The Heartbreaker of Echo Pass by Maisey Yates
CHAPTER EIGHT
HEHADN’TSLEPTat all the night before. Everything on his body hurt. Sometimes, he just had those nights. Not as often as he used to. But there were times when he just couldn’t get certain images out of his head. There were times when he was forced to relive that night. Over and over again on an endless loop. And if he tried to dream, it only became clearer. Only became worse.
On those nights, he either got drunk enough to black out so there was nothing in his mind, or he got up. Last night, he got up. Ran some floodlights out to the homesite and had worked. For no real reason. But now, it was 9:00 a.m., and he was numb all over and regretting the decision.
He could go to sleep whenever he wanted, and he was about to do just that when the door to the cabin pushed open, and in walked Iris, laden down with platters.
“What the hell?”
“I’m here. To perform my... My duties.”
He could only stare at her. She looked bright and chipper and altogether offensive. Her dark hair was captured in a low ponytail, one that spoke of deep practicality, and no concern for fashion. He was fascinated by that. That everything she did seemed to be about service. Seemed to be about what was easiest.
She was no-frills.
Except... Her love of sweets was definitely a frill.
And he shouldn’t be wondering about the strange layers that she contained.
“I didn’t know you were coming this morning.”
“I didn’t know that I needed to... But of course it makes sense. I guess I should make sure to prearrange things with you. But I went to the bakery yesterday and everything is great. I started baking last night. In the kitchen. The kitchen is amazing.”
She said kitchen like some people might say sex.
And that realization sent a kick straight down to his gut.
Desire? Lust?
He hadn’t felt a particular inclination toward either of those things in so long he could barely recognize them.
Why? Why was it attaching itself to this woman? He had to be very honest and admit that he hadn’t exactly thought about when he might have sex again. If he would. He just hadn’t thought about any of it. It wasn’t like he had decided one day that he wasn’t going to have dessert. Wasn’t going to enjoy the taste of food, was simply going to consume what he needed to survive. He had just done that, because it was all his body had demanded. But Iris had brought cookies, and had reminded him about taste.
Apparently, she was now reminding him of other things.
And that was forcing him to think. Forcing him to maybe make decisions.
Being up here is a decision.
That was true enough.
He had separated himself from the outside world and he had done a damn good job of it. He had isolated himself by design, and that, he was certain, had made it even easier for him to go on living as he had.
He had decided on a monastic life here. Joined the priesthood of grief and hadn’t looked back.
When he’d been in the Bay Area still, his friends had always been checking in on him. Family. Always asking him if he would rebuild. If he wanted to go out. To a bar. To dinner. When he was coming in to the office again. And the answer had always been blank. It had been a feeling. A violent sense of simply not wanting to. And he had waited for it to change. But it hadn’t.
Nothing had changed, not really, until he had left entirely. Driving up I-5, crossing the border into Oregon, had been a strange kind of torture.
Because there hadn’t been any chatter in his car. No effervescent laughter or stream of consciousness ideas about what it would be like when they finally left. When they realized their dream of being out in nature.
I don’t know. It will just be nice not to be tied to those people anymore.
Our friends?
People who care about image. I just want to live.
He gritted his teeth against the memory. Feet on his dashboard and long blond hair. Happiness. Most of all, he didn’t want to remember the happiness.
“I’m tired,” he admitted.
“Oh. Sorry. I would’ve brought coffee.”
“I don’t drink coffee.”
“You don’t drink coffee? What do you have with your sweets?”
“Milk? I mean, or whiskey, as discussed.” His answer came from another time. Since before she’d come up the mountain, he hadn’t eaten sweets.
“How do you not drink coffee?” she asked.
“Can’t stand the stuff. Anyway, my mom always used to say it stunted your growth.” He spread his arms wide. “Seems to me that you can’t prove she wasn’t right.”
“I’m not that small,” Iris said.
“You’re half grown, little girl,” he said.
She blinked, and shot him an evil look. “I am not a girl.”
She made him feel about a thousand years old, that was sure. It was that brightness. That cheer. That brisk, stalwart sort of sense she had about her. Like a particularly bright-eyed rodent moving about industriously. She had that sense of someone who was uncrushable. At least, thought she was. Because she hadn’t been exposed to anything intense enough to crush her.
That thought brought him up short. Because she had said something about her mother the other day...
He shoved his sympathy to the side.
Losing your parents was normal enough.
Callous, maybe. But he’d given a lot of thought to the natural order of things. And there were losses a man expected to endure.
And the losses he didn’t.
It wasn’t that it wasn’t loss.
But there was a certain sense of unfairness when somebody young died. A certain amount of anger. Because it just wasn’t the way that life was supposed to work.
Of course, he lost any idea that the world was supposed to work any kind of certain way.
It had screwed him from every direction.
That’s nice. Little bit of self-pity. Wallow in it.
He gritted his teeth.
“What did you bring?”
“I brought breakfast. And baked goods. Because I started working on my menu. And I want to name a menu item after you. I’m doing it for my sisters and my brother. I wanted to give you something too because you’re giving me this chance.”
“I don’t want to be a menu item.”
“Why not?”
“Do I look like a cookie to you?”
She wrinkled her nose. “No. You have to be something sour.”
“Like a lemon?” He felt like a lemon half the time.
She tapped her chin. “No. Passion fruit,” she said.
That word sent a jolt down to his gut. Passion.
He couldn’t remember passion. And hearing it on her lips, spoken so innocently... It was a strange and terrible thing. That’s what it was.
He was angry at her then. In a futile way. That she could say that word without it carrying weight. That was soft and young and looking ahead in a way he never could. Not again.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said, ignoring the tight band that stretched between them.
“Oh. Well. It’s just...” She opened up a Tupperware in her arms, then walked over to the counter and unloaded everything onto it. “I did make a few different things.”
He looked down into the Tupperware. There was an array of bright confections. Cookies, and other things. “This is like a pavlova cookie,” she said. “I love pavlova, and we don’t have it in the States that much. But I saw it on a British cooking show and I got obsessed with it. I did a lot of research and saw that in New Zealand they have it with passion fruit a lot. And I really love passion fruit. I did think... This could be yours.” She lifted the treat aloft. White and airy, with a bright yellow center.
“This is weird,” he said.
“Try it,” she said.
She shoved it toward him, and he took it, staring at her while he took a bite. It was amazing. Sweet and extremely sour when you got to the center, and just the strangest thing, just like her.
Because what the hell was she even doing. At his cabin, handing him baked goods.
His life had been turned upside down in the weirdest way in the past few days. Iris Daniels was a low-key force to be reckoned with, and she didn’t even seem to know it.
There were many a natural disaster that you could predict to an extent. You could try and figure out which way the wind would blow. You could predict where a hurricane might travel. Iris was more like an earthquake. You can know that a fault line was there, but you never know what might wake it up. It just hit one day.
With a plate of cookies.
And whatever the hell a pavlova was.
“It’s good,” he said.
She looked so hopeful that he didn’t want to crush that hope.
It was weird. Caring a little bit about how someone else felt.
But she was kind of undamaged and miraculous, and he didn’t want to be the one to harm her. No, he hadn’t asked for her to be in his path. Hadn’t asked for her to come here. None of it had been his idea at all. But he still didn’t...
He didn’t want to be the reason that she cried. That was for sure.
“Can I name it after you?” She deflated slightly then. “It won’t be an honor for you. So what’s the point?”
And just like that he was as angry at himself as he’d been with her a few moments before. He wanted to push her away. He wanted to keep her here.
He didn’t like the pull she created inside him.
He was used to certainty.
That was one thing about being up here that was good. His life was easy, and it was stripped back to basics. This wasn’t basic. It was something more. He couldn’t make sense of it any more than he could deny it.
He didn’t want her sad. That was all he knew right then.
“Why don’t you name it the Mountain Climber? Because you climbed up the mountain to meet me. And... I don’t feel like I deserve any credit for this. I’m not doing you a favor. Not really.”
A small smile tugged at the corner of her lips. “Really?”
“Really. I mean, it’s a business deal, right? So you don’t need to go doing me any favors. We are trading.” He looked down into the Tupperware. “What’s that one?”
“Well, the trouble with my sister Rose is that if you name a cookie after her, I suppose it has to have some Rose in it. So this is rose and lemon. And then I’ve got Pansy’s special, which is a sugar cookie with blackberry buttercream, which is of course kind of blue, for her uniform. Ryder’s is chocolate chunk. Because he’s kind of classic, but also...just him. Sammy’s is my take on a hummingbird cake, but in a cookie. Coconut crushed pineapple. Because my sister-in-law is a whole thing, but very sweet with it.”
“And this one?” he asked.
“Logan’s. He’s my...” She hesitated, and something in his chest hitched slightly. “Well, he’s my future brother-in-law. But he’s like a brother already. It’s complicated. It’s very complicated.”
“Your family is obviously important to you.”
“You have no idea. We just... We raised each other. Me and my siblings. And Logan. Sammy.” She pointed to two other cookies in the box. “Colt and Jake. My cousins. Pecan sandy and white chocolate raspberry.”
“I see.” He didn’t quite have it in him to ask. The silence stretched between them, and he wondered if she would offer. Clearly, she was deciding. Finally she said, “Our parents died in an accident. All of them.”
“Shit,” Griffin said.
It took a lot to shock him. Frankly, his tolerance for tragedy was blown way the hell out of proportion. But that did it. “How old were you?”
“Fourteen. Rose was six. Pansy was eight. Ryder was eighteen. He was the only one. The other boys were fifteen through seventeen. Sammy’s parents didn’t die, but they were abusive, and she was our neighbor. Eventually, she moved in with us. Well, she parked her camper on the property. It took her and Ryder a long time, but eventually they admitted that their feelings for each other were more than just friendship. But it was tough for them. Because... Nobody else really has what we do. We were so dependent on each other for everything. It was all hands on deck. The boys helping on the ranch, and me doing my best to take care of the household stuff. We just all did the best we could. And I guess that kind of explains me. I guess you can kind of see how I forgot to move on. How I forgot to get out of the role that I was in. I’m kind of an empty nester, I guess.” She scrunched her face up. “It’s the strangest thing.”
He felt like an ass then, for thinking what he had about her, and that was a feat. But she’d been through a hell of a lot more than he’d given her credit for.
When she’d implied she’d lost her mother he hadn’t realized this was the whole story.
“Sorry,” he said. “About some of the things that I’ve said to you.”
“You didn’t know.”
“Because I didn’t ask.”
“I realized that.”
He let out a long, slow breath. “It’s been a while since I’ve done... People.”
“I assume you don’t want me to ask,” she said looking down.
He shook his head once. “That’s true. I don’t.”
“And if I did?”
“I wouldn’t answer you.”
It was all dangerously too close to things he didn’t want to think about. Things he didn’t want to deal with. Not with her. There were just some things that were sacred ground, and there was no stepping on them. Not ever.
There was no use going over what couldn’t be changed. There was just no use at all.
“Well, good to have boundaries, I guess.”
“And dessert,” he said.
“Indeed.” She looked around the room. And he looked at her. At the fine line of her neck, that pointed, determined chin and surprisingly soft looking mouth.
He couldn’t remember how he’d seen her that first time. Only that he thought she was plain.
She wasn’t plain at all.
It would be better if she were.
“I better head out,” he said.
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I have some work to do.”
He might be tired, he might be damned sick of being outside, but he wasn’t going to stay in here with her. Not any longer.
“I guess so... I guess I’ll clean.”
“You don’t have to. Hell, don’t you have a bakery to try and open?”
“Well, yes. But... I guess until I actually open there’s not a whole lot for me to do. I have to get a permit and things like that.”
“Right.”
“So, I’ll just stay.”
“If you insist,” he said.
“I do,” she said.
“All right. See you later. If you’re not here when I get back.”
“Right.”
And for some reason, turning and walking away felt difficult. And he couldn’t just blame it on lack of sleep, or his bad temper.
Couldn’t blame it on anything other than the woman standing in his cabin.
And her damn cookies and sad life story.
A little bit of manual labor would do him good.
The only thing that sleep had for him was more nightmares anyway.
And he was all out of patience with that.
