Chapter Two
Three months earlier, Colorado
Maybe I should have gone home for Christmas.
The Narman family was in residence at their luxurious Aspen vacation home, which meant that caretaker Lee didn’t have the run of the house as she always did when they weren’t here. They were generous with this. “Of course you must use the whole place. That’s exactly what we want. For it to look lived in.”
She tried to be generous in return, going above and beyond what they expected of her, airing the huge rooms out whenever she could, and keeping everything scrupulously clean, preparing the house with fresh flowers and freshly made beds and handpicked groceries when they were due to arrive.
It was a cushy arrangement that she had at this place, with its ski-in ski-out access to the Aspen Highlands slopes, and she didn’t want it to change. The family usually stayed here only a few weeks a year.
This time, they were spending the full ten days from before Christmas until after New Year’s, and they’d brought a large party of family and guests, so that even in the cozy little janitor’s apartment on the lowest level of the house, which Lee retreated to when the family was around, she could hear the noise of partying and children, and the frequent heavy clump of boots in the ski room overhead.
She tried to ignore it. It was only six in the evening, so things probably weren’t going to quieten down anytime soon. The floorboards were thumping, there was yelling and laughter and music, doors banging, kids crying, the occasional shriek, the sound of water whooshing through the pipes that ran through the ceiling above her head.
Forget her book; she couldn’t concentrate on the story. Try some TV. She switched it on, but couldn’t find anything that really appealed. How about something to eat? She had deli pasta and sauce in the refrigerator, and had been thinking about a long soak in the tub, followed by the meal, a glass of wine, read her book while she ate.... So cozy and quiet.
“It’s not going to work,” she said out loud. Living on your own, you did tend to talk to yourself, sometimes. Nothing wrong with that.
But maybe there was something a little wrong with how disappointed she was about the disruption to her quiet, cozy evening.
Maybe I should have gone home, she thought again.
It was just under four weeks since Tucker had called. Tucker, her ex-fiancé, who was now engaged to her baby sister. He’d more or less asked Lee’s permission to be in love with Daisy, and while Lee appreciated the gesture and had not the remotest desire to still be engaged to Tucker herself, let alone married to him—it was more than ten years since they’d called it off, after all—there was a tiny part of her that felt...odd about it. Daisy and Tucker were getting married in March.
A seriously tiny part, just to be clear.
Most of the time, Lee felt completely happy about the whole thing. And if she tried to project what would have happened if she and Tucker had gone through with the wedding...couple of school-age kids by now, not seeing each other that much because the demands of Tucker’s landscaping business wouldn’t have meshed very well with her own career in mountain sports...
Well, she couldn’t picture it at all.
It scared her that she’d come so close to making such a huge mistake.
In other words, yes, she was really happy for them.
All the same, it had seemed like a good idea not to go east for Christmas this year. She would go for the wedding. Must get that organized soon....
So it was Christmas Eve, and she was on her own. Yes, she had her little tree in the window, with several prettily wrapped gifts beneath. Yes, she was eating baked ham with friends on Christmas night. But still...
She was thirty-three years old. She lived alone and liked it maybe too much. Was it just possible she was getting into a rut?
“Okay, you win,” she said to the Narman hordes overhead. “I’m going out.”
She substituted a quick shower for the long tub soak, dived into a pair of slinky black pants and a sparkly Christmas top she’d planned for tomorrow night, sketched on a little makeup, put in some bright, dangly Christmas-themed earrings, grabbed a big black winter coat and her heeled black faux-fur boots, and went out into the snow to make the easy half mile walk to her favorite Aspen hangout, the Waterstreet Bar.
Nobody was there.
Well, it was crowded, but they were tourists, not locals. No ski instructors, no mountain management people or hospitality staff, none of the year-rounders she saw all the time during the quieter summer months. Where was everyone?
The thought itched in the back of her head that if the Narmans hadn’t been having a noisy party tonight, she would have sat all cozy at home the whole evening and never realized that her Christmas Eve was too solitary, that everyone else, friends and casual acquaintances, had other plans tonight.
She went up to the bar and ordered a light beer and a bowl of spicy wings with sour cream, and when the guy behind the bar offered her one of those buzzer thingies that started hopping around on the table and flashing red lights when your order was ready, she shook her head and said, “Nah, I’ll wait for it here, thanks.”
He looked vaguely familiar, one of the seasonal staff who she’d maybe seen on the slopes, maybe even taught to ski. If they got chatting, she could just stay and eat her wings and drink her beer right here at the bar.
But he was too busy, she soon saw, and he was only about twenty-two. For chatting purposes, he was all about the nineteen-year-old snow bunnies or rich women looking for a short-term good time, with no interest in a hardworking local woman in her thirties who was more athletic than feminine, more striking than pretty.
For the first time in a long while, Lee was suddenly conscious of the nearly eleven-year-old burn scarring on her neck and jaw. She didn’t often wear neck-baring clothes, but the Christmas top had been pretty and silly, and she hadn’t been able to resist.
The friends she was going to join for dinner tomorrow had seen her scars before, so that was no big deal. They were faded now. Her skin was pale and sort of melty-looking from just above her left jawline to just below her collarbone and out to her shoulder. She’d gotten splashed with hot oil in the kitchen of the restaurant at Spruce Bay when she was around the same age as this barman here, and had spent some time in hospital, dealing with pain and infection and skin grafts.
Old news.
Irrelevant, for a woman who spent most of her time in ski jackets or collared hiking shirts.
It unsettled her to be thinking about it as if it mattered, because it didn’t. It really didn’t. She liked this top. It was fun. If anyone noticed the scarring, and disapproved of her showing it, that was their problem, not hers.
She sat up straighter and wiggled her head a little so that she could feel the tickle of the spangly red-gold-and-green Christmas trees dangling from her ears. The youthful barman delivered her beer and she drawled, “Thanks,” and dismissed him from her mind.
“Nice earrings,” someone said, close by.
She turned to find an unfamiliar male in a black T-shirt seated on the bar stool beside her. “Oh. Thanks.”
He was grinning at her. “If you’re wondering how much they caught the light just now, the answer is a lot. I still have spots before my eyes.”
“You got me,” she said, grinning back. “I did it on purpose. Love dazzling people till they can’t see.”
“No point in wearing Christmas trees if nobody notices, right?”
“Right.”
The twenty-two-year-old thumped two bowls of wings down on the bar, one in front of Lee and one in front of the earring admirer, then reached back to the serving window again and brought out two matching bowls of sour cream. “Snap,”