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But he didn’t want to talk about that either, so all he said was “Yeah, well, that’s why it was a one-off. No point promising something that’s not going to happen.”
And it wouldn’t.
Of that he was utterly certain.
Chapter 6
The next three weeks were busy ones for Beth. Now that the gallery was open, she, Izzy, and Indigo found their schedules filled with stock sourcing and production, record-keeping and banking issues, not to mention having gallery shifts to cover.
Because as it turned out, Brightwater Dreams was a hit with the tourists. Many came to view Evan’s paintings (Finn had managed to wheedle another couple out of him) and were thrilled to find out he was a resident of the town. Then, once they finished looking at the paintings, they started looking at the gallery’s other offerings, and once they started looking, they started spending.
It was very, very pleasing, and the three of them were ecstatic about how it was turning out.
Izzy had met with Cait to see if the Rose could start doing café meals and/or lunches for the tourists during busy weekends, so those who weren’t doing outdoor adventure activities could poke around the gallery, then have a nice lunch afterward.
Beth was over the moon that her first lot of jewelry sold out quickly, then got slightly panicked when she realized she was going to have to make more—and keep on making more to satisfy the demand.
Which was why, despite her initial worries about living in Clint’s farmhouse, mainly based around Finn owning the place and possibly being around far more than was comfortable, the shift from the Rose to Clint’s was a welcome one.
She and Indigo moved in the week following the gallery opening, and it was great to finally have her own room again after over a month of living out of a suitcase at the hotel.
Clint’s farmhouse was a rustic wooden building with a steeply pitched roof of red corrugated steel, a gabled front room, and a wide porch at the front of the house.
Inside it was basic but comfortable, with a front room that housed a big wood-burner, a small kitchen and bathroom at the back, and a couple of bedrooms on the other side of the hallway.
Clint had been happy to leave all his furniture behind, so they didn’t have to face furnishing it, but Beth had already privately decided she was going to get a new bed when she had some money, because the one in the bedroom she’d claimed was uncomfortably hard.
Not that she was complaining. Because the best part about Clint’s was the workshop space and the bench that Finn had talked about, which was indeed big, and there were plenty of places for her to put her jeweler’s tools.
She hadn’t been able to do any work since she’d left Deep River—or not proper work—and having the space to put everything away and store the raw materials she’d collected over the past month was fantastic.
Indigo was insanely happy there was enough room to do her dyeing too, bustling about with dye pots and drying racks and bins full of undyed yarn, then doing some more bustling in the house, making it habitable.
The only downside was the house being a good fifteen minutes’ drive from the town, which would have been a problem if Clint hadn’t also left them his old truck and a quad bike to use as runarounds.
Beth loved the quad bike but she didn’t know how to drive it, so she stuck with the truck instead to ferry her and Indigo—who didn’t drive—up and down from town. It took some getting used to driving a right-hand drive vehicle, and several times she accidentally drove on the wrong side of the road, but it didn’t matter too much, not when there were so very few other cars on the road too.
She didn’t see a lot of Finn. He and the other Pure Adventure NZ team offered to help her and Indigo move, but since there was really nothing to move but their suitcases, she and Indigo graciously declined.
He’d visited once, briefly, to see how she and Indigo were doing and to tell them that if there was anything they needed to let him know, but apart from that, she didn’t see him much at all.
Toby Miller and his two sons from the neighboring farm managed the day-to-day running of the stables, while Finn would visit every couple of days to keep an eye on things, Karl at his heels since apparently, Izzy had told her, Clint had given his dog to Finn. But he didn’t come inside the farmhouse, not even to say hello. Not that she was there even when he did, because she was usually doing a shift at the gallery.
She only saw him on the periphery, helping tourists out by the lake or sitting with Chase and Levi in the pub. Once, she saw him take a small group out on a horse trek and found herself watching him as he rode, his lean, muscular body at ease in the saddle.
It was sexy. He was sexy.
Not that she was looking for him or anything, or even noticing him. And she definitely wasn’tstillthinking about that night on the couch in HQ. No, most definitely not.
What she was doing was concentrating on this new life she’d built for herself in Brightwater Valley, with the gallery and making her jewelry. Surrounded by nature and making friends with a whole new bunch of people who only ever knew her as the positive, sunny Beth she was here.
Not the sad, gray, scared Beth she’d been back in Deep River.
Life was good.
So good that at first she didn’t realize how much more tired she was in the evenings, a lot more tired than normal, and that she was falling into bed sometimes as early as eight o’clock. And sometimes she felt a bit sick in the mornings, but surely that had to be a virus.
Then one morning in the gallery, a customer came in with an egg sandwich from Bill’s general store next door, and Beth abruptly knew she was going to be sick.
