by Marie Force
“We can stop on the way back down.”
The reminder that they had to come back down didn’t do much for her nerves. She had visions of the out-of-control sled scene in Christmas Vacation.
“Have you ever seen Christmas Vacation?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Who’s in it?”
How did he not know that? “Chevy Chase.”
“Oh yeah, I saw that. Years ago.”
“You know that scene where he greases up the sled and flies down the hill?”
Laughing, Will said, “That’s not going to be us on the way back down. Four-wheel drive, baby.”
“How much farther is it?”
“Another mile.”
She’d have a nervous breakdown well before then. “I should’ve stayed in the office where it’s safe.”
“And miss all this fun?”
“Your idea of fun and mine are obviously very different.”
“Tell me about your idea of fun.”
What to say, what to say … She couldn’t exactly tell him that getting down and dirty with a mountain man sounded kinda fun at the moment. That thought nearly made her giggle, so she forced her thoughts toward more pedestrian activities. “I like to work out and go to the theater. I meet up with my friends and go dancing and clubbing. That can be fun, unless they’re super crowded. I don’t like crowds.”
“Ah! Finally something we have in common. What else?”
“I like to go shopping.”
“Somehow I suspected that.”
“The suede boots were probably a giveaway.”
“Theater, huh?”
“I love the theater. Have you ever been to a professional production?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“I should take you sometime. You’d love it.”
“Um, I doubt that, but if you want to take me, I wouldn’t say no.”
“You wouldn’t? Really?”
“You’re stepping outside your comfort zone in the great white north. It’s only fair that I return the favor at some point.”
“Have you ever been to New York City?”
“Nope.”
“Oh my God! You have to come! I’d show you all my favorite places and take you to the top of the Empire State Building and everything.”
“I’ve never had any desire to see New York until recently.”
She smiled at the implication behind his sweet words. She was still smiling when he finally reached the top of what seemed like an endless hill and pulled the truck to a stop outside an A-frame house. Smoke curled appealingly from the chimney as Will tooted the horn to let his brother know he had company.
Cameron reluctantly released his hand so they could get out of the truck. She hoped he’d hold her hand on the way back down, too. The combined scents of cold air, pine and woodsmoke greeted her. She couldn’t believe how much colder it was up here than it had been in town and was doubly grateful for the warmer coat Will had given her.
Behind the house was another wooden structure with a sign that read ABBOTT FAMILY SUGARHOUSE to the right of the door. The biggest woodpile Cameron had ever seen sat next to the sugarhouse. Behind the buildings, the incline stretched upward into a forest as far as she could see. Snaking through the trees was an intricate maze of pipes and tubes and other equipment.
With her curiosity sparked, she followed Will into the sugarhouse where they found Colton sitting at a desk with two yellow labs at his feet. A wood stove heated a cramped space that included shelves full of maple syrup, maple candy and other products for sale along with bins and barrels and other equipment.
Did people actually come all the way up here to buy syrup they could get at any roadside store in the state? That was one of many questions that filled her mind as she took in the rustic setting.
“What brings you up here?” Colton asked his brother. His coloring was similar to Will’s, but his hair was much longer and he wore a thick beard that reminded her of Mr. Edwards from Little House on the Prairie.
“Checking on you and the sugaring. And I wanted you to meet Cameron Murphy, who is here from New York to build a website for the store. Cameron, my brother Colton and his dogs, Sarah and Elmer, named for our grandparents.”
They looked just like his dogs and his dad’s and they got up to greet Will with kisses. He squatted to give them as much attention as he gave his own dogs.
Colton stood and extended a hand. “You’re the girl who hit Fred, right?”
Cameron shook his hand. “How in the heck did you hear about that all the way up here?”
“I have my sources,” he said with a twinkle in his eyes, which were the same golden-brown shade as Will’s. He was big and rugged and muscular, or at least she thought he was. The bulky coat and coveralls he wore made it hard to be certain. While he had a certain appeal to him, she quickly decided he was no match for his stunningly sexy older brother, at least to her. “Heard you got the worst end of it.”
She took off her sunglasses and propped them on her head, earning a wince from Colton.
“Ouch.”
“It’s been quite an introduction to Butler.”
“I’d imagine so. Never heard of a girl named Cameron before.”
Cameron glanced at Will, remembering the night they met. Was that really only two days ago?
“He’s never heard of Cameron what’s-her-name either,” Will assured her.
“Diaz,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Cameron Diaz.”
“Who?” Colton asked.
“Honestly,” Cameron said. “You two are missing out. Most guys find her quite hot.”
“We’ll have to take your word for it,” Will said with a wink.
“I hope my family is being nice to you and not putting you in the middle of Abbott warfare over the website,” Colton said. He was amazingly well informed for living in the middle of freaking nowhere.
“We’ve worked that out,” Will said, somewhat abruptly.
Was it her imagination or did he step a little closer to her, possibly letting his brother know that he’d already staked his claim? You’re being ridiculous, she thought. Staked his claim. She bit back the urge to snort at the foolishness of it all.
“Cameron is curious about the sugaring facility and how it works. Would you mind showing her around?”
“I’d love to.” Colton extended a hand to direct her to the adjoining room.
Cameron walked in ahead of the brothers, gasping at the frigid temperature inside. It was colder in there than it was outside, and that was saying something.
“I’m not boiling today,” Colton said. “Too cold. We need warmer days and cold nights for ideal conditions. Should be better later in the week.”
“Anything is better than last year,” Will said. “We had a heat wave this time last year. It was seventy degrees for five straight days.”
“Screwed us big-time,” Colton added. “Our yield was down by half.”
“Tell me everything. I want to know all about how it works.”
“She’s a recent convert to the wonders of Vermont maple syrup,” Will told his brother. “As of this morning.”
“I’ve already admitted to being wrong about there being no difference between yours and what the grocery store offers. Do we need to keep rehashing that?”
Colton laughed. “I like her, bro.”
“So do I,” Will said pointedly.
“Anyway …” Cameron’s face heated at the territorial way Will was acting. She’d never admit to finding his possessiveness wildly arousing because that kind of he-man thing went against everything she believed in as a modern woman. Or so she’d thought until she met him. “What’s the average yield for a good year?” she asked, making an effort to focus on business.
“About five thousand gallons.”
“Holy cow. That’s a lot of syrup. How many trees do you use for that?”
“About twenty-five thousand trees on two hundred acres. Most of the trees have one tap, but some
of the bigger ones have two. The sap comes downhill from the trees through all the tubing you saw outside and eventually it lands in here after we put it through a process to get the water out.” He pointed to two deep stainless steel bins that were about twelve feet long and four feet wide. “We boil here. Open that door behind you.”
Cameron turned to open the rough-hewn wooden door to find a room full of wood.
“Did you see the huge woodpile outside?” When she nodded, he continued. “This is the other side of the pile. I have a bunch of kids who live on the mountain who come over after school. Their job is to feed the fire when we’re boiling.”
“In other words, they get paid to play with fire,” Will said dryly, making Cameron and Colton laugh.
“How much wood do you go through in an average season?” Cameron asked.
“About forty cords.”
“I don’t know much about cords and whatnot, but I assume that’s a lot.”
“It’s a shitload,” Colton said with a grin. “In the off-season, I spend a lot of my time splitting and stacking and getting ready to boil.”
“I’d love to come up sometime and watch the boiling.”
“You’re welcome anytime,” he said with a sweet smile. “Want to see the house so you get the full picture of life in the wilderness?”
“That’d be great, but I don’t want to impose.”
“It’s no imposition. I enjoy the company.”
“Don’t you ever get lonely up here all by yourself?” Colton had put her immediately at ease, so she felt comfortable asking.
Will grunted out what might’ve been a cough or a laugh behind her.
Cameron looked over her shoulder and saw that he seemed amused and maybe a bit annoyed, too. What was that about?
“Not too often,” Colton said as he led her back into the retail space. “I have my dogs, and people come up just about every day to check out the place and buy some syrup right from the source.” He pulled a jug off a shelf and handed it to her. “A souvenir of your first visit. Oh, and take some of this, too.” He gave her a box of white candies shaped like maple leaves in a green box with a gold foil liner. “A fresh batch.”
“Thank you so much.” She was going to need another bag for all her Vermont treasures. Her phone chimed with a text. “Really? There’s reception up here in the middle of nowhere but not in town?”
“You’re probably getting a signal from St. Johnsbury,” Colton said. “The mountain blocks it in town.”
“So if I want to use my cell phone, I should come up here?”
“Anytime you want,” he said suggestively, waggling his brows for emphasis.
Cameron laughed while Will glowered at his brother.
“I’m going to check this really quick while I can.”
“By all means,” Colton said.
Will dragged him off to a corner while she read the series of texts from Troy:
Are you still alive up there? Heard about the moose and the shiners …
Need me to come get you?
Send smoke signals or some such thing to let me know you’re okay.
Smiling, she wrote back: I’m fine and so is the moose. The car? Not so much. We got the job. Will be here awhile, and will call from a landline soon.
He fired right back:
What is this landline you speak of?
Laughing, she typed, Modern invention, used only in Vermont.
Take care. Love ya.
Love you, too.
When she rejoined the Abbotts, Will had Colton in a headlock. The younger brother was fighting back, and they were getting close to a big display of syrup.
“Um, boys, stand down,” Cameron said.
Will released him abruptly, and Colton straightened, his face red from exertion as a smile lit up his face. They looked like guilty little boys who’d gotten caught wrestling by their mother.
“Anyway,” Colton said, picking the conversation right up, “in response to your earlier question about being lonely up here, I also get down to town at least once a week.” They crossed the frozen yard to the back porch of his home with the dogs trotting along with them. “Our grandfather built this place using trees from the property, and he and our grandmother lived up here for the first ten years they were married. We still have no electric, no running water, no modern anything.”
“How do you run a business with no modern anything?” Cameron asked, trying to fathom how that was possible.
Inside, they stomped the snow off their boots and followed him from the mudroom. The cozy space was really one big room that consisted of a living room, kitchen, office area, sofa and a bed in the far corner. Two plaid dog beds were arranged in front of the woodstove. It wasn’t all that different from Will’s place, and yet Will’s seemed positively luxurious in comparison.
Colton went to the desk and brought a book to show her. “This is how I run the business. The old-fashioned way.” On a table made of the same rough-hewn planks that had formed the walls of the house, he opened the big book to show her ledgers and records, all written in longhand.
“This is amazing,” Cameron said as she flipped through years of hand-drawn charts and graphs and drawings and columns of numbers.
“Hunter keeps far more official records in the office, but these are the ones I rely on. If you look in the back, you’ll see our yield records for the last sixty-five years, since the year my grandfather first bought the place.”
“His parents already owned the store, so he had a built-in way to sell the syrup,” Will said. “It took off from there.”
“During the Depression,” Colton added, “the store became a clearinghouse for hard-to-find things like sugar and flour. People brought what they could afford to share, and in exchange they could get things they needed. From what we’ve always heard, the store kept the town alive during the war years.”
“Has a member of your family always run the sugaring facility?”
“For the most part,” Colton said. “Two of our uncles did it for a lot of years. I’ve been up here for eleven years now, and I can’t imagine any other kind of life.”
“I can’t wait to incorporate all of this into the website. I’d love to scan some of your ledgers and use the images as backdrops on the pages about the sugaring facility.”
“My ledgers are your ledgers, whenever you need them,” Colton said.
“I’m sure we’ll work closely on the sugaring section,” Cameron said, her face heating when she realized he was flirting with her, ever so subtly, and that she might be encouraging him because it was clearly bugging Will.
“I’ll look forward to that.”
“We should go,” Will said abruptly. “We still need to stop at Hannah’s, and I’ve got work to do in the office.”
Cameron felt bad for keeping Will from work with all her questions about the sugaring facility. “This was great, Colton. Thanks so much for showing me your home and your business.” She extended a hand to him.
“Definitely a pleasure.” He bent gallantly to place a kiss on the back of her hand. “Hope to see you again soon.”
“You’ll see her at Mom’s on Sunday.”
“And Sunday dinner with the Abbotts gets more interesting.”
“Knock it off, Colton,” Will said in a sinister tone she wouldn’t have thought him capable of. Surprise, surprise.
Colton only laughed at his brother, which seemed to further infuriate Will.
Cameron hoped he wasn’t mad at her, too.
Colton walked them out to the truck, where Will held the door for her and gave it a harder-than-usual slam when she was settled in the cab.
In the side-view mirror, she saw him exchange a few heated words with Colton that made Colton laugh again. Judging by the slam of the driver’s door and the stormy expression on Will’s face, he hadn’t appreciated his brother laughing at whatever he’d said to him.
He turned the truck around and sent a tail of snow flying behind them that just missed Colto
n.
“What is the matter?” Cameron asked as he took the first turn that curved down the winding hill.
“Nothing.”
His gruff demeanor was reminiscent of the night they met. “Clearly something is bugging you. I wish you’d just tell me—”
The truck fishtailed violently as he slammed on the brakes, threw off his seat belt and reached for her.
Cameron barely had time to register her surprise before he was kissing her. And Oh. My. God. The man could kiss. She all but melted into him as he cupped her face with one hand and fisted her hair with the other, his lips moving over hers, softly yet insistently.
When the shock wore off, she realized he was waiting for her to participate before he took it any further. Wanting to encourage him, she put her arms around his neck and dabbed her tongue along his lower lip.
He took the hint and growled as he gave her his tongue in teasing increments that made her needy for more. As he shifted closer to her, the truck lurched forward, sliding on the ice.
“Shit,” he said, as he broke free from her to control the truck’s slide toward the guardrail that was the only thing between them and a plunge into the ravine far below.
CHAPTER 10
Don’t let your mouth write checks that your rear end can’t cash.
—The gospel according to Elmer Stillman
Cameron tried to remain calm, but between the ice and the guardrail and that incendiary kiss, she was anything but calm.
After what seemed like an interminable slide, they landed with a hard smack against the guardrail.
Cameron had never been so grateful for a piece of metal in her life. She took a quick look out her window and just as quickly looked away when her stomach turned at the view of the sheer drop inches to her right.
“At least you’ll never forget our first kiss,” Will said cheerfully, as if it was no big deal to have nearly slid off the road.
“I think it’s safe to say I would’ve remembered it without the near-death experience thrown in.”