Mia didn’t wear much jewelry and had no idea what the cuff link was worth, but its potential monetary value wasn’t what made her slip it into her satiny pocket that morning. She should’ve turned it in at the front desk lost and found. And if she hadn’t been completely embarrassed by her lack of inhibitions and the threat of discovery, maybe she would’ve.
She thought about the careless way he’d left them at the bar and his annoyance at his father’s idea of a gift, telling herself that GPM probably didn’t care about the things anyway. Sneaking away from the elevator, she decided that having such a small memento would help her remember that she was still a woman with passion and life left in her.
Even Prince Charming had kept a glass slipper. Of course, unlike the smitten royal, Mia had no intention of traipsing around the countryside trying to find its owner.
She traced her finger over the gold-embossed letters.
If she thought about the man she’d left naked and asleep in her hotel bed, or the way he’d made her body come alive, responding to his skillful touch and his adoring mouth, she would lose all rational thought and make a pathetic attempt to take Maxine up on her offer to have Chief Cooper perform some miracle and attempt to track him down.
No. Things would be better if she just forgot about him and their night of sensual lovemaking. She reached for the little wooden treasure chest Maxine’s son had given her for her birthday three years ago. She put the cuff link inside then snapped the box closed, along with her heart.
She doubted that a man like GPM would even want to be found. He’d seemed to have his own share of problems he’d been trying to escape from and probably wouldn’t appreciate having any long-lasting reminders of that night, let alone an unexpected paternal responsibility. In fact, he’d most likely been more than relieved to have found Mia long gone the morning after.
Really, she’d saved them both from an awkward situation.
She’d never been the type of woman who had casual sex with strangers she’d met in bars. Heck, she wasn’t even the kind of woman who went to bars, or slept with many men, for that matter. Her actions that night had been so out of character for her that her first instinct the next morning was to run and hide before pretending that it had never happened.
From the moment she’d driven her five-year-old Prius away from the hotel, she’d forbidden herself from ever thinking about GP again.
Yet she couldn’t help remembering how, as they’d walked down the deserted hallway, her plastic key card quivering in her hand, she’d known that she was making a conscious choice.
When they’d stood at her door she lifted her face toward his and saw the passion in his eyes, dimmed only slightly by a furrowed brow, as if his own set of second thoughts was playing out in his mind. Then and there she decided that maybe he needed her just as much as she needed him.
It had taken her two tries to get the key card inserted and she remembered letting out a breath when the little green light signaled that the lock had finally released, because for once in Mia’s life, she had followed her physical urges—and her heart.
But now it was time to return to reality.
Getting off her sofa, she walked across her tiny apartment and opened her patio doors looking out onto Snowflake Boulevard, the main street leading through Sugar Falls. This was her reality. This town was her safe haven and home now. She took a deep breath of the cool mountain air, wanting to inhale the familiar sights and scents as if she could absorb enough of the environment into her brain so that she could push aside all thought of her carefree and careless night in the anonymous big city.
Because that was the key. Anonymity. She’d thought about leaving her telephone number for him, or staying a couple more hours to share breakfast and possibly something more.
But no matter how much she might want to see her mystery lover again, or how guilty she might feel for keeping this baby a secret, she knew she wasn’t ready for that kind of intimacy. She was just now allowing herself to put down roots and come out of her shell. All it would take was one bad relationship to put her right back to square one.
And that was a chance she just wasn’t willing to take.
* * *
Garrett wasn’t quite sure what to make of Cessy Walker. The older socialite had kindly volunteered to fill in at the front desk until he hired a nursing staff, but she didn’t seem like the best fit for a small-town physician’s office. After all, she was dressed in a designer wool knit pantsuit—Garrett recognized it as a staple brand from his last stepmother’s closet—and enough pearls to sink a life raft.
“Have you ever worked in a doctor’s office before, Ms. Walker?”
“Please, call me Cessy. Not in an office per se, but I did chair the Boise Children’s Hospital black-tie gala back in eighty-nine and we raised over fifty thousand dollars for a new sports medicine wing.”
“And tell me again why you want to work here?”
“I figure I needed to be doing something a bit more stimulating with my time. I tried to do that volunteer patrol program with the police department, but Cooper got all bent out of shape when I played my Barry Manilow CD on the squad car’s loudspeaker.”
Garrett bit the inside of his cheek, all too familiar with the eccentric personalities of the bored elite. Apparently, even small towns such as Sugar Falls had their share of overprivileged do-gooders looking for something to spice up their daily routines. The woman was sincere enough and probably had good intentions, but he really didn’t need her help. If his first patient wasn’t coming this afternoon, he would’ve politely declined her offer to act as a quasi-receptionist. But before he could make a decision one way or the other, she continued talking.
“I can see by your expression that you’re a bit shocked at my resourcefulness when it comes to entertaining. My third husband used to look at me the same way. But just between the two of us, it didn’t take a party-planning whiz to realize that the Labor Day parade was going to be a major snoozefest with that Mae Johnston running the show. Personally, I think the townspeople enjoyed me adding some festive music and pepping things up. But afterward, the chief was concerned other townspeople might follow suit and utilize public resources in an unauthorized manner.” Ms. Walker made it sound as if her Fanilow utilization was completely authorized. “Anyhoo, Cooper suggested that you might need some temp help, and since I know everyone who’s anyone in town, I figured I would be an asset to you setting up shop and establishing yourself with the crème de la crème of our town.”
Hmm. It sounded to Garrett as if Cooper wanted his wife’s former mother-in-law out of his hair and had dumped her into his lap. He’d met her a couple of times when she’d brought her grandson to visit Cooper at Shadowview and had an idea that she was used to getting what she wanted. But he was new in Sugar Falls and, as much as he prided himself on his independence, it couldn’t hurt to have an established and well-connected member of the community give him her bedazzled seal of approval.
Plus, he was about to ask for a favor himself, so keeping Cessy Walker busy would make the chief of police indebted to him.
It had been over eight weeks since that night in the hotel, and he hadn’t been able to get the woman from the bar out of his mind. He’d tried everything he could think of to look for her—everything from calling the hotel the following day to try to find the guest who’d been staying in room 804 to researching dance performances in Boise hoping to come across her picture. He’d even spent a few evenings sitting in the hotel bar the following week, closely watching every brunette that walked through the door—but always ended up at a dead end. The more time that went by, the colder her trail would get. It was time to call in the big guns.
“All right, well I appreciate your helping me out just for the next couple of days.” He purposely paused to emphasize that her receptionist skills—or lack thereof—would only be temporary. “My first patient is a referral from a friend