wants a pass.”
“Which of course you’re going to give him,” she said. “Right?”
“Oh, so wrong.” Hud grinned and it nearly melted the bones right out of her knees. He stepped closer. “Guess what?”
“What?” she asked, annoyingly breathless.
“It’s my turn for a question now.”
Oh boy. “Aren’t you afraid that might express personal interest?”
His smile was a little naughty. “I’ve had my tongue down your throat. I’m pretty sure I’ve already expressed personal interest.”
Good point. “So what do you want to know about me?”
“I want to know about your list.” When their gazes met, her heart skipped a beat. Damn. She could stare at him staring at her all day long. He never looked at her all sad or worried, and he certainly never looked at her like he felt bad for her and all she’d been through.
It was so incredibly, amazingly attractive.
So she answered his question honestly. “I spent over a decade with an expiration date,” she said.
“Cancer?”
“Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Got it just before I turned fifteen. I was handed a death sentence but somehow managed to wrestle the beast against all the odds.” She shrugged. “I get that most people make a bucket list when something bad happens, but I never did. Ten years is a really long time and for most of it I wasn’t normal. My life wasn’t anything close to normal. I was really sick, way too sick to do much of anything.” She shrugged. “Even so, my doctor always gave me options and she said one of those options needed to be a good spirit. So I secretly dreamed big. And when I got rid of the cancer and I started to feel… normal, I guess, I wrote down the list I’d been secretly dreaming of. A what-I-get-to-do-now-that-I-get-to-stay-alive list. Probably silly but there it is.”
She waited for the usual platitudes, empty and meaningless and rather annoying, but again they didn’t come.
What did come stunned her. “Not silly, not even close. I think you’re incredibly brave,” he said quietly.
She automatically started to shake her head no because she’d never thought of herself as brave before—the opposite actually. There’d been plenty of times when she hadn’t been able to see the end of the line, hadn’t been able to imagine herself getting to this point, had in fact wanted it just to be over.
So “brave”? Nope, but she sure could get used to seeing him look at her like she was and maybe she’d get brave by osmosis. “Thank you,” she said just as quietly. It’d only been a week but she’d half convinced herself that she’d imagined the chemistry between them. She hadn’t, and she was glad.
“So you’re good,” he said.
She nodded.
“Stay that way,” he said, and took the hammer from her hand.
“Am I keeping you from anything important?” she asked as he tossed the hammer aside and began to pull out long pieces of steel and planks of wood.
“Depends on your definition of ‘important,’” he said, easily moving the long pieces of steel, the muscles of his shoulders and back moving enticingly beneath his shirt. “Been up since three a.m. on avalanche control and was about to grab breakfast.”
Good Lord. He’d been working for six hours already. And now she had him loading steel and wood, carrying it around the side of the building, and putting it together so she could access the entire wall. “Listen, I can get someone else to help me—”
“Bailey?”
“Yeah?”
“Shh.” Once he had all the material stacked near the wall they began to put it all together, and she had to admit she could never have managed on her own.
Not to mention that working in such close proximity as they were, there was a lot of accidental touching. A brushing of hands, bumping of shoulders… And every time he pulled back.
“What is that?” she finally asked when they stood on the second level of the scaffolding. She was hot, insulted, and dammit, also annoyingly turned on.
“What’s what?” he asked.
“You know what. You’re acting like you’re afraid to touch me.”
“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 wa
s 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.”
Chapter 9
Hud 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.
“What did you just say to me?” Hud asked Jacob, standing nose-to-nose with him immediately after high school graduation.
“You heard me.”
“I couldn’t have heard you correctly,” Hud said to his