I’m dripping wet. I hurry up the main street toward my hotel, trying to soak in as much of the town as I can while I literally absorb water into the hems of my pants.
Even sopping wet, and even through my bone-deep dislike of small towns, I have to admit Rush Creek, Oregon, is charming. I pass by a coffee shop that’s still giving off the rich dark smell of coffee and some kind of fragrant ginger tea. A slim woman is closing it up for the day and has stopped to exchange a few words with the bike shop owner next door, who has his helmet slung over one arm and a pannier under the other. Their warm conversation reminds me of how that guy in the car called out to Gabe, how Gabe knew the bookstore owner’s name. This is definitely the kind of town where everyone knows everyone else.
The kind of town my mom and I have stayed away from since I was twelve.
I can see that, despite the local sense of camaraderie, Rush Creek is a town in flux, like my mom said. It’s got a strong Western vibe. There are feed stores and tack shops and outdoor equippers tucked in among the gift and ice cream and bookshops. But I also note a bunch of shops catering to the town’s recently surfaced hot springs and its new wedding venues—gifts, beauty products, and, yes, wedding dresses.
Most of the buildings have that low, boxy Western style and the pale brown long-plank siding to go with it. A few of them are cottages, with brightly colored doors and shutters. There’s a log cabin or two and an old-style Western train depot, painted red. Flower barrels, rain barrels, and benches squat at intervals along the sidewalk, and the lampposts are tall wooden Ts hung with Craftsman-gaslamp-style lights.
It’s got a totally different flavor from the Vermont town where I grew up, but it’s just as cute and quaint in its Western-flavored way.
It would be fun to explore some of the shops, if I have the time and the sun comes out. Taking into account that it’s all Small Town and therefore Not My Thing.
I climb two wide concrete steps, enter the lobby of the Depot Hotel, and cross to the reception desk.
“Oh, hon,” says the woman behind the desk. She’s wearing a cowboy hat. “You look like you could use a hot drink.” I guess her to be sixty-something. She has ash-blond-and-silver hair and leather-tanned skin.
“Oh, God, that sounds good,” I breathe.
“Why don’t you help yourself to tea or coffee on the sideboard there and then come back and we’ll get you checked in.”
“Thank you,” I say, dismayed to feel teary again. Ever since I blew up my job, small things get under my skin. Now fluffy ducklings and an offer of hot tea can wreck me. Go figure.
I fix myself tea. Just holding the steaming paper cup between my palms makes me feel better. I hadn’t realized how cold I was.
The lobby of the Depot Hotel is dark and cozy, bare log-style with a roaring fire in the heavy stone hearth, chunky geometric prints, and an antler chandelier. There’s a big leather couch in front of the fire, and it’s calling my name. Loudly. But if I sit down now, I won’t get up again.
God, that sounds good.
I force myself to head back to the desk.
“That’s better,” the clerk says, smiling at my drink and then at me. “Name?”
“Lucy Spiro.”
She taps on the keyboard. “Single occupancy, double bed, three nights, right?”
Uh-oh. “Three—weeks.”
“I’ve got three nights here.” My stomach drops at her apologetic expression. “I’m so sorry, Ms. Spiro. Our system says three nights. And I wish I could say we have something for you, but the Spring Festival starts this weekend, and we’re booked straight through the weekend and next week.”
“Can you recommend another hotel?” I ask.
She winces. “Oh, hon. Everyone’s booked up. Six towns in the festival, so hotels as far as Bend are full.”
“Let me just—” I scroll on my phone, looking for the email with confirmation, hoping against hope that the mistake is the hotel’s—which would at least put them in a position of having to find a place for me—but as soon as I see it on my screen, I realize I’m out of luck. It says three nights. I put my palm to my forehead. How did I not catch that?
Maybe because you were busy trying to get out of town as fast as possible? So you wouldn’t run into anyone you knew from work?
Right. That.
I realize my forehead is still in my palm and look up to find the woman behind the desk eyeing me with a combination of sympathy and alarm.
“I’ll be okay,” I reassure her. “Worst case scenario, I’ll stay with my mom and her new boyfriend in his Airstream.”
Her eyebrows go up. “That sounds… crowded.”
“Yes,” I agree. The Airstream where they’re living until they close on the new house would be tiny, even if Gregg didn’t have two cats (that I’m allergic to) and a ginormous, drooly dog. Also, my mom and Gregg are still very much in the honeymoon bonk-intensive period of dating, and the last thing I want to think about is my mom having sex. I’m happy to believe I was the product of immaculate conception. “It’s pretty bad. But I’d have a place to sleep.”
“There’s that,” she says brightly. “I’ll keep an ear to the ground for places with rooms.”
But she doesn’t sound optimistic.
I guess it’s not surprising that the run of bad luck that bounced me out of New York isn’t over yet. These things tend to hunt in packs.
She hands me the keycards and tells me my room number. “Good luck finding a place to stay.”
I ride the elevator up and swipe myself into the room. The lone queen bed has a bedspread that looks like a cribbed Native American pattern, and the walls are decorated with posters from the now-defunct Rush Creek Rodeo, but otherwise, it’s your basic generic hotel room, probably about a decade from its last update, but clean and serviceable. The events of the last hour have totally caught up to me, and I collapse on the bed and stare stupidly into space. I don’t know what I was thinking, saying yes to Gabe’s drink invitation.
I wasn’t thinking. I was feeling. Feeling the intensity of his dark brown eyes, the force of what he wanted from me. He was looking at me like I was the last slice of chocolate cake on the platter or a glass of ice water on a hot day.
Forty-five minutes. Meet me at Oscar’s.
He’d practically grunted it. It should have been a huge turnoff. But it was the exact opposite. It was a light switch, flipped to the on position.
I’m the light switch in this scenario.
When I first spotted him, coming out of the feed store with the huge bag of dog food slung over his shoulder like it was a sack of feathers, I can’t begin to explain what happened. I’d been standing there, wanting to cry along with the poor ducklings and their freaked-out mama… and then there he was. Maybe it was just that he was a local and I figured he’d know who to call for help with the ducklings, but I swear it was more than that. He looked like the kind of guy who doesn’t wait around for other people to make stuff happen. He looked take charge.
And he did. No questions asked. He took stock of the situation. Jogged across the street, still hoisting his ain’t-no-thang dog food bag, rustled around in his manly Jeep, and returned with tools. Which he wielded.
I guess I’m saying it’s one thing to have a bunch of tools in your Jeep, and yet another to know how to use them.
Plus—and I really don’t think you can discount this—he’s insanely hot. At least six-two, ruggedly built like a guy who works with his body for a living. Tanned skin, dark hair a little too long and shaggy, in the best possible way. Several days of scruff clinging to a hard jaw, a strong nose, but a yummy mouth and dark, broody eyes.
And he smells so good. Woodsy, masculine, and magnetic.
I was already a goner before he started talking to the ducks. “There you go, little dude,” he said, after we freed the first one. And then, “That’s it, go keep your brother company.” And “Hey, man, she’s this way,” when the third one started off in the wrong direction.
How can any one human being be so adorable and so hot at the same time?
I wanted him to take charge of me the way he took charge of the duckling situation.
I wanted him to murmur to me the way he murmured to them. Only more rumbly and grunt-y, close by my ear as he braced himself over me.
But that was before I discovered I needed a new place to stay. Before I looked at myself in the mirror.
I won’t be able to make myself presentable in twenty minutes. It would take a hot shower and a blow dryer and my whole makeup kit. Forty minutes minimum. I sink down on the toilet at the thought, wrecked from a day of travel and the drama of babies separated from their mom and being wet and cold for so long.
Yeah, no. As much as I want to be Gabe’s slice of chocolate cake tonight, I want more to crawl into a warm bed and sleep this day off.
I call Oscar’s and ask for Gabe, and I haven’t even started to describe him when the woman at the other end of the phone says, “Yeah, hang on a sec, hon, he’s right here.”
Right. Small town, the kind of place where everyone knows everyone and there are no secrets. Of course they know who Gabe is. And if I’d showed up and left with him, everyone would have known that, too.
That said, I know better than anyone that even in a big city, things are sometimes way too close for comfort.
Gabe comes to the phone. His voice is deep, deeper than I remember it being in person. “Hey,” he says.
“Hi, um, this is Lucy?”
Did I really ask that like a question? “This is Lucy,” I say, with more certainty.
He chuckles, a low, rough, totally delightful sound. “You’re not here.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say. Meaning, Sorry, not sorry.
“You’re going to stand me up.”
My body likes the way he made the words a statement and not a question, low, rough, and absolutely certain. My nipples prickle with delight. Or because I’m chilled to the bone.
“I’m cold and tired,” I admit. “And I have a meeting first thing in the morning. I should never have said yes. Also, it turns out I screwed up and only booked myself for three days in this hotel and I’m staying three weeks, so I have to find another place to stay.”
“Tell you what,” he says. “I can help with that. I know everyone.”
Right. Small town.
“Are you at the Depot Hotel? I’ll come there. There’s a bar downstairs, and we can get spiked hot drinks. I’ll sort you out.”
He says it syrup-slow, almost a drawl but not quite. He’s not asking. He’s telling me. I’ll sort you out. And I love it, even though I pride myself on being a woman who controls her own destiny… and does a pretty damn fine job at it.
Tonight, though? Tonight, I want to be sorted.
It’s been that kind of month.
“Okay.”
The word slips out before I can stop it.
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
I end the call, race into the bathroom, and churn myself into a frenzy redoing my makeup and fast-blow-drying my hair. Then I throw on clothes at a breakneck pace and head downstairs to meet my destiny.
Okay, let’s not kid ourselves.
I head downstairs to meet Mr. Tonight.