women embraced, Sage looked over Nic’s shoulder and met Gabe’s gaze. Silent understanding passed between them. Acid flashback, no. Flashback of a real experience triggered by violence, you bet. “It’s survival of the fittest out there,” he observed. “Laws of nature are seldom pretty.”
“They break your heart.”
“That they do, Ms. Anderson. That they do.”
Nic released Sage and stepped back, a considering look in her eyes as she studied them both. Nic Sullivan wasn’t a fool, and she recognized that something more had happened here. Gabe braced for an intrusive question, but she surprised him. “Guess what, Sage? While you were out here communing with nature, I was busy saving Eternity Springs.”
“Oh, yeah? And how did you manage that?”
“I used my charm and my persuasive abilities and my business acumen to convince Mr. Callahan here to design the cornerstone of our revitalization project.”
Sage arched a question brow toward Gabe. “Is that true?”
He rubbed the back of his neck and made a show of considering. After a long moment, he shook his head. “No. She’s wrong.”
He watched Nic’s face fall and stilled a grin. His expression serious, he added, “It was the brownies that did it.”
FIVE
Over the next few weeks, the riot of fall colors disappeared from the mountains as aspens and cottonwoods dropped their leaves. Winter arrived in Eternity Springs with chilling winds and falling temperatures, but only a dusting of snow. The last seasonal stragglers departed town, and Nic and her fellow year-rounders settled into their winter routines.
Folks tended to congregate at the Mocha Moose, a coffee house and Internet café, and the Red Fox Pub, where they visited with their neighbors and fretted about the scarcity of snowfall in southern Colorado. A slow start to the ski season meant fewer people in the mountains, which meant fewer adventuresome, tired-of-the-lines people wandering into town to spend their precious tourist dollars. Luckily, Celeste Blessing’s repair and renovation dollars were taking up the slack. The amount of activity had caused one grateful business owner to wonder if the bars found in her cellar really had been gold bars painted silver as a disguise.
The Cellar Bride and her thirty pieces of silver fired the imaginations of Eternity Springs’ citizens. Speculation as to the circumstances that led to the bride’s entombment in Cavanaugh House’s root cellar was just the sort of mystery people loved to discuss on a cold and otherwise uneventful winter’s night.
Once Gabe had agreed to participate in Celeste’s healing center plans, he and Celeste had held a series of meetings in Nic’s kitchen, where they discussed Celeste’s vision of the healing center and hammered out a work agreement that suited them both. Nic believed the final result had to be the strangest contract ever negotiated.
She understood keeping the plan under wraps until his design was complete and the concept ready to present. Asking him to work on-site rather than up at Eagle’s Way made sense, too. The more he interacted with townspeople the better he would understand the culture of Eternity Springs. That could have a positive influence on his work—or at least help avoid unforeseen problems.
His demands were more difficult to understand. Gabe Callahan agreed to design the landscape plan as long as he was allowed to lead the work crew doing renovations on the house, too. He wanted physical labor, all the brownies he could eat, and a home other than his own for the boxer. Plus he wanted Sage to create a work of art of her choice for Eagle’s Way.
That last request had caused Nic to suffer a brief and shameful bout of jealousy. After all, she’d “not dated” Gabe first. But something had passed between those two up on Murphy Mountain that day. They’d connected in some intangible way, and Nic had felt like a third wheel.
She talked about her reaction with her aunt when she and Nic’s mom visited for Thanksgiving. After dinner, while her mom took a nap, Nic and Aunt Janice bundled up and headed outside to walk off their meal. When Janice asked Nic about her love life, Nic spilled the beans about the new man in town.
“At least I had the good sense to keep my reaction—and face it, my attraction to Gabe Callahan—to myself,” she said as they walked briskly down Aspen Street headed toward the lake. “I know I’m oversensitive, projecting my own past experience into current events. Gabe isn’t my husband, Sage isn’t my business partner, and I’m not going to walk into my own home and discover