Currant Creek Valley. RaeAnne Thayne

      “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

      SAM WATCHED BRODIE’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