owner. She knew the place and how to run it better than anyone. If she quit, he was screwed.
“For now,” she said. “Anyway, I was just checking inventory, and we need a produce run...”
Perfect. Any excuse to get up in the air.
He shut down the computer then stood and grabbed his winter coat. The predicted snow had just started to fall, although it was mid-April, the mountain air was still frigid. “I’m on it,” he said.
An hour later, he sat in the cockpit of his Cessna on the Big Bear City Airport runway, waiting for clearance to take off. Sure, he could order inventory to be shipped to the resort, but he only trusted one place for his business’s needs—Stanley’s Fresh Goods in San Francisco. And they didn’t deliver outside the city. To make the trip more cost-effective, he would also stop at the fish market before heading back.
The ground crew flagman waved him up next, and after the slightest moment of hesitation, Scott headed toward the end of the runway. Checking the plane’s controls and setting his course, he radioed the tower. “Cessna 215 ready for takeoff.” And moments later he was up and on his way. Sweat trickled down his back. Once he’d leveled off, he shrugged out of his coat and forced a feeling of anxiety aside.
It was just him, and he had control.
As he headed south for the twenty-minute run, he broke through a bank of clouds and the sun appeared. He felt himself relax.
A former commercial pilot, he’d only been interested in the Cessna cargo plane when he saw the ad for the resort in the Big Bear daily newspaper. Unfortunately, the resort’s owner, Doug Delaney, hadn’t been interested in selling the plane on its own. The closed, run-down West Mountain Resort and the plane were a package deal.
“You take them together or it’s no deal,” the grumpy old man had said when Scott had gone to see him about purchasing the cargo side of the business. Delaney went on to explain that both businesses had once belonged to him and his late wife. She’d run the resort and he, a retired pilot, had started the cargo business to “stay out of her hair.” He made weekly trips to LA and San Diego to pick up supplies and products for the resort to reduce shipping costs while earning extra cash making deliveries for other local businesses. The idea that the cargo business had an existing client base was also a draw for Scott.
Having lived in Big Bear most of his life, Scott had known about the Delaney family–owned companies, but he’d only wanted to purchase one of them. “I’m really not interested in owning a resort. I wouldn’t have any idea how to run it. I’m a pilot,” Scott had explained.
The man had looked past him to Scott’s old pickup truck parked in the driveway. “Where’s your plane?”
“I don’t have one yet.”
“A pilot without a plane isn’t much of a pilot,” Delaney had said before collapsing in a fit of coughing.
Scott had heard around town that old Doug Delaney was sick with lung cancer and the doctors hadn’t expected him to make it past Christmas the year before. The cargo delivery business and resort were suffering without family to take them over, and the old man wanted nothing more than to rid himself of the burdens and fly south. “Somewhere warm where I can die lying in the sunshine,” he’d told him.
Unfortunately, the sale of the cargo business alone wouldn’t have been enough to fulfill the man’s dying wish, so in the end, Doug had sold Scott both businesses for next to nothing and had died a week later exactly the way he’d wanted—lying in the sunshine on a beach in Mexico.
At first, Scott hadn’t planned to do much with the resort, instead focusing on fixing up and painting the cargo plane with a new company logo—Scott’s On-Time Delivery, specializing in any kind of pickup or drop-off service the residents of Big Bear needed. Doug’s former customers had been happy to rehire Scott, and he’d easily secured several new regular customers, including a few restaurants near the ski resort and a heavy-machinery repair place in town. Within months, he was doing okay.
But then his brother had visited over the holidays and suggested that he flip the resort for a profit. The place had been closed for a couple of years, but had once been a prime vacation property.
At the time, it sounded easy enough—a fresh coat of paint, some updated fixtures, nice decorative lighting and paintings for the walls...but it had quickly turned into a nightmare renovation project when he discovered a leaky pipe on the third floor had caused water damage to the two floors below it. The electrical wasn’t up to code and the roof was ready to cave in at any moment. Half a million dollars later, the resort was barely recognizable as the same run-down place that had been closed and forgotten for years, but Scott was also so far in the red, he couldn’t let the place go for any less than what he’d paid.
Fix it up and sell it, Derek had said. As if things were that simple. Then again, luck had always been on his older brother’s side. Scott’s own luck consisted of bad and worse, so a year later, all he had was a struggling resort that he didn’t want and not enough time to grow the cargo delivery business that had been his ultimate goal.
He sighed as San Francisco came into view.
And now his brother wanted to use the resort to make the biggest mistake of his life. Scott might not be able to talk Derek out of the wedding, but he didn’t have to host it at his resort.
AS SHE TURNED her Escalade onto Highway 330 later that afternoon, Kate was still fuming. What a rude, arrogant man Scott Dillon was. He’d actually hung up on her. After refusing to host his own brother’s wedding? Well, he might be able to hang up a phone or hide himself away with an unlocatable email address and no Facebook or Twitter accounts, but he couldn’t ignore her when she was standing right in front of him.
Though it had been more determined annoyance than common sense that had driven her to leave her office and head to Big Bear. She wished she’d at least gone home and packed an overnight bag. And now, as she made her way farther north, the tiny snowflakes grew heavier and her windshield wipers struggled to keep up. She wondered if maybe she was acting...a tad desperate?
She was desperate. This wedding was happening in six weeks...in Big Bear...at this resort if it killed her. And it actually might, she thought, wide-eyed, as a large transport truck approached in the opposite lane on the slippery hill.
She gripped the steering wheel and closed her eyes briefly after the vehicle passed.
Her cell phone rang, making her jump after her imagined head-on collision. She cursed to herself, quickly glancing toward the display panel on her dash. Her stomach turned when she saw the number flashing on the screen underneath the name Fuck-head.
She hit the do not answer button on her steering wheel. What the hell did Cooper want? Unfortunately, she knew exactly what he wanted, and it was her own stupid fault. She gripped the steering wheel. How had she been so stupid to have angry, passionate, impromptu sex with her ex-fiancé the week before?
Because she’d been lonely, more than a little drunk and had just lost a big client. And she’d stupidly thought that “coming by to get a few things” he’d left in the garage when he’d moved out was a genuine retrieval mission and not a lame excuse to see her.
The moment she’d opened her front door instead of just allowing him access to the garage, she knew she was in trouble. He’d still been in his police uniform, looking nervous but even more gorgeous than ever, and she hadn’t been able to find the strength to push him away when he’d hugged her. “You look amazing,” he’d said.
In actual fact she’d had mascara-stained cheeks, her hair a tangled mess, wearing an old football jersey, but she’d accepted the words and had clung to him a little longer than was safe.
“I’m sorry, Kate, so sorry,” he’d whispered in her hair. The same words that he’d said repeatedly to her voice mail and in emails