style="font-size:15px;"> They had been friends forever, even before that momentous summer after her freshman year of college when he finally woke up and realized how much he had come to care about her as much more than simply a friend. After she left, he had missed the woman he loved with a hollow ache he had never quite been able to fill, but he sometimes thought he missed his best friend just as much.
After three nights at the hotel with these frustrating, fleeting encounters, he was finally able to run her to ground early one morning. He had an early meeting at the fire station, and when he walked out of the side entrance near where he parked the vehicle he drove as fire chief—which was as much a mobile office as a mode of transportation—he spotted someone working in the scraggly flower beds that surrounded the inn.
The beds were mostly just a few tulips and some stubbly, rough-looking shrubs but it looked as if somebody was trying to make it more. Several flats of colorful blooms had been spaced with careful efficiency along the curvy sidewalk, ready to be transplanted into the flower beds.
At first, he assumed the gardener under the straw hat was someone from a landscaping service until he caught a glimpse of honey-blond hair.
He instantly switched direction. “Good morning,” he called as he approached. She jumped and whirled around. When she spotted him, her instinctive look of surprise twisted into something that looked like dismay before she tucked it away and instead gave him a polite, impersonal smile.
“Oh. Hello.”
If it didn’t sting somewhere deep inside, he might have been amused at her cool tone.
“You do remember this is eastern Idaho, not Madrid, right? It’s only April. We could have snow for another six weeks yet, easy.”
“I remember,” she answered stiffly. “These are all hardy early bloomers. They should be fine.”
What he knew about gardening was, well, nothing, except how much he used to hate it when his mom would wake him and his brothers and Caidy up early to go out and weed her vegetable patch on summer mornings.
“If you say so. I would just hate to see you spend all this money on flowers and then wake up one morning to find a hard freeze has wiped them out overnight.”
“I appreciate your concern for my wallet, but I’ve learned in thirty-one years on the earth that if you want to beautify the world around you a little bit, sometimes you have to take a few risks.”
He could appreciate the wisdom in that, whether he was a gardener or not.
“I’m only working on the east- and south-facing beds for now, where there’s less chance of frost kill. I might have been gone a few years, but I haven’t quite forgotten the capricious weather we can see here in the Rockies.”
What had she forgotten? She didn’t seem to have too many warm memories of their time together, not if she could continue treating him with this annoyingly polite indifference.
He knew he needed to be heading to the station house for his meeting, but he couldn’t resist lingering a moment with her to see if he could poke and prod more of a reaction out of her than this.
He looked around and had to point out the obvious. “No kids with you this morning?”
“They’re inside fixing breakfast with my mother.” She gestured to the small Craftsman-style cottage behind the inn where she had been raised. “I figured this was a good time to get something done before they come outside and my time will be spent trying to keep Alex from deciding he could dig a hole to China in the garden and Maya from picking every one of the pretty flowers.”
He couldn’t help smiling. Her kids were pretty darn cute—besides that, there was something so right about standing here with her while the morning sunlight glimmered in her hair and the cottonwood trees along the river sent out a few exploratory puffs on the sweet-smelling breeze.
“They’re adorable kids.”
She gave him a sidelong glance as if trying to gauge his sincerity. “When they’re not starting fires, you mean?”
He laughed. “I’m going on the assumption that that was a fluke.”
There. He saw it. The edges of her mouth quirked up and she almost smiled, but she turned her face away and he missed it.
He still considered it a huge victory. He always used to love making her smile.
Something stirred inside him as he watched her pick up a cheerful yellow flower and set it in the small hole she had just dug. Attraction, yes. Most definitely. He had forgotten how much he liked the way she looked, fresh and bright and as pretty as those flowers. Somehow he had also forgotten over the years that air of quiet grace and sweetness.
She was just as lovely as ever. No, that wasn’t quite true. She was even more beautiful than she had been a decade ago. While he wasn’t so sure how life in general had treated her, the years had been physically kind to her. With those big eyes and her high cheekbones and that silky hair he used to love burying his hands in, she was still beautiful. Actually, when he considered it, her beauty had more depth now than it did when she had been a young woman, and he found it even more appealing.
Yeah, he was every bit as attracted to her as he’d been in those days when thoughts of her had consumed him like the wildfires he used to fight every summer. But he’d been attracted to plenty of women in the past decade. What he felt right now, standing in the morning sunshine with Laura, ran much more deeply through him.
Unsettled and more than a little rattled by the sudden hot ache in his gut, he took the coward’s way out and opted for the one topic he knew she wouldn’t want to discuss. “What happened to the kids’ father?”
She dumped a trowel full of dirt on the seedling with enough force to make him wince. “Remind me again why that’s any of your business,” she bit out.
“It’s not. Only idle curiosity. You married him just a few years after you were going to marry me. You can’t blame me for wondering about him.”
She raised an eyebrow as if she didn’t agree with that particular statement. “I’m sure you’ve heard the gory details,” she answered, her voice terse. “Javier died six months ago. A boating accident off the coast of Barcelona. He and his mistress du jour were both killed. It was a great tragedy for everyone concerned.”
Ah, hell. He knew her husband had died, but he hadn’t heard the rest of it. He doubted anyone else in Pine Gulch had or the rumor would have certainly slithered its way toward him, given their history together.
She studiously refused to look at him. He knew her well enough to be certain she regretted saying anything and he couldn’t help wondering why she had.
He also couldn’t think of a proper response. How much pain did those simple words conceal?
“I’m sorry,” he finally said, although it sounded lame and trite.
“About what? His death or the mistress?”
“Both.”
Still avoiding his gaze, she picked up another flower start from the colorful flat. “He was a good father. Whatever else I could say about Javier, he loved his children. They both miss him very
