DIDN’T FIND Jeremiah as quickly as it did his gently snoring partner but he wasn’t complaining. There were worse things than to be cuddled up to a beautiful naked woman on a frigid cold night. But his mind was moving in dizzying circles even as his body was heavy with sated pleasure. The tension that continually corded his shoulders and kinked his neck—no matter how many times his chiropractor back in Wyoming had tried to pull it out—was gone, and for that, he was inordinately happy.
However, no matter how sated his body, his mind refused to give up the images he was doing his best to run away from. Maybe he should’ve picked a tropical climate instead of a place where it snowed like it did in Wyoming, only ten times heavier.
Tyler had loved the snow; the kid had been fearless on his snowboard. The memory of his eleven-year-old son shredding the slopes elicited a brief smile that faded almost as quickly as it came. Fearless...maybe that had been the problem.
Maybe if he’d cautioned Tyler to be less fearless, the boy wouldn’t have been crushed beneath his ATV in a rollover that had happened faster than a rattlesnake strike. Maybe. Maybe. God, he hated that word.
Shake it off, Jeremiah. Nothing you say or think is going to bring him back. His own counsel always sounded so pathetic in his head whenever he tried to pull himself from that ledge of depression and grief. It’d been a year since Tyler died. Eight months since his wife had left him. Seven months since he’d been served divorce papers. A lot could happen in a year.
The woman in his arms stirred and curled her arm around his stomach, pulling him closer as she buried her nose against the side of his chest. She fit against him as if she were made to.
He touched her hair lightly, enjoying the texture of the dark strands against the pads of his fingers. He didn’t know how a woman like her wasn’t attached, but for selfish reasons, he was glad. He couldn’t imagine a better person to break the seal on his self-imposed celibacy than a hot stranger who wanted nothing more than a dirty, sweaty good time.
He sighed and allowed his eyelids to slowly shut. He was here in Homer for a fresh start with a new job. Tomorrow, he’d put a clean brush of paint on the old and battered walls of his life.
But tonight...he was going to just enjoy the simple pleasure of the feel of a woman’s body pressed against his and sleep.
* * *
MIRANDA NEVER SLEPT in on a workday and she was never late.
Except today.
She opened her eyes blearily to find the pale watery light of the morning filtering into her bedroom and for a moment she was disoriented by her surroundings. What the...?
“What time is it?” she muttered, her mouth tasting like the bottom of a dirty boot. Why had she drunk so many tequila poppers last night? Major mistake. Her head was splitting. With all the sharpness of a dull ax blade, Miranda pulled the memory of last night from her mental cache and glanced around in surprise to realize that her temporary lover had done her a solid by letting himself out before she woke.
And he’d even left her a note. She grabbed the folded paper and focused on the masculine scrawl.
Homer has one hell of a welcome party. Way better than a gift basket.
Miranda dropped the note to her nightstand and fought the growing disquiet churning her insides. On one hand, she ought to be happy that he’d saved them both from any awkward, stilted conversation exchanged in the harsh morning light, but on the other hand, it didn’t sit well with her ego that he’d been the one to simply slip out the door while she’d been dead to the world. However, the bigger issue was far more upsetting than a bruise to her ego. Her temporary lover wasn’t a tourist.
And by the sounds of it...he was taking up residence right here in Homer.
“I’ll be damned,” she said, barking a short, irritated laugh, and headed to the shower. The town was too small to hope they wouldn’t run into each other at the grocery store at some point, but Miranda wasn’t above hoping and praying Homer simply wasn’t to his liking and he would leave.
Why? Because there’d been a moment when lying in his arms had felt completely natural—almost as if she’d been waiting to find herself in those arms since the day she was born—and Miranda didn’t want any part of anything that resembled that.
Besides, she already had her plus one—her son.
And she sure as hell wasn’t auditioning anyone for the role of daddy anytime soon...if ever. Much to her mother’s chagrin, of course.
With a mild shudder at the very idea, she dropped any lingering thoughts about her overnight guest and, after double-checking with her son’s paternal grandmother that the older woman had gotten Talen to school on time this morning, Miranda rushed to shower away the night’s activities and get ready for work.
Today was a big deal, which made her oversleeping a major screwup and only added fuel to the argument that she hadn’t been ready for the position the new guy had managed to snag from beneath her nose. She wanted to look the new boss in the eye and see for herself if he was up to the job because there was no better tracker in the department than Miranda, aside from her brother Trace, of course. And no one knew the surrounding area better than Miranda.
Miranda pulled into the slushy parking lot, the crunch of dirt and thin layer of snow beneath her knobby tires a familiar and welcome sound, but as she walked up the stairs she couldn’t shake the feeling of disquiet that dogged her steps. Sour grapes and disappointment, that was all it was, she told herself.
Talen’s paternal grandmother, a Yupik Native, had always praised Miranda’s intuition, saying it was that inner knowing that helped her to navigate the dangerous Kenai Mountains when tracking the hapless lost. As Miranda pushed open the door to the Fish and Game Department field office to stride inside, it was then that she knew her intuition had been spot-on.
Oh, shit. She wanted to die. Or at the very least sink through the floor and disappear.
Standing there addressing the office, dressed sharp as a tack, looking fresh and starkly handsome, was her one-night stand—and apparently, her new boss.
Hell, she didn’t even know his name but she vividly remembered what he looked like naked in the pale moonlight.
Somehow, she didn’t think that information was going to be helpful.
Well, her mother had warned her that her bad behavior was going to catch up to her someday.
Guess today was the day. And it felt every bit as wretched as her mother had probably hoped that it would.
Yay me.
CHAPTER THREE
JEREMIAH ADDRESSED HIS new team, looking at faces that he would soon learn to know and personalities he would learn to understand, but part of him couldn’t help but wonder if he’d made the right choice as he stood before strangers, especially when he knew for a fact he was running away from a particular heartache.
He had no doubt he could do the job. It wasn’t that he was having a sudden attack of inadequacy fears, rather he knew he should have been a bit more adult about his decision to leave everything he knew in Wyoming to start fresh in a town where he knew no one and felt even more
