Angel's Rest(26)

Nic dropped down on her knees. “Sage? Honey, what is it? What’s wrong? Where are you hurting?”

“I’m okay,” she replied softly. Weakly. “I’m okay.”

“No, obviously you’re not,” Nic snapped. “Gabe, I keep a medical bag in the tool box of my truck. Would you get it for me?”

“No. I’m fine.” Sage lifted her head and rolled back on her heels. “Really.” Her pained gaze met Nic’s, then lifted to Gabe. He sucked in a breath. He recognized that look. It was a unique glaze of horror, agony, and guilt. He’d seen it in his brothers’ eyes the night over twenty years ago when they started the fire that almost destroyed a town and did destroy their family. He’d seen it in the eyes of the man who’d confessed the terrible truth about a planned attack on America that ultimately led to Gabe’s “death.”

For the past nine months, he’d seen it every time he looked in the mirror.

She cleared her throat. “I … uh … must have been another pesky acid flashback.”

“Yeah, right,” Nic replied. “This from Eternity Springs’ resident health nut. You tell me what happened right now or I’m loading you into the truck and laying rubber to a hospital.”

Gabe noted the long-distance lens on the camera as he reached out and took Sage Anderson’s hand, helping her to her feet. “You saw something in your viewfinder, didn’t you?”

She nodded. Shuddered. “It was … nature. A fox brought down a rabbit. I don’t know why it hit me that way. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

Nic gave her friend a relieved hug, and while the two women embraced, Sage looked over Nic’s shoulder and met Gabe’s gaze. Silent understanding passed between them. Acid flashback, no. Flashback of a real experience triggered by violence, you bet. “It’s survival of the fittest out there,” he observed. “Laws of nature are seldom pretty.”

“They break your heart.”

“That they do, Ms. Anderson. That they do.”

Nic released Sage and stepped back, a considering look in her eyes as she studied them both. Nic Sullivan wasn’t a fool, and she recognized that something more had happened here. Gabe braced for an intrusive question, but she surprised him. “Guess what, Sage? While you were out here communing with nature, I was busy saving Eternity Springs.”

“Oh, yeah? And how did you manage that?”

“I used my charm and my persuasive abilities and my business acumen to convince Mr. Callahan here to design the cornerstone of our revitalization project.”

Sage arched a question brow toward Gabe. “Is that true?”

He rubbed the back of his neck and made a show of considering. After a long moment, he shook his head. “No. She’s wrong.”

He watched Nic’s face fall and stilled a grin. His expression serious, he added, “It was the brownies that did it.”





FIVE





Over the next few weeks, the riot of fall colors disappeared from the mountains as aspens and cottonwoods dropped their leaves. Winter arrived in Eternity Springs with chilling winds and falling temperatures, but only a dusting of snow. The last seasonal stragglers departed town, and Nic and her fellow year-rounders settled into their winter routines.

Folks tended to congregate at the Mocha Moose, a coffee house and Internet café, and the Red Fox Pub, where they visited with their neighbors and fretted about the scarcity of snowfall in southern Colorado. A slow start to the ski season meant fewer people in the mountains, which meant fewer adventuresome, tired-of-the-lines people wandering into town to spend their precious tourist dollars. Luckily, Celeste Blessing’s repair and renovation dollars were taking up the slack. The amount of activity had caused one grateful business owner to wonder if the bars found in her cellar really had been gold bars painted silver as a disguise.

The Cellar Bride and her thirty pieces of silver fired the imaginations of Eternity Springs’ citizens. Speculation as to the circumstances that led to the bride’s entombment in Cavanaugh House’s root cellar was just the sort of mystery people loved to discuss on a cold and otherwise uneventful winter’s night.

Once Gabe had agreed to participate in Celeste’s healing center plans, he and Celeste had held a series of meetings in Nic’s kitchen, where they discussed Celeste’s vision of the healing center and hammered out a work agreement that suited them both. Nic believed the final result had to be the strangest contract ever negotiated.