Lili figured if somehow, by the grace of a merciful God, she made it safely to the bottom of Sinner’s Prayer Pass she’d need a crowbar to pry her fingers away from the steering wheel of her new Ford pickup truck.
Considering that she was only one-third of the way down and she’d already come way too close to sliding off the narrow road at one of the switchbacks, she figured chances were good that the crowbar would be the coroner’s problem.
Lili had never driven a truck before this trip. Never pulled a trailer of any kind. What had made her think she could safely tow a fifth wheel to the end of the world called Eternity Springs? Doing it through the flatlands of Oklahoma was one thing. Climbing the Rocky Mountains was something else entirely!
Obviously, she’d been out of her mind four days ago after witnessing Tiffany Lambeau strutting her stuff downtown on the heels of the debacle at Lili’s parents’ house. She’d definitely been angrier than she’d ever been in her entire twenty-nine years of life.
Thinking about it again today made her hands shake. That and the sheer drop-off below her. “What’s the deal? Is there a guardrail shortage the media has ignored?”
Directly ahead at the U of a switchback, she spied a wide spot in the road marked Scenic Overlook. She pulled into it, shifted into park, and breathed a sigh of relief.
She seriously wondered about her sanity. Never before had she been this angry. Never before this scared behind the wheel. She switched off the engine, climbed down from the cab of the pickup truck, and shouted out at the vast mountain vista before her. A lot of nevers. “What the heck am I doing?”
The words that echoed back trumpeted through her mind: Looking for a life.
It was true. Here she was with her thirtieth birthday churning toward her like an F5 tornado. She had no boyfriend or social life or even a pet because she’d worked seventy hours a week playing keep up with the overachieving sibling and trying to earn the approval of her uber-successful parents.
And what had that gotten her as a result? A clean balance sheet? Clean bedroom sheets? To heck with that.
“If this is what being good gets me, then I’m ready to be bad.”
Liliana wanted a life. She wanted to have fun, to be adventurous, to do things she might actually live to regret.
I want to grow up and be like Patsy!
Liliana had been renting a garage apartment from Patsy Schaffer for three years now. It had been a humbling experience to discover that Patsy’s life was about a million times more interesting than hers. The former exotic dancer had married a divorced oilman ten years her junior when she was forty-one. They’d had “twenty-two and a half blissful years followed by six months of misery” before she lost him to liver cancer. She’d traveled the world with her “Billy-luv,” published a truly frightening serial killer novel, interviewed three former First Ladies for a magazine article, and never missed a Sunday in church if she could help it. Now in her seventies, Patsy had a social calendar that would make someone half her age sigh with exhaustion. And she was off to a summer in the mountains with a couple hundred of her closest friends.
Lili envied Patsy her extensive friendships. She had a handful of friends, but they were all in some way connected to work. Wonder what they thought of her now? Wonder what gossip was going around the office about her?
Even if Lili’s friends believed in her innocence, they wouldn’t want anything to do with her. Just the whiff of fraud was enough to make anyone persona non grata at the firm. In their shoes, Lili would have felt the same thing.
She’d bet the Saint Christopher medal on her visor—the one she’d bought at the Catholic church gift shop after navigating her first mountain pass—that if their situations were reversed Patsy’s friends would rally around her. Lili really needed to work on finding a new group of friends.
“And that’s what you’re doing. Right?” Surely out of a camping club of five hundred women Lili could find a few ladies with whom she shared something in common.
Five hundred. Not for the first time, Lili shook her head at the number. Patsy had founded her female-only camping club five years ago, and she’d regretfully capped membership just last week because organizational logistics had become a nightmare. Of course, not every member made every trip, but they always had a crew of at least eighty show up for the weekend events. Thirty-seven of the Alleycats had booked a campsite for the entire summer in Colorado along with Patsy. Another fifty-seven had booked more than a month. Dozens and dozens of others campers planned to come and go as time would allow throughout the summer.
No, not campers, Lili corrected herself. Glampers. The Tornado Alleycats went glamping.
“It’s a fusion of glamor and camping,” Pasty had defined in answer to Lili’s question when the older woman brought home a new Airstream trailer two years ago. “Glamping involves traveling in comfort, if not outright luxury, in order to get off the beaten tourist path and immerse oneself in authentic local culture or environment.”
Lili’s only experience with camping had been related to advising a client that no, he couldn’t deduct his RV payments as research for the book he hoped to write someday. Lili had never gone camping as a child. Her parents weren’t fans of the outdoors and the summer camps they’d sent her to were educational ones, usually set on college campuses.
She’d done a lot of those kinds of camps. Physics camp. Weather camp. Math camp. Engineering camp. Biology camp. By the time she actually arrived on campus at UNC as a freshman, she was an expert on dorm rooms.
She did have the opportunity to go camping once. A guy she’d dated in college offered to take her tent camping at a state park, but the whole peeing-in-the-woods thing had turned her off.
Patsy’s style of camping was a long way away from sleeping on an air mattress and peeing in the bushes. After a month of decorating her travel trailer in order to make it “perfectly Patsy,” Lili’s landlady had given her the grand tour. The task took less than two minutes, but it had been enough to give Lili trailer envy.
Not that she’d been able to do anything about it. She’d had that seventy-hour workweek going on, after all.
She had thought about that trailer tour the day of the debacle as she had sat at a red traffic light on the edge of downtown Oklahoma City. The previous day, Patsy had left for her summer in Colorado. She’d begged Lili to steal a long weekend away from work and join her at some point during the summer. Lili had promised to try. After partnerships had been announced, of course.
When the traffic light had switched to green, she shifted her foot from the brake pedal to the gas and pulled slowly forward. Too slowly, apparently, for the guy behind her had bumped his horn and sped around her. She’d ended up in the lane next to him at the next red light. He’d revved his engine and flipped her the bird. Her vision had gone as red as the traffic light. She’d turned right just to get away from him.
And fifteen minutes after that, she’d ended up headed west on I-40. Clueless as to why.
Now, four days later, two death-defying miles away from her destination, she knew that had been a lie. Four days ago in Oklahoma City, Liliana had made a choice. A totally reckless, impulsive choice. Reckless, impulsive, and totally out of character.
Fight-or-flight. She’d been ready to fight, but then her parents had thrown the first punch. Seeing her nemesis on her former mentor’s arm had knocked her flat.
So that had left flight.
And that’s what she’d done. Wearing a suit and heels with a half gallon of milk and leftover curry in her refrigerator, she’d exited I-40 without using her blinker and turned into a Ford dealership. The one right next to RV World.
She’d fled Oklahoma like Thelma in search of Louise in a heavy-duty Ford pickup towing a thirty-two-foot fifth wheel, headed for a place called Eternity Springs.
Lili stared down at the little town nestled in the valley below. She spied church steeples and Victorian houses and a main street right out of an 1880s mining-town photograph. The place looked sort of charming from here. It certainly was isolated. Probably a good place to hide. What were the chances she’d run across anyone who knew her here?
She lifted her face to the sun, filled her lungs with sweet mountain air, then exhaled heavily. She eyed the cab of her truck. She could do this. She had this. All she had to do was avoid death while descending the balance of Sinner’s Prayer Pass.
Then she could begin her new life.
* * *
Brick sprawled facedown across the king-sized bed inside the home he intended to use for the summer, the prototype tree house he’d built before settling on the final design for the two he’d constructed up at Stardance River Camp. He came awake with a start. “What the…?”
Living at the edge of a mountain forest, he was accustomed to unusual sounds in the night: the creepy, baby-like cry of a fox, the grunt of a bull moose looking for love, the scream of a mountain lion and crash of a falling tree. This was the first time—and he hoped the last time—that he’d ever awakened to the god-awful noise of 1970s disco.
He lifted his head from his pillow and scowled at the glowing red numerals of his bedside clock. Two twenty-seven? Seriously?
The Alleycats hadn’t looked like troublemakers, he thought as he pulled a plump feather pillow over his head in an attempt to drown out the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive.” They’d looked like … grandmas.
Hearing another blast of music from the direction of the campground—Gloria Gaynor, shoot me now—he wondered if he’d been fooled by false advertising. Maybe they might be more aptly called the Tornado Troublemakers.
He wasn’t the least bit surprised when his camp phone rang a minute later. Branch’s motor coach. The honeymooners. Great. “Callahan,” he said when he answered the call. The new husband sounded a little desperate.
“Yes.… Yes. I heard. I’m sorry.” Rolling out of bed, he added, “I’m on my way to take care of it right now.”
Brick switched on the bedside lamp, then pulled on his jeans, yesterday’s flannel shirt, and his boots. He grabbed his pack, then took the walkway to the ground and his golf cart.
The distance between the RV campground and River Camp was over ten miles by road. However, he’d cut a trail over the ridge dividing the two and built this particular tree house at a spot where he could tend to both places. Maybe someday if River Camp proved to be as successful as he hoped he’d build a cabin near this spot and finally set down permanent roots. Or maybe not.
When it came to housing, Brick was a wanderer. He’d never owned a home. Never really wanted to. Since moving to Eternity Springs, he’d lived in a rental apartment, in a trailer, on his uncle Luke’s houseboat on Hummingbird Lake, in his dad’s house at the Callahan compound, the North Forty, and, for now, in this tree house. The lifestyle suited him just fine.
Solar lanterns illuminated the trail that led him down the mountain toward the campground in the flats. Brick didn’t need the lights in order to navigate his way. He knew this land like the back of his hand.
He’d coveted the property from the moment he’d first laid eyes on it. Three years ago while negotiating on behalf of his grandfather for the purchase of a four-hundred-acre section of land from the owners of one of southern Colorado’s largest ranches, Brick had topped the eastern ridge on horseback, gazed down into the picturesque valley, and lost his heart. Brick was fiercely proud of his independence, and he’d thought long and hard about entering into any sort of partnership with family—especially his domineering grandfather—but the pull of the property wasn’t to be denied.
Branch Callahan, the wily, interfering old coot, had scented blood in the water.
So Brick had hired Mac Timberlake, an attorney even craftier than his granddad, to structure a deal that Brick’s pride could abide and his bank account could manage. To help sell the deal, he’d enlisted the help of Aunt Maddie—the one person on the planet consistently able to influence Branch. The day they’d signed the papers ranked right up there with the best days of Brick’s life.
He’d moved a trailer onto the property and begun building his dream on a shoestring, taking it slow in an effort to do it right. He’d had some setbacks and the lean times had yet to fatten up, but he was encouraged. He now had a full-time staff of ten, counting himself, and he loved the work.
KC and the Sunshine Band blared out through the darkness and Brick winced. Of course, every job had its drawbacks.
The trail Brick followed evened out as he exited the trees and made his way toward the lakeshore and the RV and tent campground. Raucous laughter drifted across water. He didn’t try to hold back his sigh. Sound carried through the nighttime forest. Bad disco carried louder than almost anything.
This was not a good start to the summer. With so many new guests, he shouldn’t have skipped making his usual final round of the Ranch before going to bed. He’d been so blasted tired after the horrors of the evening that he’d been lazy.
He shuddered at the memory. The sights. The sounds. The scents. Holy Moses, the scent. The helplessness and horror that he’d felt.
Nothing like learning that “sympathetic vomiters” do exist while driving over Sinner’s Prayer Pass with three wailing urchins in the back of your two-week-old extended-cab pickup.
That’s what he got for doing a favor for family. He loved Uncle Gabe’s kids; he truly did. But he’d think twice before volunteering to play chauffeur to all three of the little puke monsters again after a pizza parlor birthday party.
“Disco Duck” screeched out across the night. “Speaking of puke,” Brick muttered.
He grew closer to the campground. Three separate campfires burned along the bank of the lake. Gales of laughter, bone-chilling screams, and numerous splashes told him the ladies were indulging in a midnight swim. Despite his irritation, Brick snorted in amusement. What had they expected from a lake full of snowmelt while the calendar still officially read “Spring”?
However, experience told him that the late-night dip would make his break-up-the-party efforts easier. Nothing made a man—or granny—want to crawl beneath the bedcovers like being frozen to the bone.
Whistling beneath his breath—oh, hell, a KC and the Sunshine Band earworm was not a good thing—he approached the lake just as the full moon broke from behind a cloud and illuminated the scene before him.
He slammed his foot on the brake. He turned his head and squeezed his eyes shut, but not before the sight burned into his brain.
He’d expected swimsuits, but they were skinny-dipping! They were … ah, jeez … naked grannies.
Brick appreciated a peep show as much as any other man, but this was just wrong. He seriously wished he hadn’t seen that. But even as he tried to scrub his memory, a new song entered his head. One from Sesame Street.
He’d heard it early this evening when he’d delivered the stinking kids to their parents. Gabe’s wife, Nic, had plopped the baby down in front of the TV to distract him while she cleaned up the twins. On PBS, Bob and Susan had been singing “One of These Things.”
“One of those things,” Brick murmured.
One of the female bodies standing beside the lake had been toned and taut and sleek as a mountain cat, with full breasts and curvy hips and legs worthy of a 1940s pinup girl.
“Most definitely, not like the others.”
With all the noise they’d been making, they hadn’t heard him approach. He briefly considered fading back into the trees without making his presence known, but “Disco Duck” reminded him of the honeymooners and potential TripAdvisor reviews.
Keeping his head turned away, he called out the warning he sounded when he went into the ladies’ restroom or shower room to fix something: “Man on the premises.”
After a moment’s silence, someone called, “Thank God.”
Laughter exploded from the gathering, and Brick knew right then and there that he was in for a long summer.
He counted to thirty, then stepped forward, making a cautious scan as he approached. Naked skin had disappeared beneath towels and T-shirts and cover-ups, thank heavens.
And then he spied her.
Legs.
He dragged his gaze slowly up her towel-clad body to her face. Something niggled at him. A sense that he’d seen this woman before.
He had not checked her into camp. He was certain of that. However, at least half of today’s arrivals had checked in after his shift had ended. Maybe she’d been in town for a day or two and he’d seen her there. If that was it, she hadn’t been wearing shorts when he saw her. He’d remember legs like those.
He forced his attention to the matter at hand. “I’m sorry, ladies. I hate to be a buzzkill, but I need to enforce our noise policy.”
Patsy Schaffer placed her hand on her chest, her fingers widespread. She batted her lashes and spoke in a tone syrupy with innocence. “Oh? Stardance Ranch RV Resort has a noise policy?”
He couldn’t help but laugh as he stepped forward into the firelight. “Yes, ma’am.”
He heard a gasp, and then Legs said, “Mark?”
Mark was his given name. He rarely used it anymore. The Callahan clan had christened him with the nickname Brick a few years ago, and it had stuck. He narrowed his eyes and studied her.
“Mark Christopher!”
Christopher. His adoptive family’s name. Not Mark Callahan or “Chris” Callahan as he’d been known to the family for a time, but Mark Christopher. For Legs to know him by that name, she had to be someone he knew in his youth.
He gave her another swift once-over, and truth dawned.
No. No way. She couldn’t be Derek’s sister. Brick’s childhood best friend’s uptight, nerdy, overachieving, good-girl little sister must have a doppelgänger. Liliana Howe would never skinny-dip in public.
And yet … she’d always been tall. Those legs. But she’d been skinny. She’s not skinny anymore!
Somebody abruptly switched off the music. Into the sudden silence, Brick said, “Freckle-Sticks? Is that you?”