Heartache Falls (18 page)

He thought a moment, then said, “Give me a few minutes. I’m not a young stud anymore.”

She pulled his chest hair. “I meant for supper.”

“Oh.” He grinned, knowing that was what she’d meant all along. “I could eat something. How about you?”

“I’m torn between food and sleep at the moment.”

He tucked her head beneath his chin, inhaled the citrus scent of her shampoo, and said, “How about a catnap? Then we can grab a bite to eat, and after that I’ll probably be hungry again. Sound like a plan?”

“The best plan ever.”

For the first time in longer than she could remember, Ali woke up warm. Toasty warm. Well, actually hot, since when she woke up her husband’s mouth was tending to her breast.

When they finally crawled out of bed and showered, she grimaced at the idea of putting on yesterday’s clothes. Still, she didn’t want to take Mac back to the carriage house. Not yet. So she pulled on her slacks and shirt and, while he was shaving, called out, “I’ll run and get us coffee and breakfast, okay?”

“Sure.”

On her way, she bypassed the Mocha Moose coffeehouse and headed for the carriage house at Angel’s Rest. She started stripping the moment she made it inside and went straight to her bedroom. From the bottom drawer of her dresser, she took out the lingerie she’d purchased while shopping with Sarah for Sage’s wedding shower gifts last fall—a lacy, push-up, fire-engine-red bra and a matching pair of panties. They still had the tags attached. She’d had neither the occasion or desire to wear them before now, and she didn’t even know why she’d brought them from home. As she pulled the tags off the panties, she wasn’t totally certain she wanted to wear them today. They were thong panties. She’d never worn thong panties in her life. The whole wedgie thing had turned her off the idea, but Sarah had goaded her into buying them.

Now, faced with a choice between butt floss that just might make Mac’s eyes pop out or a drawer full of plain ivory panties, she decided to go for broke and donned the new lingerie. Darned if wearing them didn’t make her feel just a tad trashy.

She pulled on a clingy purple shirt and a pair of jeans, then hurried back to the Mocha Moose, where she purchased two tall coffees and two huge blueberry muffins.

Mac was waiting for her in one of the Adirondack chairs on the lawn beside the creek. Seeing her, he smiled, his gray eyes knowingly amused. “I figured you’d gone to change your clothes. Couldn’t bear the idea of wearing yesterday’s panties, could you?”

“No.”

Accepting the coffee she handed him, he casually asked, “Didn’t want me seeing your place?”

It was no casual question, she understood. “It’s not that. Okay, that’s part of it. I don’t want to take you there this morning. I’ll cook dinner for us there if you’d like.”

“How about we cook dinner together?”

Happiness radiated through her like sunshine. “That would be lovely. So, what would you like to do today?”

“Well, Chase told me there’s an alpine trail near here that has spectacular scenery. Apparently there’s a jeep rental place in town? Weather is supposed to be good. Would you like to give that a go?”

“Absolutely. We could stop by the grocery store and get stuff for a picnic, too, if you’d like.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Ali directed Mac to the outfitters, where he rented a jeep for the day. After filling out paperwork, he added a few items to the tab, including fishing poles, worms, and salmon eggs for bait. “Do you have a license, Ali?”

“Actually, I do.” Noting his surprise, she explained. “My place is beside Angel Creek. Fishing is surprisingly relaxing.”

“Have you caught anything?”

“I did. Once. I caught a ten-inch rainbow trout.”

“Oh, yeah? What did you do then? Who took it off the hook?”

She wanted to say she’d done it herself, but she knew he wouldn’t believe the lie. “I carried it over to the teenage boys fishing upstream of me. One of the boys reminded me so much of Stephen.”

“What did he do, scold you with a look?”

Nodding, she sighed. “Tsked his tongue, too, and then he offered to teach me how to take the fish off the hook.”

Mac smirked. “I could have told him not to waste his breath.”

She opened her mouth to make her usual response, which ran along the lines of
That’s why I have a husband and sons
, but thought better of it, considering she was currently living—and fishing—alone. Instead, she said, “Let me help carry some of that to the jeep.”

He handed her the two fishing poles, then asked, “Are we walking to the grocery or driving?”

“The Trading Post is at the other end of town. Let’s take the jeep.”

At the grocery, Ali found Lori Reese manning the cash register and started to introduce the young woman to her husband, but Mac surprised her by saying, “Lori and I met last night. I was wandering around town looking for you and she clued me in on the fact that you had tickets to the play.” To Lori, he said, “Thanks again for your help.”

“Glad I knew the scoop,” Lori replied.

“And I’m glad I finally had the pleasure of meeting you. I recall that Chase told me you want to be a veterinarian?”

“Yes, sir.”

Mac and Lori discussed her freshman year at Texas A&M for a moment, then Ali asked, “Does your mom stock picnic baskets of any kind?”

“Yes, they’re in the side room on the shelf beside the T-shirts.”

“Excellent. We’re driving the high country trail today, and we wanted to take something for lunch.”

“The grapes are really good,” Lori said. “We also got in a selection of cheeses you might look at.”

“Thanks, sweetie.” While Mac selected a bottle of wine, Ali filled her basket with fruit, cheese, crackers, and her husband’s favorite guilty-pleasure junk food—Cheetos. Twenty minutes later they turned onto the narrow dirt road that took them up into the hills.

They didn’t talk much while they drove, but they communicated plenty. Mac kept hold of Ali’s hand, even when he shifted gears, and she thought back to college days, when he drove a secondhand Ford Crown Victoria that he’d been given by an older gentleman for whom he’d done yard work. Mac had been embarrassed by the car, but Ali had loved it. The bench seat meant she could sit beside him on their dates. After the summer when he’d interned at the Chicago firm and finally made enough money to buy what he called a real car, the Mustang he’d chosen came with bucket seats. She’d lamented the loss of the Crown Vic and explained why. That’s when he first held her hand while he shifted gears.

She’d never really noticed when he’d abandoned the practice. After they married? When they had children? She guessed it didn’t really matter because it was, after all, a very teenage thing to do.

Yet she felt like a teenager again this morning. She felt renewed and rejuvenated and young.

She felt happy.

“I asked the guy at the outfitters to recommend a good fishing spot along this drive,” Mac said, pulling a folded piece of paper out of his shirt pocket. “He
gave me this—a place called Heartache Falls. Said it’s the map they reserve for locals and that it’s off the beaten path, but it’s a beautiful spot beside a little lake just downstream from a little waterfall. If we don’t mind hiking a little ways, we should have the place to ourselves. You up for a walk?”

“Absolutely.” She studied the map, glad she’d worn her boots to the theater last night. “Heartache Falls. I’ve heard people talk about it, but it’s not on any of the tourist maps. It’ll be nice to get away from the crowd.”

“You call this a crowd?”

“For Eternity Springs it is. I know how important it is for us to attract tourist dollars, and since it’s the height of the season, I’m glad to see the town bustling. The majority of the businesses in town make the bulk of their profit for the entire year between June and August. I admit I enjoyed the sleepy days in town before the summer people arrived.”

“The town was bustling last night. So, tell me about this Lost Angel mystery. I caught the last half of the play. How much of it is fact and how much is fiction?”

“More fiction than fact, definitely. We know that the human remains found in the cellar at Cavanaugh House along with a nineteenth-century wedding dress and thirty bars of silver was Daniel Murphy’s lost Angel, his bride-to-be, Winifred Smith. Pretty much everything else was conjecture.”

“I expected your killer to be the lantern-jawed gardener.”

“That’s our banker. He says playing the villain
comes naturally to him. So were you shocked that the sweet Gertie Gallagher did the dirty deed?”

He grinned. “Yes, you definitely caught me by surprise on that one. I suspected her, then dismissed her as a red herring. It’s an entertaining show. Poor old Daniel Murphy.”

“He believed he lost his good luck when she disappeared.”

Mac reached over and took her hand once again. “I can relate. So he drowned his sorrow in suds, lost his fortune, and had to sell his mountain, hmm? Which one is it, by the way?”

“Murphy Mountain?” Ali looked around, only just then realizing how high they had climbed above the valley that nestled Eternity Springs. “Oh, wow. Look at this view. Isn’t it gorgeous?”

Rather than take in the scenery, he looked straight at her. “Absolutely.”

Ali felt herself blush. She was thrilled at his attention—truly she was—and yet a part of her wondered where this attention had been for the past six months. Six years. In that moment, she experienced a stirring of unease.

Had anything changed? Anything at all?

Maybe yes, probably no. How could she know unless they talked at a level deeper than the surface? Except she didn’t want to talk deeper. She was enjoying the surface. The sailing was smoother here. And smooth sailing was what she and her husband needed right now.

So stay on the surface. Let him flirt with you. Let him seduce you. Seduce him right back
.

Ali believed that if they managed to fix the physical
part of the marriage, that would go a long way toward fixing the other troublesome spots, too.

She studied Mac, who had finally turned to look at the vista beyond. Maybe that was what he thought, too. Maybe that was what had brought him to Eternity Springs yesterday and lay behind his request that they hold off talking about anything more serious than the Lost Angel mystery.

Considering how she’d spent last night, Ali had to give a thumbs-up to that plan.

She pointed toward the snowcapped mountain that rose to the east of them. “That’s Murphy. It’s owned by descendants of Lucien Davenport, the third member of the trio who made the Silver Miracle strike and founded Eternity Springs.”

“Have you met any of them? Davenports or Murphys?”

Ali hesitated. Sarah and Lori had shared the truth about Lori’s paternity with her in confidence. In the past, situations like this had been the subject of debate in her marriage. Ali’s opinion had been that she didn’t keep secrets from her husband, any secret, that though they were a couple, they were a unit. They were one. Sharing something with one of them meant sharing with both of them.

Mac, on the other hand, could teach the CIA about keeping secrets. To Mac, a confidence shared with him was simply that, period. He would no more share it with her than a priest would break the seal of the confessional. Ali had long nursed a resentment about his stance. Unfair, perhaps, but real.

This time, however, rather than share Lori’s secret, she said, “No.”

Then Ali said to herself,
Surface. Surface
.

She grabbed the map to the fishing spot. “We should be getting close to the turnoff.”

“All right. Help me watch for it.”

Ten minutes later, she pointed toward a gate marked
B&P
. “There it is.”

“B & P. Is that another area ranch?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t heard of it if it is.”

Mac used the access code provided by the outfitters to open the gate, then Ali closed it behind them after Mac drove the jeep through. The road became little more than a rutted path winding its way downhill through a forest of fir, pine, and aspen. She watched for wildlife in the trees as they drove, hoping to spot elk or bighorn sheep. She’d just as soon not see any bears or mountain lions.

“The outfitters said to look for a pull-off shortly after we pass off private land into the national forest,” Mac said. “We park there, then Heartache Falls is about a twenty-minute hike. You still up for it?”

“Absolutely. I have my heart set on trout for supper.”

They located the turnoff, parked, and gathered their supplies. “There’s the trailhead,” Mac said. “You ready?”

“Lead on, Magellan.”

Before they’d taken a dozen steps, a familiar voice called out, “Hello, Ali!”

“Celeste?” Ali looked around in surprise.

Celeste Blessing stood behind them on the road, her Honda Gold Wing motorcycle at her side. It wasn’t running. Ali said, “I didn’t hear you ride up.”

“I didn’t ride. Not the past hundred yards or so.
I’m afraid I failed to check my gas gauge when I started out this morning. I’ve run out of gas.”

“Oh, no,” Ali replied.

“Foolish of me, but maybe it was meant to happen so that I could run into you.” Celeste beamed a smile at Mac. “You must be Mac. Ali speaks so highly of you. I’m Celeste Blessing.”

While Mac stood there looking surprised, Ali introduced him to her friend. He cleared his throat and said, “I’m pleased to meet you, too, ma’am. I know Ali is excited about her work with the restaurant.”

Now it was Ali’s turn to be surprised. They hadn’t discussed the restaurant much at all. The kids must have told him how much she loved the project. “Were you out on a ride enjoying this beautiful day like we are, Celeste?”

“Partly. I did take the long way here from town because it is such a lovely morning. However, I’m on my way to visit Bear and Patricia. He’s our local mountain man, tour guide, and taxidermist. Have you seen his yurt, Ali?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“It’s definitely something to see, and it’s just up the road a little bit.” She eyed the jeep, then glanced back at her motorcycle. “Could I trouble you two to give me a lift to Bear’s place? I’m sure he’ll have a gas can and fuel to share.”