back then and hadn’t bothered to move. There was no reason to—until now. If she could part with the home that was part of her heritage.

  The log house had originally been the center of a ranch, but Taylor’s Crossing, barely a fork in the road in her great-grandfather’s time, had steadily encroached and now street lamps and concrete sidewalks covered what had once been acres of sagebrush and barbed wire. In the past few years there had been big changes in the place. Acre by acre the ranch had been sold, and now the property surrounding the house was little more than two fields and a weathered old barn. The log cabin itself, upgraded over the years, now boasted electricity, central heating, plumbing and a new addition that housed her small photography studio.

  She parked her car near the garage, stopped off at the mailbox and winced at the stack of bills tucked inside. “Great,” she muttered as Sassafras, her father’s collie whom she’d inherited along with the house, barked excitedly. Wiggling, he bounded ahead to the door. “Miss me?” she asked, and the dog swept the back porch with his tail. She petted his head. “Yeah, me too.”

  Inside, she tossed the mail and camera on the kitchen table, refilled Sassafras’s water bowl and poured herself a tall glass of iced tea. Her headache subsided a little, and she glanced out the window to the Cascade Mountains. The craggy peak of Mount Prosperity, whereon Ridge Resort had been built years before, jutted jaggedly against the blue sky. She wondered if Gavin was there now. Did he live at the resort? Was he planning to stay after it opened? Or would he, once his ankle had healed, resume his downhill racing career?

  “What does it matter?” she asked herself, her headache returning to pound full force.

  Tomorrow she’d get all her answers and more. Tomorrow she’d meet Gavin again. And what in the world could she possibly say to him?

  * * *

  The next morning, as shafts of early sunlight pierced through thick stands of pine, Melanie drove up the series of switchbacks to the ski resort.

  A few clouds drifted around the craggy upper slopes of Mount Prosperity, but otherwise the sky was clear, the air crisp with the fading of summer.

  Located just below the timberline, Ridge Lodge, a rambling cedar and stone resort that had been built a few years before the Great Depression, rose four stories in some places, with steep gables and dormers. The building had been remodeled several times but still held an early-twentieth-century charm that blended into the cathedral-like mountain
s of the central Oregon Cascades.

  Melanie had always loved the lodge. Its sloped roofs, massive fireplaces and weathered exterior appealed to her as much today as it had when she was a child. She’d lived in Taylor’s Crossing most of her life, except for the six years she’d been married to Neil and resided in Seattle. Ridge Lodge had been an important part of her youth—a special part that had included Gavin.

  As she parked her battered old Volkswagen in the empty lot, her pulse fairly leaped, her skin was covered in goose bumps. The thought of seeing Gavin again brought sweat to her palms.

  “Don’t be a fool,” she berated herself, climbing out of the car and grabbing her heavy camera bag. He’s long forgotten you. Shading her eyes, she looked over the pockmarked parking lot and noted that Jan’s sports car wasn’t in sight. “Terrific.”

  She started up the path, noticing the bulldozers and snowplows standing like silent sentinels near huge sheds. Behind the lodge, ski lifts—black chairs strung together with cables—marched up the bare mountainside.

  “It’s now or never,” she told herself. Keyed up inside, her senses all too aware, Melanie swallowed back any lingering fear of coming face-to-face with Gavin.

  She pounded on the front doors, and they creaked open against her fist. “Hello?” she called into the darkened interior.

  No one answered.

  Hiking her bag higher, she squared her shoulders and strode inside. The main desk was empty, the lodge still, almost creepy. “Hello?” she yelled again, and her voice echoed to the rafters high overhead. Summoning all her courage, she said, “Gavin?”

  The sound of his name, from her own voice, seemed strange. Her nerves, already strung tight, stretched to the breaking point. Where was Jan?

  Maybe Gavin had changed his mind. Or, more likely, maybe Rich Johanson had spoken out of turn. Probably Gavin wasn’t even here. Disgusted, she turned, thinking she’d wait for Jan outside, then stopped, her breath catching in her throat.

  Blocking the doorway, crutches wedged under his arms, eyes hidden behind mirrored aviator glasses, Gavin Doel glared at her.