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Or he could go to the party that was happening out at the fairgrounds. He’d seen a bunch of the locals out decorating the big gym at the townhall. It was new, he’d been told. The construction had been finished a few weeks before he and Van had moved here. He’d overheard a group talking about how nice it would be to have a warm place for the Winter Festival gathering. The annual festival featured skiing and snowboarding competitions, tons of crafts, and food and activities for the kids.
He was pretty sure there would be some kind of protest by the Flanders’ family, but he hadn’t figured them out yet. He hadn’t figured out much yet, and that was refreshing. Most of the time people were easy to figure out or they were easy to ignore. Not so in Bliss.
He rather thought that was why Jake had offered to send them up here while Van was in school. There had been lots of choices in Dallas, but Jake had included Adams State University. It was close to Bliss and the lodge they’d both originally worked at.
“Well, I appreciate it.” She picked up a towel she’d draped over her neatly made bed and ran it over her hair. “I’m afraid I’m new in town, and my first day here has not been a great success.”
He moved into the tiny bathroom. Normally he didn’t like to make small-talk. He wasn’t good at it. But she was awfully pretty. She was only an inch or two shorter than he was, with curly dark hair that barely brushed the tops of her ears. That hair framed a face with high cheekbones and brown eyes. It was her lips that really got to him. They were full and dusky pink. He forced himself to focus on the task ahead of him. The pull he felt was odd and disconcerting.
He was a man who could focus on a task. Sometimes way too much. He could tune out the world in a way that some people found annoying. It was one of the things he liked about this town. When he missed social cues, the folks around here simply shrugged and tried again or moved on without judgment. He’d already heard someone saying that was “just Hale.” He liked being “just Hale.”
This woman was distracting him, and he wasn’t used to being distracted.
He needed to focus on the shower. He wasn’t going to take the bait because it would lead to nothing but him making an idiot of himself. Van was the smooth one. When they had a woman with them, she was almost always into Van and put up with him because…well, he could focus on a task, and that included sex.
The sex had gotten hollow. He wanted to connect with someone, but it wouldn’t be this gorgeous goddess of a woman.
So he moved to the bathroom and picked up the showerhead. She’d placed it on the sink with her neatly put-together makeup bag and a familiar-looking medication bottle. Prescription from a national chain. It was facing out, and he immediately recognized the name of the drug. Tamoxifen.
His heart constricted. His aunt had used that medication for years after her first round of breast cancer.
“Why would you say it’s been unsuccessful?”
Damn. He hadn’t meant to ask the question. He was supposed to be disengaging. Maybe she hadn’t heard him. Maybe she was ignoring him because he was the weirdo handyman. He opened his tool kit and pulled out a Phillips-head screwdriver.
She stood in the doorway, but she’d wrapped a heavy sweater around her robe. “Well, I’m here to get in touch with a long-lost relative, but when I went out to his last known address, there was no one there. I asked a neighbor and they told me they’d never heard of him. Said the lady who used to live there was in Dallas with her sons.”
This was going to be a short job. It looked like someone had played around with the showerhead and left it loose. At some point one of the screws had come off and likely gotten cleaned up by the housekeeper. Over time and use, the showerhead had worked its way off and bent the second screw that held it on. “Who are you looking for? We have a surprising amount of connections to Dallas. My partner’s family is from that area.”
“Oh,” she said with an odd sigh. It sounded almost disappointed. Maybe she didn’t like Texas. “Uhm, I’m looking for Luthor Hughes. He used to be in the military. He was an SFC.”
He’d never studied military stuff. He was more interested in construction. “I’m not sure what that is, but I don’t know a Luthor. I know there’s a Hughes here, but he was definitely not military. He’s on the kooky side but nice enough.”
