Chapter Three

      They’d been home a half hour. The girls were parked in front of The Princess Bride, mesmerized, as if they’d never seen the movie fifty times before. But Whit couldn’t settle, couldn’t shake an odd case of restlessness.

      He prowled the rented house from room to room. The mountain cabin suited him far better than their home in Charleston—but Zoe loved the city side of life, so a city house was what she’d wanted.

      He liked it here. The quiet. The clean air. The mists in the morning, the smell of pine, and the house itself had a dream of a layout. The great room had a massive corner fireplace, and the kitchen/dining area was all open. You could feed two or twenty in the same space. Glass doors everywhere led to a wraparound porch. The back door opened onto a practical mudroom and downstairs bath, and beyond that was a good size master bedroom.

      The upstairs was a simple open loft—a bedroom and den type of area—the girls had squealed nonstop when they first saw it, thought it was “beyond awesome” to have a whole floor to themselves. He thought it was equally “awesome” that they were always safely within his sight.

      When he’d prowled the house enough, he settled with a mug of cider in the great room—as far away from The Princess Bride movie as he could get—and accidently found himself staring out the glass doors to the west. More precisely, he wasn’t staring out, but staring up.

      He couldn’t see the MacKinnon lodge through the thick forest, but without those trees, he suspected he’d easily be able to locate Rosemary’s place, maybe even see her, if she were outside on her front deck.

      Mentally he could still picture her long legs, the careless, easy way she wore clothes. Her hair was short, blond as sunshine, always looking finger-brushed, framing her delicate face so naturally. The way her sun-blushed skin set off added to her looks being striking, interesting.

      More than interesting. He hadn’t felt his hormones kick like this in a long, long time.

      There was a reason—there had to be a reason—why a smart, delectably attractive and downright interesting woman was living alone. It gnawed at him to think of her being alone, especially during the holidays. It wasn’t as if there were close neighbors or friends who could easily stop over for a visit. Whit understood that she’d won that academic grant, that she loved the study, that whole business.

      But that still didn’t explain her holing up alone for the holidays.

      And it didn’t begin to explain the sadness in her blue blue eyes.

      Abruptly he heard the tune on his cell phone, flipped it open and heard the country drawl of Samson, one of his truck drivers. No emergency, Sam just wanted to relay that he was headed to Savannah for his Christmas family gathering, and he hoped Whit and the girls would have a good holiday.

      The conversation lifted his spirits. His employees had been together for years now, except for a few extra college kids he’d hired over the summer. They’d turned into a team, the kind who shared good times and bad, who attended each other’s christenings and graduations.

      Whit didn’t know what that really meant until Zoe died, and the crew hung closer to him than sticky glue. Someone called every day; someone else brought food; and all of them offered help with whatever needed doing—either for Whit or for the girls. It taught him forever that “family” could mean a lot of things, and wasn’t always defined by blood kin.

      When he finished the call, he almost put down the phone...but instead flipped it open again. Rosemary’s number was already in his phone’s memory, from their first call. It only took one impulsive, brainless moment to dial it.

      Her line was busy.

      So, he thought, she did have someone to talk to.

      He couldn’t call again for a couple hours, because the movie ended and the girls immediately claimed starvation. The vote for dinner was a made-from-scratch pizza—one of the few things he could do well in the kitchen. It just always seemed to require every dish and every counter to put it together.

      The girls helped clean up. Some. Predictably, though, they scattered faster than dust in the wind when he turned on the news.

      Once they ran upstairs, he tried calling Rosemary again.

      For the second time, her line was busy. So she either had another person to talk with, or she’d talked for three solid hours to her first caller. The former seemed more likely, but as the girls came back down to con Whit into an old fashioned game of Clue, he got the niggling idea that possibly she was in trouble. Maybe she hadn’t been talking. Maybe her phone wasn’t working, because for a hermit to be occupied with two calls seemed odd. A puzzle piece that didn’t fit.

      If that thinking was flimsy, he figured out the obvious. He wanted to talk with her. Any excuse he could conjure up was good enough.

      He checked on the girls, found them in their Christmas pj’s, lying on their tummies reading. He stole a good-night kiss from each, then took his cell phone into his room downstairs.

      He kicked off his shoes, flipped off the light and sank into the recliner facing the west glass doors. The master bedroom suited him like a good pair of gloves. Nothing fancy, just a giant bed with a serious mattress and a warm, dark pine comforter. The best part was the view. The glass doors looked straight up the mountainside. A few nights before there’d been a full moon. He’d been close enough to touch it.

      Okay, so maybe not that close. But he’d moved the recliner to the window that night, and that’s where he’d spent the past few evenings since, a short brandy in his hand, the lights off, to just inhale the mountain, the air, the peace.

      When he dialed Rosemary’s number this time, she answered. “Whit? Trouble at your house?”

      She sounded breathless, animated. “No trouble. Did I catch you in the middle of something?”

      “Yeah. Stargazing.”

      She didn’t chuckle but he could hear the smile in her voice.

      “I was doing that here, too. I just shut off the lights. I can’t get over how many stars I can see from this altitude.”

      “It’s the mountain. You know the mountain’s full of magic, don’t you?”

      “Oh, yeah. I’m a real believer in magic,” he said drily.

      Again, he could hear the smile in her voice. “Whisper Mountain has a legend. The ‘whisper’ business is supposed to be real. Except that only true lovers can hear the mountain whisper. It’s a sign.”

      “You mean like a stop sign or a construction warning sign?”

      “No, you lunkhead. It’s a magic sign.”

      “Did you just call me a lunkhead?”

      “No, of course not. That was the other woman on the phone. Not me. I don’t even know what a lunkhead is. I never heard the word before.”

      “Well, would you put Rosemary back on the line?”

      “Can’t. She’s in the bathtub shaving her legs. Took a glass of wine and a candle with her, so I doubt she’s coming out soon.”

      “Is it me, or is this conversation coming out of never-never land?”

      “What do you expect? You’re living with two preteen girls