Too Hot to Handle (Jackson Hole 2)

She was a jack of all trades, and while she hadn’t mastered anything, she was a hard worker. She wasn’t lazy. She wasn’t dumb. Even if her cousins had given her the nickname The Merry Slacker a few years before. Even if, when her mom had bought a new condo, she’d cautiously explained to Merry that it only had one bedroom, so she wouldn’t be able to take Merry in again.

That had hurt. Merry had moved in with her mom for a few months once, but that had been four years before. “What are you talking about?” she’d huffed, trying to hide her injury with irritation. “Why would you even say that?”

“I just thought you should know, sweetie. I won’t be much of a safety net anymore.” A safety net. As if Merry were a circus performer with a terrible track record.

Okay, maybe she’d also moved home a few times after college, but those had been short stays. And yes, she lived life one day at a time, unlike her cousins who were both attractive, driven and financially successful. Family gatherings were a little painful, but Merry could deal with it. What she couldn’t deal with was her newly hatched self-doubt. Hell, her mom had always been a free spirit, and now it seemed even she was expressing concern.

Squinting against the bright morning sun, Merry stepped over a tall purple wildflower she could never bring herself to step on, despite that it was smack in the middle of the trail.

Over the past year, what had started as a niggling worry had steadily grown into an irritation. A grain of sand beneath her skin. Slowly the minerals of anxiety and fear had begun to accumulate around it, just above her breastbone. Pressing. Displacing. Now it was like a stone she could feel every time she swallowed.

She’d always been happy. And she’d always assumed that someday she’d stumble onto that one good thing. The job that made work into a passion. The love that transformed her single life into something bursting with joy.

It hadn’t happened. Because things like that didn’t happen. She’d decided that attitude would only buy her more years of floating over life, mindless and untethered, tossed about, content to be lost.

Not anymore. Not this time. Not in Providence.

Merry walked confidently up the wooden steps that led to the surprisingly sturdy porch of the first little house. She opened the door and pretended she wasn’t doing a quick scan of the doorway for spiders before she stepped in.

Providence might look like eighteen dying buildings surrounded by weeds and harsh mountains, but she was going to make it into a destination. A fascinating tourist stop. A quaint little museum. She would do that. This town would be her triumph.

* * *

THIS TOWN WAS going to be her Waterloo.

Another week had passed, and Merry was losing her mind. The board of the Providence Historical Trust was made up of five lovely people who all happened to be over sixty years old. And two of them had been married to the benefactor of the trust, Gideon Bishop. Not at the same time, of course. One woman had been married to him for forty years, though there was a first wife before her somewhere. The third wife had only spent five years with him, but she’d been his wife when he’d died, which seemed to give her pride of place at the table. At least in her mind. The other three were men who each claimed to have been Gideon’s best friend at some point.

It could have been like a lovely family reunion when they met every other week. Instead it was like an episode of Passive Aggressive Theater. None of them could agree on anything, or even seem to remember the same event the same way.

“Please,” Merry begged for the third time that day. “I need to do something. Anything.”

Ex-Wife Jeanine nodded. “Well, there are those files.”

“Yes, I finished organizing them a week ago.”

“Ah,” Harry said, “You know what could be helpful? The Jackson Historical Society. I bet they’d have all sorts of pictures and stories and—”

“Yes,” Merry ground out, feeling guilty for cutting the old man off even before he finished his sentence. “I mean, of course. You pointed me in that direction last week. I already spent hours there, but it seems Gideon had finished up there. I couldn’t find anything new.”

“The library?” Third Wife Kristen suggested.

“That, too.” Merry tried to smile. “I’m working through all the books I could find on the history of the area, but—”

Levi Cannon slapped his hand down on the table so hard that Merry squeaked. “I’ve got it! Teton County Historical Society!”

Merry felt a little twinge of excitement. That was one place she hadn’t visited. But the excitement died like an ember swept up into the cool sky. “I’ll check it out. But…you brought me here to start a museum. To draw people to Providence. That’s what Gideon wanted, right? And that’s what I want, too. I can make copies of pictures and gather more information about the founders of the town and the flood that led to its destruction, but that’s not going to get people out there. I need to get the buildings restored. Grade the road. Build a parking area. We need to come up with plans. Hire workers. Do something.”

Third Wife Kristen cleared her throat and shot a look at Harry who looked at Levi.

“Well…” Levi said, then paused to pull a handkerchief from his pocket to swipe over his nape. “You see, there’s a bit of a problem.”

“Problem?” Merry felt a quick crawl of anxiety over her skin. It slipped down her arms and made her fingers tingle with the guilty suspicion that she wasn’t good enough. “What problem?” she asked. “Is it my résumé? I know I’ve only got two years of experience, but I promise you won’t find anyone more dedicated. I already love Providence like it was my own. If—”

“No, no,” Jeanine interrupted. “You were quite the bargain. We couldn’t possibly have afforded someone with more experience, what with the— Ouch!” Jeanine jumped and glared at Third Wife Kristen. “Did you kick me?”

“You’re being rude!”

But Merry didn’t mind. She was a bargain. Or a cheap knockoff of someone who really knew what they were doing. But she was too damn happy about being here to care.