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.”
“Lucille has gas heat, and I don’t plan on exploring the hinterlands this winter,” Olivia said.
“You laugh now, but you’ll find out soon enough if you stick around,” Bob said. “Folks around here look after each other.”
“I can look after myself. Thanks all the same.” Olivia had a hard enough time getting used to everyone in town knowing everyone else’s business—knowing her business. How much worse would it be when there were fewer people to keep the busybodies occupied? She was tempted to get out of town while she still could, but her son, Lucas, liked it here, and though her mother, Lucille, would probably never admit it, Olivia thought she liked having them here in Eureka, too.
Besides, she didn’t want to give certain people the satisfaction of thinking she was running away from them.
She hefted the recycling bin onto one hip and headed out the back door, to the alley behind the bar where the truck could pick it up this afternoon.
“Let me help you with that.” Before she could react, two strong arms relieved her of her burden.
She glared up at the man whose broad shoulders practically blotted out the sun. “What are you doing here, D. J.? I thought I made it clear I didn’t want to see you again.”
A lesser man might have been knocked off his feet by the force of her glare, but Daniel James Gruber, too good-looking for her peace of mind and far too stubborn by half, never flinched. “Which do you think is heavier?” he asked. “These bottles or that grudge you’re carrying around?”
If he thought her feelings about him were the heaviest thing in her heart, he didn’t really know her very well.
But, of course, he didn’t know her. If he had, he never would have left her in the first place. So why had he tracked her all the way to middle-of-nowhere Eureka, Colorado? And why now? “Go home, D. J.,” she said. “Or go back to Iraq. Or go to hell, for all I care. Just leave me alone.”
“Mo-om!” The shout was followed almost immediately by a boy with wispy blond hair, large ears, and round, wire-rimmed glasses. He wore cutoff denim shorts, a too-large T-shirt, and the biggest smile Olivia could remember seeing on him.
“You don’t have to shout, Lucas,” she said. “I’m right here.”
“Mom, you gotta come out to the truck and see the fish I caught.”
“Where were you fishing? You know I told you not to go off in the mountains by yourself.” Almost two months ago, Lucas had fallen down a mine tunnel on one of his solo expeditions, exploring the surrounding mountains. Ever since, Olivia had been haunted by worries over all the ways this wild country had for a boy to get hurt—mine tunnels and whitewater rivers, boiling hot springs and treacherous rock trails. Lucas had never been a particularly rambunctious boy, but he was still a boy, with a boy’s disregard for danger.
“I didn’t go by myself. D. J. took me.”
She could feel D. J.’s hot gaze on her, though she didn’t dare look at him. If she detected the least bit of smugness in his expression, she’d leap up and scratch his eyes out. How dare he think he could get to her by playing best pal to her son!
But she couldn’t tell him what she thought of him now, with Lucas standing here. The boy idolized the only man who’d ever really taken an interest in him. The man she’d been so sure would make such a good father.
She bit the inside of her cheek, the pain helping to clear her head, and managed a half smile for Lucas. “Go ask Jameso to give you a soda and I’ll be out to look at your fish in a minute,” she said.
She watched him go, his shoulders less rounded than they’d been even three months ago, his head held higher. He’d shed the hunched, fearful look he’d worn when they first arrived here. That was the real reason she couldn’t leave Eureka, at least not yet. As improbable as it sounded, Lucas was thriving here, roaming the unpaved streets of town and the back roads beyond, as if he’d lived here all his life.
“He’s a great kid,” D. J. interrupted her thoughts. “I’m not hanging out with him to get to you, if that’s what you think. I like spending time with him.”
Since when had he developed this ability to know what she was thinking? Too bad he hadn’t been so tuned in before he skipped town. “You’re just prolonging the hurt,” she said. “Isn’t it enough that you broke his heart once?” That he broke her heart? “You should go now, before you make it worse.”
“There’s unfinished business between us. I won’t leave until it’s settled.”
“It’s settled, D. J. It was settled when you walked out the door six months ago.” She started to move past him, but he took hold of her arm, his touch surprisingly gentle for such a big man, familiar in the way only someone with whom you’d shared the deepest intimacy could be. No matter that they hadn’t been lovers in months, her traitorous body responded to him as if he’d last held her only yesterday, her skin heating, her heart thumping harder.
“I’m not letting you off that easy,” he said. “I’ve decided to stay. At least for the winter. Maybe if we spend a few months snowed in here together you’ll let go of that grudge long enough to grab hold of what you really need.”
“And you think you’re what I need? Of all the self-centered, arrogant, male things to say.”
“All I’m saying is, you don’t have to carry all your burdens alone. Let me help.”
She wrenched away, rushing into the bar and out the front door, past Jameso and Bob and Lucas, who sat on a stool next to Bob, sipping a soft drink from a beer mug. She wanted to jump in her truck and drive and keep driving without stopping until she was a thousand miles away from here.
But she’d already learned moving on wasn’t the answer. You couldn’t ever really run away when the thing you were running from was yourself.
“I’m a lot of things, but I’m not a magician. I can’t pull money out of thin air or make this budget stretch