Willowleaf Lane

Charlotte didn’t know. And right now she didn’t want to talk about either Harry Lange or Spence Gregory.

“Can I get you anything?”

“Actually, I came in to ask you a huge favor.” With a cheerful grin, Alex let herself be distracted. She seemed so happy lately since she had started seeing Sam Delgado, a new contractor in town.

Charlotte was thrilled for her, she really was, but sometimes she couldn’t help an insidious little niggle of envy. While Charlotte found their developing relationship wonderful for the two of them—especially since she knew firsthand how deeply Sam cared for Alex—Charlotte had once entertained hopes herself toward the man when Sam had first come to town.

He had endeared himself to Charlotte forever by reaching out to help her troubled brother Dylan, offering him a job with Sam’s construction company despite Dylan’s new limitations. Her brother had refused—no big surprise there—but Charlotte wanted to think the offer had meant something to Dylan. It had certainly meant something to her—so much that she had asked Sam to go to the town’s annual Giving Hope Day gala.

She had hoped the two of them might hit it off and that he might ask her out again. Sam was new in town. He hadn’t even known her before the changes of the past year and a half and she had hoped that might give her a slight advantage, but it had become obvious fairly quickly that Sam was completely tangled up over Alex.

During these past few weeks since the two of them had come together, it was transparent to all they were crazy about each other. Alex gave every appearance of a woman deeply in love.

“I’m glad to help,” Charlotte said now, pushing down that spurt of envy. “What can I do?”

“You don’t even know what it is, and you’re already agreeing to help. That’s one of the things I love most about you, Char.”

She cherished all her friends who had supported her on her recent journey toward reinvention, in no small part because they had loved her just as generously eighty pounds ago. “You know I’ll help in any way I can. Unless you need me to rob a bank or taste test one of your new fattening dessert recipes.”

Alex grinned. “Nope. This one is easy. A friend of Sam’s has been in town helping him with all the work coming his way. He’s thinking about making his temporary stay in our fair little hamlet a permanent thing. He’s a single guy, really sweet but a little lonely, I think.”

Charlotte braced herself, guessing what was coming next. Her friends seemed to feel a compelling need to set her up on dates with eligible men lately. First Claire McKnight just happened to know a new police officer in her husband Riley’s department she thought would be perfect for Charlotte, then Evie Thorne had wanted her to go out with a business associate of her husband, Brodie.

She was beginning to wonder if she had subconsciously started sending out some secret bat signal that she was single and desperate. Which so didn’t describe her at all. Okay, she was single. But she hadn’t yet descended into desperation.

“I don’t know.” She stalled for time.

“Come on. It will be fun. Sam was thinking we could take him out to dinner to celebrate his move here. Maybe go up to Le Passe Montagne.”

“Not Brazen?” Charlotte asked, surprised.

“Well, obviously that’s the best restaurant in town but Sam knows how hard it is to get a reservation there.”

“Even when a guy is sleeping with the chef?”

Alex grinned, looking completely pleased with the world. “Even then. If you want the truth, I did suggest we just meet there but Sam seems to think I don’t relax when I’m eating in my own restaurant. Imagine that.”

Charlotte laughed, despite the lingering disquiet over Spence’s reappearance. It was hard not to laugh around Alex, who deserved every bit of the success her new restaurant was enjoying.

“I think I can picture it. He knows you well, doesn’t he?”

Her friend made a face. “So we were thinking next week sometime, maybe Saturday. I’m giving you plenty of advance notice. Will that work?”

“I’m not really crazy about blind dates,” she said, which was a rather monumental understatement.

“Don’t think of it as a blind date. Just a few friends getting together.”

“Two of whom happen to be seeing each other.”

“Well, yes. Come on, Char. He’s really a nice guy and we want to make sure he feels like he has a few connections in town besides us.”

She swallowed a sigh, imagining how awkward it would be to go on a double date with Alex and Sam Delgado, considering her prior interest in Sam.

She opened her mouth to politely decline but clamped it shut again. Just the night before while she had been eating her Healthy Choice dinner for one, she had promised herself she would try to get out more. She had no real reason to say no, other than a little embarrassment at unrealized dreams. And heaven knows, she had enough of those lying around to fill a darn auditorium.

An image of Spence Gregory, lean and dark and muscled, filled her head but she shoved it aside.

“Sure,” she said quickly before she could talk herself out of it. “Dinner would be lovely. Thank you for the invitation.”

“Perfect. We can talk next week but let’s tentatively plan on a week from Saturday, about seven. Does that work?”

“Yes.”

“You’re going to love Garrett, I promise.”

“I’m sure I will,” she lied as Alex gave a cheery wave and left the store.

Customers came in right behind her and Charlotte was grateful for the distraction they provided. She didn’t need to think about blind dates or old hurts or how, after only a few minutes with Spencer Gregory, she once more felt fifteen years old—fat, awkward, shy—and desperately in love with a boy who barely knew she was alive.

CHAPTER TWO

A FEW HOURS after leaving the candy store, Spence decided house hunting had to rank about dead last on his list of favorite activities. Even behind the IRS audit he had once endured.

“I’ve got several more houses to show you but I’m not sure we even need to see them,” the perky real estate agent flashed her extremely white teeth at him as they pulled up to the address she indicated, in a neighborhood he remembered delivering papers to.

“Given what you’ve told me you’re looking for, I think you’ll really love this house,” Jill Sellers went on. “The location is fantastic, close to the mouth of Silver Strike Canyon and the recreation center but within walking distance of the downtown restaurant scene. The house comes fully furnished, which I know you want. The interior is beautifully designed in a contemporary style for the discriminating renter.”

Was that what he was? Since when? As far as he was concerned, a couple beds and a working kitchen just about covered his needs.

She beamed at him, which he found more than a little unsettling. He certainly didn’t remember her being this helpful when they went to school together, at least in their earlier years. By the time he had reached high school, he had started to excel in sports and the same girls—who the year before had turned up their nose when he walked past in his ripped jeans and too-small jacket—had suddenly seemed to look at him with new eyes.

He supposed he should be grateful he wasn’t a complete leper in town.

“I’m sure we’ll love it,” he answered.

“Or not,” Peyton muttered.

She hadn’t liked any of the rental properties Jill had showed them in the past two hours—and made no secret of it. Several houses later, he was sick of her attitude and tired of trying to find something she might like, when he knew in his bones she wasn’t going to be happy with anything.

Nothing in Hope’s Crossing would please her. She was quite determined to hate everything about the community, which ought to make for an interesting six months.

He sighed, wondering again if he had made a huge mistake taking this job at the recreation center. It had seemed like an ideal opportunity when Harry Lange had called him—far better than sitting around working on his golf handicap, dabbling in a few investment interests he had held on to and waiting for offers he knew were never coming.

He had also had some vague idea that perhaps this might be an opportunity for him to reconnect with the daughter who had turned into a baffling, surly stranger.

“You’re going to have to at least take a look inside before I’ll let you tell me how much you hate it,” he said to Peyton.

“Whatever.”

She followed the two of them into the house. Though moderately sized from the outside, the inside seemed to open up, probably because of the soaring windows of the two-story great room that looked out behind the house at Silver Strike Canyon. From the front, the house would have a pretty view of town.

The decor, while fine, seemed a little impersonal. What else could he expect in a property that was mainly used as an executive rental?

The master bedroom was huge with an oversize shower in the attached bath that featured multiple showerheads. The second bedroom also had an attached bath and he saw Peyton’s eyes light up at the jetted tub, though she quickly veiled her expression.

The best feature of the house, as far as he was concerned, was the completely glass solarium with a small but adequate lap pool.

“This one works for me,” he said when they returned to the gourmet kitchen for another look, after Jill Sellers had led them through the house, her speech punctuated with exclamation points and capital letters. “We’ll take it.”

“I just knew you’d love it!”

She touched his arm in a way he definitely recognized as flirtatious. He glanced down at her hand against his sleeve, the nails pink, sharp and glossy. Unbidden, he had a sudden image of Charlotte Caine’s hands, competent, a little callused, with her nails short and unpainted.

She had made all the fudge in the store. Peyton had told him as much when she had rather grudgingly shared a couple samples with him.

He forced away thoughts of Charlotte. “You must have good instincts,” he said in reply to Jill.

“I hope so. Without good instincts, I wouldn’t be able to do my job, would I?”

He didn’t know a blasted thing about being a real estate agent and had no desire to learn. Of course, he didn’t know the first damn thing about being the director of a community recreation center either, yet here he was, preparing to take on the job.

“Can you see if they’ll consider a short-term lease? I only want six months. And how soon can we move in?”

He wasn’t even sure if he—or Peyton—would make it that long, but he had committed to six months and intended to stick to his contract with Harry.

“I’ll speak to the owner, see if I can negotiate a little, and bring you back a lease agreement to sign in a few hours. You could be in this little gem by bedtime.”

“I still don’t see what’s wrong with staying at the lodge,” Peyton muttered.

What he wouldn’t give to have her carry on a halfway civil conversation with him. Of course she preferred the luxurious accommodations at the Silver Strike Lodge. But he had a feeling Harry wouldn’t be too thrilled about extending their stay indefinitely in rooms that generally went for several hundred dollars a night.

“We’re not spending the next six months in a hotel. We need a real house.”

“We have a real house. In Portland.”

By the time those six months were up, she was going to make him crazy. “Which will still be there when we’re finished here in Hope’s Crossing. Meantime, we need a kitchen, outdoor space, room for a housekeeper.”

“Babysitter, you mean.”

This was another argument he didn’t want to debate with her again so he decided to ignore the comment for now. “This works better than any of the others we looked at, don’t you think?”

“I guess.”

That was as ringing an endorsement as he was likely to get from her. “We’re in,” he said to Jill. “Give me a call after you talk to the property management company.”

“I will. I have your number. And you have mine, right?”

“I’m sure I can find it somewhere.” He managed a polite smile and hoped she understood he didn’t intend to call her about anything but his real estate needs—which, after signing this lease, would be nonexistent.

He ushered Peyton out to the Range Rover he had picked up to replace the sports car he drove in Oregon. As he backed out of the driveway and turned in the direction of the canyon mouth, he was struck by the charming view—the colorful houses nestled in trees as they climbed the foothills, the picturesque downtown with its historic architecture, the grand rugged mountains standing sentinel over the valley.

He certainly didn’t remember Hope’s Crossing ever being so appealing when he was living with his mother in that tiny dilapidated house a few blocks off Main Street that probably hadn’t been painted since his grandfather had died twenty years before Spence was born.

Kids could certainly be self-absorbed and he had been no different. Like Peyton, he had spent his days in a cloud of discontent, hating just about everything in his life except football and baseball. The town and its inhabitants had been part of that. He had convinced himself he couldn’t wait to leave, but when he looked back now, he realized he had never really hated Hope’s Crossing.

For every snobby cheerleader mom who thought he was going to impregnate her daughter just by looking at her, there had been others who had seen beyond the mended clothes, the threadbare shoes, the haircut he usually tried to manage himself—until he took a job in high school to pay for little luxuries like a decent razor and a letterman’s jacket.

Dermot Caine, for instance.

He smiled as he drove back toward the canyon, though it was tinged with a shadow of guilt. Now there was someone he should have remained in contact with over the years. Dermot had always been kind. Hell, he had given Billie Gregory a job when no one else would and had kept her on even when she showed up half the time blitzed, when she bothered to show up at all.

Thinking of Dermot inevitably led his thoughts to Charlotte. He remembered again that shock when she had identified herself at the candy store.

Charlotte Caine. He couldn’t get over how she had changed. All that gold hair shot through with hints of red, the big blue eyes, the sexy, curvy figure he could see beneath the apron she wore.

Was she anything at all like he remembered?

When he had known her before, she had been more than a little overweight and had hidden those stunning eyes behind big thick-framed glasses. While she could have moments of quick wit and she was as kind as her father, she could also be painfully shy.

If he remembered correctly, she had been a couple or three years behind him in school though she was four years younger. She had been ahead a grade and he had been behind because of the dark time after his father had died when he was eight, when Billie had gone off the deep end and dragged him aimlessly around the country from flophouse to homeless shelter to the backseat of her car.

He had hated being older than everybody else but still struggled in school—with English class, especially. He had never been a very big reader until long road trips with the Pioneers when he had little else to do. Charlotte, on the other hand, could have been an English teacher herself, even at twelve. She knew her stuff and he had been savvy enough to take advantage of the generous help she offered him.

He would venture to say, Charlotte Caine had been the only reason he had been able to keep his grades up high enough to allow him to participate in school sports.

In a roundabout way, he supposed he had her to thank for his whole career with the Pioneers—which didn’t explain the instant attraction that had been simmering in his gut since the moment he had walked into that candy store and saw her standing behind the counter looking fresh and lovely.

What was wrong with him? He didn’t have time for this. Harry Lange had offered him one chance at redemption, one chance to move beyond the demoralizing isolation of the past year and prove he was more than lousy headlines.

He couldn’t screw this up. He needed to focus on repairing his damaged reputation, not on Charlotte Caine, no matter how much she had changed.

* * *

THIS WAS THE hardest thing she had to face.

Other people had their Rubicons, their Pikes Peaks. She had her dad’s café.

As she walked from Sugar Rush down the street and around the corner to Center of Hope Café after work, her stomach rumbled in anticipation. She swore she could already smell delicious things sidling through the air, tempting and seductive.

Yeah, she worked all day in a candy store, surrounded by chocolates and caramels and toffee, but there she could resist temptation. It was her business and she certainly wanted to produce a delicious product but she supposed it was a little like being the teetotaling owner of a distillery. She didn’t mind a little fudge in moderation once in a while but she never had a desire to stuff herself until she was sick.

This, though. The gnawing craving for some of her father’s comfort food sometimes kept her up at night.

Gooey rich macaroni and cheese. Shepherd’s pie, with thick roast beef and creamy mashed potatoes coating the top like a hard snowfall on the surrounding mountains. Cinnamon-laced apple pie with Pop’s famous homemade vanilla ice cream.

Her dad’s café specialized in the kind of food that numbed and sedated, that soothed hunger pangs and heartache in equal measure.

Despite eighteen months of struggling to change a lifelong addiction to it, whenever she stumbled over one of life’s inevitable bumpy patches, she still craved a hit of Pop’s cooking like a junkie needed crack cocaine.

She knew why. She knew the food at the café represented more than just butter-laden calories. It was her mother waiting for her with a warm towel fresh from the dryer at the end of a rainy walk home from the school bus. It was Pop snuggling her on his lap for a bedtime story, his whiskers tickling her neck. It was summer nights spent sleeping in the tree house with her brothers behind their home while crickets and frogs filled the night with song.

Pop’s food was like home, or at least the home she remembered before the winter she turned ten, when everything changed forever.

On days like this, with her emotions in chaos, she wanted nothing more than to be snugged up against the counter at the diner, burying every concern and feeling of inadequacy under calories.

Drat Spencer Gregory anyway. He had no business coming back to town and leaving her so shaken, filled with dismay and memories and the echo of old pain.

Lasagna. Wouldn’t a big plate of lasagna, dripping with cheese, hit the spot right about now? She bet Pop had some hot and ready. She only had to say the word.

She sighed, increasing her pace. She wouldn’t ask for lasagna. She was stronger than the craving. She only had to remember how hard she had worked the past eighteen months to reshape her life. No matter how provoking her day might be, she couldn’t go back to old habits, the well-traveled pathways in her brain that would inevitably lead her to a destination she no longer wanted.

Instead, she had a chicken breast at home in the refrigerator, soaking in her favorite low-fat marinade of lemon juice, tarragon and a splash of olive oil. As soon as she finished a few errands, she would throw it on the grill along with some vegetables and be far better off.

She pushed open the door and the familiar rich scents surged through her bloodstream like a solid jolt of high-octane caffeine.

“Hey, girl.” Della Pine, who had been waitressing at the Center of Hope as long as Charlotte could remember, greeted her with a wide smile on her wrinkled cheeks. She tottered toward Charlotte in the painfully high heels she always wore, even when she had to spend all day on her feet.

Despite the extra inches, the woman still barely reached Charlotte’s chin, except for her hair, which towered over both of them in all its teased glory.

Charlotte leaned in and kissed the waitress’s cheek, smiling at the familiar olfactory concoction of hair spray, cold cream and lavender powder.

The café was busy, as usual, hopping with the dinner rush. The clientele was generally a healthy mix of tourists and locals. She recognized a few of the latter and raised a hand in greeting.

“Is Pop around?” she asked when Della grabbed a couple menus off the counter by the door for a pair who had come in after Charlotte.

Della jerked her head toward the back. “Check the office. We had some trouble with one of the beef suppliers. Last I checked, he was still trying to iron it out.”

“Thanks.”

She headed toward the office, fighting through the temptation to stop and order a few things off the menu on her way.

Chicken-fried steak, maybe, with a big side of garlic mashed potatoes.

Pop was wonderful at running the Center of Hope Café. Over the years, she had learned more from watching him than any of her business classes in college. She had learned by example how to be a responsible, caring employer, how to be kind to customers and workers alike, how to treat everyone with dignity and respect.

And he cooked one heck of a pork chop.

She sighed as she walked into the office, tucked in behind the kitchen.

This place was as familiar to her as her own childhood on Winterberry Road.

Heaven knows, she had spent enough time here when she was a kid. Even before her mother died, she had loved coming to Center of Hope, hanging out at a table and doing homework while she listened to the sounds of life around her.

During the hard, ugly two years Margaret Caine fought cancer, coming to the diner had been an escape from the fear, from the pain and sickness that seemed to seep through the walls of their home like black mold.

She had avoided that toxic sludge as much as possible. Her mother mostly wanted to sleep anyway, and Charlotte had hated being there. Maybe she should have tried harder to help but that was a heavy burden for a young girl. She had felt like she was coping alone, for the most part.

By then, her only sibling still home had been her next oldest brother, Dylan. At sixteen, he had been too busy with friends and sports and school to offer much help.

She couldn’t deny she had found undeniable comfort in coming to the café after school to do her schoolwork, where Pop would invariably give her a nice chocolate milk shake and a slice of pizza.

Was it any wonder she weighed nearly a hundred eighty pounds by seventh grade?

She paused outside the office door, reminding herself sharply that she was doing her best to become something else. Though she still craved the pizza, the milk shake, she could have her father’s love without it.

She pushed open the door and smiled at the familiar voice uttering a few tasteful swear words at the telephone he had just returned to the cradle.

Her father was still good-looking in a distinguished way, with a shock of thick white hair and the blue, blue eyes she had inherited. His features were tanned and weathered from all the time he spent out in the garden he tended zealously.

“Problem?”

He looked up as she came in and she wanted to smile at the way his eyes always lit up at the sight of her.

“If it isn’t my darling girl, come to see her old da.” Though he had left the green hills of Galway behind when he was a boy of six, sometimes the brogue slipped through anyway.

“Hi, Pop.”

She hugged him from behind, smelling Old Spice and a hint of garlic.

“And how was your day, my dear?”

She thought of that strange encounter in her store a few hours earlier and the wild chaos of her thoughts ever since.

“Interesting. Did you know Spencer Gregory was back in Hope’s Crossing?”

Dermot swiveled around in his office chair and folded weathered hands over his still-lean belly. “Well, now, you know, I did hear something to that effect. About a dozen customers had to tell me they saw him around town.”

She could only imagine how the café must have buzzed with the news. People would be talking about this for some time to come.

“Well, nobody had the courtesy to warn me. I just about fell over when he walked in. I still can’t believe it. How can he return to town like nothing’s happened? Does he expect us to just throw out the red carpet like this town has always done for him?”

“Now, Charley...”

She perched on the edge of the desk. “I’m serious. He gives Hope’s Crossing a bad name. I can’t believe people can’t see that. Now he’s back and he’s going to dredge everything up all over again.”

“I think you’re exaggerating a wee bit.” Dermot gave her a chiding sort of look, the same one he used to wear when she didn’t finish her orange juice in the morning or when she chose to stay home and study instead of go to social activities at school. “A man shouldn’t have to pay the rest of his life because of a few poor decisions.”

“Poor decisions? I’d call it more than that. He was a drug dealer! He ran a steroid and prescription drug ring out of the team locker room.”

“The charges against him were dropped, remember?”

“Because of a technicality in the evidence. He’s never once denied it.”

She didn’t want to admit to her father that she had followed coverage of the case religiously, though she had a feeling Dermot might already know. He seemed to have uncanny insight when it came to her, as much as she might try to be obscure and mysterious.

Spencer’s situation was one of those fall-from-grace scandals the media seemed to relish voraciously. He had been a much-admired sports celebrity with a huge paycheck and a slew of endorsements—a kid from nowhere with fierce talent and extraordinary good looks who had made it big early in the game and continued to produce stunning wins for the Pioneers for the next decade.

She couldn’t lie to herself. She had also followed Spence’s career with the same interest as she did the scandal later. Despite past betrayals, she had celebrated his success, happy for him that he had attained every goal he set out for himself as a driven, angry teen. His nickname, Smokin’ Hot Gregory—Smoke—referred not just to his stunning good looks but also his wicked fastball that had once been clocked at over a hundred miles an hour.

Then three years ago, everything changed. In one horrible game against the Oakland Athletics, he suffered what turned out to be a career-ending injury. Months later, after he had tried to come back, she had caught the press conference when he admitted to a problem with prescription drugs following his injury and that he had gone into rehab for it.

With other Pioneers fans, she had celebrated when he returned to the program as a pitching coach—and then, like the rest of Hope’s Crossing, she had felt personally betrayed when accusations were leveled against him. Someone had been supplying prescription drugs and steroids to his teammates and the evidence against Spence was overwhelming, including a large shipment found in his vehicle parked in the team lot.

Then, in another stunning development, the judge threw out the charges just days before he was supposed to go to trial. Not that the court of public opinion shifted its vote so readily.

While Spence never went to prison, he lost his career, his endorsements, his reputation—and when his stunning former supermodel of a wife was found floating facedown in their pool the very afternoon the charges were dropped, most people blamed him for that, too.

Through it all, Dermot had only seen the good. It was a particularly exasperating failing of her father’s, particularly in Spence’s case.

“Say what you want about him, but he was always a good boy,” her father said now, quite predictably, with that same admonishing look. “You know he had no sort of home life at all, what with his father dying young and his mother tippling away anything she could earn here. My heart fair ached for the lad.”

For some reason, at her father’s words, she pictured Peyton, pale and thin and troubled.

“He has a girl. A daughter. Skinny as a pike. She could use a little of your good apple pie, if you ask me.”

“Or your fudge.”

“I gave her some.”

She smiled a little, remembering the girl’s stunned expression at the simple act of kindness, as if nobody had ever done anything spontaneously nice for her before, then her features had shifted back to truculence when her father found her in Sugar Rush.

“I don’t think she likes it here much.”

“Oh, the poor lamb.”

Predictably, her father was easily distracted by a sad case, and she decided to push yet another even more tender button to avoid further discussion of Spence Gregory.

“Sorry. I didn’t come in to talk about Spence or his daughter. I wanted to let you know I’m heading out to drive up Snowflake Canyon tonight to check on Dylan. Do you have anything you want me to take to him?”

Dermot’s features softened with worry even as he stood up from his chair a little gingerly, as if his bones ached.

“Excellent idea.” He draped an arm over her shoulder and they headed out of the office toward the kitchen. “You’re a grand sister, you are. The meat loaf is good today. He always favors that. And I’m sure I could find a bit of soup and perhaps some leftover fried chicken. Another of his favorites.”

“Perfect. Those should keep him going for a while.”

“That boy. What are we to do with him?”

She leaned her head against Pop’s shoulder. “I wish I knew. He can’t go on like this. I think he’s lost an extra twenty pounds just since he’s been home.”

She didn’t need to add that Dylan hadn’t any spare poundage to lose, not after the severe injuries and then resulting infection that had nearly killed him.