Too Hot to Handle (Jackson Hole 2)
CHAPTER ONE
THE NOW FAMILIAR sound of the toaster popping up woke Merry from a dead sleep. She opened her eyes and immediately flinched from the brutal sunlight spearing between a gap in the curtains of the living room window.
“Are you sick of me yet?” she groaned, her voice muffled by the pillow. It was the same question she asked every morning. At some point the answer would be yes. But not today, thank God.
“Are you kidding?” Grace called from the kitchen. “If I kick you out, I lose more than half of the furniture in this place.”
“And one very intrusive sofa bed.”
“Not to mention my best friend.” Grace appeared next to the fold-out couch and held out a mug. “Coffee?”
“God, I love you,” Merry groaned.
“You’re using me for my coffee.”
“And your apartment.”
“Would you drop that?” Grace complained. “Anyway, you’re supposed to say you’re using me for my hot bod. It makes me feel beautiful.”
Merry sat up and dared a sip from the steaming mug before she shook her head. “No way. I don’t take sloppy seconds. And from what I can tell, Cole’s been using you up.”
Grace snorted. “Maybe. Or maybe I’ve been using him up.”
“Here I thought that limp of his was still left over from surgery.”
Grace had turned to walk away, but she spun back and leaned down to kiss Merry’s head. “All kidding aside, I’m glad you’re here. I mean that. I’ve missed you. Stay as long as you want. Six months. A year. It doesn’t matter.”
“Yeah, I want to sleep in your living room for a year,” Merry scoffed. But it was just a front. She’d happily sleep on the floor, just to have her friend back. They’d lived fifteen hundred miles apart for three years, and Merry had missed having her near. The living room was fine by her. She had no need for a big bed and a locking door. There were no men hanging around waiting for a shot at her. Hell, she’d given up masturbating half a year ago. Even her imagination had gone celibate, completely defeated by the unending dry spell. So she’d given in with a sigh and moved on to solving crossword puzzles on her phone.
“I’ll make breakfast,” she volunteered once she’d gotten a few more sips of coffee in her.
“I’ve got it already. Hand-toasted bagels. My specialty.”
Half an hour later, they were out the door. Merry dropped Grace off at the photography studio where she worked setting up location shoots and scouting for film companies. Then Merry drove out of Jackson and into the valley beyond.
She’d been here a week now, but the mountains still surprised her. No, surprised wasn’t the word. They overwhelmed her. Awed her. They made her feel tiny, and she liked that. Though she wasn’t model tall at five-seven, she felt too noticeable all the time. She wished she were little like Grace. Wished she could hide in a crowd instead of feeling big and awkward all the time. Mostly awkward. Her body was fine, but she didn’t know anything about clothes. She didn’t wear heels. Didn’t know what to do with makeup unless Grace was there to help. She was just the girl in jeans and a funny T-shirt who was hyperaware of the easy cuteness of the other women around her.
But none of that mattered anymore. This wasn’t Texas, where girls were born with perfectly coiffed hair and polished nails and the ability to walk in heels before they could crawl. This was Wyoming. And she worked in a ghost town.
Smiling, she turned her old sedan onto a ranch road and gravel pinged against the undercarriage. She couldn’t wear anything but jeans and T-shirts out here. Maybe that would change when she got the actual museum up and running, but for now her workplace was a ghost town. Literally. Her personal collection of broken-down, graying wood houses, waiting for her like an adventure every day.
Okay, the town didn’t belong to her, per se, but she still grinned when she briefly spotted the peak of the church steeple rising above a hill far ahead. The car dipped down into a valley again and the steeple disappeared.
The town didn’t belong to her, and she’d only been working there for a week, but she already loved it like mad. It was lonely. Some people might even call it sad. Just a scattered little group of eighteen buildings, half of them collapsing in on themselves, but Merry breathed a sigh of relief as she rounded the final curve
and the town came into sight.
Providence, it had been called. And it was that and more for Merry.
It was providence that she’d found this job, here in this part of Wyoming when her best friend had moved here not nine months before. And it was amazing luck that she’d been hired after only a year of experience working in a small-town museum. She was a newbie, but the Providence Historical Trust had believed in her, and Merry was going to make them proud. She was going to make herself proud.
She pulled into one of the patches of bare, hardened ground at the edge of the narrow dirt road and stepped out of her car. The sound of her car door closing echoed across the meadow that stretched behind her. In front of her stood Providence, the buildings spaced along either side of a wide road that had been overtaken by grass and the occasional clump of sagebrush. Beyond the town, the hills rose up into patches of rustling green aspen.
Merry took a deep breath, inhaling air that was cleaner than any she’d ever breathed before. This was a good place to make a life for herself. She couldn’t fail here. She knew it. This tiny little dot of land in the middle of Wyoming was the most beautiful spot she’d ever seen. How could it be anything but good?
She shifted the bag she’d slung over her shoulder and started along the trail that cut through the grass.
Regardless of how much she loved Providence, failure wasn’t an option at this point, anyway. She was thirty years old. She’d been floating through life like a bit of dandelion fluff on the wind. Oh, she’d touched down occasionally. Held jobs for a year or two. Bank teller, sales support, blackjack dealer, dog walker. She’d even gone to school to learn to do hair, but the only thing good that had come out of that had been her friendship with Grace.