Currant Creek Valley (3 page)

“Looks clear enough,” Sam said, rolling up the blueprints he had pulled out of his pickup truck. “Since all the appliances and shelving and counters are already here, it’s only a matter of putting everything in place. You should still be able to have your mid-May opening.”

“I’m going to hold you to that, Mr. Delgado,” she said.

“Once my crew comes tomorrow, we can dig in.”

“How many guys will you have?”

“Three others, besides me. We’ve all worked together a long time.”

“Does everybody have a place to stay?”

“Brodie has made reservations at a hotel on the edge of town. Nothing fancy but it will do for now.”

“Good. Good.” She smiled. “Well, let me know if you need anything.”

“I’ll do that.”

It was now or never, she thought, and plunged forward. “So I don’t see a ring. Is there a Mrs. Delgado?”

Plenty of men didn’t care to wear a wedding ring, either out of personal preference or deliberate obfuscation. When she was interested in a man, she was scrupulously careful about double-checking that particular point.

Some hard-earned lessons tended to stick with a woman.

Sam Delgado blinked, obviously a little bemused by the question. If she hadn’t been watching him carefully for some sign of deceit, she might have missed the tangle of emotion in his gaze.

“As a matter of fact, there is. My brother’s wife.”

“But you don’t have one of your own?” she pressed.

“Not currently.”

His guarded reaction didn’t seem particularly encouraging. He could be engaged—another hot button of hers because of family history—but she hadn’t missed that sadness in his eyes and sensed he was telling the truth.

“Do you anticipate that changing anytime in the near future?”

“Not that I’m aware of, no. Why are you so curious?”

She shrugged. “Personal rule. I don’t date men who are married, engaged or otherwise involved in a long-term relationship.”

A corner of his mouth danced up. “I didn’t realize we were planning on dating.”

“Planning on it? No. But if the opportunity arose, I like to be certain ahead of time that both parties are...unentangled. Poachers bug the hell out of me. And men who allow themselves to be poached are even worse.”

He gazed at her for a long moment as if he wasn’t quite sure how to answer. “You don’t have any problem speaking your mind, Ms. McKnight, do you?”

“Please. Call me Alex. Especially considering we might be planning on dating at some point in the foreseeable future.”

He laughed as he shook his head. “Here’s something you should know about me then. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to be in the driver’s seat in these sorts of things.”

She gave him a sultry smile over her shoulder. “Oh, you foolish, foolish man. You might
think
you’re behind the wheel when it comes to most women, but that’s only because we’ve decided to hand over the keys.”

He chuckled that rough, sexy laugh that sent shivers down her spine again. “I don’t know what sort of p—er, pansies—you traditionally date, Alex McKnight, but I’m a former Army Ranger. Know what our motto is? Rangers lead the way. And we don’t just mean into enemy territory.”

She hadn’t been this attracted to a man in ages. She generally didn’t go further than second base with the guys she dated, but something about Sam Delgado made her suspect he was just the sort of guy to tempt her into changing her mind.

“I’ll keep that in mind. I guess I’ll see you around, then.”

She gave him a smile and a wave, tucking a strand of flyaway hair behind her ear as she picked up the basket of picnic supplies and headed for the door.

“Wait a minute,” he called out. “You can’t just leave. We were having a conversation here.”

Was that what he called it? She smiled. “I thought we were done.”

“What time am I picking you up tomorrow night?”

Oh, she really, really liked a man who took the initiative.

“I’m working tomorrow night until nine.”

“Perfect. I’ll probably be busy here until late and will need to unwind a little before I head to the hotel.”

“Do you play pool, Army Ranger Delgado?”

“I’ve been known to chalk a few cues in my time.”

“Great. Why don’t I meet you at The Speckled Lizard? It’s on Front Street, two blocks west of the center block of Main Street. It’s one of the few places that stays open late on a Thursday night during the off-season.”

“I’ll see you then. Tomorrow, twenty-two hundred, Speckled Lizard. It’s a date.”

She smiled and headed out the door, anticipation winging through her.

All in all, she was very glad she hadn’t hit him with a two-by-four.

CHAPTER TWO

S
AM
WATCHED
B
RODIE
’
S
CHEF
walk down the hill toward town swinging a picnic basket at her side, her blond curls bouncing behind her as she walked.

His heartbeat was still racing and he didn’t know what the hell just happened there. Right now, he felt as if he’d just spent the past thirty minutes tumbling around in a cement mixer.

This surge of adrenaline and anticipation and
life
churning inside him was unfamiliar, uncharted territory.

When he walked into this old firehouse, he certainly never expected to stumble across a woman like her, brash, funny, brimming with energy.

What was it about her? She was beautiful, yes, with those huge green eyes and the endless spill of hair, but he knew plenty of beautiful women.

Though he continued to insist it wasn’t necessary, Nicky’s wife, Cheri, was always trying to hook him up with some friend of hers or other. For a stay-at-home mother, his sister-in-law seemed to know an unusually large number of lovely women, many from her previous job as a public-relations executive.

While he might have been attracted to a few of those women Cheri had found for him, none of them had ignited these wild sparks that still snapped and buzzed through him, even after Alex McKnight had turned down a side street and disappeared from view.

He would have to tread carefully here. The situation had the potential to spawn a whole morass of complications.

For the next month, he would have to work closely with her on the Brazen project. She was the chef, after all. Not only that, he knew from conversations with Brodie that Alex was good friends with Brodie’s wife, Evie.

His whole life hinged on making a success of this project, on finishing the work on budget and on time and on doing a good enough job that Brodie would continue to contract with him and would recommend him to his friends around Hope’s Crossing.

Sam couldn’t afford to screw things up.

He looked at the scene below him, the neatly quaint downtown with its wide streets and graceful old historic buildings, the rows of established clapboard houses mingling with higher-end log homes.

Colorful spring blooms already burst out in patches, and the trees leading down the street had new pale green buds on them. He could imagine the place would be spectacular in the summer, with those raw, rugged mountains looming as a backdrop.

He breathed in the high mountain air. It seemed sweeter here, though he knew that was probably just the abundance of pine and fir trees around, sending out their citrusy fragrance.

This was the new start he wanted, that he needed, and he couldn’t afford to screw up his chances of making a life here.

A couple kids rode down the hill on bicycles, legs sticking out as they let gravity take over and flew past him, their laughter ringing loudly.

Across the street, an older lady with snow-white hair tended to flowers in a box hanging from her porch railing, and farther down from that, a couple people stood talking beside a mailbox.

It looked peaceful, comfortable. Perfect.

A few weeks ago, he had come up from Denver to check things out. From the moment he had driven into the city limits, he had felt the tension in his shoulders relax, the dark edges retreat.

He wasn’t naive enough to think trouble couldn’t find him here. While the surface of Hope’s Crossing might look like something out of a Norman Rockwell illustration, the reality was never as ideal.

After all, he had met Brodie at the Denver Children’s Hospital when Sam had been working on renovations to an office suite there at the same time Brodie’s teenage daughter was a patient, after she had suffered a terrible accident here in Hope’s Crossing.

Bad things happened in small towns just as easily as big cities like Denver. Marriages still fell apart, plenty of kids dabbled in drugs and alcohol, people still got cancer and died.

He grimaced at that thought and turned around to head back into the restaurant just as his cell phone rang. After a quick glance at the caller ID, his frown disappeared.

“Why, hello,” he answered. “If it isn’t my favorite son.”

“Favorite and only,” Ethan said primly.

Sam smiled, picturing his nearly seven-year-old’s dark curls and the blue, blue eyes he had shared with his mother. “Maybe so. But even if you had a half-dozen siblings, you’d still probably be my favorite.”

“That’s hypothetical, though. We can’t really know that for sure, can we?”

Hypothetical
was apparently the word of the week. Last week it had been
enumerate
and the week before
precocious
. Spoken in that sweet young voice that still had a trace of a lisp, the hundred-dollar words always made Sam smile.

Love for his terrifyingly brilliant son was a sweet ache in his chest. “How is everything at Uncle Nick and Aunt Cheri’s?”

Ethan’s sigh was heavy and put-upon. “All right, I guess. I had to play Barbie dolls today with Amanda. I was Malibu Ken and she had Hula Barbie and they were supposed to be going on a date. I decided they should go on a date to the beach and we had them go surfing down the rain gutter in front of the house. How was I supposed to know Malibu Ken would fit down the sewer grate?”

“I bet that went over real well with your cousin.”

“Aunt Cheri made me stay in my room for an entire half hour. I don’t see why I had to be punished when it was simply an estimating error.”

“Life isn’t fair, is it?”

“Rarely, in my experience,” Ethan said glumly.

His son was six for a few more weeks but acted as if he was thirty-six most of the time.

“When can I come see Hope’s Crossing again, Dad?”

He grimaced, though there was no one but the lady across the street with her flowers to see. He missed his son already. “I’ll bring you up first chance I get, I promise.”

“I want to live with you for good in our own house, where I don’t have to play Barbies or share a room with somebody who still watches Barney.”

“I want that, too, more than anything. I’m working on it, I swear. Soon, okay? Six weeks. You have to finish the school year first and I need to find a decent place for us to live.”

“Six weeks seems like
forever.
”

“I know. To me, too. But we’ll spend every weekend together and before you know it, school will be out and you can come here for the summer when Uncle Nick and Aunt Cheri take off to Belgium. Then next fall you’ll have a whole new school and new friends.”

“I don’t want to go to a new school,” Ethan said, that stubbornness creeping into his voice.

“I know you don’t, son. But Hope’s Crossing is too far for us to drive to St. Augustine’s every day. If we’re going to live here, we’ll have to find a school here, too. Don’t worry. I’ve heard this one is terrific. You’ll see.”

Beyond the two-hour distance involved, Ethan attended a very elite private school. He had thrived at St. Augustine’s, where they celebrated his brain and had spent the past two years trying to stimulate it.

Move or not, he couldn’t continue there now. For one thing, Sam’s former in-laws had insisted on paying the hefty private school tuition but those funds had dried up a year ago.

They loathed Sam now. While they claimed they wanted to continue a relationship with Ethan, he couldn’t allow it, not when they filled his son’s head with lies and vitriol.

The whole thing was such a mess. When his late wife’s father had been arrested, the tuition payments stopped. Sam had managed to scrape together enough to keep Ethan at St. Augustine’s this year but he certainly couldn’t continue paying that much unless he wanted to deplete Kelli’s entire life insurance policy before Ethan even reached college age.

“You were going to have to go to a new school either way, kid. You know that. You couldn’t stay at St. Augustine’s. The schools here in Hope’s Crossing are supposed to be excellent. We’ll have all summer together to get ready for second grade.”

“I miss you,” Ethan said, his voice small.

“Oh, son. I miss you, too. It’s only a few weeks and then things will be better. You’ll see.”

“I guess.”

“Hang in there and be good for Uncle Nick and Aunt Cheri. I’ll call you every night to check on your homework and I’ll come home next weekend, okay?”

After a few more moments, he hung up with his son. As he gazed down at the picturesque little town, he decided he could use some of the town’s eponymous Hope.

He sincerely hoped he was making the right move here. He had to make a living and that was becoming increasingly difficult in Denver. His reputation in Denver construction circles suffered coming and going.

From J.T.’s friends, he was considered a traitor for whistle-blowing on his own father-in-law and starting the chain of events that had led to J.T.’s conviction. Sam still didn’t know what else he could have done except go to authorities in Denver with his suspicions about his father-in-law. After all, Sam had first given J.T. the chance to make things right when he had discovered Tanner and Sons Construction was dangerously cutting corners—and using shoddy imported materials—but billing full price on government contracts.

From the honorable contractors left, Sam was painted with the same ugly brush as his father-in-law because he had been J.T.’s second-in-command for the last three years and should have known what was happening under his nose at the company. They didn’t seem to make allowances for a floundering man who had been helping his wife fight cancer and then grieving when she lost the battle.

Hope’s Crossing offered a chance to make a new start, away from all that ugliness. Thanks to Brodie and a few of his contacts, he had jobs lined up for several months. He had no doubt he could keep them coming, as long as he focused on the work at hand.

That was all the more reason to keep things casual and friendly with Alex McKnight. He couldn’t afford the distraction and the complication of a woman like her. He would meet her the next night for a game of pool and some friendly conversation, but that was as far as he would let things go.

His future—and, more importantly, his son’s—depended on it.