Chapter Seven

Mack awoke to an uncomfortable weight on her chest. Heart attack? Had the file cabinets fallen over in the night? She panicked and shifted, and her elbow hit something soft. Something soft that let out a moan.

She jerked away in surprise, and the weight lifted. Connor pulled his arm off her and rubbed his eyes. What the fuck?

She looked wildly around her. She was on the floor, tangled in blankets. Tangled in Connor. Light streamed through the window, a mix of sun and clouds, and she was warm. Warmer than when she’d fallen asleep, curled up on the office couch. Alone.

Alone and shivering, the inside of her jeans uncomfortably damp and sticking to her thighs in rebuke.

Connor had taken the blanket and gone to sleep in the bar. She knew he had. She’d sent him there.

So how had they both wound up on the office floor, his arm curled protectively around her, her back against his chest as though it thought that was where she belonged?

She didn’t know whom to blame. He’d obviously come into the office at some point in the night, but she’d clearly been drawn from the couch. By the blanket, she told herself. Not by him.

Either way, it didn’t matter. She had to get out of there before someone came by, saw both their cars, and stopped in to see what was up.

The rain had passed, leaving a sweet, cool gray in its wake. Fog lifted thickly off the mountaintops. The trees were heavy with new green, and flowers seemed to have shot up overnight. It was hard to imagine that something so cleansing had left such destruction in its wake. Everywhere branches were down, and although the power line had been dragged off the road, it was going to take more than a day to clear the debris.

But a crew was busy chopping up the downed tree and she could get out of the parking lot, which was what mattered. She booked it out of there as fast as she could. She didn’t care what Connor was doing—probably looking for his shoes. All she wanted was to get in her car and drive.

To Canada, maybe. Straight up to the North Pole. Somewhere where she’d never have to face Connor—or herself—again.

She didn’t have enough in her checking account for that kind of gas, though, so she settled with going home and taking the hottest shower she could stand, as though she could scrub the mistakes from her skin.

When that proved impossible, she tried to pace the regret away, turning circles in her living room until she was dizzy and bored.

By the afternoon, she had to accept that she was getting nothing done. It had been a tactical imperative for her to exit before anyone could see them there together, her shirt with its missing button, that unmistakable just-fucked look in her hair.

But she’d run out in such a hurry, she’d left her bitters at the bar, and her bartender’s notebook with the notes she’d taken before…

Well, before things went alarmingly downhill.

She couldn’t get anything done without them, so rather than make herself even crazier than she already felt, she got back in the car and once again drove the familiar stretch to the bar.

Stepping into the restaurant, the night didn’t feel as far behind her as she’d hoped. Everywhere evidence of their activities glared accusingly at her. He’d folded the blanket and straightened the office, but he hadn’t touched anything in the bar. That was her space, and he knew better than to go there. So she had to face their empty glasses, the candles a pool of wax on the wood. Her stomach twisted, a tremor spreading through her hands. There was no denying what had happened here, no matter how much she wanted to pretend.

Yes, there were times when in theory it seemed like sex, any sex, was preferable to another night alone. But she’d always resisted, because she knew how she would feel the next day. And now she’d gone ahead and broken down with Connor?

You don’t shit where you eat. Period. And despite what last night’s dalliance suggested, she’d meant what she said. She did have standards.

There were guys who wanted to take her out after her shift, see where things would go—once upon a time Connor had been one of them, the very first night he arrived in Gold Mountain. But Mack couldn’t help it. She was picky. Not only about physical aspects, although she liked guys bigger than her, which counted as just about everyone, but not so beefy that she’d be crushed. She also liked kind eyes, big smiles, messy hair—which was lucky for her, since the skiers that came through in the winter and the hikers who passed through year-round were known for the tousled, hat-head look.

She wasn’t so into the suits who came up skiing for the weekend and then went back to Seattle and their fancy jobs—and, she suspected, their wives and girlfriends. She wasn’t much for the ski bums, either—which was what Connor had been when he’d arrived. Not because those guys didn’t match her idea of hot, but because they were so transient.

And that was the real problem she had with dating up here. The problem she’d had with Connor as soon as he walked into the bar and started chatting her up. Most of the men who passed through Gold Mountain were just that: passing through. If she wanted someone to stick around, she should have picked a town where people settled down instead of a resort where they were always on the go.

She knew what Agnes, her old social worker, would say. Did Mack think it was possible she’d chosen a place where people were always leaving precisely to protect herself from anyone getting too close? It sure seemed awfully convenient that she could always say no to someone on the grounds that they were halfway out the door.

Mack may have been well beyond needing the state to sign off on her, but if Agnes were here, Mack would have given the exact same response to that question as when she was a smart-mouthed fourteen-year-old with her nose freshly pierced, her knuckles bruised from the latest fight she’d never squeal about. “Anything’s possible. Look up, there’s a pig about to fly!”

Poor Agnes. Stuck being the one constant in Mack’s life until Mack turned eighteen. Fortunately by that time she was busy bussing tables at Billy’s, and that was where she’d stuck around, learning the trade, working her way up until she was practically running the place. That was her world.

And then Billy died, the rent on the bar went through the roof, and it seemed like people didn’t come around the way they used to. They still had their regulars, but they needed new faces, too. Mack’s boyfriend at the time suggested not so subtly that it was time for her to get a “real” job. And Mack decided that as much as she hated making changes, she’d drown if she didn’t start to swim.

She knew how it felt to watch a business go under. But this time, she wasn’t going anywhere. She’d been here before Connor, and she’d be here long after. This was her home, her bar, and one night in which she’d acted counter to her best interests wasn’t going to ruin that for her.

She used a knife to flake the hardened wax off the bar and threw out the candle nubs. She was fine, she was in control, it wasn’t like she’d done anything wrong. Stupid wasn’t a crime.

Then she heard a crinkle and realized she’d stepped on the condom wrapper, and an electric current zapped her right through the center of her chest. She’d jumped up that morning like she’d seen a tarantula in the blanket. Even now, throwing the wrapper away, it seemed impossible that she’d woken up in Connor’s arms. He wasn’t just bad news because she knew he’d leave her, leave this town, walk away without a backward glance. It was that he didn’t even like her. She’d just happened to be around when he couldn’t get with somebody else.

Mack remembered vividly the first time Connor came to the bar. He was up snowboarding with his little brother, Matthew, and it was hard to decide which of them was cuter. A lot of women would choose Matthew because he was built, but for Mack it was all about lean muscle and facial scruff—anything that scraped against her thigh. They’d been snowboarding, and their cheeks were flushed and windburned. They had a giddiness that lit up the room.

Connor had set his sights on her immediately. And although Mack was used to ignoring guys at the bar, she’d liked him. He was funny. He seemed smart, too. Interesting—like he had substance. When she talked to him, it was because she wanted to, not because she was gunning for tips.

But then she asked where he’d come in from. She was just making conversation, but he talked about meeting up with Matthew on his farm in Oregon and hanging out there for a while. “I’ve got no idea what comes next,” he’d added lazily. “I might go up to Canada. Cross into the Rockies. I’m not big into plans.”

Mack had swallowed hard and pried herself away to mix another drink. In the end, Connor had gotten the hint and gone back to the table his brother was holding, where—how convenient—two other women had already joined them.

Mack knew perfectly well there were no guarantees in this world. She wasn’t looking for forever, or even something long term. But she couldn’t do people coming in and out of her life for a night or two at a time. Call it a mental block. Call it a problem she had. It was a simply the way she’d become.

She’d thought she was protecting herself, keeping things safe, the kind of thing she’d congratulate herself for later on. Or else she’d forget about him completely, because who cared? Out of sight, out of mind.

Only he hadn’t left, that bastard. He’d stayed.

He came by the bar the next night. And the next, picking up one woman after another right under her nose.

Proving that even if he physically stuck around for a little while, it didn’t mean anything. She’d sworn he wasn’t going to try her out like that. Only now she’d gone and broken her resolve anyway.

The memory came to her of his hands grabbing roughly at her hips, turning her around and pinning her to the bar, his growl in her ear—“Tell me how you want it”—and she’d said… Oh God, how could she have said that? How could she have begged for him, the echoes of her cries still ringing in her ears, “Harder, harder,” her breath, her whimpers, her body betraying her with every thrust?

Her phone vibrated, and she grabbed it, her first thought that it must be him.

But it was her friends, making sure the storm hadn’t affected her too much. Claire and Abbi had heard from Sam that electricity was out at the restaurant. Back on track, Mack wrote. I’m here checking up on things but heading out soon. There was nothing more to tell. If she repeated that enough times to herself, it would be true.

No one else needed to know. She couldn’t bear their questions about what it meant or what came next. Plus, Connor was friends with her friends. Friends sleeping together could get messy, fast, and Mack didn’t want anything with her life in Gold Mountain to change.

But now, as she went around the bar hiding the evidence of their tryst, packing up the bitters, and trying to get herself back to before things went horribly wrong, to when she was tasting the elixirs and deciding if they were any good, she realized there was something even worse than having their night be discovered.

It was called silence, and she hated it even more than she’d hated that smug satisfaction on Connor’s face when she came.

Every time a car drove by, she looked out the window, tensing in anticipation. Was it him?

And then the car kept going and she felt a sinking mix of disappointment and relief.

Followed by a hot wave of anger that she’d let herself feel a thing. That she cared what he thought about seeing her again.

It wasn’t like she’d hoped Connor would text, or call, or whatever. He might make it into a thing. Or else pretend it never happened, and she couldn’t decide which would be worse: him thinking he’d finally gotten his shot with her, or him treating her like just she was just another stop along his way.

But it didn’t matter, because she heard nothing.

And then it was days with no word, and she knew she had her answer. Connor didn’t need to say anything to make the message clearer. Nothing was happening between them. She couldn’t go around thinking things had changed.