Slow Heat

He stood to leave, watching while his mom turned the iPod over and over. “The power button’s on the side,” he said, and tried to show her but she clutched it to her chest.

“I’ve got it!”

He had to laugh. He and Jacob were both stubborn to the end. The apples hadn’t fallen far from the tree. But this part of the visit with his mom always made him feel awkward. They hadn’t done presents when they were little. She’d never been able to keep dates straight. So that had meant no birthday celebrations, no Easter. No Christmas. At least not on the correct dates. He and Jacob had done their best to keep some semblance of normalcy, but they’d had their hands full with things like making sure bills had been paid and that they had food and a roof over their heads. Holidays and birthdays had been a luxury they’d never given themselves.

Which reminded him what he’d seen on his Visa bill. “Mom, did you order water balloons from Amazon?”

She pretended to be vastly interested in something on the iPod. He was pretty sure she still hadn’t gotten it turned on but there was no way she’d admit it. “Mom?”

She lifted a shoulder. “I don’t think so. Why would I do that? You’re a grown man.”

Okay so she was with it tonight. Or at least at the moment. And if she was, then he had another question for her. “And cigars?”

“Of course not,” she said, now shaking the iPod like it was an Etch A Sketch. “You can’t smoke at your age.”

And there went the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reality portion of the evening…

Bailey got out of Denver on Friday heading toward Cedar Ridge only to get stuck in mountain traffic, all of them slowed down by unexpected icy conditions. It stressed her out making the drive at night on the windy mountain roads, and she white-knuckled it the whole way. By the time she got to Cedar Ridge, she literally fell out of her car and into her unit.

And slept straight through until her phone beeped an incoming text from Aaron the next morning.

You never texted me that you’d arrived in C.R. last night. Let us know you’re safe or I’m coming up to find you.

I’m fine, she quickly texted him back, hating the royal use of the “us”—which in this case meant Aaron and her mom.

They were quite the pair.

It drove her nuts in the worst way. She felt like such a jerk, but she hated that Aaron was still close to her mom. He’d friended her on Facebook and she kept him up to date on all things Bailey.

She got that there’d been a time when the two of them had needed each other, when they’d been each other’s support system, when they’d taken turns going to the doctor with Bailey and compared notes on everything from her mood to her temperature to her numbers to her damn bodily functions.

But these things weren’t necessary anymore.

She was fine.

She was more than fine. She was alive and planning on staying that way.

And yet they still maintained that unhealthy link, even now when she and Aaron were no longer seeing each other.

It didn’t work for her on any level. She was tired of trying to convince them both separately and as a team that she was not working herself into an early grave, that she was loving her choices. They both meant a lot to her, a whole lot, but she and Aaron had broken up for a reason.

He was a saver.

And she didn’t need saving.

Since the Breakfast God didn’t knock this morning, she showered and dressed and hit the cafeteria herself. She grabbed a coffee to go and a quick breakfast burrito, which she ate on the walk to her car.

Once there, it took her three trips to unload the supplies she’d brought and another half an hour to get herself situated on the scaffolding.

She’d finished penciling in her grand plan, using a big carpenter pencil that she loved working with. The Kincaid family tree had started to come to life, complete with drawings of each of the Kincaids in such a way as to present their unique personalities on the mountain.

Now it was time to start painting.

Challenging as it was, some of it was easy. The background and the tree itself were fun and the actual people would be even more so. She knew exactly what she wanted for each of the siblings. Well, except for Jacob, who she still didn’t have a handle on.

And Hudson… but that wasn’t because she didn’t have a handle on him. That was more thanks to the fact that just thinking about him turned her upside down and sideways.

After she had started with the tree and got it situated the way she wanted, she took a moment to just sit there high up off the ground, cradling her coffee, staring at the mountain in front of her.

The day was… glorious. A painfully blue sky streaked with a few long tendril-like clouds. The rugged peak dotted with the dark green pines, whose tips were frosted in the morning sun. There were people on the mountain, traversing their way down.

It was all so perfect it could have been a painting, and she sat there momentarily overcome by gratitude that she was here to experience it. She tipped her head back and let the sun warm it, let the fresh pine-scented mountain air fill her lungs, and let herself just enjoy and appreciate that she was even here to have the moment.

“Working hard?” asked the now unbearably familiar masculine voice that never failed to send the most delicious kind of shiver right through her body. The sensation pinged off some parts more than others, leaving her both warm from the inside out and also a little dazed. It was a lot of reaction to get from just a voice, but he was also a lot of man.

Chapter 11

It’d been a whole damn week since Bailey had heard that voice, an entire week to replay the feel of his mouth on hers, his body warm and hard against hers. She’d told herself she’d exaggerated his effect on her.

Turned out nope.

She forced herself to remain still, cool, calm, and collected as he leaned his skis against the scaffolding and climbed his way up to her with an effortless ease that had her mouth going completely dry.

There were other reactions, too, reactions she planned on firmly ignoring. Even when he crouched down at her side, balanced on the balls of his feet, and looked over the wall.

She realized she was holding her breath, waiting for his reaction.

It was an endless minute as he absorbed it all, slowly, taking his time to see everything before he turned back to her.

“Okay,” he said. “So you know how to paint.”

She let out the breath in a whoosh and made him smile.

“Like you care what I think,” he said.

If he only knew. She blithely ignored this and offered him her coffee.

He took it with a heartfelt gratitude that had her taking a second look at him. “How long have you been up?”

“Since two thirty this morning,” he said. “Got called in. The conditions were ripe for an avalanche.”

She must have paled because he smiled. “We got it handled.”

“How do you handle it?” she asked.

“Explosives.”

She blinked.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’re good at it.”

She let out a breath. That easy confidence was incredibly attractive. Or maybe it was the element of danger she found exciting, though she wasn’t sure she liked what that said about her.

Still, the fact remained that she couldn’t even begin to imagine all the responsibilities he faced on a daily basis. “The most dangerous thing I face on my job is a paper cut,” she said.