Days after the fire at the inn, the smell of smoke clung to Amanda’s hair and skin, the stench pervasive despite multiple showers and shampooing her hair so many times, her scalp had begun to hurt. As she sat in front of the woodstove in Landon Abbott’s cozy cabin, Amanda noted the irony of needing the fire to stay warm when fire was the thing she was now most afraid of.
While a late-May Nor’easter raged outside, she had nothing but time to think and relive the horror of her near-death experience.
It’d been a week since the Admiral Butler Inn had burned, trapping her with a badly sprained ankle until Landon’s identical twin brother, Lucas, had come to her rescue. They’d been on the way out of the room when the ceiling had come down on top of them, trapping them.
She shuddered every time she thought of that explosive moment and how Lucas dove on top of her. He’d been the more badly injured one, suffering a broken arm that had required surgery to repair, as well as smoke inhalation.
Amanda had been briefly hospitalized to receive oxygen and IV fluids as well as treatment for her ankle. When she was released, Landon had brought her home to his place to recover, as the next closest lodging was two towns away.
Since most of her possessions had been lost in the fire, Landon had bought her new jeans, sweaters, pajamas, socks and underwear at his family’s Green Mountain Country Store, probably in consultation with one or all of his three sisters. They would’ve been able to accurately guess her sizes. He’d even gotten her a new coat and boots to navigate the lingering mud season, and his family had delivered enough food to feed ten people.
Her own mother had been in a panic after hearing about the fire. Once Amanda finally succeeded in assuring her that she was fine, her mother, who was also her boss, had sent a new cell phone and laptop. They were already configured to the company’s servers, so she could get back to work whenever she felt up to it.
She had everything she needed to resume her life already in progress, if only her hands would quit trembling. If only she didn’t see and hear and smell the fire every time she closed her eyes. If only she could shed the bone-deep fear that followed such an incredibly close call. She’d relived it a thousand times, from waking up to find the room engulfed in fire, to jumping out of bed and landing wrong on her ankle, to Lucas storming in to rescue her and shielding her from the falling ceiling with his own body.
There’d been just enough time before Lucas showed up for Amanda to contemplate the very real possibility that she might die from the flames and toxic smoke that filled the room so quickly, she barely had time to process what was happening, let alone react, before it became too late to do anything.
Prior to the fire, she’d been on autopilot, traveling through life with no attachments, no responsibilities other than work, no emotions and a stubborn refusal to reexamine her painful past. After the fire, she could think of little else but what she might’ve missed if she’d died that night.
For one thing, she’d never been truly in love. She’d been in lust that she’d mistaken for love, but that didn’t count. In the seconds before Lucas arrived to save the day, it had occurred to Amanda that she could actually die before experiencing true love. She’d never skied or zip-lined or bungee-jumped or traveled to Europe or been on a cruise or gone swimming in the Pacific Ocean. Even though she’d been to Los Angeles for work at least six times, she’d never once bothered to swim in the ocean. She’d always assumed she’d have plenty of time to do those things. There was always more time to be had in the future.
Now she knew better.
After being reminded that time was finite and how quickly the future could be stolen from her, Amanda had begun a list of the things she’d never done. She wanted to take piano lessons, climb a mountain, learn to drive a stick, have an orgasm with a man. Amanda underlined those three words multiple times. She’d had plenty of the solo kind, as well as a few from trying out her company’s product