Her Holiday Secret. Jennifer Greene
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with a view of secluded woods and a sharp ravine.
Maggie obviously liked blue. Furniture clustered in the room’s center, blue couches, blue chairs, and a thick plush blue carpet made for bare feet. Nothing looked too pricey or overly color-coordinated...more like she just plain loved blue, and had chosen comfortable furniture big enough to curl up in.
She came up behind him, carrying two steaming mugs. “You might as well just tell me that you think the place is splendiferous. You’ll hurt my feelings if you don’t.”
“I think it’s beyond splendiferous. The whole place has a great hideaway feeling.”
“Good boy.” She grinned. “Built it myself. Or that’s the story I tell. The truth is more like I couldn’t possibly have handled the chimney or window fittings or plumbing. But I designed it, did the stonework and even the roof, so I figure I should get the lion’s share of the credit.”
“You won’t get any argument out of me. I’m impressed. Seriously.”
“Well, I almost killed myself tackling the roof...got my feminist knickers in a twist trying to play Superwoman, when I should have had the brains to call for help. But that’s water over the dam.” She took a fast sip from a royal blue mug, and then motioned with it “Come on, I’ll show you the rest. There isn’t much. Just a sleeping loft upstairs and my office and a storage room...”
The storage room combined laundry with a squared-off space for sports gear—she was an experienced skier and climber both, judging from the sturdiness of her equipment—and she had a shop section with tools serious enough to make a man drool. Her office, by contrast, was pure female. A fancy high-tech computer setup was back-dropped by girl stuff everywhere—scented candles and bowls of potpourri, a hanging lamp with a fringy shade, doodads and plants and pictures all fighting for the same space.
“I take it you work from your home here?” he asked.
“Yeah. I do technical writing for Mytron, Inc.—they’re out of Boulder. I put together brochures and manuals for them, that sort of thing. Once every few weeks—at least once a month—I drive to Boulder and stay overnight, do the face-to-face meetings kind of thing. Otherwise all I really need are the phone, fax and modem to make the telecommuting style work just fine. And I’ll show you the loft, but only if you promise to blind your eyes.”
He had to chuckle. “Trust me, I’ve seen messy before.”
“Uh-huh. I’ve heard big claims like that before. But I’m talking bad messy. I’m talking disgrace. I’m talking my sister is ashamed to know me, it’s so bad.”
An open staircase led up, where a waist-high balcony viewed the stone fireplace below. The room was a cluttered mess, so much so that Andy’s first thought was Good, not too likely she’d had men sleeping over recently.
She whipped a bra out of sight, kicked a scrap of something pink under the bed, kept him chuckling, but a second and more serious thought had already followed the first...for all her apparent pep and lively spirit, she’d had some rough nights since the accident. Her queen-size bed had a white down comforter over salmon sheets. The sheets weren’t just rumpled but untucked and pulled out, as if her dreams had been wild and troubled.
It was her architecture and design she was showing off, though, so he played along. The slanted roof had a skylight. The floor was carpeted with an Oriental rug that looked ankle-deep, but it was tricky to tell the pattern with the clothes and papers and books she had piled all over. The adjoining bathroom was big enough to have a square tub and a sit-down counter space. Her scent pervaded the bath. Soft, not sweet, not a scent he knew or could pin down, but distinctive and evocative. Like her.
“So how long have you lived here?” he asked.
“Almost four years now. Grew up in Colorado Springs, got the job at Mytron in Boulder when I graduated from school. But I really like country life, and my sister lived here, and when her husband was diagnosed with cancer about then...well. She’s my family and they needed some help. It took a while to convince Mytron that I could do the job via telecommuting, but once I could see that was going to work out, I started looking at land to build a place. I really love the area.”
“I was born and raised here, but I love it, too. Think I’m addicted to the mountains, and I can’t imagine living in a place where buildings close you in.” As they climbed back down the loft stairs, Andy again noticed the slight limp in her right leg. But a shadow moving on her porch snapped his cop’s eyes in that ditection...at least for a second. “Um, I believe you’ve got a deer on your patio.”
“Yeah. Horace. He’s a voyeur—around this time of day, he usually shows up for a handout and peeks in my windows at the same time. He was in love last fall. God, there is no worse doofus than a buck in love. Brought Martha up to the patio to meet me. But I haven’t seen her since, think the love affair must have gone sour, and he’s gone back to peeking in my windows again.”
Andy scratched his chin. “I’m not sure there’s a charge for a sexually deviant deer.”
“It’s okay. I don’t think Horace is highly motivated to reform anyway. The only neighbor who gives me real fits is Cleopatra—she’s a raccoon, and I swear she steals anything that isn’t nailed down or padlocked. You want a refill on that coffee?”
“Thanks, but I really should be going.” Andy figured he’d stayed long enough for an uninvited visitor. “Never heard a name like Cleopatra for a raccoon before.”
“Well, it seemed to fit. Honestly, if you saw her, you’d fall for her. All the guys do. She turns up pregnant every spring. I think it’s in the eyes. She’s got that fatal allure kind of thing.”
“Maggie?” She made him chuckle again, imagining a raccoon with fatal allure. But they were ambling through the kitchen toward his coat. Andy considered he only had a few minutes left to get in anything serious, and Maggie cocked her head curiously when she heard the change in his tone.
“You’re pretty isolated on this stretch of road. You really getting around okay since the accident?”
“Yeah. Really. Just fine.”
“How about wheels?”
“Well, I have to get around to car shopping. A fate worse than death, if you ask me...but I’m fine for now anyway. Colin brought in some fresh groceries, and this time of year I’ve always got a stocked freezer because there’s always at least one blizzard before Christmas. My sis has a car I could borrow if I had to. Really, I’m fine.”
“You want some company car shopping?”
She’d paused to stir her spaghetti pot, glanced up. “Frankly, I wouldn’t ask that of my worst enemy, Andy...but if you mean it...sure.”
“Yeah, I mean it. The doc clear you to be out and around?”
“The doc ordered me to sack on the couch for a couple of days. I’ve rested until I’m blue in the face,” she said dryly.
“So rested that the memory came back that was bothering you so much? You remember the accident now?”
It was the first time he saw that upbeat smile of hers falter. The shadows darkening her eyes made him think of that rumpled, torn-up bed. “No,” she admitted quietly. “It’s like that whole twenty-four hours before the accident was just wiped off my map.”
He unhitched his leather jacket from the hook, burrowed into it, but his eyes stayed honed on her face. “It still just happened a few days ago.”
“I know. And the doc must have told me a dozen times that it’s really common. It’s just... Andy, you don’t know me. But I’m just not a person who folds in a crisis. I do rescue work. I hiked the Appalachian Trail alone when I was a kid. I’m no wimp. And especially since the accident wasn’t my fault, I just don’t understand why I can’t make those memories come back unless something else serious happened.”
She was so frustrated, she didn’t