by Cindy Gerard
In fact, he sensed that she was having the same problem he was. Damn. It was bad enough to know that his libido was giving him fits. Knowing she was struggling, too, made it that much harder to ignore.
When she turned away and scaled the last step to the top of the stairs, he let out a breath that should have been relief but felt more like disappointment.
“And Mother Nature did a great job on this, wouldn’t you agree?” she asked, as they stepped out of the stairwell and into the twilight hues lighting the widow’s walk.
He agreed. Oh, yes. He agreed in spades, but it wasn’t the view he was appreciating. It was the woman at his side. And it had to stop.
Four
Colin made himself walk to the rail and look down over the spectacle of Legend Lake and Crimson Falls. With effort, he concentrated on the view and grasped a tentative understanding of why she loved this place beyond what might be good for her.
In this light, soft with the coming of dusk, an iridescent translucence cloaked the air, casting the scene before them in cooling shades of blue. Even the grass, two stories below, lay like a rumpled blanket of muted, blue-green gloss; the evergreens surrounding the clearing rose in a midnight indigo splendor; the lake shimmered metallic, mirrorlike and still. And the falls, streaked with crimson and frothed with white, lent color but not conflict to the picture-postcard scene.
Only the woman at his side added discord to the peace. To his peace. Of mind and body. Her serenity beside him, as she experienced this view that was so special to her, only served to unhinge him more.
Could she really be this uncomplicated? This pure of purpose and need? Her profile was as clean and defined as the values she treasured. Her hair shone more blond than red by evening light. Not for the first time he noted that she’d rebraided it. Not for the first time he wondered if she’d done it for him.
The prospect was as appealing as it was unsettling. And absurd, he realized, when he caught himself courting thoughts he had no business entertaining.
She turned to him just as he managed to drag his attention from her to the lake.
“Bigger men than you have been struck speechless by this view.”
The smile in her voice wouldn’t have been there if she’d realized that it was her, not the scenery, that held him spellbound. He wondered what kind of man would have left a woman like her.
“Sometimes when I come up here, I can picture the bay the way it was in its heyday. Teaming with hundreds of men and boats, or stacked shore-to-shore with thousands of floating logs on their way to the mills in Duluth. And I can see the ladies watching from this vantage point, waiting for the men to make them laugh, spend their money, ease a little of the loneliness.”
Odd, he thought, that the word loneliness had entered her conversation. Odd and contradictory for a woman who professed to a love of isolation. The poignancy in the statement tugged at his chest in an unfamiliar and uncomfortable way. Thankfully, before he gave in to questioning the soulfulness of her statement, she diverted him.
“Would you listen to me, waxing melancholy like a sentimental sap. It’s the widow’s walk, I guess. Every time I come up here, I get a little too wrapped up in the lives those men and women must have lived.” She smiled apologetically. “Come on. Let’s finish the tour before I make a bigger fool of myself.”
As fools went, he figured she wouldn’t hold a candle to him, if he acted on the sudden, impulsive desire to pull her against him, stroke a finger along her jaw and tell her she didn’t ever have to be lonely again. Fortunately for both of them, the chances of him acting on that impulse were about as slim as those of her admitting her loneliness—even, he suspected, to herself.
The final stop on the tour took them back downstairs to the bar. Of all the aspects of the hotel, this is the one that Colin appreciated the most.
It was in this room, with its rolling hardwood floors and its beveled glass mirror and brass foot rail skirting the bar, that he could actually envision life as it must have been. Where the widow’s walk had been a woman’s territory, the bar had definitely been a man’s.
A gaudy painting of the obligatory reclining nude, a voluptuous, full-breasted siren complete with a feather boa and a come-hither smile, hung above the gilt-framed mirror. An ancient, but working, player piano filled one corner of the room. A scarred billiard table with woven leather pockets sat in the middle of the floor. Shims, stuck strategically under its thick legs, helped keep it level. Old photos, posters and dollar bills, signed by visitors who’d passed through and wanted to leave something of themselves behind, plastered the walls in a hodgepodge of disordered memorabilia.
And then, of course, there was Geezer, another relic from the past, snoring softly in a corner booth.
Scarlett pressed a finger to her lips when she spotted him. “Let’s let him sleep.”
“No problem,” Colin whispered back. “One more bolt from his evil eye tonight and I’m liable to turn into a pillar of salt.”
She grinned and slipped behind the bar. “What’s your pleasure?”
“Sarsaparilla?” he suggested, giving in to an impulse that he’d have felt foolish acting on if she hadn’t played along.
“Sorry, mister. We’re fresh out. How about a soda instead?”
He propped an elbow on the worn bar rail. “That’ll work.”
“You wouldn’t rather have a drink or a beer?”
“What are you having?”
She lifted a bottle of white wine.
“That’ll work even better.”
“So,” she said, setting out glasses, then filling them. “What do you think of the hotel, now that you’ve had the fifty-cent tour?”
He scratched his brow, considering what to say as she rounded the bar, slipped onto a stool beside him and tipped her wine to her lips. “It’s a very unique place,” he said evasively, and tried not to think of the delicate crystal glass and her full pink lips and how utterly sensual they were in combination.
“I hear a qualifier in there. Come on,” she prompted when he stalled. He was still fighting his reaction to the simple act of a beautiful woman sipping wine. Digging deep, he searched for something positive to say.
In the end his preoccupation with her mouth was so disturbing that he blurted out his take on the hotel to vent his irritation with himself. “It’s falling down around you, Scarlett.”
She shifted uncomfortably on her stool. “You think I don’t know that? That’s why I was forced to hold the raffle.”
Oh, yes, the raffle. Propping both elbows on the bar, he swilled the wine around in the glass, then downed a hefty swallow. The damn raffle was the event that had brought him here. From what he’d seen, the money she’d made from the ticket sales wouldn’t be enough to cover even the cost of basic repairs, let alone make the restorations she’d told him she wanted to complete.
He didn’t want to point that out to her. Not tonight. Maybe not ever. After all, even though he had to keep reminding himself, he was not involved. Not in the hotel. Not with her. He was just here to get a few people off his case, and then it was back to business as usual. He wasn’t here to worry about her or to help her out of her current difficulty. Besides, she hadn’t asked. To keep the appropriate distance between them, he wouldn’t offer.
“Well,” he said, reaching for the bottle and refilling her glass, then his. “I’ve no doubt you’ll put the money to good use.”
“You’re right about that,” she said with a confident tilt of her head. “I’ve a little Scottish blood running through these veins. I can make that money stretch a long way. And speaking of money, I didn’t give J.D. the chance to fill me in. How is it that you make yours?”
She blanched, then covered her face with her hand. “Oh, my gosh. I’m sorry. I don’t know where that came from.”
He just smiled, appreciating her candor every bit as much as he had Geezer’s. “I suspect it came from curiosity.”
“Or bad manners. I’m not usually so...”
/> “Direct?” he suggested.
“Snoopy,” she amended, and he could see that she really was embarrassed. “It’s really none of my business.”
“Justified is the word you’re looking for,” he said, wanting to put her at ease. “I’d probably be curious, too, if I knew someone had dropped money sight unseen and bought into my business.
“Renovation,” he supplied, when it became apparent she was prepared to drop the issue.
She slanted him a questioning look.
“It’s what I do to make my money. I renovate. I buy run-down property at deflated values, restore and refurbish, then sell for a profit.”
She looked interested but a little uneasy. “Kind of ironic, don’t you think? That you now own a piece of yet one more property in need of restoration?”
Now he understood her wariness. “You’re jumping to conclusions again. I thought we’d gotten past that. I have no designs on this hotel—for restoration, resale or otherwise. Don’t take offense, but it’s way too small a project. While we started out with smaller buildings, we deal strictly with corporate buildings—multiple stories, prime business locations—that attract major players.”
She took another sip of wine. Again he became mesmerized by the fit of her full lips to the rim of the glass, the gentle convulsion of muscle beneath the silk of the skin at her throat as she swallowed. The thought of the wine settling her, soothing her, had the opposite effect on him. He clenched his jaw, then methodically uncurled his fist, finger by finger, from around the fragile wineglass, before he broke it.
“I’m sorry,” she said after a moment. “For slipping into that groove again. It’s just that Crimson Falls means so much to me. The thought of someone—even someone who I’ve decided is not a corporate stuffed shirt,” she added with a pained smile, “wanting to exercise control over what’s mine, is very distressing.”
Very distressing, he echoed in silence. Too distressing. Suspiciously distressing. It fostered a whole new catalogue of questions. Like who was responsible for her wariness. Who had been so controlling in her life that she felt threatened by the prospect of losing that control. Had to be the ex, he decided, as the guarded look was slow to leave her eyes.
And the ex had to be a fool. he concluded, draining his second glass. Colin knew he wasn’t a marrying kind of man, but he’d seen enough of Scarlett Morgan to realize that any man who’d been lucky enough to marry her had been the king of fools for letting her go.
“J.D. mentioned something about a development company coming into the area,” he said to divert his thoughts to safer ground. “He also told me you were against it.”
“He’s got that right”
“From a business standpoint, the condos could only help yours.”
She cut him an impatient look.
He didn’t back down. “Think about it. The condos mean more people. That means more exposure for the hotel. It also means more accessibility. All of that amounts to revenue.”
“What it amounts to is invasion. This land is special. It’s unique and unspoiled, and that’s a commodity more valuable than money any day.”
“A commodity more valuable than money. Now there’s a concept that would blow the Wall Street moguls out of the water.”
“It’s a concept a few more people should think about.”
As suggestions went, hers wasn’t the most subtle. It was also a reminder—to both of them—about priorities. And the differences between theirs. His priority was and always had been success. Success to him meant making money. Lots of it. Success for her meant surviving and preserving both tradition and topography. Neither were endeavors he’d ever spent much time or energy contemplating.
They were polar opposites. This fact should have been enough to curb his interest.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Her values only intrigued him more.
Colin didn’t know what bothered him more: seeing through the tiredness in her eyes that fatigue was taking its toll on her, or the protective feeling that made him unexpectedly suggest that she go to bed and get some rest.
“I need to wake Geezer and make sure he gets to bed okay, before I turn in,” she’d insisted.
“I can handle Geezer.”
Either she recognized that his tone left no room for negotiation or she was exhausted enough not to argue. In any event she had conceded with a yawn, left Geezer to him and wished him a good-night.
That had been an hour ago. After she’d left, he’d poured himself another glass of wine and nursed it with a growing concern over the tangle of emotions one small, self-reliant woman had managed to evoke.
He tried to convince himself he was preoccupied with her out of boredom. He wasn’t used to having so little to do...and so much free time to do it in. The prospect of having a blank slate for the next thirteen days added to the problem.
Generally, he had far more to occupy his mind. Whether he was in New York, working at his corporate headquarters, or out of state or abroad on a buying trip or site inspection, his days began at five a.m. with a five-mile run at the closest private health club available. He was on the job at seven, rarely called it a day until seven or eight at night, and even then most evenings ended with a business dinner. Weekends were spent on the fax or with his lap-top reviewing bids and cost estimates. He was the hands-on CEO of his own corporation, and he intended to keep it that way.
None of that made him a workaholic—not in his eyes, at least. He worked hard, yes, but that’s the way he liked it. His work was his life. It grated on him that he increasingly found himself defending that position. He didn’t want anyone but himself deciding how much he worked, or if the number of hours he chose to work was healthy. As long as he didn’t expect long hours from anyone else who worked for him, it wasn’t anyone’s business.
After all, he was content. He was productive. What more could a man want out of life?
A woman like Scarlett Morgan.
That unwelcome conclusion popped into his mind before he had a chance to waylay it. And since he didn’t want to deal with why it had slipped in so easily, he woke a softly snoring Geezer, helped the old man to his feet and made sure he made it out of the bar.
Alone, and unused to the quiet and the idle time to think about something other than business, he walked to the lakeshore. For over an hour he just stood there.
The faint sound of the falls tumbling over the bluffs in the distance infiltrated a quiet he’d thought to be absolute. There were sounds here—they were just different from the sounds of the city. Like background rhythms to a slow, hypnotic dance, the water made a soft, lapping babble as it gently mated with the shore. From a far corner of the bay, a loon called, the cry reminiscent of an old Henry Fonda, Katherine Hepbum movie his mother had been particularly fond of. Actually, the entire area, with its towering pine and glacier-carved boulders and moodily shifting water, reminded him of the setting for that classic film.
Accompanying the night sounds was a blanketing sense of...of what, Slater? he asked himself with a scowl, as the explanation eluded him. It was something he couldn’t pin down. Solitude, yes, but not so much a sense of isolation as it was... serenity. That was the word that finally came to mind, surprising him. Serenity. And peace. That word surprised him even more.
Neither concept appealed to him. Well, maybe now that he was experiencing them they didn’t seem so bad—just. abstract from his point of view. He’d never had the time for either.
He drew in a deep breath, let it out, then wandered onto the dock and looked out over the lake. So this is what Hazzard was always harping at him to experience.
“It’s like no place on earth, man,” J.D. had said more times than Colin cared to count. “It’s like you go up there and a door closes on the rest of the world. You forget your ambition, you forget your drive—you forget about fortunes to be made and lost and you just experience.”
It had always sounded like a sinful waste of time to Colin. Until now, he realized, in a cathartic momen
t of truth. Until this exact moment, as he stood there, soaking up the essence of the feeling J.D. had preached with the zealousness of an evangelist, he hadn’t been able to fathom the allure of not having one single, solitary thing to accomplish except appreciating the moment.
He breathed in the clean air. He felt the essence of the night enfolding him. Beneath the dock, the rhythm of the lake rocked against the wooden pilings in a gentle undulating motion. Above him, as big and vast and mysterious as these unaccustomed feelings, the sky stretched into infinity, glittering with an array of stars so crystalline and bright it stunned him.
So this was night without smog and manmade light.
And this was Colin Slater without business on his mind.
Uncomfortable, suddenly, with the ease at which he’d slipped out of business mode and into relaxation, he shoved his hands in his pockets and turned back toward the hotel.
It was late. After eleven. The hotel was dark, except, he noted with a frown of curiosity, for a light blazing from a window on the second story. Mentally he walked through the floor and realized that the light was coming from his room.
Picking up his pace, he hiked the distance to the verandah, thinking all the time of Scarlett telling him about lights out at ten p.m. He remembered her saying, “That’s why there’s an oil lamp in each room.”
There was no way an oil lamp could generate that much light. Short of a spotlight, there was only one thing he knew of that burned that bright—fire.
Heart pounding, he sprinted up the veranda steps, jerked open the hotel’s front door and took the stairs to the second landing two at a time. By the time he raced down the hall and reached his room, he was in a rare panic. He grasped the doorknob, then jerked his hand away. It was hot to the touch, the light glowing from under the threshold, beacon bright.
He spun around, searching the darkened hall. When he spotted the fire extinguisher, he jerked it free from its metal housing and rushed back to the door. Flipping the nozzle, he sucked in a deep breath and geared up to ram the door with his shoulder—just as it swung open with a slow, creaking groan.