he’s close on your heels.”
Boone wouldn’t bet against Tucker either.
“And speaking of what you want,” his mother continued as she removed crispy bacon from the frying pan onto a platter. “Dare I get my hopes up about Hannah?”
“No,” he fired back quickly. Too quickly, because she pinned him with a suspicious look.
“What’s wrong with her? I liked her very much too.”
“Nothing’s wrong with her. As far as I know. I guess something might be wrong with her, but I don’t know it yet. I don’t know her well enough to have discovered it.”
“Well, I’m a good judge of character, and I think she’s lovely. Quietly classy. Not a snow bunny gold digger like that last girl you introduced to us.”
“C’mon, Mom. The only reason I introduced you was due to some spectacularly bad timing.” It had been one of the most embarrassing moments of his life. What were the chances that his parents would book the same intimate bed-and-breakfast near Wolf Creek ski resort as he, and exit their room at the exact moment Boone was unlocking the door to his room with his date’s hand in his pants?
Quetta McBride’s lips twitched as she reached for her own coffee cup and took a sip. “Well, I’m glad to see you dating a woman your age.”
“I don’t discriminate based on age,” Boone defended. He’d dated plenty of women older than he. But then he’d dated plenty of women, period. That probably was not a direction he wanted to take the conversation, so he said, “Anyway, Hannah is not a permanent resident of Eternity Springs.”
“Unless you decide you want her to be one.”
“Mother.” Boone snitched a slice of bacon off the platter and got his knuckles slapped for the effort. “Your confidence in my ability is gratifying but misplaced.”
She made an unladylike snort.
“Okay, I’ll admit to being dogged in my pursuits, but anything between Hannah and me is truly in the puppy stage. I don’t want you to get your hopes up where my love life is concerned, Mom. I have bigger fish to fry at this particular moment.”
As soon as the words left his mouth, he knew he’d made a mistake. Dang it. This was why he’d tried to steer clear of his mother this weekend.
She pounced like a cat. “What fish? You have another project cooking, don’t you, son? I knew it. You’ve been avoiding me all weekend. What is it this time? A new business in Redemption? That’s it, isn’t it? Have you come up with the idea that will bring you home to Texas? You know if you settle in Redemption along with Tucker and Jackson and you all marry and start families, your father and I might need to buy a vacation home down there. It would be so lovely to have family around us once again. Why I wouldn’t be surprised if your sisters moved—”
“Mom. Whoa.” Boone held up his hands, palms out. “Slow down. You’ve leaped in a seriously wrong direction. I don’t have any more plans for businesses in Enchanted Canyon.”
“Seriously?” Her smile drooped. “Not even anything with Ruin?”
Boone hesitated. Ruin was the ghost town at the far end of Enchanted Canyon, an outlaw conclave occupied in the latter part of the nineteenth century and part of the McBride family’s recent inheritance from a distant relative. Boone sincerely believed it was a gold mine waiting to be worked. Tackling that project had been next on his to-do list after helping to launch Tucker’s Enchanted Canyon Wilderness School.
All that changed with a phone call from Fort Worth.
The phone call he couldn’t mention to his mother. Yet. “Ruin is on my list, but I’m going to have my hands full in Eternity Springs this summer.”
“So you do have a project,” she stated.
He said the first thing that popped into his mind. “Maternity Springs.”
“Excuse me?”
Well, he’d jumped into this pool. He might as well start swimming. “It’s a new retail business. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’ve had a serious population boom here in town. Our residents have nowhere to shop. Plus, we have tons of grandparents who are in the market for those NANA WENT TO ETERNITY SPRINGS, AND ALL I GOT WAS A LOUSY T-SHIRT shirts. Stock some stuffed bears and elk and raccoons I think we can sell a bundle of souvenirs during tourist season. Then the rest of the year, we can sell to residents. People prefer to shop locally, if at all possible.”
Despite being an off-the-cuff idea, he floated it