The Mountain Between Us

Also by Cindy Myers:

 

“Room at the Inn” in
Secret Santa

KENSINGTON BOOKS
www.kensingtonbooks.com

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

Thank you to Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers for your unwavering support and the many friends I've made in this wonderful organization. A special thanks to the Hand Hotel for hosting the writers' retreats where much of this book was written. Mike, Stella, and Richard, I couldn't have done it without you. The same goes for the writers who are regular parts of the retreat—you keep me going!

Thank you to the many people at Kensington Publishing who work behind the scenes to make this book possible, with special thanks to my editor, Audrey LaFehr, for her continued support of my stories.

As always, the people and places of Ridgway and Ouray, Colorado, inspired my writing. I can't think of a more beautiful and special place.

Finally, thank you to my husband, Jim, for his unwavering encouragement and love. You are the best.

C
HAPTER ONE

M
aggie Stevens stared out the front windshield of the Jeep, at the mountainside ahead painted with golden aspen, maroon rock, and purple aster—as if fall were playing a game of “top this” with summer, decorating itself with even more beautiful color. A lot of people probably came to this overlook above Eureka, Colorado, to try to deal with life's big questions, to let the hugeness of the mountains lend perspective.

Really, she'd only driven up here because the cell phone reception was best.

She glanced at the plus sign on the little plastic strip in her hand again. “Maybe the test is defective,” she said into the phone. “Maybe that's why it was for sale at the dollar store.”

“You bought a pregnancy test at the dollar store?” On the other end of the line her best friend, Barb Stanowski, sounded very far away.

“I certainly wasn't going to buy it here in town.” If anyone had seen her with her purchase at Eureka Grocery, the news would have been all over town before she even got back to her place. So she'd driven half an hour up the road to Montrose. “And I couldn't bring myself to pay ten dollars for something I was going to pee on. Besides, I needed three of them.”

“Three?” Barb was laughing again.

“I wanted to be absolutely sure. What if they're wrong?”

“All three of them? Not likely. How are you feeling?”

“I told you. Sick. Scared. And kind of elated.” Her first husband had refused to consider the idea of children. When he'd left her shortly before her fortieth birthday, she'd resigned herself to never having the baby she'd always wanted. Then she'd met Jameso and now . . .

“Any physical symptoms?” Barb asked.

“My breasts are really sensitive. I've been throwing up, but not just in the morning. Yesterday, Janelle brought onion rings with my lunch. I love her onion rings, but one whiff of those and I had to leave the café. And Rick told me I was glowing.”

“Your boss told you you were glowing? Have you been around any leaking nuclear reactors lately?”

“He was teasing me.” Rick Otis, editor and publisher of the
Eureka Miner,
made a hobby out of getting people's goat. “He said I must be in love, because I was positively glowing.”

“You are in love, aren't you?”

“Yes, maybe. I mean, yes, I love Jameso, but he's not exactly responsible father material.” Handsome, sexy, unpredictable Jameso Clark, who'd roared into her life on a motorcycle on her very first night in Eureka. He'd made her feel alive and sexy and hopeful again after the emotional wreckage of her divorce.

“How can you say that, if he cares about you and the baby?” Barb liked Jameso. She'd liked him before Maggie did, and continued to see qualities in him Maggie couldn't.

“He'll probably freak out when I tell him about the baby.” Maggie shuddered. She pictured him climbing on his motorcycle and riding away, out of her life forever. “I do love him. I think he's great, but I don't have any illusions about him. He's a part-time bartender slash ski instructor slash mountain guide, whose most valuable possession is a motorcycle. He's estranged from his family, and he probably suffers from post-traumatic stress, though he won't admit it.” Jameso refused to talk about his time in Iraq and turned away if she tried to question him.

“I think you're underestimating him,” Barb said. “This may be just what he needs to turn his life around. He'll probably make a great father.”

“What about me? What kind of mother will I be?” Maggie allowed herself to give in to the panic a little. “I don't know anything about children. I've never spent any time around them. I'm forty years old. I'll be ready to retire when this baby graduates college.” She closed her eyes, fighting a wave of dizziness.

“Calm down. Lots of women in their forties have babies these days. And you've always wanted children. You'll be a great mom.”

“Barb, I'm scared.” She opened her eyes again, shifting her gaze until she found the top of Mount Winston. How many mornings now had she awakened to the sight of that towering peak since coming to Eureka from Houston five months ago? She'd come here intending to stay a week—two at the most—gathering her late father's effects and trying to learn as much as she could about the man who'd walked out of her life when she was only a few days old. But the mountains had pulled at her, refusing to let her leave. Of all the things her father had left her, his greatest gift had been that new perspective on her life and the chance to start over with a different vision.

Was a baby part of that vision? Apparently, it was. Was it possible to be so thrilled and terrified at the same time?

“Oh, honey, I know,” Barb said soothingly. “I was scared when I found out I was pregnant with Michael, too. But you'll get over that, I promise.”

“What if I screw this up?”

“You won't. You and Jameso will make the most beautiful baby, and you'll love it in a way you've never loved anyone in your life.”

“What if Jameso can't handle this and he leaves?” Her husband and her father had bailed on her—why should she expect any better from Jameso?

“If he does, you'll manage on your own. You have a lot of people to help you.”

She put her hand on her stomach, trying to imagine a life growing in there. She couldn't do it. It was the most wonderful, impossible, surreal thing that had ever happened to her.

“Where is Jameso right now?” Barb asked.

“At work at the Dirty Sally.”

“He gets a dinner break, doesn't he? Go tell him.”

“No, I can't tell him at work.” The Dirty Sally Saloon was the epicenter of Eureka's highly developed gossip chain. If Jameso really did flake out on her, she'd rather it didn't happen in front of the whole bar crowd. “I'll tell him tomorrow. He's off in the morning and we're supposed to drive up to the French Mistress to check on the new gate I had installed.” The French Mistress Mine, another inheritance from her father, had turned out to contain no gold, but it was producing respectable quantities of high-quality turquoise. Work was shutting down for the winter and Maggie had installed an iron mesh gate to keep out the curious and the careless.

“That's kind of romantic, telling him at the place you first met.”

“That's Jameso—Mr. Romance.”

“You don't give him enough credit. It's going to be all right. I promise.”

“I hope you're right.”

“Of course I'm right. Don't you believe me?”

“I believe you.” Maybe it was talking to Barb, or maybe it was sitting here, letting the beauty of the mountains soothe her. Such a vast landscape made her feel small, and her problems small, too, in comparison.

She said good-bye to Barb, then started the Jeep and carefully backed onto the highway. She had about eighteen hours to figure out how to tell Jameso he was going to be a father. And about that long to let the realization that the thing she'd always wanted most was finally happening—and she'd never felt more unprepared.

 

Fall always felt like starting over to Olivia Theriot. The first sharp morning chill in the air and the tinge of gold in the leaves made her want to buy a new sweater and sharpen a pack of number two pencils. She'd turn to a blank page in a fresh notebook and start a new chapter in her life.

One of the chief disappointments in being an adult was that fall didn't bring new beginnings that way. No new clothes, new classes, new friends, and the chance to do things over and get it right this time. While she'd sent her thirteen-year-old son, Lucas, off to school with a new backpack and a fresh haircut, she felt more stuck than ever in a life she hadn't planned.

“I've got a bad feeling about this one.”

“I feel that way so often I've thought of having it put on a T-shirt.” Olivia slid another beer toward the man who'd spoken, a part-time miner named Bob Prescott who was the Dirty Sally Saloon's best customer.

“You're too young to be so cynical.” Bob saluted her with the beer glass, then took a long sip.

Next month, she'd turn thirty. To Bob, who had to be in his seventies, that probably felt young, but most days Olivia felt she'd left youth behind long ago. Maybe it was having a kid who was already a teenager. Or having lived in at least fifteen different places since she'd left home at fifteen. Or maybe this used-up feeling was really only dismay that nothing in her life had worked out the way she'd planned. Back when she was a starry-eyed twenty-something, her dreams of happily ever after had certainly never included single motherhood, a job tending bar, and sharing a house with her mother in a town so remote it didn't even make it onto most maps.

She pinched herself hard on the wrist. Time to snap out of it. At this rate she'd end up crying in her beer, like one of her sloppiest customers. “What do you have a bad feeling about, Bob?” she asked. In the four months she'd worked at the Dirty Sally, Bob could be counted on for at least one outrageous story or proclamation a week.

“This winter.” Bob shook his head. “It's going to be a late one. We should have had snow by now and there's scarcely been a flurry. Mount Winston's practically bare and here it is into October.”

“It has been awfully dry.” The other bartender, Jameso Clark, moved down the bar to join Bob and Olivia. Tall, with dark hair and a neatly trimmed goatee, Jameso was something of a local heartthrob, though lately he seemed to have settled down with Maggie Stevens. “It's not looking good for an early ski season.”

“You working as a ski instructor again this year?” Bob asked.

“Of course.”

“Aren't you getting a little long in the tooth to play ski bum?” Olivia asked.

Jameso's eyes narrowed. “I'm only two years older than you. And there are plenty of guys who are older than me, a lot older, who work as instructors or on ski patrol.”

“But it's not like it's a real job. Not something a man can support a family on.”

“Who said anything about a family?” Jameso's voice rose in alarm.

She never should have brought it up. Now he was going to get all pissy on her. “Things just seem pretty serious with you and Maggie. I thought you two might get married and settle down.”

“What if we do?” Color bloomed high on his cheeks. “That doesn't mean I can't keep skiing. Maggie likes me fine the way I am.”

“Forget I said anything.”

“You won't be teaching anybody to ski if we don't get snow,” Bob said. Olivia didn't know if he was deftly cutting off their argument or merely continuing with his current favorite topic, oblivious to what had just passed between her and Jameso. Whatever the reason, she gratefully picked up the thread.

“I can't believe you two are moaning about the lack of snow,” she said. “Why would you even want the weather we have right now to end?” She gestured out the front window of the bar, where a cluster of aspens still held on to many of their golden leaves. The sun shone in a turquoise blue sky, the thermometer on the wall showed sixty-four degrees, and the breeze through the open window at her back was dry and crisp. Olivia, who'd lived all over before coming to this little corner of the Rockies, had never seen such glorious weather.

“The weather's good, all right,” Bob said. “Too good. We need a good snowstorm to send all the tourists packing.”

She rolled her eyes and started emptying the contents of the bus tray into the recycling bin.

“What about you, Miss O?” Jameso asked. “Have you decided yet if you're staying in Eureka for the winter?”

Olivia fixed him with a baleful glare.

“What?” He held up both hands in a defensive gesture. “I just asked an innocent question.”

“You're the sixth person who's asked me that question in the past week. I'm beginning to think people are anxious to see me gone.”

“You've got it all wrong.” Jameso leaned his lanky frame back against the bar and grinned in a way most women probably found charming. “Maybe we're anxious to see you stay.”

“People say if you can survive your first winter in Eureka you're likely to stick around for good.” Bob regarded Olivia over the rim of his beer glass. “You strike me as the kind of woman who's got what it takes to stick it out.”

This passed for high praise from Bob, who regarded most newcomers to town with suspicion—herself and Maggie excepted. Olivia suspected his approval of her had more to do with her ability to pull a glass of beer and the fact that her mother was the town's mayor than with her potential as a mountain woman.

“I don't see what's so special about winter here,” she said, going back to filling the recycling bin with the bottles from last night's bar crowd. “The way you people talk you'd think Eureka's the only place to ever get snow.”

“It's not just the snow,” Jameso said, “though we get plenty of that. We measure storms in feet, not inches. But snow here in the mountains isn't like snow in the city. Some of the roads around here don't get plowed until spring. Avalanches can block the highway into town and cut us off from the rest of the world for days. Most of the tourists leave town, so everything's quieter. The people who stay are the ones who really want to be here, and everybody pitches in to help everybody else.”

Olivia wrinkled her nose. “You make it sound like some sort of commune.”

“That's community—the two are related,” Bob said. “You find out who your friends really are when your car breaks down on a winter road or you run out of firewood with two months of winter left.”