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As he tried the door again, guilt poked at her. Even if she didn’t want him here, she couldn’t sit here when one of her guests needed help. It was rude, selfish and irresponsible. “Stay,” she murmured to Cyrus, then stood up and made her way down the porch steps of Primrose Cottage and back up those of Cedarwood.
“May I help?”
At her words, Elliot whirled around, the fingers of his right hand flexing inside his sling as if reaching for a weapon. She could only hope he didn’t have one. Maybe she should have thought of that before sneaking up on him.
Elliot was a decorated FBI agent and always exuded an air of cold danger, as if ready to strike at any moment. It was as much a part of him as his blue eyes.
His brother had shared the same eyes, but the similarities between them ended there. Wyatt’s blue eyes had been warm, alive, brimming with personality. Elliot’s were serious and solemn and always seemed to look at her as if she were some kind of alien life form that had landed in his world.
Her heart gave a familiar pinch at the thought of Wyatt and the fledgling dreams that had been taken away from her on a snowy road so long ago.
“Megan,” he said, his voice as stiff and formal as if he were greeting J. Edgar Hoover himself. “I didn’t see you.”
“It’s a dark evening and I’m easy to miss. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
In the yellow glow of the porch light, his features appeared lean and alert, like a hungry mountain lion. She could feel her muscles tense in response, a helpless doe caught unawares in an alpine meadow.
She adored the rest of the Bailey family. All of them, even linebacker-big Marshall. Why was Elliot the only one who made her so blasted nervous?
“May I help you?” she asked again. “This lock can be sticky. Usually it takes two hands, one to twist the key and the other to pull the door toward you.”
“That could be an issue for the next three weeks.” His voice seemed flat and she had the vague, somewhat disconcerting impression that he was tired. Elliot always seemed so invincible but now lines bracketed his mouth and his hair was uncharacteristically rumpled. It seemed so odd to see him as anything other than perfectly controlled.
Of course he was tired. The man had just driven in from Denver. Anybody would be exhausted after an eight-hour drive—especially when he was healing from an obvious injury and probably in pain.
What happened to his arm? She wanted to ask, but couldn’t quite find the courage. It wasn’t her business anyway. Elliot was a guest of her inn and deserved all the hospitality she offered to any guest—including whatever privacy he needed and help accessing the cottage he had paid in advance to rent.
“There is a trick,” she told him. “If you pull the door slightly toward you first, then turn the key, you should be able to manage with one hand. If you have trouble again, you can find me or one of the staff to help you. I live next door.”
The sound he made might have been a laugh or a scoff. She couldn’t tell.
“Of course you live next door. I should have known.”
She frowned. What did that mean? With all the renovations to the inn after a devastating fire, she couldn’t afford to pay for an overnight manager. It had seemed easier to move into one of the cottages so she could be close enough to step in if the front desk clerks had a problem in the middle of the night.
That was the only reason she was here. Elliot didn’t need to respond to that information as if she was some loser who hadn’t been able to fly far from the nest.
“We need someone on-site full-time to handle emergencies,” she said stiffly. “Such as guests who can’t open their doors by themselves.”
“I am certainly not about to bother you or your staff every time I need to go in and out of my own rental unit. I’ll figure something out.”
His voice sounded tight, annoyed, and she tried to attribute it to travel weariness instead of that subtle disapproval she always seemed to feel emanating from him.
“I can help you this time at least.” She inserted his key, exerted only a slight amount of pull on the door and heard the lock disengage. She pushed the door open and flipped on a light inside the cheery little two-bedroom cottage, with its small combined living-dining room and kitchen table set in front of the big windows overlooking the lake.
“Thank you for your help,” he said, sounding a little less censorious.
“Anytime.” She smiled, her well-practiced, smooth innkeeper smile. After a decade of running the twenty-room Inn at Haven Point on her own, she had become quite adept at exuding hospitality she was far from feeling.
“May I help you with your bags?”
He gave her a long, steady look that conveyed clearly what he thought of that offer. “I’m good. Thank you.”
What else could she do but shrug? Stubborn man. Let him struggle. “Good night, then. If you need anything, you know where to find me.”
“Yes. I do. Next door, apparently.”
“That’s right. Good night,” she said again, then returned to her front porch, where she and Cyrus settled in to watch him pull a few things out of his vehicle and carry them inside.
She could have saved him a few trips up and down those steps by lending a hand, but clearly he wanted to cling to his own stubbornness instead.
As usual, it was obvious he wanted nothing to do with her. Elliot tended to treat her as if she were a riddle he had no desire to solve.
Over the years, she had developed pretty good strategies for avoiding him at social gatherings, though it was a struggle. She had once been almost engaged to his younger brother. That alone would tend to link her to the Bailey family, but it wasn’t the only tie between them. She counted his sisters, Wynona Bailey Emmett and Katrina Bailey Callahan, among her closest friends.
In fact, because of her connection to his sisters, she knew he was likely in town at least in part to attend a big after-the-fact reception to celebrate Katrina’s wedding to Bowie Callahan, which had been a small destination event in Colombia several months earlier.
Megan had known Elliot for years. Though only five or six years older, somehow he had always seemed ancient to her, even when she was a girl—as if he belonged to some earlier generation. He seemed so serious all the time, like some sort of stuffy uncle who couldn’t be bothered with youthful shenanigans.
Hey, you kids. Get off my lawn.
He had probably never actually said those words, but she could clearly imagine them coming out of that incongruously sexy mouth.
He did love his family. She couldn’t argue that. He watched out for his sisters and was close to his brother Marshall, the sheriff of Lake Haven County. He cherished his mother and made the long trip from Denver to Haven Point for every important Bailey event, several times a year.
Which also begged the question: Why had he chosen to rent a cottage on the inn property instead of staying with one of his family members?
His mother and stepfather lived not far away and so did Marshall, Wynona and Katrina with their respective spouses. While Marshall’s house was filled to the brim with kids, Cade and Wyn had plenty of room and Bowie and Katrina had a vast house at Serenity Harbor that would fit the entire Haven Point High School football team, with room left over for the coaching staff and a few cheerleaders.
Instead, Elliot had chosen to book this small, solitary rental unit at the inn for three entire weeks.
Did his reasons have anything to do with that sling he was sporting? How had he been hurt? Did it have anything to do with his work for the FBI?
The answers to those questions were none of her business, Megan reminded herself. He was a guest at her inn, which meant she had an obligation to respect his privacy.
Elliot came back to the vehicle for one more bag, something that looked the size of a laptop, which gave her something else to consider. He had booked the cottage for three weeks. Maybe he had taken a leave of absence from his job at the FBI to work on another book.
She pulled Cyrus onto her lap and rubbed behind his ears as she considered the cottage next door and the enigmatic man currently inhabiting it. That was another component to the mystery of Elliot Bailey. Whoever would have guessed that the stiff, humorless, focused FBI agent could pen gripping true-crime books in his spare time? She would never admit it to Elliot, but she found it utterly fascinating how his writing managed to convey pathos and drama and even some lighter moments.
True crime was definitely not her groove at all but she had read his last bestseller in five hours, without so much as stopping to take a bathroom break—and had slept with her closet light on for weeks.
That still didn’t mean she wanted him living next door. At this point, she couldn’t do anything to change that. The only thing she could do was treat him with the same courtesy and respect she would any other guest at the inn.
No matter how difficult that might prove.
* * *
WHAT THE HELL was he doing here?
Elliot dragged his duffel to the larger of the cottage’s two bedrooms, where a folding wood-framed luggage stand had been set out, ready for guests.
The cottage was tastefully decorated in what he termed Western chic—bold mission furniture, wood plank ceiling, colorful rugs on the floor. A river rock fireplace dominated the living room, probably perfect for those chilly evenings along the lakeshore.
Cedarwood Cottage seemed comfortable and welcoming, a good place for him to huddle over his laptop and pound out the last few chapters of the book that was overdue to his editor.
Even so, he could already tell this was a mistake.
Why the hell hadn’t he simply told his mother and Katrina he wouldn’t be able to make it to the reception? He had flown to Cartagena for the wedding three months earlier, after all. Surely that showed enough personal commitment on his part to his baby sister’s nuptials.
They would have protested a bit but would have understood—and in the end, it wouldn’t have much mattered whether he made it home for the event or not. The reception wasn’t about him; it was about Bowie and Katrina and the life they were building with Bowie’s younger brother Milo and Kat’s adopted daughter, Gabriella.
For his part, Elliot was quite sure he would have been better off if he had stayed holed up in his condo in Denver to finish the book, no matter how awkward things had become for him there. If he closed the blinds, ignored the doorbell and just hunkered down, he could have typed one-handed or even dictated the changes he needed to make. The whole thing would have been done in a week.
The manuscript wasn’t the problem.
Elliot frowned, his head pounding in rhythm to each throbbing ache of his shoulder.
He was the problem—and he couldn’t escape the mess he had created, no matter how far away from Denver he drove.
He struggled to unzip the duffel one-handed, then finally gave up and stuck his right arm out of the sling to help. His shoulder ached even more in response, not happy with being subjected to eight hours of driving only days post-surgery.
How was he going to explain the shoulder injury to his mother? He couldn’t tell her he was recovering from a gunshot wound, not given his family’s history.
Charlene had lost a son and husband in the line of duty and had seen both a daughter and her other son injured on the job.
Nor could he tell his brother Marshall or his brother-in-law Cade about all the trouble he found himself in. He was the model FBI agent, with the unblemished record.
Until now.
Moving into the cottage was an easy job that took him all of five minutes, transferring the packing cubes from his duffel into drawers, setting his toiletries in the bathroom, hanging the few dress shirts he had brought along. When he was done, he wandered back into the combined living room/kitchen.
The front wall was made almost entirely of windows, perfect for looking out and enjoying the spectacular view of Lake Haven during one of its most beautiful seasons, late spring, before the tourist horde descended.
On impulse, Elliot opened the door and walked out onto the wide front porch. The night was chilly but the mingled scents of pine and cedar and lake intoxicated him. He drew fresh mountain air deep into his lungs.
This.
If he needed to look for a reason why he had been compelled to come home during his suspension and the investigation into his actions, he only had to think about what this view would look like in the morning, with the sun creeping over the mountains.
Lake Haven called to him like nowhere else on earth—not only the stunning blue waters or the mountains that jutted out of them in jagged peaks, but the calm, rhythmic lapping of the water against the shore, the ever-changing sky, the cry of wood ducks pedaling in for a landing.
He had spent his entire professional life digging into the worst aspects of the human condition, investigating cruelty and injustice and people with no moral conscience whatsoever. No matter what sort of muck he waded through, he had figured out early in his career at the FBI that he could keep that ugliness from touching the core of him with thoughts of Haven Point and the people he loved who called this place home.
He didn’t visit as often as he would like. Between his job at the Denver field office and the six true-crime books he had written, he didn’t have much free time.
That all might be about to change. He might have more free time than he knew what to do with.
His shoulder throbbed again and he adjusted the sling, gazing out at the stars that had begun to sparkle above the lake.
After hitting rock bottom professionally, with his entire future at the FBI in doubt, where else would he come but home?
He sighed and turned to go back inside. As he did, he spotted the lights still gleaming at the cottage next door, with its blue trim and the porch swing facing the water.
The swing was empty now. She wasn’t there.
Megan Hamilton. Auburn hair, green eyes, a smile that always seemed soft and genuine to everyone else but him.
He drew in a breath, aware of a sharp little twinge of hunger deep in his gut.
When he booked the cottage, he hadn’t really thought things through. He should have remembered that Megan and the Inn at Haven Point were a package deal. She owned the inn along with these picturesque little guest cottages on Silver Beach.
In his defense, he had no idea she actually lived in one herself, though. If he had ever heard that little fact, he had forgotten it. Should he have remembered, he would have looked a little harder for a short-term rental property, rather than picking the most convenient lakeshore unit he had found in his web search.
Usually, Elliot did his best to avoid her. Megan always left him...unsettled. It had been that way for ages, since long before he learned she and his younger brother had started dating.
He could still remember his shock when he came home for some event or other and saw her and Wyatt together. As in, together, together. Holding hands, sneaking the occasional kiss, giving each other secret smiles. Elliot had felt as if Wyatt had peppered him with buckshot.
He had tried to be happy for his younger brother, one of the most generous, helpful, loving people he’d ever known. Wyatt had been a genuinely good person and deserved to be happy with someone special.
Elliot had felt small and selfish for wishing that someone hadn’t been Megan Hamilton.
Watching their glowing happiness together had been tough. He mostly had managed to stay away for the four or five months they had been dating, though he tried to convince himself it hadn’t been on purpose. Work had been demanding and he had been busy carving out his place in the Bureau. He had also started the research that would become his first book, looking into a long-forgotten Montana case from a century earlier where a man had wooed, then married, then killed three spinster schoolteachers from New England for their life insurance money before finally being apprehended by a savvy local sheriff and the sister of one of the dead women.
The few times Elliot returned home during the time Megan had been dating his brother, he had been forced to endure family gatherings knowing she would be there, upsetting his equilibrium and stealing any peace he usually found here.
He couldn’t let her do it to him this time.
Her porch light switched off a moment later and Elliot finally breathed a sigh of relief.
He would only be here three weeks. Twenty-one days. Despite the proximity of his cabin to hers, he likely wouldn’t even see her much, other than at Katrina’s reception.
She would be busy with the inn, with her photography, with her wide circle of friends, while he should be focused on finishing his manuscript and allowing his shoulder to heal—not to mention figuring out whether he would still have a career at the end of that time.
CHAPTER TWO (#u238e85bb-32b3-5a93-83cf-5d2b9ae2dbc3)
LATE-SPRING MORNINGS on Lake Haven were the very definition of heaven on earth.
Megan stood outside the three-story inn inhaling the most perfect combination of scents she could imagine. Freshly turned earth, lilac shrubs and silver-green lavender plants, still several weeks away from blooming but still sending out their luscious aroma from the greenery alone.
If she could bottle that scent, she would make a fortune.
Late spring or not, the early hours before the sun climbed the top of the mountains were still cool. She wore her favorite sweatshirt as she worked on the flower beds around the entrance to the inn. Even in July and August, visitors invariably needed sweaters and jackets in the mornings and evenings, especially at this altitude. Still, the possibility of warmer days was just around the corner.
She had about a million and one things to do this morning but couldn’t resist standing here a little longer so she could embrace this particular moment that would never come again.
Lately, Megan had tried to make a conscious effort to focus on living in the moment, savoring the joy of the now instead of worrying about that to-do list or about the latest crisis among her staff or guests or about the photography exhibit that consumed every waking moment.
To that end, she lifted her face to the sunshine, trying to focus on the warmth on her skin, the music of birds greeting the day in the treetops around the inn, the fragile perfection of a May morning on the shores of a stunning mountain lake.
