Total pages in book: 152
Estimated words: 145574 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 728(@200wpm)___ 582(@250wpm)___ 485(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 145574 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 728(@200wpm)___ 582(@250wpm)___ 485(@300wpm)
“Don’t worry about the mess,” I said over my shoulder. She had enough on her plate without picking up my house. It wasn’t like I had much else to do today, and she needed the break. “Besides, don’t you have to open the center?”
“I hate to— Oh my God, I’m going to be so late!” She scooped a kid into each arm, then nearly skidded by, stopping to kiss my cheek. “Thanks for the coffee.”
“Have a good day at work, dear,” I sang, dropping a banana in her oversize purse.
“It was nice to meet you, Noah!” she yelled back as she raced out the door.
“You too!”
The door shut with an audible wham.
“A banana?” he asked, lifting his eyebrows.
“She always remembers to feed her kids breakfast, but she gets too busy to eat for herself,” I answered with a shrug as my phone buzzed.
Hazel: He gets about a dozen points for that maneuver with the kids.
“Traitor,” I muttered, sticking my phone in my back pocket without responding.
“So,” Noah said, tucking his hands into his front pockets.
“So,” I responded. “I’ve never scheduled a fight before.” The air between us could have crackled with all the anticipatory electricity flying about.
“Is that what you’d call this?” He smirked.
“What would you call it?” I put the coffee mugs in the dishwasher.
He gave it a moment’s thought. “A premeditated walk for the purpose of discovering a mutually beneficial path so we might navigate our personal and professional differences to attain a singular goal,” he mused. “If I had to call it something off the cuff.”
“Writers,” I muttered. “Then let’s walk ourselves back to the office.”
His eyes flared with delight. “I have a better idea. Let’s walk along the creek.”
I arched an eyebrow at him.
He put his hands up. “No climbing. I’m talking about the creek in your backyard—the one in the letters, right? I think better on my feet. Plus it takes breakable objects out of the equation if you want to throw something at me.”
I rolled my eyes. “Fine. I’ll get my shoes.”
By the time I got back to the kitchen, now wearing hiking boots and a much more sensible T-shirt, he’d cleaned up the mess Hazel’s kids had left, and even I had to reluctantly admit he was scoring points.
Broody writer? Check.
Hot as hell? Check.
Good with kids? Double check.
My chest went all tight on me. This was so not good.
“You didn’t have to, but thank you,” I told him as we headed out the kitchen door and onto the patio.
“I didn’t mind—whoa.” He came up short, staring at the expanse of garden that Gran had loved.
“It’s an English-style garden, naturally,” I explained as we started down the path between the trimmed hedges. Fall had set in, bringing out the oranges and golds everywhere but the greenhouse.
“Naturally,” he said, taking it all in, his attention darting to one plant, then another.
“Are you memorizing it?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Gran used to tell me that she was memorizing a place. The way it looked and smelled, the sounds she heard, the smaller details she could drop into a story that would make the reader feel like they were there. Is that what you do?”
“I never thought about it that way, but yeah.” He nodded. “This is beautiful.”
“Thank you. She loved it, even when she was complaining that she couldn’t get some of her favorite plants to live at altitude.” We reached the back gate, where an evergreen hedge separated us from the Colorado wilderness. I turned the wrought iron handle and walked us through. “She said it made her feel closer to her sister.”
“Constance taught her, right?”
“Yep.” It was weird, but comforting that someone else had read Gran’s manuscript, knew that part of her life as intimately as I did.
“Well, damn. This is beautiful, too,” he said toward the aspens ahead of us.
“It’s home.” I took a deep breath, feeling my soul settle the way it always did at this particular view. We were nestled in a valley of the Elks, which rose up high before us, their crowns already tipped with the first snow.
The meadow behind Gran’s house was colored in shades of burnished gold, both from the knee-high grass that had surrendered to the cycle of fall and the leaves of the aspen trees that flanked both sides.
“This is my favorite time of year. Not that I don’t miss fall in New York, because I do. But here there’s no riot of color. No war between the trees as to whose leaves will be the brightest. Here, the mountains turn gold, as if they all agreed. It’s peaceful.” I walked us along the path that had been worn into the meadow long before I was born.
“I can see why you’d want to come back,” Noah admitted. “I’m a sucker for autumn in New York, though.”