Sam was still Sam—I knew that. There was still the irritating know-it-all laugh, and those eyes that were always watching me, waiting for me to trip or bump into something so he could laugh. But when he’d kissed me, something inside me clicked into place.
I might not have spent years daydreaming about Sam Palmer…but maybe that was because he was already there. Every time I turned around, Sam was there. He’d been too close to consider, maybe. I’d grown up right next to him, facing the same direction as him. And when you’re both looking ahead, you never really notice who’s standing right beside you. At least I didn’t. But now that he wasn’t by my side, I found that I missed him.
Chance had been stapling foil wrap in a vertical line just over my head on a ladder, while I secured it below. Together we were finishing up the last part of one house before moving on to the next. My mother had gone to get a sip of water as Sam carried a ladder to the next lot. He glanced at me as he passed, and our eyes met for a brief second, but as soon as they did, he looked away. I stared after him, still stapling my heart out. Which wasn’t the best way to use a staple gun, as it turns out.
“Ready?” Chance was on the ground behind me, folding the ladder.
I’d been working on my knees, and as I went to stand now, something pulled me violently back to the ground. “What the—?” My chin smacked into the padded foil and I went back to my knees, dropping the staple gun to rub my chin.
“Uh, Miranda,” Chance had put the ladder down and was by my side, a silent chuckle coming from his mouth as his hands pulled at my shirt. “You got a little crazy with that staple gun here,” he said, and I looked to where his hands were working. The edge of my blue T-shirt was fastened to the foil of the house. I’d stapled myself in place, probably when Sam had walked by.
“Wonderful,” I said, still rubbing my aching chin.
Chance managed to free me without tearing my shirt, and then he offered me a hand to help me up, that winning smile focused solidly on me. “There you go,” he said, pulling me to my feet. His scent floated around me in the dry air, manly and musky and without even a hint of licorice. His dreamy blue grey eyes met mine, and we stood face to face, closer than we’d ever been.
This right here? This was the stuff of my dreams—Chance Palmer, inches from me, holding my hand.
I waited for the butterflies to kick in, but they stayed still. Flightless.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yup, just another winning Miranda move,” I said, dropping his gaze. I realized Chance was still holding my hand, and my gaze shot over to the house next door where Sam stood, watching us, my mother at his side. She was talking to him, but his eyes were fixed on me.
I pulled my hand back and knelt to pick up the staple gun I’d dropped, heat washing through me. I was finding it hard to believe, but it was becoming clear to me that everything I’d ever believed I felt for Chance was suddenly applicable to his brother, my high-school nemesis, Sam.
I followed Chance to the next structure, where my mother was waiting for me with a cup of water.
“Your face is red, pudding.”
“Maybe because I just slammed it into the side of a house?” My voice was bitter as I accepted the water and drank, trying to sort through my confusing jumble of feelings.
“Or maybe because you were just chatting with handsome Chance Palmer?”
I darted a gaze around, dreading the possibility that either of the Palmers could have heard her words, but they must’ve been on the other side of the house. “That’s not it,” I said, and we carried a large piece of unrolled foil to the back of the house and began fastening it. “A week ago? I would have said yes.”
Mom seemed to perk up at this, her spine straightening a bit as she smiled at me. “I knew it! He’s very handsome. And successful,” she gushed.
Oh dear, I’d accidentally activated the find-a-match-for-Miranda button on my mother. She did this now and then, though I had made it pretty clear a couple years ago that I wasn’t very interested in help in this department. Now she was full speed ahead. “You know, he might have literally saved my life that day on Wake Up Kings Grove,” she continued. “He was so gallant after the sheet incident, when I…” Mom trailed off, still unable to discuss the fitted sheet folding disaster.
“I know, Mom. I think that was part of what made me like him in the first place.” That and everything else about him that appealed to a teenaged girl.
“Well, I think he’d be lucky to have you,” she went on. “He’s been single long enough really. Wouldn’t that be so exciting? A mountain marriage! Oh, Miranda, you would have the cutest babies with that boy.”
“You’re way ahead of yourself, Mom.”
“I know,” she said, her voice calming a bit. “I can’t help it.” She stapled as she talked. “The idea of you and Chance being together, getting married.” She turned her head and looked at me, her staple gun pausing in the air before her. “I guess I think if you marry someone local, you might actually stay here.”
“Even if I wanted to marry Chance Palmer, it wouldn’t happen, Mom. Chance has never given me the time of day. If your hopes for my future are pinned on either of the Palmer brothers, you’d better find something new to hope for. There are no Palmers in my future.”
My own strange disappointment at Sam’s recent coldness colored my voice. I looked up to make sure my mom had gotten the message that this conversation was over, and my heart sank like a stone to see Sam standing just behind her, clearly having heard every word I’d said. My eyes met his and he narrowed his gaze, nodded his head once, and turned on his heel and walked away.
I leaned my head into the side of the house I was working on. I didn’t know what might have been happening between Sam and I, but there wasn’t going to be anything more happening there now, that was for sure.
“Miranda,” Chance’s voice came from behind me. “Did you staple yourself again?”
I pulled my head up and looked back at him over my shoulder. “No, I’m okay, Chance. Thanks.”
He grinned at me. “Good. Okay, well if there are any more staple problems, grab John Trench, okay? Sam says the rangers are asking if we can send the bobcats back toward the fire line, and we need to get the rest of equipment heading down the hill, so we’re headed in.”
I nodded, a mix of relief and disappointment flooding me. Sam was leaving? I’d hoped maybe we would have a chance to talk today as we worked, though now that he’d heard me declare myself Palmer-free, I didn’t know if I’d have the energy to undo and re-explain everything. “Okay,” I said.
“See you later, Mrs. George,” Chance said. “Doing good work there.”
My mother beamed and then turned to me and waggled her eyebrows again.
I shook my head at her and mouthed Not. Happening.
I tried not to watch Sam climb into the cab of the truck as he and Chance prepared to leave, but my eyes followed him even when I didn’t want them to. He looked stern and determined, and he didn’t glance at me once as he folded his long frame into the truck and disappeared.
Chapter 21
Miranda
It was almost seven o’clock that evening when Mom and I rode back to the diner with John Trench.
“You ladies did good work out there today.” He smiled at us in the back seat. Poor Mom was so tired she’d dropped her head behind her and was snoring softly.
“You too, John,” I said. “Thanks for the ride.”
He parked and I shook Mom gently awake. “Let’s go get some food and check in with Dad,” I said.
She looked around groggily and then agreed. “I am hungry.”
We got out and went into the diner, where the work crews from all around the village were coming back in, dusty and dirty and exhausted. Dad sat at the counter, a cup of coffee in front of him as he chatted with Connor and Maddie. When he saw Mom and me, he stood and came to put his arms around us. “I hear my girls are being a big help out there,” he said. He pulled back, k
eeping a hand on each of our shoulders. “You doing okay?”
I stared up at the familiar face, lined with worry and etched with the late nights and early mornings he’d been keeping since the fire had begun moving this way. “We are. How are you doing?”
His lips pressed into a thin line, and he seemed to be thinking for a long minute. Then he tilted his chin down at us. “The call to evacuate just came in. I want you girls to go down to Aunt Steele’s. I’ll call and keep you informed.”
Mom, who had been silent up to this point, looking sleepy and worn out, perked up. “Absolutely not.”
“Honey, it’s a mandatory evacuation.”
“We’ll go when you do,” she said. Her face, usually soft and sweet, and well—maternal—had turned steely with determination.
Dad sighed. “I can’t go yet,” he said.
Evidently he’d announced the evacuation just before we’d come in, because people were saying goodbye to one another tearfully, and a few families were getting into cars in the parking lot. Dad sank back down onto the stool he’d vacated when we’d arrived and shook his head. “You can stay for now, but not at the house. You’ll have to stay here. I need to be able to get to you at a moment’s notice, and that back loop is the most likely entry point for the fire.”
Mom agreed somewhat violently, her head bobbing and making her curls bounce. “Everything we need is in the car anyway.”
I didn’t mention the freezer full of meals, but I didn’t think even Mom believed those were for evacuation. They had been cooked for one purpose in the days leading up to this—to help preserve Mom’s sanity. Dad clearly wasn’t enthusiastic about us staying beyond the order to leave, but he didn’t seem angry. Maybe he was just too tired to be mad.
Over the next hour or so, the diner began to clear as people said goodbye to one another and began the drive down the mountain to the valley floor. I couldn’t imagine how it would feel to leave my home behind, not knowing whether there’d be anything left of it when I returned. What kind of changes would a raging fire wreak on our town? The structures wouldn’t stand—I knew that—but I tried to imagine how hard it would be to walk around the little meadow in the aftermath of an inferno like this, stepping through char and ash instead of pine needles and wildflowers. The landscape of my youth, my life really, had been painted in greens mostly, and a lot of dusty brown with bright swaths of color thrown across it. To imagine it in black and grey now was almost impossible, but if the air outside was any indication, it was coming and I’d see the results soon enough.
Ash floated to the ground outside the windows, and the sky, which had been an eerie dusky orange all day, was an ominous foggy gray as evening fell.
Adele and Frank seemed fine with making the diner into a shelter of sorts, and they actually brought a few cots out from the back and a load of pillows and blankets appeared on one table. Frank turned out piles of sausages and french fries, salads and soups, and those of us waiting for news helped ourselves gratefully.
Chance and Sam came in a little while after most people had left as I sat at the counter with my mother eating vegetable soup. My heart jumped as they strode through the door, and so did my soup spoon. I dabbed at the mess.
They stopped to chat with Frank, their tall forms changing the atmosphere inside the diner and charging it with energy, and I couldn’t help staring at their broad strong backs, the perfect tousled hair, the muscled and tanned skin extending from the rolled-up sleeves of their work shirts. Sam rubbed a hand across the back of his neck as he stood talking, and I let my eyes linger on his hand, wishing there was a way I could have one more chance, wishing I had reacted better when he’d kissed me. I’d needed time to process everything that had happened, time that we didn’t have that day. And now it felt like it might be too late.
I stared at Sam’s back, wishing I’d figured everything out sooner—not that I’d figured much out now, but I knew for sure that I’d been wrong about him. For a long time. Or wrong about my own feelings at least. The attention Sam had always paid me hadn’t been malicious. He hadn’t been looking for ways to humiliate me—at least not since high school, and maybe not even then. Maybe he’d been trying to get my attention, to make me realize I was looking the wrong way as I mooned over his brother. Maybe he knew all that time that he was the Palmer brother I should have been paying attention to.
As if he could feel my eyes on him, Sam turned. He dropped the hand from his neck and fixed me with his blue gray stare, and after a long minute in which I don’t think I remembered to breathe, he came toward me. My skin tingled as he approached, like my entire body was suddenly attuned to Sam Palmer. It was a hard thought to accept, but it was true.
“Hey,” he said softly, the shield he’d had in place all day finally disappearing.
“Hey,” I returned, unable to think of much else to say.
“You aren’t evacuating?” he asked, sliding onto the stool next to mine.
I dropped the spoon I’d been holding back into my bowl, realizing too late that I’d splashed my shirt with soup again at some point in the last few minutes. “We’ll go soon, probably. Whenever Dad does.”
He nodded, his eyes searching mine for something and then flicking past me to my mother. She was absorbed in the newspaper crossword on the counter beside her, and Sam’s attention came back to me.
“Are you guys heading down? Did you get all the equipment out?”
Sam dropped an elbow on the counter and leaned into it, and I could see how tired he was in the lines etched around his eyes, the slump of the strong shoulders. “We’re staying for a bit, but yeah, we got most of the stuff heading down. Kept a couple things up here to help out.”
“Help out?”
Sam ignored my question, and his teeth worked the corner of his bottom lip as he seemed to think about something. “I need to talk to you about something,” he said.
My heart began to gallop, and my head nodded slowly. Yes, we needed to talk. I needed to find a way to explain that I didn’t hate black licorice after all, to thank him for being patient, to apologize for all the years I’d been distracted. “Okay.” My voice was a breath.
“The office,” he began, and my heart juddered to a confused stop. “We’re closing up shop up here. As soon as the fire threat is gone,” he said. “And I wanted to let you know, since you’ve been working with us. We’re moving operations down to Sac, and we won’t need you anymore. We’ll send a check for what you’ve done so far.”
The words cut me like a knife. We won’t need you anymore. “Oh,” I managed, confusion muddying my ability to process what Sam had just said.
His handsome face revealed nothing as he watched me, and the big hand that swiped across his stubbled jaw didn’t reach out to calm or reassure me. Only his eyes looked like maybe they didn’t agree with the words he’d said. “Nothing for us here really, makes more sense to focus on the valley.”
I didn’t know if he was talking about business or life in general. “Okay,” I said. “So you’re…moving?”
He shrugged and a sigh escaped his lips. There was something so sad in the set of his shoulders, the resigned tone of his voice. If I’d been braver, I would have put my arms around him, begged him to stay. But I’d never been brave, and understanding men wasn’t something I’d mastered.
“Yeah,” he said. “Pretty much packed up everything important. We’ll grab furniture and stuff later if there’s anything left.”
It was my turn to nod. I was speechless. I’d taken Sam for granted, definitely. But it had never occurred to me that he would leave. “I’ll miss you,” I managed.
Sam’s eyebrows rose at this statement, and he looked like he might say something as his lips pressed together and his expression shifted.
“There’s one more thing,” Sam said, and his voice softened a bit. “It’s stupid and it probably doesn’t matter now, but I want to clear the record.”
My head spun. “Okay.”
“Just listen,
okay?” He took a deep breath, as if this would take strength to say.
I nodded, waiting.
“That night in the shed, at Chance’s party.”
“Sam, I—” Of all the things we might discuss, this was absolutely not on my list of preferred topics.
“You’re listening, remember?” He said, waiting for me to interrupt again. When he was confident I was going to be quiet, he continued. “Sophie Weiland tricked us both. She told you Chance was out there waiting to say goodbye to you.”
I felt my eyes widen. I’d never told anyone what had happened.
“She admitted it,” Sam explained. “I confronted her because she lied to me to get me out there, too.”
“What did she tell you?” I wondered what in the world Sophie could have told Sam to get him to wait in a darkened woodshed as a hopeful freshman at a senior party.
“She told me you were waiting for me.” His voice was sad and careful, and I knew this admission had to be hard.
My heart dropped. “Me?” I whispered.
“Sam,” Chance called from the doorway.
We both turned to see Chance standing with my father and two of the Forest Service men who had been at the station since the fire began. Sam stood and I followed him, hanging back slightly.
“I told these guys we could get in just ahead of the fire line here and push more of that debris out of the way,” Chance said. He was pointing at a map of the village.
One of the other men spoke. “The fire road is still accessible. If we clear back here, there’s a chance they can contain this face of the fire and keep it out of the village.” He drew an arc where the fire was currently burning.
Sam nodded.
“Things could shift while you’re back there,” the other man said. “We’d send our guys, but everyone’s already in there fighting this thing. I’ll go back with you and Ranger George is willing to go, but Judd has to stay up here to manage communications.”
Love Reimagined (Kings Grove Book 2) Page 13