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Odds were his intruder walked on two feet rather than four.
Noah had to be smart so this situation didn’t flare out of control.
The recent snowfall served Noah well in that it muffled his footsteps. He approached the building at an angle that he knew made him difficult to spot by anyone—or anything—inside. Drawing close, he stopped and listened.Click. Click. Click. Squeak. Swish. Squeak. Swish.
In an instant, Noah recognized the sounds. The click was a lighter. The squeak and swish were the opening and closing of a door on one of his dollhouses. What the hell? The structures were created to be set ablaze but at a fire station, not in Noah’s workshop.
Angry more than afraid at this point, Noah strode toward the barn’s front door and shoved it open. What he found inside stopped him in his tracks.
A kid. A little boy. Seven or eight years old, he’d guess, wearing outdoor gear. Blond hair peeked out from beneath a red stocking cap. Carrying a BIC lighter in his hand, he stood looking at the shelves lining the wall where half a dozen dollhouses in various stages of construction sat. Finally, the kid jerked his head around to stare at Noah, wonder and excitement glowing in his big blue eyes.
Noah growled. “Who the hell are you?”
The boy’s expression quickly transformed from wonder to accusation, and he declared, “You’re not Santa Claus!”
Genevieve crossed the fingers of her right hand behind her back as she observed Gage Throckmorton flip through thestack of French movie posters that she’d stacked on her dining table. She’d asked the Colorado rancher to drop by her house this morning on his way to his standing weekly appointment at the barbershop. Gage wore his poker face, so she couldn’t judge his reaction to her purchase based on his expression.
She’d spent a pretty penny on the posters, an unexpected find during the sisters’ trip she and Helen had taken to Germany to visit the Christmas markets in December. After discovering a pair of vintage posters at a booth in Bonn, she’d learned that the vendor had an entire collection of French posters of classic American film noir movies. Knowing they’d be perfect to grace the walls of The Emily, she had met the vendor at his shop and agonized over which posters to choose. Finally, an impatient Helen convinced her to buy them all. Genevieve had shipped them home and waited on tenterhooks for the box to arrive in Lake in the Clouds.
Like almost everything she and Helen had bought on their Christmas market extravaganza, the shipment home had been slow to arrive. She hadn’t told Gage about her purchase, and she was worried he wouldn’t love them as much as she did. The man had been surprisingly opinionated about interior decorating choices for the theater. After butting heads with him repeatedly, Genevieve challenged him about it. He’d explained that he was making selections he believed his Emily would have made.
Genevieve quit arguing with him after that. But oh, she wanted him to like these posters.
However, he’d worked his way halfway through the stack and had yet to speak a word. Genevieve’s nerves were stretched tight.
If he hates them, I’ll resell them on eBay. It’ll be no big deal.
No, I won’t resell them. The Emily is my project, too. So I get to have some say-so.
Compromise. We will simply have to find a way to compromise.
She crossed her left-hand fingers, too.
Finally, having studied all twelve posters, Gage let out a low, slow whistle. “Genevieve. I am in awe.”
Her tension eased. “You like them?”
“Like them!Le Faucon Maltais.Le Grand Sommeil.Les Enchaînés. Bogart. Alan Ladd. Orson Welles. Bacall. Ingrid Bergman. Veronica Lake! It’s a treasure trove!”
Whew.“We talked about tracking down vintage posters for musicals, but we never discussed detective movies or film noir. I didn’t know how you felt about it.”
“Love it. I don’t think you can beat Bogart and Bacall. This was a great find, Genevieve.”
Genevieve beamed from the praise. “They’ve given me all sorts of ideas about programs for the theater. Depends on which direction we want to go with it.”
He looked up from the movie posters and pinned her with his crystalline blue-eyed gaze. “What do you mean?”
Goodness, the man is fine to look at.Genevieve forced her attention back to the matter at hand. “This theater project began on a lark.”
He shot her a grin that made Genevieve’s toes tingle. “Actually, it was more of a lie at the time.”
“That’s harsh, Gage.” What happened was that Genevieve had conceived of the idea on the spur of the moment to ward off gossip about Gage’s presence at her home very early one morning. It had been an innocent visit. Gage had been widowed less than a year and was still deeply grieving his wife. But small-town tongues like to wag, so Genevieve gave them something positive to wag about withher theater-redevelopment partnership plan. “I like to think the idea was inspired.”
“Okay, yeah. I’ll give you that. So, tell me what’s on your mind about our direction with The Emily.”
“I think we have some mission drift, and it’s my fault.”
Gage removed the reading glasses he’d donned to study the posters and slipped them into his shirt pocket. “Mission drift?”
