dropped her suitcase in, then came around to the passenger side. “You didn’t lock your car?”
Sydney shook her head. “The only thing we lock our doors against in Hades is the wind, not each other.” Getting in, she put her key into the ignition.
Lily watched the only other vehicle in the area pull away. The word Sheriff was painted on the side of the Jeep in big, bold black letters.
Black suited her mood, as well, and she wasn’t altogether clear as to why. Residue from Allen, she surmised. That, and having to deal with an irritating specimen of manhood just now. “Why did he bother coming at all, I mean, if he was just going to leave like that?”
Sydney noted the way Lily was watching Max drive away. She doubted the woman even realized how interested she looked. Well, Alison’s sister wouldn’t be the first woman, young or old, to get hooked on the town’s sexy sheriff.
Glancing in her rearview mirror for any stray animals darting into the road, Sydney put the vehicle in gear and pulled out. “Because April asked him to.”
So he had indicated. She didn’t like thinking of herself as an assignment, liked his thinking of her as such even less. “Does he always do everything April asks him to?”
“Whenever he can.” A fond smile tugged at Sydney’s lips. Since she’d come to live here five years ago, she had learned quite a bit about the people of the town. Mostly all good. “They’re very close.”
She debated for a moment, then decided that it wouldn’t hurt for Lily to have a few facts at her disposal. It wasn’t as if this was a secret, and it might help her see Max in a better light.
“From what I gather, their mother sort of drifted away into a land all her own after their father just took off one day. April was eleven, Max was ten. June was about seven, I think. Anyway, April tried very hard to be both mother and father to the others, even after her grandmother took them all in. Max feels he owes them both a lot—his grandmother and April.” She spared Lily a glance as she drove into the heart of the town. “He’s sensitive that way.”
Lily watched the car up ahead disappear around the bend and frowned. “He certainly doesn’t strike me as being the sensitive type.”
“That’s just Max’s way. He doesn’t warm up much until he gets to know you. Give him time.”
There wasn’t another soul around anywhere, Lily noted. This place was even more desolate than she’d remembered. No wonder she’d read that they paid people to live here. They certainly couldn’t pay her enough to spend her life in Alaska.
“I don’t intend to be here that long.”
Sydney merely smiled to herself. She’d heard those words before more than once. Had even thought them herself when she’d first arrived. She’d come then to marry the man who had written her such wonderful, glowing letters about the region where he lived. He’d won her heart with his beautiful prose. But when she’d deplaned in Anchorage, after pulling up stakes and packing up her entire life, she’d discovered that her almost-husband had had a change of heart. He’d run off with the woman he’d been trying to get over when he’d written all those letters to her.
It was his brother, Shayne, who’d come to the airport to give her the bad news. Feeling sorry for her, Shayne, who’d been struggling with his own loss at the time because his brother was the only other resident doctor in the area, had offered her temporary lodgings until she could book a flight back to where she’d come from.
It was a lucky thing, she thought, looking back now, that Hades hadn’t had a hotel. Otherwise, she might have very well left without finding her heart. But she’d stayed with Shayne and wound up marrying him. Being jilted by his brother was the best thing that had ever happened to her, she mused.
Life had a funny way of making things work whether or not you were aware of it.
Sydney glanced at the woman beside her. Who knew what the future held for Lily? Both of her siblings had come here, intending to be in Hades for only a short while. Alison had come to earn credits toward her nurse practitioner degree by working in the town’s only clinic. Jimmy had just come to visit Alison. Both had wound up falling in love with natives of Hades and putting down roots here.
“Fate’s kind of funny,” she told Lily, guiding her vehicle carefully along a winding road. “It doesn’t really pay much attention to what you intend so much as what it intends.”
It was all Lily could do to keep from closing her eyes and sighing. Another homily. Did everyone around here sound as if they had stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting?
She sincerely hoped that living in this small, isolated Cracker Jack box-size village hadn’t done a number on Alison’s brain or on Jimmy’s.
“I’ve got a life waiting for me back in Seattle. A life and a restaurant,” she added. “I’m just here because it’s been a long time since I’ve seen either Alison or Jimmy and I thought it might be time for a visit.”
Lily covertly slanted a look toward Sydney to see if the woman seemed to know anything to the contrary. She didn’t think Alison would have told anyone that she was coming here to get over breaking up with Allen, to somehow make peace with the fact that she had wasted three years of her life on a man who didn’t have the depth of a hand mirror.
Sydney merely nodded politely, allowing the other woman to have her lie and her dignity. She knew exactly why Lily Quintano had suddenly put her extremely busy life on hold and come out here to “the wilderness,” as she knew Lily referred to Hades. It wasn’t an overwhelming need to see her siblings so much as to mend a bruised ego and heart, in that order.
It wasn’t that unusual a reason. Her best friend, Marta, had come for the same one. To get over a man, or, more specifically, to get over what had amounted to a very bad relationship.
This was the place for it, all right. Sydney turned to the right to avoid the rabbit that bounded into the road.
“Sorry. Rabbit,” she explained when Lily made a grab for the dashboard.
They had men of all sizes and shapes to spare in and around Hades, Sydney thought. Even the plainest woman could hope for more than a little ego-soothing attention, and Lily Quintano was far from plain. Her ego should be up and running in no time.
“Family’s important,” Sydney went on to agree. “I didn’t have any when I first came out here. My father had just died and I was totally alone.” She didn’t bother telling Lily what had brought her to this place. That would come later, if the other woman was interested. Right now, she had a feeling it would only bore her. “But I got very lucky. I found a wonderful man and he came equipped with two children.” Whom she couldn’t have loved more if they were her own. They had a daughter of their own now and all three children had equal claims to her heart. “The townspeople became my extended family.”
Definitely Norman Rockwell, Lily thought. She didn’t belong here. She didn’t need solitude, she decided. She needed someplace busy, someplace with noise to fill her head and make her forget everything else until she got over being angry that she had been such an idiot.
“This is a great place to visit—or to stay in,” Sydney was saying as she pulled up to the clinic.
Lily remained where she was, looking around at the area. She’d only been
