Long Range (Joe Pickett Book 20)(31)

Candy wriggled into a pair of yoga pants and a tight spandex top. She turned slowly in front of the mirror and looked at herself from every angle. She wished her thighs were slimmer, but that had always been a problem. Fortunately, he’d never pointed that out.

This, by far, was the best situation she’d ever had, and she was determined not to lose it. During the evening, after her nap and when Tom was gone, she’d walk through all of the rooms with a glass of wine and pinch herself.

Like Tom, she’d been married before, but in her case it was twice. The first time she’d lived in a double-wide trailer outside of Williston, North Dakota, which was quite unlike the failing dairy farm she’d grown up on in southern Nebraska. She’d never been as cold or as lonely as she had been in North Dakota. Although Brent made good wages in the Bakken oil fields, the money never went as far as it should have, given the inflated prices of everything during the energy boom and Brent’s penchant for wasting it. Brent never saw the incongruity of driving his new yellow Corvette home and parking it in a snowdrift by the side of the trailer at night. She did, though.

Her second husband, Nicolas, worked as a financial planner in Bismarck when she met him and he wore a tie and drove an SUV and he urged her to order another glass of wine when they had lunch together to discuss a plan that would result in Candy and Brent’s fiscal stability. Brent hadn’t thought the meeting was necessary, but Candy knew it was. He feared she’d try to put him on a budget.

But the actual result of the lunch, once Candy realized how handsome and charming Nicolas came across, was: Goodbye, Brent.

*

UNFORTUNATELY, THOUGH, NICOLAS turned out to be a very unhappy man. What he really wanted—and he confessed to her six months after her divorce to Brent was final and they had married—was to go off the grid and “get back to nature.” Nicolas revealed to Candy that he’d been born a hundred and fifty years too late and he craved a simpler and more basic existence that actually meant something tangible. He wanted to kill and catch their food and make love to her under the warm hides of big-game animals he’d shot and tanned himself. He wanted to be one with the earth, and he was sure it would fill up his heart.

They’d moved from North Dakota to Alaska, which was even colder. The log cabin he built for them was on the bank of the Chatanika River thirty-five miles north of Fairbanks. The first fall, Nicolas grew out his beard and killed a moose and a caribou, and caught salmon and Arctic graylings in the river. He talked for hours about writing a book about his journey back to the simple life, but he never started it. Candy drove the snowmobile an hour each way to the post office to retrieve the parcels of fashionable clothing that Stitch Fix sent every month. They were too impractical to wear—but she kept them all.

While Nicolas was on a two-week bear hunt with some neighbors, Candy strapped all of her Stitch Fix boxes onto the back of a sled and towed it behind the snowmobile to Fairbanks, where she used a stash of cash and Nicolas’s credit card to buy a used minivan. Then she motored south for forty-one hours and over two thousand miles until she collapsed from exhaustion at a resort near Whitefish, Montana, where she slept for two days straight.

Candy had no idea she was one of the few non-attendees of a national conference at the resort when she dressed in her best Stitch Fix cocktail dress and went to the bar that night. But that’s when she met Tom, who was recently divorced and lonely and attending the professional event from northern Wyoming.

She thought a lot about that double-wide trailer and that drafty log cabin when she walked through Tom’s home with her glass of wine.

*

CANDY GRABBED A plastic bottle of Vitamin Water from the refrigerator and selected a jacket from the back closet because it was getting colder every night as fall came. Her state-of-the-art yoga studio was located a hundred yards from the house in the loft of the sprawling horse barn. It had been completed the previous summer, but she’d yet to teach any classes in it.

There were two reasons for that. The first was she didn’t know many locals and she had no network to get the word out. Her target clientele were women like her, of a certain age, who had free time during the day to drive out to the property. She didn’t want super-athletic young things who would show her up and create a judgmental environment for her clients.

Candy knew there was a way to find those kind of women—she didn’t want any men, either—and she’d recently learned about the members of the Eagle Mountain Club and considered it a target-rich environment. Unfortunately, by the time she’d settled on a word-of-mouth marketing campaign among the older female spouses of the club, it was fall, and they’d left the place.

The other reason was she enjoyed having the studio all to herself. Tom had never pressured her about opening it up to strangers, and until that happened, she felt no reason to do so.

*

TO AVOID THE HASSLE of keying the password into the alarm system for the front door, Candy left the house through the four-car garage. There was an illuminated pathway outside from the side garage door to the barn and her studio.

Tom’s new gunmetal-gray Ford Raptor pickup was parked next to her Mercedes. Tom loved his pickup, and he’d explained to her that it cost $53,000—as much as a luxury car—but that because it was a pickup it didn’t raise as many eyebrows among the locals as a Mercedes or BMW would have. Candy herself didn’t mind being seen in the Mercedes that Tom had passed along to her. In fact, she reveled in it.