My first day at Adventura started like a fireworks show.
In a cabin.
In the middle of the forest.
With leaky gas tanks.
And three feet of snow piled outside.
I arrived loaded down with bags of clothes charged to Maverick’s credit card as a gracious I’m-sorry-your-life-burned-down gift. He’d thrown in a couple of new books for good measure, even though I’d stopped at the library and borrowed ten. Ellie loaned me a backpack, and Bethany a laptop. With what I had left in savings, I managed to get a new phone.
But when I walked into Adventura, all my certainty faded.
An explosion seemed to have detonated since my visit, because Mark’s desk was absolutely piled with papers. His computer screen—an ancient PC that wheezed every few minutes—had practically disappeared amid the stacks.
“Glad you’re here!” Mark cried as he shook the snow off his coat. He’d helped Mav take all my stuff to my new cabin. “Have a seat.”
He waved across the desk to a folding chair that spewed stuffing from a rip across the top. Thankfully, JJ was nowhere in sight, but the vague scent of outdoors lingered in the air. He must be somewhere close.
Mark wore a pair of workout pants, an old T-shirt, and ratty tennis shoes. But his eyes were bright, and he seemed eager. I let out a long breath.
I could do this.
First, I just had to get out my spreadsheet. I’d created a matrix where I could note all his expectations, the final list of desired projects, and a timeline for each. Then I’d easily be able to map out some sort of schedule and figure out what kind of time it would take.
“Ready to get started?” he asked.
“Yes, of course. Do you mind if I ask a few questions first?”
He shrugged. “Sure.” He tipped his head to the buried computer. “Need access to it?”
“Ah, no.”
I lifted my backpack, where I’d stuffed Bethany’s laptop and headphones. “Where do you want me to work? Then I’ll start asking.”
His neck straightened. “Ah. Workspace. Right. Comes at a premium here.” He hummed to himself for a second as he scanned the area. “Good question.”
Although I’d been here before, it seemed so different without JJ in the room. The haphazard elements—clothes hanging off a nail on the wall, a spare roll of toilet paper—were out in bulk this morning. A single, dangling lightbulb had burned out over his desk, casting this side of the room in shadows. The whole place smelled like dust.
It needed a good offensive attack.
Pinnable board, here I come.
Mark tsked under his breath. “I’ll need access to my desk, so I can’t put you here for now. How about the table?”
The table was a foldout that stood on three rickety legs, with books jammed under two of them. It was half behind his desk, half in the hallway that led to the bathroom. But it was that or the floor.
I shuddered thinking of what had crawled across those wooden planks.
By some miracle, I could potentially move this work to my own cabin where I could control the environment a bit more. I hadn’t seen said cabin yet, for obvious reasons. Because I was secretly terrified of what I’d find.
“This table is good for now,” I said. While I set up my laptop, plugged it in, and booted it, Mark stood behind his desk and stared at the mess with a furrowed brow. He nudged a towering pile of papers with his toe and a hearty dose of what appeared to be fear.
“Ah, my questions shouldn’t take long,” I said. “I’d love to nail down your expectations for my work.”
“Right. Sure.” He gestured to the mess. “This is a good chunk of the paperwork that we need organized and put in the cloud, or whatever.”
I eyed it warily. “A good chunk?”
“The rest of it is boxed in the spare bedroom. Probably under the cot you slept on.”
“And how many boxes are there to go through?”
“Dunno.”
“How will I know which ones?”
“Just look through them. If there’s paperwork, go through it.”
“Okay.”
My brain almost malfunctioned. Knowing the Bailey boys as I did now, anything could be in those boxes. I’d have to deal with that later. What if it was personal in nature? What if it was alive—or had been once? I shook my head to clear my thoughts.
“Is this your first priority?” I asked.
“I mean . . . you could start the website whenever you want.” He shrugged. “We’ll probably need that completed before we can build the investor dashboard. However, we could really use some space around here.”
“Website. Right. I almost forgot. What’s the URL again?”
“For which one?”
Which one? He hadn’t mentioned multiple existing ones.
“Adventura?”
“Oh, that’s just a page on a social media site. We’ll need to amp that up. Actually, we may have a Wordpass domain.”
“Self-hosted?”
He blinked. “Uh . . .”
I waved a hand. “Never mind that. What’s the URL?”
“I can’t remember off the top of my head. Should be in the paperwork.”
He couldn’t remember his own website?
“What paperwork?” I asked.
He gestured at the desk with two hands. “That paperwork.”
My fingers stiffened on the keyboard. He wanted websites created, I had no idea if he even had a domain, and I was facing years’ worth of paperwork shoved into haphazard piles. Somewhere in said paperwork lurked the most basic answers. Answers that he didn’t keep in his supposedly brilliant mind.
“Oh.”
His phone rang, startling me. “Oh, gotta take this.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Good luck, Lizbeth. Wi-Fi is pretty solid unless there’s a storm. Not sure where the password is, but it’s on the desk.”
“Wait!” I called after him. “What’s your priority? Where do you want me to start?”
“Don’t care!” he called. Then he answered the phone with a quick, “This is Mark,” and disappeared up the attic ladder with the light pounce of a cat. I swallowed hard and stared at the explosion of papers on the table.
Sweet baby pineapple, but what had I gotten myself into?
An hour later, I stood knee-deep in a mess of paperwork that didn’t make any sense, attempting for the tenth time to connect to the internet with a different password because Mark couldn’t remember which one was current, all while trying to note on a new spreadsheet just how many categories of paperwork I’d unearthed from one stack.
One of which included a midterm exam from eighth grade.
The list stopped at ninety-seven categories so far, only five of which were business.
When JJ breezed into the cabin, smelling like sunshine and snow, with flushed cheeks and a radiant smile, I wanted to throw said paperwork at his head and tell him to leave me alone or give me coffee. The last thing I needed was the equivalent of a Greek god watching me fail.
“Hey.” His smile widened. “You made it.”
He closed the door behind him, darkening the room again. Then he tilted his head back and frowned. “Did the bulb burn out over there?”
I set down a folder full of receipts. “Please tell me you can change it. I need the light and can’t find the light bulbs.”
“Of course.”
He slipped past me and into the back, rummaging in a closet near the bathroom. Less than a minute later, light flooded my disastrous workspace.
“Thank you!”
JJ rolled his eyes. “That’s Mark. Bet you a hundred bucks he didn’t even notice it’d burned out.”
“I think you are a hundred percent correct.”
He propped his hands on his hips. Breath failed me when he pulled his hair down and ran his fingers through it. This was going to be harder than I’d thought. Way harder than I’d thought.
And that had nothing to do with Mark’s disorganization.
“So,” JJ said. “He got the paperwork out for you, eh?”
“This is only some of it.” I ran a hand over my face, already weary. “I haven’t even attempted the boxes in the guest bedroom. I’m a little afraid a mouse will jump out at me when I open them.”
“Oh, I can help with that.”
“Really?” There was entirely too much hope in my voice.
Five minutes later, as I swept an unholy amount of unused lined paper into another pile, he’d stacked four more boxes in front of me.
“That should be the last of it.”
My heart sank to the floor. “This is going to take forever,” I whispered.
JJ rested a sympathetic hand on my shoulder. “I think you’re brave, for what it’s worth. And probably not paid enough even at forty an hour, so go for a raise.”
He moved into the kitchen with a wink.
I used the reprieve to slow my traitorous heart. Eventually, I worked up the moxie to ask, “Where have you been?”
“Climbing.”
“I’m sorry, you were what?”
“Climbing.”
“There’s three feet of snow outside.”
He reached for a coffee mug, his hair still wild on his shoulders. “Well, more mountaineering. Trying to see if I can maneuver back to ice-climb the waterfall at the end of the canyon. I think it was probably too low before the cold hit, but I want to see. The snow is four feet deep in some places, so I think I’ll need a snowmobile.”
Naturally.
Because who didn’t do that during their free time?
While he filled a coffee mug with water and shoved it into the microwave, I tried to recover my senses and not swallow my tongue. Ice-climb a waterfall?
Was that a thing?
I take my adventure indoors, thanks, I thought of saying. With a side of cream and sugar. Like the adventure of trying a new kind of espresso bean.
The life he led couldn’t be farther from mine. I resisted the urge to slip onto Pinnable and create a corkboard for him. Mountains, grasses, and for some reason, I pictured sage. That would be perfect for him. Wild man, wild places.
No, that would only distract me from the mess I had surely stepped into. Two minutes later he stood in front of me with a fresh mug of coffee.
“Cream and sugar,” he said. “I made assumptions on amounts.”
“How did you know?”
“Your withdrawal is obvious.”
The first sip—perfectly warm—slid all the way into my stomach like we were meant to be. I closed my eyes, savored the smell, and waited for the caffeine to recharge me.
“Thank you.”
“Anytime.”
JJ plunked a tea bag into his mug, then wrapped his hands around it and leaned back against the couch. I purposefully turned away from him, feigning interest in a stack near an old printer. Time to sort papers that were far away, facing a direction in which I couldn’t possibly sneak a glance at him.
“I finished setting up your cabin this morning,” he said after several minutes. “Took me a while to dig it out and get the power restored, but now I think you’re good.”
“Oh, thank you.”
“Do you want me to take you to it?”
“Only if I never have to come back to this mess,” I muttered.
He laughed, set aside his tea, and motioned with a wave. “C’mon. Time for a break.”
“Hold on. I have to note it on my spreadsheet.”
“For what?”
I cleared off the top of my laptop and pulled up another spreadsheet. “For time. I have a feeling Mark hasn’t even thought of my time card, so I just created something.”
“Oh. That’s very . . . honest of you.”
I shrugged.
Once I noted the time—it had only been two hours and felt like twenty years—I popped up, slipped on my coat, and followed him outside. A walking path had been cut into the three-foot bank of snow outside. Impressive at any rate, even if it was entirely too cold. I shivered in my jacket and hurried to keep up.
The cabin was a quaint little thing from the outside. A single window and door, with round logs stacked into a perfect square that might be barely big enough for a bed and a small table. Snow, thick and white as a wedding cake, was piled on the roof. Perfect insulation for a chill like this. Weather aside, I predicted it would be warm in there. Lazy smoke drifted upward from a chimney on the left.
JJ opened the door and motioned for me to go in first. Snow flaked off my boots as I stepped inside.
“Oh, it’s so cute!”
The warmth of a homey cabin embraced me. A fire crackled in a small hearth piled high with wood on the side. A narrow bed on a cot filled the space behind the door. The hardwood floor appeared recently swept. Thankfully, no cobwebs lingered in the corners. No trails of mouse poop on the floor, either, or obvious spiders scuttling the walls. Relief swept over me.
In fact, the place was pristine. It even smelled like pine. All of my shopping bags and pillows from Bethany’s were piled on the small bed, which had what appeared to be a newish quilt on top.
“This is much nicer than I expected.”
He grinned ruefully. “It’s still not the greatest, but it is warm and private. There’s no bathroom, but you can get to ours from the back door. I’ve tamped down a path for you. I’m in charge of meals, so you won’t have to worry about that.”
“Full service.” I grinned. “How nice.”
A small table, just large enough for my laptop, a notebook, and a pen, stood off to the side. Beneath it lay a surge protector. The walls were the same wood as the exterior, but chinks in between the logs had been filled in with something like glue.
“Are you comfortable maintaining the fire for warmth?” he asked. “I plan to come out at the end of your work day and start it to get things warm for you. There’s an extinguisher behind the bed if you need it.” He cracked a smile. “We both know you can use that.”
I managed a laugh but felt pained at the reminder. “Thanks. That’s very thoughtful.”
Scratching sounded at the door. JJ pulled it open, and a black dog bounded inside, floppy pink tongue flying wild. I laughed as he swept up to me, nudging my hand.
“Hello.”
“This is Atticus.” JJ pounded him affectionately on the back. “Justin’s dog. He’s our resident mountain lion watcher.”
I swallowed hard. Mountain lions. Hadn’t thought of that. I crouched down, laughing when a wet tongue got the best of my ear. Another pair of shoulders appeared in the doorway.
“Hey, man.”
I glanced into the striking blue eyes of a man with short brown hair. JJ motioned to me with a tilt of his head.
“Justin, this is Lizbeth.”
“Ah.” Understanding flooded his features. “The brave soul who’s taking on Mark’s paper project. I’m Justin. I’m their resident maintenance guy and the one who’s dating their sister. Atticus, down.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said with a little laugh as I straightened away from the dog.
Justin tilted his head back to study the rafters. “Thanks for getting in here today, JJ. Sorry I didn’t make it. Place looks the best I’ve ever seen it. Roof is holding okay, looks like. Lizbeth, let me know if you need anything. We’re all on the same radio channel, so you just need to speak. I take the radio with me everywhere, and it works up to a half mile away in this part of the canyon.”
He gestured to a black thing sitting on the floor in the corner. A small light blinked an intermittent green.
“Thanks.”
JJ answered a few more questions about some quick repairs he’d done this morning in the kitchen. I ran a finger along a dustless shelf next to the bed, just right for my collection of library books.
So all the cleanliness was thanks to JJ. How very thoughtful and detailed of him. My fingers itched to note it in the love binder—which I’d managed to save with the cash—that waited in my backpack. A clean place to sleep? Now that was romantic.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad here after all.