Hummingbird Lake (9 page)

Even as Sage opened her mouth to defend herself, Sarah went in for the kill. “Most telling of all, you haven’t said word one about your gallery showing in Texas. You’ve gone out of your way to change the subject or ignore the question when someone asks about it. Did you think we wouldn’t notice?”

Nic touched her forearm and asked, “What happened in Texas, Sage?”

“It was a man, wasn’t it?” Sarah asked. “Who was he? What did he do? Did he hurt you, Sage?”

Nic set down her yogurt. “Honey, are you pregnant?”

At that, a laugh burst from Sage’s mouth. She understood why Nic’s thoughts would go there. A year ago Nic had had her own Christmas season soiree and ended up the mother of twins. “I wasn’t hurt or impregnated. Nothing bad happened.”

“Then what happened, dear?” Celeste asked. “You haven’t been yourself since you came back from your show. Is it career-related trouble?”

“No.” Sage recognized that concern, not nosiness, lay behind her friends’ questions. While she appreciated that they cared, she had no intention of sharing the full story. She’d never told anyone the entire nightmare—not her colleagues, not her therapist, not even her sister. She simply couldn’t.

So she gave them what she could. “But you’re right, I haven’t been myself. My sleep cycle is all out of whack and I’m not sleeping well. When I do sleep I have horrible dreams, and that exacerbates the problem. I’ll get back to normal eventually, but in the meantime …” Sage shrugged. “I’m cranky.”

“Can’t you take pills to help you sleep?” Sarah asked.

“I could. I don’t want to go down that road if I can avoid it. In the past, they’ve turned my nightmares into Nightmares.”

“Is there anything we can do to help you?” Sarah reached across the table and touched Sage’s arm. “We’re worried about you.”

As the others nodded their agreement, warmth washed through Sage. She loved these women. She truly did. “I’m okay. No need to worry. Just bear with me a bit. One of my sister’s favorite sayings is ‘This too shall pass,’ and I know that it is applicable in this case. I’ve been down this road before. I know what to expect.”

The others all shared a look, then Sarah asked Nic, “What do you think?”

Nic shrugged. “I’m a veterinarian, not a psychologist or a sleep specialist.”

“Or a man,” Celeste observed. “That’s what Sage needs. A good man. A good marriage.”

Amusement gleamed in Ali’s eyes. “Now there’s a thought, Celeste. Good sex does make a girl sleep like a baby.”

“True,” Nic agreed, smiling smugly.

“Now, that’s just rude.” Sarah turned to Sage and said, “I don’t know about you, but I’m getting tired of these giddily happy married women lording their sex lives over us.”

It was a running jest between them. Sage knew her friends were trying to lighten the mood.

“Yep. I don’t like it either.” Sage polished off her cinnamon
roll, then licked her fingers while the others continued their banter. Just when she’d begun to hope that the intervention part of the morning was behind her, Sarah had to circle around to the topic once again. Darn her, the woman was a terrier.

“I hate that you’re having trouble sleeping,” Sarah said, “but I don’t think it’s a good excuse for you to go hermit on us. This isn’t like your bouts of creativity, Sage.” Gesturing toward the studio walls, she added, “I don’t see new paintings stacked up.”

That’s because I keep them hidden away
. Sage couldn’t bring herself to destroy or paint over all of the nightmare canvases, but she couldn’t bear to look at them, either. No way was she going to make their existence public.

Rather than address the topic of paintings, she tossed a proverbial bone. “You’re right, Sarah. I’ll make an effort to get out more. Okay?”

“You’ll join us for the Patchwork Angels meeting next week?” Celeste asked. When Sage hesitated, she added, “Please, Sage. For me?”

Sage couldn’t say no to Celeste. “I will.”

“Promise?” Sarah folded her arms. “No convenient burst of I-must-paint-because-my-muse-demands-it?”

“I promise, Sarah. I’ll come to quilt group.”

After that, talk shifted to Nic’s babies and Sage gratefully concluded that the intervention had now eased into a coffee klatch. Relaxing, she sat back, sipped her tea, and told herself she’d get through this rough patch. After all, she had the dearest, most caring friends in the world on her side, along with the haven that was called Eternity Springs.

Still, a little sleep wouldn’t hurt.

Colt Rafferty held his breath as he reached the summit of Sinner’s Prayer Pass during the third week of February.
The road was well maintained, but the switchbacks in winter were a heart attack waiting to happen. He hoped his tires held. He really hoped his brakes didn’t quit. When he hit an icy patch and skated toward the edge of the road—the edge of the mountain—he sent up a prayer and decided that whoever had named this pass certainly called it right.

Colt had made this drive dozens of times before, but never in the dead of winter. Never in ten-degree weather. Never with snow deep enough to swallow his rental SUV. This would be his first trip to Eternity Springs during the off-season. When his boss told him to go someplace to cool off, he couldn’t think of a more fitting place to go. As his back tires fishtailed, he muttered, “Hope that wasn’t my last fitting thought.”

Colt was coming off the most difficult stretch of weeks he’d experienced since coming to the CSB. Two horrific accidents, eighteen deaths that could have and should have been prevented, and a bureaucratic wall of red tape and politics that made him see red and, unfortunately, lose his temper.

Well, sliding off the road here on Sinner’s Prayer Pass would at least get him out of the lawsuit that was probably coming. He’d really screwed up when he threw that punch at the OSHA guy.

But dammit, he was sick to death of the agencies all working both sides against the middle, and he’d finally erupted. He’d just ended a phone call to Melody Slaughter in which he’d had to tell her that the chemical spill that had killed her husband and eleven others the previous week had been completely avoidable had the OSHA inspector done his job.

“I don’t know why I even try,” he muttered as he downshifted. What good were they doing, really? Only a small percentage of their recommendations ever made it into regulation. Only a percentage of those regulations
were being followed in the field. “Why should they follow regulations when it’s easier to bribe an inspector instead?”

That was the piece of news he’d received that had led to the meeting that led to his blowup. Were there no good, honest people in the world anymore?

Yes, there were. That’s why he was headed to Eternity Springs.

Having been given two weeks of forced leave, he’d booked his flight to Colorado, and since his usual rental was closed for the winter, he’d called Celeste Blessing to arrange for a place to stay. He’d asked for one of the outlying cottages on the Angel’s Rest property, but after Celeste explained that a church group from Kansas had rented the entire facility for a week, she suggested alternative lodging that she believed would suit his needs perfectly. She’d volunteered to make all the arrangements for him and instructed him to stop by Angel’s Rest to pick up a key.

He couldn’t wait to get there. He’d flown to Denver last night, then headed into the mountains this morning. He’d added at least an hour and a half to the trip by stopping to admire the snowy vistas at least half a dozen times since entering the mountains. He was hungry, craving a strong cup of coffee, and nursing a strong sense of anticipation. He loved Eternity Springs, its people, and their small-town values.

Life wasn’t gentle in the mountain valley—especially not this time of year, he imagined—but in many ways, life was kinder there than elsewhere. People didn’t cut other people off in traffic in Eternity—there wasn’t any traffic. They weren’t rude to strangers, because the only strangers were tourists and tourists were the economic lifeblood of the area. And of special appeal to him, here people said what they meant and meant what they said. The only spinning done in Eternity Springs was done by
skaters on Hummingbird Lake in winter. They damn sure wouldn’t take bribes and look the other way, putting lives at risk.

Finally he rounded the hairpin curve that offered the first sight of the little town nestled in the narrow valley. Once again he pulled to the side of the road and took a moment to soak in the view. “It’s a postcard,” he murmured. Gorgeous. Beautiful.

Special.

Mountains filled with evergreens and snow ringed the narrow valley with a small town nestled at its center. Unlike other times of year when nature painted a myriad of colors across the landscape, today white was the predominant color, with a spattering of blue, green, and yellow on the wood siding of the Victorian-era homes in the center of town. Smoke rose from redbrick chimneys, and he counted five snow-dusted church steeples reaching toward heaven. At the far end of town, Hummingbird Lake lay beneath a sheet of ice.

As Colt watched, the doors to the school opened and children came pouring out. He grinned like a kid himself as he pulled back onto the road and completed the final short leg of a long journey.

When he drove past the city limits sign, tension rolled off his shoulders and his spirits lifted. Coming here had been a good decision. The right decision. He’d always wanted to see this place in winter. And he had a score to settle with the redhead, too.

“Sage Anderson,” he said aloud. He’d thought about her off and on since their little tête-à-tête at the Fort Worth Water Gardens in December. Once he got over the shock of having the woman let loose with a bloodcurdling scream while he was kissing her, then being called out by the cops before he figured out what was wrong, he’d recognized that she’d provided him a big fat piece of the puzzle she presented.

Consider the circumstances. They’d been alone together in a dark outdoor venue. She’d gone from being enthusiastically responsive to scared to death in a heartbeat. That pointed to a flashback of some sort. He suspected the odds were pretty good that at some point in her past she’d been sexually molested or assaulted.

Some men were pigs. Some men were even worse. With any luck, during the next two weeks he’d have the opportunity to prove to her that he was one of the good guys.

Just another reason to be happy to be here in Eternity Springs.

He made his way down Cottonwood Street, then crossed the bridge over Angel Creek to Angel’s Rest, where he glanced with a sense of artistic pride at the sign he’d carved. Damn, but he did good work. During the design process he had envisioned it with snowdrift on the flat edges, but the reality of it looked even better than he’d imagined.

He continued up the drive to Cavanaugh House, the original structure at Angel’s Rest and the hub of the healing center. Parking his rental in the designated parking area, he was pleased on the town’s behalf to see so many other vehicles in the lot. He opened his door, took a deep breath of the clean, crisp mountain air, and smiled. How could fifteen-degree weather make him feel so warm?

His heart lighter than it had been in weeks, Colt walked up the front walk and climbed the porch steps. The small sign beside the doorbell read
Welcome to Angel’s Rest. May your visit here be peaceful
.

Colt stepped inside and was greeted by a teenage girl he recognized from his last visit. She’d worked at the local ice cream parlor. “Hey, Mr. Rafferty.”

“Hi … Elizabeth, isn’t it?”

“Yes sir. Ms. Blessing said I should expect you. She’s
in the upstairs parlor, and she said to send you up after I present your special welcome gift.” She stepped from behind the desk and gestured toward the library. “If you’ll wait for a moment?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

Colt went into the library and smiled at the collection of angel figurines decorating the fireplace mantel. Also new to the decor were a trio of framed historical photographs depicting scruffy-looking men in front of a mine shaft, St. Stephen’s church, and a view of the valley he recognized as having been taken from Murphy Mountain. He stepped closer and studied the men in front of the mine. Could these be the town’s founders? He tried to recall what he’d learned from visits to the local museum, where his mother had dragged her uninterested offspring who wanted nothing to do with learning on vacation days. Hadn’t there been three men in on that silver strike?

At that point he heard Elizabeth’s footsteps and he turned toward her to see her approach wearing a mischievous grin and carrying a bowl. “Don’t tell me. Is that …?”

“Taste of Texas rocky road,” she confirmed, handing him the bowl of ice cream. “Celeste loves it as much as you, so she laid in a supply.”

“The woman is an angel.”

“She says it’s never too cold for great ice cream.”

“A brilliant angel.”

Elizabeth laughed. “She’s waiting for you upstairs. Feel free to take your ice cream with you.”

Colt climbed the stairs and followed the sound of voices down the hall to the parlor. He paused in the doorway and grinned.
Well, well, well. If it isn’t sweet, intriguing Sage. Isn’t this handy?

He savored another bite of ice cream, then said, “Good afternoon, ladies.”

Celeste looked up, and her face lit with a smile. “Colt! You made it. How was your trip?”

“Long,” he replied, looking expectantly toward the redhead, who wasn’t meeting his gaze. “Worth it, though, when I have such a delicious treat waiting for me at my destination.”

“The ice cream is wonderful, isn’t it?”

“That, too.”

Celeste smirked and said, “Colt, have you met my friend Sage Anderson? She is Eternity Springs’ artist in residence.”

“We met last fall at the grand opening, and …” He hesitated until she darted a wary look his way.
So she’s kept quiet about seeing me in Texas. Interesting
. Allowing his smile to warm, he added, “It’s a pleasure to see you again, Sage.”

She mumbled something and still didn’t meet his eyes. Her cheeks flushed with color that betrayed her embarrassment.

Celeste carried on as if she hadn’t noticed her friend’s lack of enthusiasm at his arrival. “I am trying to select a new painting for this parlor,” the older woman said. “Sage has brought me a lovely selection of Sage Anderson originals, but I’m afraid I’m having a horrible time making up my mind. Take a look at these, Colt. What do you think?”