by Cindy Gerard
“And you,” she sputtered to her image in the mirror, “you wouldn’t be irresistible to a starving bear.”
Let alone to a man like Colin Slater.
She felt, suddenly, very sexless and very much like a country bumpkin in her faded old jeans, a pink tank top that had seen better days and grubby tennies. In the next instant, however, she felt defensive. She had nothing to apologize for. She worked hard and she was proud of it. Just because she didn’t have much time for feminine fluffing didn’t make her less of a woman. Not that she wanted Slater to think of her as one.
What then, a rutabaga? she wondered.
Losing patience with herself, she tugged her braid free and jumped into her second shower of the day. Fifteen minutes later she’d rebraided her hair, slipped into a pair of navy shorts and a white T-shirt, applied eye makeup and washed it off.
“You don’t wear makeup any other day,” she mumbled under her breath as she jogged down the stairs to the first floor. “You’ve got no reason to start now.”
Yet when she opened the screen door and stepped out onto the verandah, she had sharp and immediate second thoughts.
Colin Slater was waiting for her there. Not sitting, but, as she’d suspected, standing at the rail. Hands shoved deep into his pockets, he shifted from one foot to the other with an unconscious sort of restlessness as he studied the view.
Even unsettled, the man was gorgeous. He couldn’t help it, she conceded, as she watched his profile in daylight made soft by the sun’s slow descent behind the trees. His features were sharp and clean; his hair, beautifully styled, enhanced them.
Some women might consider him irresistible. Not her, of course. But some women. Women who didn’t liken themselves to rutabagas. Model types, she suspected. Savvy, stylish socialites with buckets of money, expensive hair and soft skin. None of which she had.
She didn’t much like this overkill of awareness she felt around him—or that once again she was so conscious of her lack of sophistication. She didn’t like it, but she did know what to do about it. Ignore it. Like a bad cough when the cold ran its course, it would go away. Just like Colin Slater would go away at the end of his two-week exile.
In the meantime she’d decided to take what he’d told her at face value. He didn’t have any interest in the hotel. Since that had been the biggest source of her concern, she was determined to relax around him.
For all of his wealth, he seemed like a nice man. He wasn’t pompous, and when he let himself relax a little, was fairly quick with a smile. He’d also gained major points when he’d faced off with Geezer and given the crusty old soul his due. All things considered, if she could get past this attraction—which should be easy, since she wasn’t sixteen anymore—they ought to get along just fine for the next fourteen days.
Resolved to make his experience at Crimson Falls enjoyable, she joined him by the rail. Though he had to have heard her open and close the door behind him, his attention remained focused on the scene beyond the verandah. She understood his absorption. It was a picture she never tired of. In a companionable silence, they took it in together.
The sloping front lawn of the hotel ran the length of two city blocks. A winding lane cut through the grass and ended where water met shore. Legend Lake lay in all its shimmering glory, shining like silver-blue foil, the surface as placid as the windless evening.
Beyond the far shore, half a mile to the east, iron-rich bluffs rose five hundred feet above the evergreen and birch forest. At the high point, a ribbon of crimson-streaked silver cascaded over the cliffs, spilling from the Minnesota waters of Legend Lake into the boundary waters of Canada and Lake of the Woods.
“It’s something, isn’t it?” she said, never taking her eyes from the falls.
He nodded in silent agreement. “What makes the water look red?”
“It depends on what story you want to believe.”
He cocked his head, inviting her to tell all.
“If you want to go with the legend, the rock behind the falls is streaked with the blood of those who died trying their luck at running them. Supposedly the Chippewa used to try to ride the falls in their canoes. Later the loggers tried to go over them, too, in their big wooden boats. None succeeded. All died and their blood stains the rock as testimony to their bravery. However,” she paused, recognizing his doubtful look. “if you want to spoil the illusion, you’ll prefer the scientific explanation.
“Scientific explanation, it is,” she said with a smile. “It’s the iron in the rock. While it’s unusual to find it this far north in the state, a particularly rich vein runs the length of the cliffs behind the waterfall. When the water spills over, and the sun hits it just right, it takes on a crimson hue.”
He nodded, satisfied with her explanation. “It’s very striking.”
“Yes, it is,” she agreed softly. “The first time I saw it, I thought it was magical.”
“And when was that?”
She smiled, remembering. “I was all of ten years old. My dad was an avid fisherman. Every year we’d head north from the Twin Cities and spend a week or two at a resort somewhere in the boundary waters.”
“Just you and your father?”
Again, she smiled. “Actually, yes. Mom was a city girl. She didn’t care for the mosquitoes or the rustic accommodations most resorts offered. And I was the quintessential tomboy. I loved it. The fishing, the hiking, roughing it. When dad found Crimson Falls, we both fell in love. Not just with the hotel, but the land and the lake. And, of course, the falls. After we found this place, we came back here every year.”
She felt his body shift beside hers then, and knew he was watching her now instead of the landscape.
“How did you come to buy it?”
“Well, that’s another story.” She tilted her head and offered him an out. “You sure you want to hear it? It’s even more boring than the first one.”
He settled a hip on the verandah railing and made himself comfortable. His look relayed that she had his undivided attention—and that he had absolutely nothing else to do, anyway, but listen to her talk.
Feeling easy with him in a way she’d never imagined possible, she decided that nothing would be hurt with the telling. “The short of it is, after Casey’s father and I divorced, I decided I needed a change of pace. I’d always lived in the city—St. Paul, specifically—and I’d never forgotten about Crimson Falls. I brought Casey up here for a weekend getaway and found out it was for sale.” She smiled and shrugged. “That’s all it took. It was like it was preordained that I buy it, and since I’ve never been one to spit in the eye of fate, I quit my job—I was going nowhere fast there, anyway—took my share of the property settlement and made a down payment. That was six years ago.”
“Six tough years ago,” he surmised, reading more into her words than she’d wanted him to.
Unfortunately he was also accurate. “Yes,” she conceded. “In some ways it’s been tough. I suppose it always will be.”
“Then what is it that keeps you here?”
His question was heavy with more than curiosity. There was wonder there and a wanting to understand something he really couldn’t fathom. She decided to accommodate him, although she suspected that a man as high-profile and intense as he was would never fully comprehend her reasons.
“The same thing that brought me. And more. It’s the hotel. The land. The people.” She shrugged. “It’s a way of life I value and can’t experience anywhere else.”
He was quiet for a long moment. “And what is it about the life...specifically...that you value? I see isolation. Hard work. Little return for your efforts. You’re smiling. Why?”
“It just amuses me, I guess—how the human race can have such vastly different perceptions of the same set of circumstances.” She walked to the steps, hugged an arm around a porch column and leaned against it. “You see this as hard work and little reward. I see it as honest work, and if I got no other reward than waking up to this sight each morning and
going to bed with it each night, I would consider myself well compensated.”
Again another long, appraising silence, as he crossed his arms over his chest and averted his gaze toward the bay. “It’s so-o-o quiet.”
“You make it sound so-o-o ominous.” She smiled again. “It’s a little unsettling at first, but you get used to it. And then you get to love it.”
He gave her a doubtful look.
She laughed. “Come on,” she said, knowing the only way he would be convinced was if he wanted to be. “I can try to convert you to my way of thinking all night, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. Let’s take that tour.”
The tour consisted of a walk around the hotel. She pointed out the fresh paint on the shiplap siding. Colin silently noticed the crumbling foundation. She extolled the virtues of the widow’s walk topping the two-story structure. He noted, with a frown, the deterioration of the shingles and the rusted gutters.
Two things he could appreciate, however, were the rough, verdant beauty of the land and Scarlett’s green thumb. Everywhere they turned she’d planted flowers, somehow making them grow among the rock and moss and pine—begonias, geraniums, glads, snapdragons. Patchworks of flowerbeds peppered the grounds with color and fragrance; baskets hung from the verandah’s eaves; filled vases decorated the dining room tables.
Flowers weren’t her only vice, as she referred to them. Her herb garden was obviously a great source of pride, as was the vegetable garden surrounded by the same single-strand wire fencing that was outside the kitchen door. He’d been curious about it since he’d spotted it from her kitchen earlier but had been distracted before he could ask.
When they got to the back of the hotel where the kitchen extended from the main body of the building, he couldn’t contain his curiosity any longer.
“What’s that fence about?” He nodded toward the single strand of thin wire.
“Don’t touch it,” she warned when he stepped in for a closer inspection. “It’s hot.”
“Hot? As in electric?”
She nodded. “We’ve had a bear problem this summer.”
“Bear? As in...bear?”
She chuckled. “Yes. As in bear. Black bear. They’re thick as thieves up here. And they’re pilfering little beggars. Especially this summer. We had a fairly dry spring, so the wild blueberry crop’s a little sparse. Once a week or so, a crew of them follow their noses to the kitchen and try to get inside to satisfy their sweet tooth.”
“You’re not serious.”
“’Fraid so. A couple of summers ago a sow and her cubs broke through the screen door, ate five fruit pies I’d just baked and trashed the kitchen.”
She laughed at the memory, then at the stricken look on his face.
“Don’t worry. As long as the hot wire’s up, they won’t get in. If they bump it, it stings them , st enough to scare them off. Do be careful, though, and don’t wander into the woods after dark. Black bears are relatively harmless, but if you surprise them, they’ll react just as a human would if they feel they’re being threatened. And believe me, six or seven hundred pounds of protective bear can convince you in a hurry that Winnie the Pooh isn’t the softy he was made out to be.”
“Bears,” he said, shaking his head. “You actually live with bears.”
“And a ghost,” she reminded him playfully, and grinned again when he rolled his eyes.
Casey came tearing around the hotel about that time, hot on the heels of two wildly running puppies, the bloodlines of which he couldn’t even begin to guess.
“Casey...” Scarlett warned.
“I know. Keep ’em out of the garden. I will. We’re going down to the dock for a little game of fetch.”
As fast as they appeared, they were gone in a flurry of playful yips, galloping feet and flopping ears.
Scarlett watched them go with a shake of her head. “Oh, to have that energy.”
Not for the first time Colin noticed how tired she looked. She may defend this way of life, but he could see it was taking its toll on her.
It wasn’t any of his business, so he didn’t comment, even though it nettled him. Instead he followed her in brooding silence when she headed back inside. She led him through the ornately decorated lobby furnished in antiques, then up the stairs to the second floor, past Belinda’s room to the Annabelle.
“Sure you don’t want to change your mind now that you’ve seen this room?” she suggested hopefully.
“It’s a nice room, but not a chance.”
She gave him a worried look, but didn’t press, as he trailed her from room to room.
“As you can see, like the antique oak tables in the dining room, I’ve tried to keep the bedrooms furnished in the period as much as possible. Iron beds, washstands, oak armoires. I want my guests to experience the same setting as the fur traders and loggers the hotel was built for.”
Colin had to admit there was a certain historical feel, and perhaps even a tug of nostalgia, for what life in this wild country must have been like at the turn of the century. The framed photographs of the lake land that hung in the dining room and lobby suggested that not much had changed here even into the mid 1900s. He might even understand why vacationers would like to spend a week or two here in the summer. He was still having difficulty, however, fathoming why anyone would prefer that era to the present age of technology; or the remoteness of this place to the teeming vitality of the city.
Something else had been bothering him. “I scanned some of your brochures while I was waiting for you after dinner. The phrase ‘No roads lead to Crimson Falls’ kept popping up.”
“It’s true. The only way to get here is by boat or plane.”
“Then how do you get supplies? Electricity?”
She provided an explanation as she led him back to the center of the floor. “Same way...for the supplies that is. Boat or plane. We have our own generator that provides electricity. And after lights-out at ten, we only run power to the kitchen, to conserve energy. That’s why there’s an oil lamp in each room.”
Something else had been bothering him. “How does Casey get to school?”
“Ah, well, that sometimes takes a little doing,” she confessed, as they walked back down the hall, remarking offhandedly that behind them were her and Casey’s private quarters.
“The closest school is at Bordertown, forty miles to the northwest,” she said as they reached one smaller, central door. She stopped and unlocked it with a key from a ring she fished out of her shorts pocket.
“In the fall and spring,” she said, opening the door and starting up a dark, narrow stairway, “we drive a forest access road to Vermilion Narrows. The lake’s only about twenty feet wide there. We hop in a boat and make the crossing. I leave my car on that side of the lake and I drive her from there. Or sometimes I just drive her as far as Abel and Mackenzie Greene’s—friends of ours—and they take her and Mackenzie’s brother, Mark, the rest of the way.”
“You do this in the winter?”
At the top of the stairs she put her shoulder to yet another closed door. When it wouldn’t budge, he offered to help.
She stepped aside, still talking. “By mid-December through mid-April the lake is frozen solid. Then we either drive or snowmobile across. If the weather’s too bad, or the lake’s too rough, she monitors her classes on a shortwave radio.”
“Very resourceful,” he said with a grunt as the door gave way. He stepped back so she could walk around him.
As she passed, he detected the faint fragrance of flowers. A soft, elusive scent that was very female and exceedingly exotic. Just as the touch of her shoulder, where it brushed against his chest when she squeezed by him, was profoundly feminine.
This close he could see the fine red-gold hue of the hair at her nape. Still damp from a recent shower, it clung in soft, silken curls beneath her braid. The skin there looked soft, too. And tempting. He had a sudden image of his hands brushing her hair aside, his lips descending to taste and caress that se
cret, sensitive spot...along with many others.
“Resourceful fits exactly,” he heard her say through a haze of sexual awareness. “It’s another plus for living here—we’re forced to be inventive.”
The sound of her voice did little to bring his erotically wandering mind back in tow. Fortunately, when she stopped and turned to him, she must have read his silence as dissension, when in fact he was still trying to come to grips with an unprecedented urge to pin her against the stairway wall and kiss her until neither of them cared about anything but the moment.
“You don’t see it as a plus, do you?”
What he saw was her. Naked. Needy. Beneath him. “What I see,” he managed to say, working hard to stall that vivid, provocative image, “is a lot of trouble.”
Trouble started all over again when she smiled.
“There’s that perspective thing again. I see it as being self-reliant. Too many things are too easy these days. Living here makes me appreciate what I do have. It’s good for Casey, too. She has a strong sense of self.”
“She’s a nice kid,” he agreed, concentrating on the image of Casey’s sweet, youthful face to divert him from other, more dangerous images of her mother. “Do you ever feel like you’re depriving her?”
“Depriving her?” Her eyes widened to relay her surprise that the thought would even cross his mind. “Here she’s exposed to a variety of interesting people. She’s loved, she knows how to make her own fun. She’s a straight-A student. Sound like a deprived child to you?”
He had to admit that she might be on to something. Casey was unspoiled, fun loving yet responsible. She’d worked like a trooper during the dinner hour tonight. He had little doubt she was a help to Scarlett in many ways. That she was such a well-adjusted child was a credit to Scarlett and the way she’d raised her.
“No,” he admitted. “She doesn’t seem deprived. You’ve done a good job with her.”
Their shoulders brushed again. In the dim light of the narrow hallway, he could sense the color rise on her cheeks. It was then that he realized she wasn’t as oblivious to the attraction sizzling between them as he’d thought.