My Kind of Wonderful (9 page)

“We both know that’s not true,” he said, eyes hot, making her remember when he’d pushed her back against her car and touched her plenty. In fact, if he’d touched her for another minute or two, she’d have had an orgasm right there in the parking lot.

“I’m not afraid to touch you,” he said.

“Then you feel sorry for me because I was sick,” she said, hating that idea.

He winced with guilt but not pity, which was good. Pity would have brought out her homicidal tendencies.

“I told you I’m not sick now,” she said.

Hudson looked her right in the eyes. “And I heard you.”

Her heart skipped a little beat. “So if you’re not afraid of me and you don’t feel sorry for me, what’s the problem?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, his gaze swept over her, from her eyes to her mouth, and locked in.

Stepping into him, she poked him in the chest. “Well?”

He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Don’t push me on this, Bailey.”

She pushed him.

He gave her a long, hard look that didn’t scare her off. Nor did he budge.

She glanced up at him, hands on hips.

He shook his head and muttered “fuck it” and then hauled her up against him and covered her mouth with his.

The kiss was hot and wet and deep and amazing, and by the time he lifted his head from hers, she could hardly remember her point, much less her name.

Holy.

Cow.

A couple of wolf whistles had her jerking back from him. Some of Hud’s crew had arrived to help with the scaffolding.

Good timing, too, because God knew she wouldn’t have found the strength to stop what had probably been the hottest kiss of her life. “That’s not a problem,” she
whispered, deciding to play it light. “That was fun.” She turned away before he could get the truth in her eyes, but he grabbed her. “Careful.”

Right. They were on the second tier of the scaffolding, fourteen feet up from the ground. Given the look in his eyes, she hadn’t been the only one feeling the heat. “I’m okay.”

That got a half smile out of him. “Glad someone is.”

So he was just as affected as she. Something to think about. Later. When her mind cleared of the sensual daze he’d put her in.

The guys went to work building the scaffolding and she went back to standing there as if nothing had happened. As if her world hadn’t just been completely rocked to the very foundation.

The entire structure was in place by eleven.

And then she was alone with her wall. She had the iPad and her rough draft, and with that she went to work dividing the wall into equal sections to begin sketching.

That night Bailey stayed in a one-room efficiency apartment on-site. She stayed up late filling in more details for the mural and got up early to get back to the wall. When she walked up to it and took in the sheer size of it, the doubts crept back in.

Hard.

As she stared at it and the reality of what she planned to do, her heart started pounding, and in spite of the thirty-two degrees and the windchill factor, she began to sweat.

It’s just math, she reminded herself. It was just a management of size, and as a graphic artist, she knew this. She was good at this.

But standing there with an impending anxiety attack barreling down on her, she panicked. What made her think she could pull this off? The mural, the list… hell, everything. What did she know about living life?

“Problem?”

At the sound of Hudson’s voice behind her, she jumped and shoved her iPad back into her cross-body saddlebag at her feet. “No.”

“Then why are you talking to yourself?”

“I always talk to myself,” she said.

“You always tell yourself you’re an idiot?”

She sighed and turned to face him. He was in his gear, and given the tenseness of his shoulders it appeared to have been an extremely long morning already. Or maybe it was her. “Remember how you didn’t want me to do this?”

“Yeah.”

“Well you win.”

“Tell me it’s a six-pack of beer and a pizza.”

Not able to find the funny, she shook her head. “I’m going to get white paint to cover the grid I made and put it back to the way it was and make your day.”

He stared at her for a long beat. “Did I leave and come back to an alternate universe?”

“Yes. And the Bailey in this universe is messed up.” With that, she scooped up her bag, threw the strap over her head, and stalked off. The effect was less dramatic than she’d have liked since she caught the bag on the scaffolding and was jerked around and brought up short. Which meant she had to untangle herself with an audience, and that of course took way too long.

Hud actually had to come help her, his big hands and dexterous fingers pushing hers aside and easily freeing her.

“I was trying to walk off in a snit,” she said.

“I have a sister, so I majored in snit,” he said. “Talk to me.”

She sighed. “I think I just need to go home and clear my head.”

“Understandable,” Hud said. “But tell me you’re coming back next weekend.”

She met his gaze and realized her mistake because his eyes drew her right in. “You didn’t even want this,” she said quietly.

“Things change,” he said back just as quietly. “Go home. Regroup. I’ll see you next weekend.”

“How can you be so sure of that?”

He studied her for a long moment. “Because I know what it’s like to doubt yourself. But I also know what it’s like to want something bad. And you want this. The mural.”

And you…
“Maybe things change,” she said.

“Maybe,” he agreed. “But my money is still on you.”

H
ud lived in a 1950s ski lodge about a half mile up the fire road from the parking lot. The resort had abandoned it in the ’80s for a new lodge, so the Kincaids had taken it over and now called it home.

The three-story log building was drafty in the winter, leaked in the spring, and couldn’t be efficiently cooled in the summer. But to Hud and his siblings, the place was the only true family home they’d ever known.

The Kincaid siblings had divided the lodge into four living quarters. Aidan and Lily, and also Hud, were on the bottom floor in two separate suites. Kenna had taken half the second floor, the other half being full of all the crap they’d accumulated over the years. The third story was for the marrieds Gray and Penny, and the rest of them tried real hard to ignore the occasional fighting match—and then the squeaking bedsprings that always followed said fighting match.

The weekend had ended and the crowds left Cedar
Ridge en masse. Including Bailey, who hadn’t painted over her markings on the wall. Hud was going to take that as a sign that she would be back. He hoped so, which surprised him. There was something about her, something that made him smile, made him think, made him… yearn.

Monday night he and his siblings ate pizza in the open living room.
Annihilated
might have been a better word. It’d been a Ski for Schools day, meaning that Cedar Ridge cut the price of the ticket by fifty percent and then split the proceeds with the local schools. It was their way of giving back to the schools, and it brought a ton of traffic in. People loved to ski for half off. And the resort more than made up for the lost income in rentals and food. The full house actually gave them a huge boost for the day—and gave them extra income to go toward their debt.

It seemed that just about everyone within five hundred miles had turned out to ski that day.

“Met with the bank today,” Gray said quietly when they’d eaten everything but the cardboard boxes the pizzas had come in.

Penny sighed and slipped her arm around him, setting her head on his shoulder.

“We’ve got nine months before the balloon payment is due,” Gray said. “No extension.”

Kenna opened her mouth.

Gray pointed at her. “Don’t. Don’t say it.”

“But I have buckets of money locked away,” she said. “Because
you
made me lock it away. It’s worthless to me, dammit. I want you to use it. Why won’t you let me give it to you for this, to save us?”

“I said no,” Gray said firmly, voice flat.

Kenna stared at him. “What-the-fuck-ever,” she finally said, and stormed out, probably to hole up in her room like the hermit she’d become.

“Gray,” Penny said softly.

“No, Pen,” Gray said tightly. “She earned that money with her own blood, sweat, and tears. She’s not using it to bail us out of the mess our asshole dad left us in.”

“But he’s her dad, too, and she wants to be one of you.”

“She is one of us,” Gray said. “She’s our baby sister and we protect her, not use her.” He looked at Aidan and Hud. “Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Aidan said, and reached out for Lily’s hand. She smiled at him and nodded.

“Agreed,” Hud said just as easily.

Kenna had been a professional snowboarder from the age of fifteen to last year, when she’d crashed and burned, both physically and metaphorically.

She still wasn’t on the people train and had been hiding out here at Cedar Ridge, pouting, playing Candy Crush on her tablet, refusing to answer her phone to any of her old contacts.

When she’d first come home again, Gray had talked her into locking up her winnings and sponsorship loot. He’d deposited it for her—long-term investments—so that she wouldn’t be further weighed down by her own ruthless, self-destructive streak.

It’d been nearly a year now and she was no longer walking around like she might kill the first person to look at her wrong, but she was far from back on track. None of them could stomach the idea of using her money to save
their hides when the day could very well come when she might need it.

Gray got a text, something about a computer problem. Shortly after that, Aidan got a search and rescue call. And then Hud got his own call as well, someone on duty at the police station had gotten sick and Hud was needed for the graveyard shift.

And so, on went the week.

By the time Friday came around, he was done in. But that night he worked another cop shift and no sooner had he started than an alarm came in for a burglary call. An eighty-year-old man had called 9-1-1 claiming someone was in his kitchen eating his brand-new raspberry tarts. And he’d been right. There’d been someone in his kitchen eating his raspberry tarts—a three-hundred-and-fifty-pound bear roughly the size of a VW Bug, sitting at the guy’s kitchen island, calm as you please.

Bears were more common than traffic accidents in Cedar Ridge.

The next call was from the local drug store. Three reportedly armed suspects had gotten into the ceiling vents, working their way toward the safe. Unfortunately for them, they’d fallen through the ceiling tiles. Hud and two other units arrived just as the suspects were stirring, writhing on the ground, moaning in pain.

They were teenagers, not armed—although they were drunk—and dressed as superheroes. One of them had gotten the brilliant idea to rob the store. Not for cash.

Nope, the geniuses had wanted candy.

It was three in the morning before Hud got home. Assuming no one else needed him, he had two whole
hours of sleep ahead of him. He fell into his bed, and as often happened when he was exhausted, he dreamed badly.

When he realized his phone was vibrating with an
incoming call, he sat straight up in bed, heart aching. But it was nearly a decade later, time to get over that shit. Besides, it was four in the morning on Saturday and the job needed his attention, which made him groan. Two hours of sleep wasn’t going to cut it, but what choice did he have? He scrubbed a hand down his face, still feeling the loss of his twin as if no time had gone by at all.

Dammit, Jacob
.

Back then, on that long-ago day, Hud had nearly gone after him, but in the end he hadn’t. He couldn’t leave his mom and he wouldn’t leave the rest of the family either.

True to his word, through an online bank, Jacob had set up an automatic payment that dropped into their mom’s account every single month since he’d been gone.

Which at times had been Hud’s only indication that Jacob was still alive.

At first, hurting at missing out on the adventure with Jacob, Hud had gone for the closest thing—the police academy. He’d become a cop and had also worked his way up through the resort to run ski patrol.

And it was ski patrol calling him.

Mother Nature had dumped another six inches of snow since he’d fallen into bed, which meant he needed to get with his avalanche patrol crew and check the mountain.

By dawn they’d deemed the place safe to open for the day. Hud sent his guys off to breakfast before they had to be back out there setting lines and patrolling when the resort opened.

“You’re not coming with?” Mitch asked inside the cafeteria, surprised when Hud didn’t head toward the food with them.

“Got something to take care of,” he said.

Mitch’s easy smile faded. “News on Jacob?”

“No.” Nothing new to report on that front was better than bad news given that Jacob was still completely incommunicado, something that both frustrated and scared him. “Nothing new,” he said to Mitch. “I’ll meet up with you.”

He headed into the cafeteria kitchen. It was hustling and bustling, people cooking and preparing food to support the resort for the day. His nose was assaulted with the scent of coffee, bacon, cinnamon rolls… all of it making his mouth water.

“Hudson,” a female voice purred.

He turned to find Quinn, one of the chefs and the ex Gray had mentioned the week before. She smiled warmly. “You’ve been avoiding me,” she said with her usual frankness. Like it didn’t even matter that the last time he’d seen her, she’d chucked his own phone at his head. Her smile and teasing tone promised all was forgiven.

“Just busy,” he said. The utter truth. She was beautiful and fun and he told himself if he’d had a spare second, he might have taken her up on the promise in her eyes, even if it’d lead to another blowout. But as of two weeks ago and one blue-eyed muralist, he hadn’t given another woman a single thought.

Quinn shook her head and called him on his bullshit. “You’re such a liar, Hud. No one’s that busy.”

And that was an argument they’d had a million times and the reason he couldn’t go there again with her. “I just need to get some stuff to go,” he said, gesturing to the food.

“Want me to take a quick break and eat with you? It’s been a while.” She smiled. “I’ll even resist throwing your phone at your head when it goes off the whole time.”

“Quinn, I’m on the run. I’m sorry.”

“Sorrier than you know,” she murmured, and shrugged. “You’re the one missing out, Hud.”

This he knew firsthand. He selected what he wanted, put it all in a bag, and swiped his card. He didn’t really know why he was doing this. It would let Bailey in on a little secret, tell her something that he didn’t particularly want her to know.

That he’d been thinking of her. That he’d hoped she’d show up and not give up—although he knew she’d at least indeed shown up, as he’d checked the employee housing log.

Insanity, really, all of it. He’d kissed her last week half hoping that it would burn out the embers. Instead it’d done the opposite.

Yes, he’d wanted her gone. But now he just wanted her.

“So who is she?” Quinn asked.

No one he wanted to discuss.

Quinn shook her head, annoyed now. “What is it with you Kincaids? You’re all wild and crazy and fun, and then one day a woman captures your heart and it’s game over in a damn blink.”

Was that true? It sure had been for Gray and Aidan.

But not him. It didn’t happen that fast, couldn’t happen that fast. He wasn’t going to allow
it
to happen at all. He didn’t have the time in his life for this.