Quinn Harrison-Pritchard stared at the words meticulously burned into a large, wooden, mountain-shaped sign on the side of the road as she slowly drove past it.
This was so not Boston.
It was quite possibly the farthest away from Boston she could be. Maybe not geographically, but certainly in every other way that was important to her.
There were no skyscrapers. No harbor. No traffic where someone would cut you off and flip you the bird in the same second.
There was no challenging yet fulfilling job at an Ivy League school for her here in Wyoming.
Of course, there wasn’t one for her back East, either. Not anymore.
Her phone’s GPS led her down the main street of the town—not that there seemed to be too many other streets—until she reached her destination, a bar called the Eagle’s Nest.
According to the bar’s simple website, they’d recently started opening at lunch and were looking for a part-time, lunch-shift waitress. It was a job Quinn had never had any desire to hold, but she’d submitted her info anyway.
After all, the run-down house she was renting by the week on the outskirts of town wasn’t going to pay for itself. And unless she wanted to explain to her younger brother what an utter failure her life had become and beg him for money, she was going to have to take whatever job she could get.
Honestly, she hadn’t been sure anything would come of it, at least not for a couple of weeks. Then she’d gotten a voicemail yesterday to come in and start today. Evidently, checking references and qualifications wasn’t as important for lunch-shift waitresses as it had been in the academic world.
This was a different world all the way around.
She cracked her window the slightest bit to let in the cool, but not quite cold, November air, hoping it would help ease the vise around her heart which made breathing feel difficult. The vise that had made breathing feel difficult for the past two months since she had been fired and blacklisted.
It didn’t ease the vise. All it did was make the inside of her used Ford Fiesta cold.
She glanced at the vast Teton mountains surrounding the small town. She could see the appeal—one would have to be blind not to. She could also see the appeal of the town itself—quaint and quirky, small but not tiny, people waving to each other at the traffic lights and from the front of the stores lining Main Street.
She knew for a fact that Oak Creek was big enough to merit a county hospital and a state college campus about ten miles outside of town. There were restaurants, a well-known bakery, and it was the home of Linear Tactical.
Not that she knew exactly what Linear Tactical was beyond some sort of self-defense and survival training company or school or something. All she knew was her brother Riley talked about the guys who worked there every time she spoke with him.
She hadn’t been here very long, but she could see why Riley was enamored with this place. And if a town could capture the heart of the famous extreme-sport sensation, Phoenix, surely it could be enough for his plain older sister. She wasn’t looking for stunts and adventures like he was. She was looking for a place to lick her wounds and figure out exactly what the hell had happened.
This was not where she wanted to be, geographically or metaphorically. It wasn’t where she thought she would be as she turned thirty-nine.
Not just the town of Oak Creek. All of it.
Alone, without a career, in a state she’d visited once, driving a junker car she’d bought after she’d sold her BMW to help cover the expenses from her divorce.
To have taught at an Ivy League university for the past dozen years, she felt pretty damned stupid to be in this situation now, pulling into a bar parking lot about to become a waitress.
Of course, recognizing her own stupidity wasn’t going to change anything, so she put the car in park and got out.
She tucked an escaped tendril of hair back into the tight bun where it belonged and strode purposefully toward the entrance. Her eyes were still adjusting to the lighting change when a female voice rang out from farther back.
“Sorry, we’re not open for lunch for another hour. Maybe longer if the new waitress I hired doesn’t show.”
Quinn took a deep, affirming breath. She could do this. “Well, you don’t have to worry about the latter,