“You’ve never been there?”
She shook her head. “My family lived in Grand Junction for about six months when I was in elementary school but we didn’t do a lot of sightseeing to other areas of Colorado.”
“Why only six months?” he asked as they drove over the bridge that spanned the Hell’s Fury River and headed around the east side of the lake toward Snow Angel Cove.
“My father was on a temporary job for the summer there. He was a road construction supervisor and we moved around a lot. I went to nine elementary schools in seven different states by the time I graduated sixth grade.”
“That must have been tough on a kid.”
“Yes.” An understatement. “When I was thirteen, he got a more stable job as the county road supervisor on the central coast of Oregon so we stayed put through my high school years.”
“What was your favorite place to live?”
She had to think about it. “Well, I did enjoy Lincoln City. We lived for four months on the Big Island in Hawaii. I loved waking up and smelling the ocean, being able to ride my bike down to the beach and play in the baby breakers. I even surfed a little. There is something so...comforting about the water, you know?”
“Something we have in common. It’s one of the things that drew me to Lake Haven. It’s not quite the same as the ocean but a mountain lake offers its own kind of calm.”
She thought of the lunch she had shared with the women in town and the bits of conversation she had picked up. “I think it only fair to let you know, you’ve put the whole town on edge.”
He looked startled. “I have?”
“I stopped at Mayor Shaw’s gift store earlier. Apparently a group of her friends gets together a few Friday afternoons a month for a buffet lunch. This happened to be one of them and they invited me to join them.”
“That’s nice. Haven Point seems like a very friendly town.”
She wished again that it could have become her friendly town. All those years of moving around as a child had given her a deep desire to settle in a place where she and Maddie could belong. This would have been idyllic.
She had to stop wishing for the impossible. First a job that now didn’t exist and then a man who might have kissed her once but certainly wouldn’t make that mistake again.
SHE WAS NERVOUS.
As Eliza drove, Aidan couldn’t help noticing the way her fingers would tighten and release on the steering wheel or the fine tension in her shoulders, the curve of her jaw, the way she pressed her lips together.
Was it because of that kiss?
He certainly hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it. The entire time he was enmeshed in the last-minute negotiations for a software company he didn’t even care about, he had been remembering the softness of her skin, those delectable little sounds she made, the sweetness of her mouth.
She was even lovelier than he remembered. He wanted to kiss her all over again. Even the headache pressing in against his skull wasn’t enough to distract him from the aching need.
He dragged his attention back to more appropriate channels and tried to focus on what she was saying.
“Haven Point is a friendly town, from what I’ve seen,” she said. “You should probably know, however, that the people of this friendly town all seem to be waiting with bated breath for you to make a move.”
“Make a move?” For a crazy moment, he thought she was talking about kissing her again.
“Yes. You’re now the biggest landlord in town. Did you know that? From what I gathered at lunch, you hold the title to a huge chunk of the available commercial space. It could reasonably be said that you own this town.”
“That’s an exaggeration.” Yes, he knew Ben’s holdings included several commercial buildings in town, along with the family’s now-closed boat manufacturing plant.
Ben had been desperate to sell after years of trying to keep up with the property tax on his family’s holdings in the town he now hated, for reasons he had never shared with Aidan.
He had been eager to unload the property and after one exploratory visit, Aidan had jumped at the chance. Okay, he might have been influenced by a brain tumor pressing in on critical decision-making parts of his brain, but his attorneys still assured him it had been a sound investment.
“It’s not much of an exaggeration, from what I hear,” Eliza went on. “At least not according to the leading ladies in town—the Haven Helping Hands. Yes. Lame name. They know. They all seem to think you have the power to make or break this town.”
He rubbed at the side of his head where his scar itched like crazy. “That’s ridiculous. I don’t have plans to make any changes in the immediate future. I just want to get through the holidays with my family.”
“What about after the immediate future? I got the impression during the conversation over soup that everyone is worried you’re going to let their downtown dry up and become a ghost town, like some of the empty towns on the north side of the lake. Or worse, they worry you’ll bring in a ski resort—or five or six—until the whole lake area becomes just another Aspen or Vail—or Hope’s Crossing—and loses all its character.”
He frowned. “Hey. Hope’s Crossing drips with character and charm. You should visit some day. It’s a great place. Becoming a hot tourist destination doesn’t automatically suck all the personality and sense of community out of a town.”
She shifted her gaze from the road to him and then back again. “So you are planning to bring in some kind of big resort?”
“I didn’t say that. I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do yet. It hasn’t been at the top of my priority list.”
“Maybe not, but it is for the people of Haven Point. You might fly in for a weekend here and there but these women live here all the time, have their businesses here, raise their families. The local economy is obviously struggling. You’ve probably seen it yourself. Half the shops on Main Street are shuttered during what should be the busiest shopping season of the year.”
And people thought he was going to sweep in like some white knight and make all the difference? The guy with the hole in his brain?
He wanted a place he could come to relax, not a new set of problems and more people who wanted him to fix them all.
“Why is this so important to you?” he asked.
She looked surprised that he would ask. “It’s a nice town,” she said after a moment. “I’d like to see it stay that way. I had an earful in the forty minutes I spent at the mayor’s shop. Apparently back in the day—when people used to flock here by the thousands to take the miracle waters at the old Shelter Springs resort, before the waters all but dried up—this town was once completely dependent on tourist income. At one point the population was almost equal to Boise, or so Linda Fremont told me. She’s apparently the self-appointed town historian. In the 1920s, the springs slowed to a trickle and the town started to die with it. This area has been struggling ever since. Your friend closing his family’s boat factory was the last straw, apparently. People want to know what you plan and I can’t say I blame them,” Eliza said.
He had seen the shuttered buildings on Main Street but hadn’t given it much thought. Really, the only thing he wanted in town was Snow Angel Cove but he supposed he was going to have to figure out what to do with the other buildings and the closed factory.
“As soon as I work up some kind of a game plan,” he said slowly, “I’ll schedule