by Mara Jacobs
If it was easy, it wouldn't be worth it.
Deni Casparich has been obsessed with the story of the Brockway Mountain Hermit since she was a kid. Little did she know he was her hottie of a boss.
Sawyer Beck is not the legendary hermit, but having spent the last ten years of his life in near seclusion, he might as well be. Pulled back into real life, Sawyer begins working together with Deni on his engineering firm's big new project. Who knew protractors and slide rules could be so sexy?!
But Sawyer's haunted past and Deni's shaky present are putting up obstacles at every turn. Can these two engineers build a foundation on more than just attraction and lust?
Is fighting for love...Worth The Effort?
Published by Mara Jacobs
Copyright 2013 Mara Jacobs
Cover design by Kim Killion
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from the author at [email protected]. This book is a work of fiction. The characters, events, and places portrayed in this book are products of the author’s imagination and are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
For more information on the author and Mara’s works, please see www.marajacobs.com
ISBN: 978-0-9852586-7-2
For Colleen
Prologue
Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them.
~ James A. Michener
Twenty years ago
“Come here, Deni, I want to show you something,” Denise Casparich’s father, Barry, said to her.
Eight-year-old Deni walked across the dirt road at the top of Brockway Mountain to the side of the hill where her father stood.
“What is it?” she asked as she came to stand beside him. He slipped an arm around her shoulders, and she leaned into his hip, a practiced movement between them.
“When I was at Tech, we’d come here in the spring, after the snow had melted and the road up here was open. And if it was a clear day, like today, you could see Isle Royale in the distance.” He knelt down to Deni’s level and stuck out his arm, pointing in the direction of Lake Superior. “There. Can you see it?”
Deni wasn’t sure that she did. It all seemed like a huge mass of water to her, with the sky and lake meeting at some indiscernible point. But she nodded to her father and squinted a little harder.
Her father chuckled, always able to read her. “It’s out there. But it is kind of fuzzy.” He stood back up, put his hands on his hips, and breathed in deeply as he surveyed the view. “Freshest air in the world.”
Deni didn’t think the air was that much fresher than back home in Farmington Hills, but again she nodded her agreement. She’d endured the ten-hour drive in the back seat between her older brothers—who’d fought the entire time—with anticipation because her father was so excited to visit his “always mother.” Or whatever it was that he kept calling the place he went to college.
But walking around campus looking at buildings was not her idea of a summer vacation. Her best friend Stephie was going to Cedar Point. She was probably riding on their newest roller coaster at this very minute.
Deni turned in a circle, taking in the view from the top of Brockway Mountain. They’d had to drive another hour and a half past the university to get there. It was pretty and all, and the curvy drive up was kind of cool, but it really wasn’t much of a mountain. Certainly not compared to those of Colorado, where they’d gone to ski last Christmas.
“Some said you could see all the way to Canada, but I never did.” Her father was going on again about the beauty of the place. And because she loved her father so fiercely, Deni stood by his side and continued to stare off into the distance.
She could hear her brothers goofing off on the other side of the large, circular lookout. Maybe they’d take their games too far and fall off the side of the mountain and she’d at least have the backseat to herself for the interminable ride home.
She didn’t even need to look behind her to know her mother was still in the car, flipping through a magazine. Content to let her husband walk down memory lane but not desiring to take the walk with him.
“Boys, not too close to the edge now,” her father said without even turning around to see what the cretins were doing. He didn’t need to; he always had an innate sense of what her brothers—Caleb, twelve, and Josh, ten—were getting into.
“We’re not,” the boys called out together. Deni could hear the rustling of them obeying their father and presumably moving closer to safety.
So, it was to be a crowded drive home after all.
“But my favorite part of this trip was always trying to find the hermit.”
Deni perked up at that. “What? What hermit?”
“Do you know what a hermit is?” Her father seemed surprised.
“Somebody who lives by himself. Away from everybody else.” She was sure about that much, just a little hazy on the reasoning. “Because they did something bad?”
“Not necessarily. In fact, most of the time someone becomes a hermit because he wants to. Because he wants to be left alone.” There was a sort of wistfulness in his voice at this, and Deni realized she wasn’t the only one who might have wished for a brother-free car.
“And one lives here?” she asked, trying to get him back to the good stuff.
“That’s the legend, anyway. The Brockway Mountain Hermit. They said he lived on this side, and that if you looked really hard you could see his hut. That he’d built it so wisely most people could never see it.”
A thousand questions rushed through Deni’s mind. How did he eat? Was there a shower in his hut? Did he have cable?
But most importantly: “Did you ever see him?”
Her father shook his head. “No. I don’t think anyone ever has. Maybe the people who live in Copper Harbor, but they don’t talk about him. I did think that I saw the hut once. I was standing in this very spot.”
“Where? Where?” she cried, pulling on the leg of his khaki shorts.
He knelt down again, one knee sinking into the lush grass. “It was a lot of years ago, and we were all pretty hung—we were really tired.” His eyes scanned the side of the mountain below them. (It had regained mountain status in Deni’s eyes with the hermit announcement!)
“It seems to me it was about two hundred yards down and about fifty yards west from this spot. I remember because of the telescopes.” He pointed to the two machines next to them and started fumbling in his pockets for coins, which he fed into one of the machines.
Deni scrambled up onto the cement slab and stood on her tiptoes to be able to see into the viewfinder. It reminded her of the thing that they looked into on submarines in movies she’d seen. Except there was no scope coming from the top of it. Kind of like her View-Master on a big metal pole.
“Can you reach?” her father asked, and she nodded. He moved the machine in the direction he’d mentioned and stepped back, moving to her side. “Okay. Take a good look, and see if you can find the hermit’s hut.” There was humor in his voice. The kind of tone that told her he was most likely teasing her. She chose to ignore it and searched through the trees and landscape of the mountain below her looking for signs. When her viewing time on the machine ran out, she asked for another quarter. And another. She asked her father to reset the viewer to the or
iginal spot he’d remembered. Her little hands fiercely clutched the sides of the view magnifier.
“Deni, honey, it’s time to leave,” her father said sometime later.
“Not yet,” she said, afraid to take her eyes from the machine. As if in the split second it would take to look back at her father to plead for more time, she’d miss the movement that would alert her to the hermit leaving his hut. The view had grown much darker than when she’d started looking, and it was then she realized she needed to use the bathroom.
Did the hermit have a toilet?
Thoughts of a bucket in the corner of the hut—
Wait. What was that? She moved closer to the machine, her nose pressed against the warm metal. Was that it? Could that be a roof, cleverly disguised to look like a bunch of fallen trees? Perhaps even a log cabin, not a hut at all?
She heard her mother approaching with an exasperated “Really, Barry, how long are you going to let her stare out of that thing? I can only imagine how many germs she’s picking up.”
Deni knew that tone of voice. Her time was up no matter how much interference her father was willing to run for her. And, given that he hadn’t piped up yet, Deni supposed he wasn’t going to run any this time.
She took one last squint, now seeing how easily the hermit could have made the fallen brush into a covering for his home. She was still not sure if it was a small cabin or a hut, so she decided to just go with “home.” The brilliance of it astounded her; the hermit used his natural surroundings and used it to hide his home from everyone.
Everyone but her.
“I found it, Daddy,” she said as she stepped back off the cement and into the grass.
“Did you?” her father said. There was that spark in his voice again, and she knew he was just humoring her. It didn’t matter. She knew she’d seen the architectural masterpiece that was the hermit’s hut.
Her mother was upon them now. Her brothers were coming out of the gift shop with suckers in their mouths.
Darn, had she missed out on candy?
“Here, baby,” her mother said, holding out a sucker for her. She quickly took the treat, unwrapped it, and stuck it in her mouth. Cathy Casparich herded her daughter and husband toward the car and the rest of the family—a not-uncommon task.
Deni ran a few steps ahead, but not so far that she couldn’t hear her parents speaking softly behind her.
“What on earth were you two looking at for so long? I mean, yes, it’s pretty and all, but…”
“Oh, nothing. Just trying to see Canada.”
“And did you?”
Deni turned around at this. Her father had been watching her, and when she looked at him he winked. “Oh, we found what we were looking for, all right.”
Deni turned back around and ran for the car, not even minding having to squeeze in between her stupid brothers.
The ride down the mountain was filled with twists and curves. Deni kept expecting to see the hermit in the middle of the road with a goat or something under his arm with every curve they turned.
At home she had a lot of storybooks, most of them vividly illustrated with lots of pictures. But the one she liked best had only a simple line drawing at the beginning of each chapter. Her father would read to her from that one on the nights when he would tuck her in.
There was one story in it, “Rumplestiltskin,” that Deni thought of now. In one of the drawings, Rumplestiltskin was dancing as the maiden sat at the spinning wheel. He was small, scrawny really, with a scraggly beard and madness in his eyes.
That image was what Deni saw when she thought about the Brockway Mountain Hermit.
They made their way into Copper Harbor, stopping at an old-fashioned general store (more candy!) and then driving on to Fort Wilkins, which the boys loved. Caleb was almost kicked out for climbing on the cannon when their parents weren’t looking.
And it was all neat and kind of cool. But the memory Deni took away from that particular family trip—which would turn out to be their last as a complete family—was that of a little, bearded man dancing around his hidden hut.
Chapter One
Depression is the inability to construct a future.
~ Rollo May
Deni turned on the light box and sat down at her kitchen table. Never much of a breakfast person, she now consumed a bowl of oatmeal each morning as she awaited the light therapy’s magic.
At first, she’d tried getting a jumpstart on the day’s emails with her laptop on the table, but it tended to block most of the light. Angling the light box didn’t work because while you weren’t supposed to look straight at it, you were supposed to face it.
And Deni knew if it had gotten this bad—bad enough to break down and order the light box—then she might as well go by the book with the treatment.
Treatment. God, she hated that word. Therapy was just as bad. Although she did enjoy her sessions with her therapist, Alison.
She just hated that she needed them.
But, after two weeks of the daily half-hour light therapy sessions, she was beginning to feel a change, albeit a slight one.
At least she didn’t spend half her workday wishing she were home in bed with the comforter wrapped tightly around her. Now it was only like a quarter of the day.
Progress.
She slowly ate her oatmeal while looking at—but not at—the special box. It kind of reminded her of the Lite-Brite she’d had as a kid, only it was completely white, and you couldn’t make cool designs on it.
After she finished the oatmeal, she still had fifteen minutes left, so she flipped through yesterday’s Copper Ingot—the small area’s daily newspaper—for any story she might have missed last night.
With ten minutes left, she pulled her laptop over and positioned it as best she could while still soaking in the magic rays. She pulled up her personal email account first, prepared for at least one message from her mother.
There were three.
Deni had put her foot down with her mother two weeks ago—about the same time she broke down and ordered the light box—about calling so frequently.
Her mother had seemed to take the edict well—but after a day, the emails had started. Thank God the woman didn’t know how to text.
Sighing, Deni prepared to open her mother’s emails, expecting to find links to articles about the newest wonder vitamin or online dating site. Perhaps today there would be a link to an engineering position in Detroit, closer to her hometown of Farmington Hills.
But another email caught her eye—one from her boss and owner of the firm, Andy Summers.
Odd. She didn’t think she’d ever received an email from Andy to her personal account. Deni wasn’t even sure how Andy knew this email address. Oh right, it would have been on her résumé. But that was nearly seven years ago. Really odd.
The subject line read “If you check your email before you come to work—READ THIS.” The message asked that everyone report right to the conference room at eight and if they’d planned to work at home or be on a site to come in for a short meeting instead.
Really, really odd.
Summers and Beck was a small engineering firm. Some might even call it a boutique shop, though all the men cringed at that term.
And it was all men, except for Deni and Sue Haapala, their office administrator. Sue basically had the task of corralling the minds of engineers and making the day-to-day business work.
Sue—a mother to six, grandmother to nine—ran the office well, allowing the engineers to do their thing while still keeping them focused.
It was a pretty laid-back place to work. The staff was allowed to work from home on any two days of the week if they wanted. Except Mondays, when they had their all-staff status meetings that took up most of the morning.
So why was Andy calling another meeting two days later?
Deni called up her work email and saw the same message from Andy. He’d done it as a blind CC, so Deni wasn’t sure if everyone got it in both their work and perso
nal accounts.
Oh God, it wasn’t just to her, was it?
There was absolutely no reason for Deni to think she was getting “called into the boss’ office,” but a shiver of panic ran through her body. She started to take deep breaths as she thought it through with the analytical part of her mind that made her an asset to Summers and Beck. And that was just exactly the phrase she’d use too, if she were in some kind of trouble!
But no. Andy would have put a personal salutation on an email meant just for her. And there’d be no need to do a blind CC. Right? She pushed the laptop away and turned her face fully to the light box, as if the glow would ease her sudden anxiousness.
And another thing—Andy knew she never worked from home, so there would be no reason to put that in there.
Deni would have loved to work from home on these cold mornings. To stay in her warm fleece pajamas and wool socks, sipping hot chocolate all day as she sat at the computer in her home office—the unused third bedroom.
But she knew that staying home, not leaving home, could be dangerous to her at this point. She needed to take a shower, get dressed, drive to the office, greet Sue and her other coworkers and interact with humans face to face throughout the day.
Because if she didn’t, it would surely soon get to a point where she couldn’t.
Her mother’s emails left unopened, Deni put her laptop in her messenger bag, turned the light box out, grabbed her keys, and started off to work, curiosity and still some anxiety coursing through her.
Somewhere in the back of her brain, she acknowledged that she liked the rush of emotions.
At least it was better than the numbness she’d been feeling.
“I see everybody checks their emails in the morning. That’s good to know,” Andy said to the group when they’d all assembled in the conference room at eight. The coffee was brewing, and there were packages of Danish and Finnish nissu from Pat’s IGA on the table.