Reunion Pass: An Eternity Springs novel (2 page)

She’d been thrilled when he announced his intention to find a job in College Station at the end of the rafting season. Maintaining a long-distance relationship was difficult. She missed him terribly, too, when they were apart.

But at the same time, having him around complicated her life in ways she hadn’t anticipated. Having him around produced seventeens on A&P quizzes. Her temper faded, replaced with despair. As wetness flooded her eyes, she abruptly shoved to her feet. “I need to walk.”

He followed her, his hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans. Lori charted a course across the older section of campus toward her very favorite spot, a bench beneath the spreading branches of a huge live oak known as the Century Tree. Seated, she gripped the bench with both hands and stared at the green, sun-dappled grass in front of her.

“It’s not your fault, Chase. I’m a big girl. I’m responsible for the decisions I make, the actions I take—good and bad.” She drew in a deep breath, then exhaled in a rush. “I have no willpower when you are around. I can’t say no to you. I don’t want to say no, but I need to say no. You know?”

“I know.” He picked up her hand and kissed her knuckles.

She drew a deep breath, then exhaled in a rush. “I don’t think you should move to College Station.”

*   *   *

Chase dropped her hand and shoved his hands in his pockets. His fingers brushed the ring he’d been carrying for almost a week. “You’re dumping me?”

“No, I’m not dumping you. I love you.”

“You love me, so you don’t want me around.” He gave a stone at his feet a vicious kick. “Right. Makes perfect sense.”

A pleading note entered her voice. “You distract me, Chase, and I can’t afford to be distracted. Not this semester. Or next semester. Maybe by next year I’ll be better able to handle my studies and have a life, too, but right now … I made a seventeen today, Chase. A seventeen!”

He could hear the fear in her voice, and even as he wanted to dismiss it, part of him wished that he’d found something to be as passionate about as she had. Another part of him resented the fact that she wasn’t as passionate about him as she was about her professional goals.

Chase was in love with Lori. Flat-out, head over heels, crazy in love. She was everything he wanted, all that he needed. She was smart. Generous. Witty.

Sexy.

She made him laugh. Made him horny. She was a loyal friend with a fierce, courageous heart. His family all loved her almost as much as he did.

Yet, he wasn’t blind to her faults. Lori was a whole helluva lot of work. She had trust issues. She had daddy issues. She had a head as hard as granite. Chase reminded himself that he truly believed she’d be worth the work in the end, but in the meantime, he needed to be patient. He needed to respect her anxieties, and in truth, he could see her point. He
was
a distraction. It didn’t help that they were now in two different stages of life.

He’d love nothing more than to travel the world with her, but he tried not to worry that she didn’t have the same sense of wanderlust as he. She was strong and steady, the kind of woman a man always wanted to come home to—wherever home happened to be.

He wanted to be with her more often than they managed now. He loved her. He missed her. Long-distance relationships sucked. Always ready to make plans on the fly, he rolled out an alternate idea he’d previously considered and discarded. “I wanted to talk to you about that, Lori. I planned to do it after dinner. I’m afraid I haven’t had any luck finding anything that suits my training or degree. Lots of jobs in this town. So far, though, nothing for me.”

She blinked rapidly. “You’re not moving to Texas?”

He read both disappointment and relief in her evergreen eyes, and he told himself that his feelings weren’t hurt, his pride wasn’t pricked. “Not College Station. I was thinking of looking for something in Dallas or Houston. We could spend Saturdays together.”

“I’d love that,” Lori said with a heartfelt sigh, her whole body easing.

He tucked the diamond solitaire a little deeper into his pocket.
Patience, man. Patience.

The word became his mantra throughout the following months, the engagement ring a constant in his pocket whenever he was due to see Lori. He didn’t move to Texas. George Overstreet, the photographer he’d met in College Station, hired him to be his personal outdoors guide when his river job came to a close, and by Thanksgiving, Chase had found his new vocation—outdoors photography.

George proved to be an extraordinary mentor who recognized and channeled Chase’s natural talent. Despite the fact that opportunities assisting George arose and caused Chase to miss a couple of weekends with Lori, she supported and encouraged his newfound interest. “I think it’s wonderful you’ve found your passion,” she told him at Christmas when he sat working up the nerve to pull the ring from his pocket. “I think it makes such a difference in life.”

You are my passion,
he wanted to say. But he swallowed the words, even as he stilled his hand from reaching into his pocket for the ring. She didn’t seem to notice that the gifts he gave her for Christmas lacked a one big “wow” present like he’d given her in previous years.

In February, he had the opportunity to travel with George to South America for a photo shoot to support a pitch that George’s friend and former Olympic athlete Lana Wilkerson was making to the cable TV networks, so Chase missed spending Valentine’s Day with Lori. Lori’s trip to Australia with her mother claimed her spring break in March. Their happenstance discovery of her father, Cam Murphy, aboard a boat named
Bliss
in a marina near Cairns not only shook Lori to her soul, but also changed her summer plans. She took an internship on a horse farm in Virginia rather than return to Eternity Springs and risk further contact with the man who’d left her mother to raise their daughter alone. She was angry with her dad. Hurt at the world and not in the mood to talk to Chase about it. It drove a wedge between the two of them that summer.

Chase never did offer Lori that ring.

Inevitably, distance and different life directions created a gulf between them that neither one could bridge. They didn’t fight. They didn’t have an official breakup event. They simply … stopped.

Lori did change her name—she took her father’s when he married her mother shortly before her junior year in college. She achieved her goal and returned to Colorado to attend vet school and to assume her new family role—that of big sister to a new little brother.

Chase’s pursuit of his vocation took him all over the world. He had just turned twenty-eight when he finally did pull an engagement ring out of his pocket.

He gave it to another woman.

Chapter Two

PRESENT DAY
ETERNITY SPRINGS, COLORADO

Lori Murphy sat in a pedicure chair at Angel’s Rest Healing Center and Spa and sank her aching feet into the heated, lavender-scented water. “Oh, that feels good. My feet are killing me.”

Seated in the chair next to her, Caitlin Timberlake looked up from her magazine. “Busy day sticking your hand up a horse’s rump?”

Lori smirked. “No veterinary work for me today. I did something worse. I helped Mom at the bakery. She had so many orders to fill she even dragged Dad into work. I cannot believe that after a month of holiday eating, so many people want her cinnamon rolls to serve at the breakfast buffets of their New Year’s Eve parties.”

“It’s one final sin before starting your diet. And your mom’s cinnamon rolls are as sinful as it gets.” Caitlin pulled a tabloid newspaper from a stack on a small table between the two chairs. “Speaking of sin, get a load of this.”

Lori noted the magazine’s early December date, then read the front-page headline aloud. “‘Man’s Head Explodes in Barber Chair’?”

“Page four.”

Lori flipped to page four and scanned the photographs.
Chase. I should have known.

Honestly, Lori would have preferred viewing photos of the exploding head.

She took a moment to reinforce her emotional walls, then spoke in a casual tone. “Monte Carlo. Saint-Tropez. The Amalfi Coast. Glitz and glamour galore. I gotta admit, I’m shocked they’re getting married in little old provincial Eternity Springs.”

“The wedding is six weeks away,” Caitlin said. “A miracle could still happen. Maybe you could talk to him, Lori. You know he’s here in town, don’t you? Skipped coming for Christmas, but shows up two days afterward. A surprise, he’d told Mom. Gonna visit three whole days. Big whoop-de-doo, if you ask me.”

Lori managed to maintain her calm. No, she hadn’t heard that Chase had come to town. Well, she could handle a three-day visit. It wasn’t like he was moving here, after all. “I will talk to him. I’ll wish him much happiness in his marriage.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Caitlin’s expression went glum as her gaze fastened on the photograph of her brother. Movie-star handsome in a black tie and three-day scruff, Chase rolled dice at a craps table, a tall, beautiful blonde resting her hand possessively on his shoulder. “I guess she’s nice enough. She does make an effort with the family, and she seems to genuinely like Chase. But that doesn’t make her the right woman for him. She is so wrong for my brother! Don’t you see it, Lori?”

Lori would sooner kick a puppy than comment on that.

Caitlin didn’t notice her lack of response as she continued her rant. “I’ll bet you a hundred dollars that she gets Botox for her wrinkles. Stephen’s wife says she’s already had a face-lift. And of course, everyone knows she’s had a boob job because that was obvious in those old
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit photos. Which, by the way, is something else I don’t get. Chase was always all about nature. What’s natural about boobs that lie like little Murphy Mountains on top of her chest? What is it about boobs that make men so stupid, anyway?”

Lori’s mouth twisted. “Well, she is an on-air personality so her appearance is important.”

Caitlin sniffed with disdain. “You’d think her wedding would be important to her. She hasn’t bought a dress yet. Can you believe that? And she’s turned almost all of the arrangements over to Mom.”

Lori had already heard that bit of gossip from her own mother. “I’m sure it will be lovely. Your mother does everything with class.”

“True.” Caitlin sighed down at the casino photograph once more. “That’s another reason why it’s hard to believe that Chase is going to marry her. I thought men married women like their mothers. Lana Wilkerson is nothing at all like Mom.”

Lori idly flipped the newsprint to another page and the photograph of a bare-chested Chase rubbing sunscreen on his fiancée’s back. A memory flashed in her mind, accompanied by a twinge of regret she didn’t want to recognize.

Once upon a time, Chase had rubbed sunscreen onto her back, his touch gentle and thrilling. However, the apartment pool deck in College Station, Texas, was a very, very long way from the French Riviera.

“Your mom is the prototypical traditional mom. Chase was never one to be happy with traditional.”

“If that’s true, then more the fool he. Although…” Caitlin cut a sharp gaze toward Lori. “I don’t know that I agree with that. He would have been happy with you.”

“Let it go, Caitlin. That ship sailed long ago.”

Just then the door swept open and Chase’s bride-to-be blew inside. Porcelain skin gone rosy with the cold stretched over high cheekbones that spoke to her Slavic ancestry. The reality TV star wore her thick blond hair piled carelessly high upon her head and diamond studs sparkled in the lobes of her ears. Long dark lashes framed big blue eyes. Her red cashmere sweater clung to her curves like a second skin. A three-carat square-cut diamond glittered on her finger.

Lana Wilkerson was a vibrant force of nature—bold, beautiful, and bigger than life. As Lori buried the tabloid beneath a stack of hairstyle magazines, she felt herself shrinking and shriveling like a raisin left out in the summer sun.

“Hello, ladies,” Lana said, her voice bright, her smile wide and white and perfect.

Lori’s tongue automatically went to that little space between her teeth behind her upper incisor.

“What a glorious day, is it not? Caitlin, I’m so sorry I’m late for our spa date. Chase took me skiing today, and we made one too many runs. Fabulous conditions on the mountain. Simply fabulous.”

She launched into a tale about Chase’s wild and reckless ways speeding down a Black Diamond hill that had Lori cringing while Lana’s gorgeous eyes sparkled with excitement. Lori darted Caitlin a sidelong glance, looking to see if Chase’s sister recognized how well her brother and this woman suited. If Lori had been the woman skiing with him, she’d have done so with her heart in her throat and visions of falls, broken bones, and traumatic brain injuries running through her head. Upon reaching the end of the run, she’d have lit into him like a firecracker rather than hug him with joy.

Neither one of them would have been happy.

Liar,
her inner voice proclaimed. His sense of adventure and daring had been one of the things that appealed most to her about Chase.

Her mother still joked that instead of giving Lori the middle name of Elizabeth, she should have gone with “Responsible.” That aspect of Lori’s personality was the result of having grown up with a single mother who worked her fingers to the bone to make ends meet and atone to her parents for her Big Mistake—getting pregnant by the town bad boy before he got sent off to jail.

Then when Lori was seventeen, Chase Timberlake had walked into her grandparents’ grocery store, and over the next few years, taught Lori all about temptation.

Lana snickered at something the nail technician said, and Lori realized that the older woman’s laugh was as lovely as her face. Lori watched her win over the customers in the salon one by one. No wonder Chase had fallen for her. The real question was, why had the Timberlake women not?

She pondered the problem while the nail tech finished her pedicure. Family dynamics were a weird animal. Lori knew that firsthand. Wasn’t her own situation fraught with tension from time to time?