the other day.”
Taft grabbed one of his sister’s delicious dinner rolls from the basket being passed around his family’s dining-room table and winked at Caidy. “Me, doing something awesome and heroic, probably. Fighting a fire. Saving someone’s life. I don’t know. Could be anything.”
His niece, Destry, and Gabrielle Parsons, whose older sister was marrying Taft’s twin brother, Trace, in a few months, both giggled—just as he had intended—but Caidy only rolled her eyes. “News flash. Not everything is about you, Taft. But oddly, in a way, this is.”
“Who did you see?” he asked, though he was aware of a glimmer of uneasy trepidation, already expecting what was coming next.
“I didn’t have a chance to talk to her. I just happened to see her while I was driving,” Caidy said.
“Who?” he asked again, teetering on the brink of annoyance.
“Laura Pendleton,” Caidy announced.
“Not Pendleton anymore,” Ridge, their older brother and Destry’s father, corrected.
“That’s right,” Trace chimed in from the other side of the table, where he was holding hands with Becca. How the heck did they manage to eat when they couldn’t seem to keep their hands off each other? Taft wondered.
“She got married to some guy while she was living in Spain and they had a couple of kids,” Trace went on. “I hear one of them was involved in all the excitement the other day at the inn.”
Taft pictured her kid solemnly promising he wouldn’t play with matches again. He’d picked up the definite vibe that the kid was a mischievous little rascal, but for all that, his sincerity had rung true.
“Yeah. Apparently her older kid, Alex, was a little too curious about a lighter he found in an empty room and caught some curtains on fire.”
“And you had to ride to her rescue?” Caidy gave him a wide-eyed look. “Gosh, that must have been awkward for both of you.”
Taft reached for more mashed potatoes, hoping the heat on his face could be attributed to the steaming bowl.
“Why would it be? Everything was fine,” he muttered.
Okay, that was a lie, but his family didn’t necessarily need to know he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Laura for the past few days. Every time he had a quiet moment, her blue eyes and delicate features would pop into his head and some other half-forgotten memory of their time together would emerge like the Tetons rising out of a low fog bank.
That he couldn’t seem to stop them annoyed him. He had worked damn hard to forget her after she walked away. What was he supposed to do now that she was back in town and he couldn’t escape her or her kids or the weight of all his mistakes?
“You’ll have to catch me up here.” Becca, Trace’s fiancée, looked confused as she reached for her glass. “Who’s Laura Pendleton? I’m taking a wild guess here that she must be related to Mrs. Pendleton at the inn somehow—a client of mine, by the way—but why would it be awkward to have Taft put out a fire at the inn?”
“No reason really.” Caidy flashed him a quick look. “Just that Taft and Laura were engaged once.”
He fidgeted with his mashed potatoes, drawing his fork in a neat little firebreak to keep the gravy from spreading while he avoided the collective gaze of his beloved family. Why, again, had he once enjoyed these Sunday dinners?
“Engaged? Taft?” He didn’t need to look at his future sister-in-law to hear the surprise in her voice.
“I know,” his twin brother said. “Hard to believe, right?”
He looked up just in time to see Becca quickly try to hide her shocked gaze. She was too kindhearted to let him see how stunning she found the news, which somehow bothered him even more.
Okay, maybe he had a bit of a reputation in town—most of it greatly exaggerated—as a bit of a player. Becca knew him by now. She should know how silly it all was.
“When was this?” she asked with interest. “Recently?”
“Years ago,” Ridge said. “He and Laura dated just out of high school—”
“College,” he muttered. “She was in college.” Okay, she had been a freshman in college. But she wasn’t in high school, damn it. That point seemed important somehow.
“They were inseparable,” Trace interjected.
Ridge picked up where he’d left off. “And Taft proposed right around the time Laura graduated from the Montana State.”
“What happened?” Becca asked.
He really didn’t want to talk about this. What he wouldn’t give for a good emergency call right now. Nothing big. No serious personal injury or major property damage. How about a shed fire or a kid stuck in a well or something?
“We called things off.”
“The week before the wedding,” Caidy added.
Oh, yes. Don’t forget to add that little salacious detail.
“It was a mutual decision,” he lied, repeating the blatant fiction that Laura had begged him to uphold. Mutual decision. Right. If by mutual he meant Laura and if by decision he meant crush-the-life-out-of-a-guy blow.
Laura had dumped him. That was the cold, hard truth. A week before their wedding, after all the plans and deposits and dress fittings, she had given him back his ring and told him she couldn’t marry him.
“Why are we talking about ancient history?” he asked.
“Not so ancient anymore,” Trace said. “Not if Laura’s back in town.”
He was very much afraid his brother was right. Whether he liked it or not, with her once more residing in Pine Gulch, their past together would be dredged up again—and not by just his family.
Questions would swirl around them. Everybody had to remember that they had been just a few days away from walking down the aisle of the little church in town when things ended and Laura and her mother sent out those regrets and made phone calls announcing the big celebration wasn’t happening—while he had gone down to the Bandito and gotten drunk and stayed that way until about a month or two after the wedding day that didn’t happen.
She was back now, which meant that, like it or not, he would have to deal with everything he had shoved down ten years ago, all the emotions he had pretended weren’t important in order to get through the deep, aching loss of her.
He couldn’t blame his family for their curiosity—not even Trace, his twin and best friend, knew the full story about everything that had happened between him and Laura. He had always considered it his private business.
His family had loved her. Who didn’t? Laura had a knack for drawing people toward her, finding commonalities. She and his mother used to love discussing the art world and painting techniques. His mother had been an artist, only becoming renowned around the time of her murder. While Laura hadn’t any particular skill in that direction,
