RaeAnne Thayne - Willowleaf Lane

“Promise?”

“Yeah, Mom.”

If their mom were still alive, Margie Caine would drag Dylan down this mountainside by his ear and throw him back into life, whether he liked it or not.

“No hot date tonight?” he asked.

She gave a short laugh, fighting down the fierce wish she could channel a little of their mother right now. “You know me. I’ve got them lined up around the block.”

Despite all the changes, dating was one area she still hadn’t really ventured out into. She had never learned to flirt when she was a teenager.

“You ought to,” he said gruffly. “Have them lined up around the block, I mean. You just need to put a little effort into it.”

If she had been able to find it at all amusing, she would have laughed at the irony of her brother giving her advice on dating when he had become a virtual hermit.

“Thanks for the vote of encouragement. Since I’m up here, I was thinking about grabbing fifteen minutes of cardio before I go home. Do you and Tucker want to come for a walk with me?”

The dog lifted his head, perking up as much as his droopy ears and morose eyes allowed. He gave his musical wooo-wooo bark and clambered to his feet, obviously understanding the magic w-word.

Dylan, not so much. He curled that hand on his thigh again, clear reluctance shifting across his features.

“What about my dinner?”

“You can eat it later.” She ignored the growl of her stomach. A few endorphins would take care of that until she could get home to her chicken breast. “Come on. We won’t go far.”

After another moment of hesitation, Dylan slowly rose to his feet and she felt a surge of elation that was probably completely unwarranted for such a small victory. She would take it anyway. A little fresh air and movement could only be good for her brother, though she knew he puttered around the barn and attached wood shop a little.

She walked off the porch, grateful for the old tennis shoes she kept in the back of her SUV for spontaneous exercise opportunities like this one.

She and Tucker had taken a few walks up here before, usually without Dylan, so she had a passing familiarity with some of the trails that crisscrossed the mountainside among the pines and aspens. She headed toward one she liked that wended beside a small pretty creek and, after a pause, Dylan followed her.

Tucker ambled ahead, his hound dog nose sniffing the ground for the scent of any interesting creature he might encounter.

They walked in silence for a time, accompanied by the annoyed chattering of squirrels high above them and the occasional birdsong.

She breathed in deeply of the high, clear mountain air, sweet with wildflowers and pine, feeling some of the tension of her day begin to seep away. “I can’t tell you how badly I needed this today,” she said.

“Glad I could help.” Dylan’s dry tone surprised a laugh out of her.

“It’s beautiful up here, I’ll give you that. Remote but beautiful.”

“Nothing wrong with a little seclusion,” he answered.

“I suppose.”

Dylan had always been so social, always in the middle of the action. She missed that about him.

Because of the time, only an hour or so from true sunset, and because neither of them had eaten, she decided not to push too hard. After about ten minutes, they reached a small glacial lake that blazed with reflected color from the changing sky.

“Let me take your picture,” she ordered, pulling out her camera phone.

He frowned but stood obediently enough, his hand resting on the dog’s head.

“Perfect,” she said, snapping several before he could move away. She didn’t bother asking him to smile.

Behind him, the surface of the lake popped and hissed like Pop’s cheese sauce bubbling in the pan. “Looks like the fish are jumping. Do you ever come up here and cast a line?”

She regretted the words as soon as she said them, when he shrugged his left shoulder, rippling the empty sleeve.

“Yet another skill I haven’t quite mastered with one hand and one eye.”

He could do plenty of things if he would only wear the prosthesis. She knew most of his rehab had been aimed at helping him adapt to his new reality. Since his return to Hope’s Crossing, he seemed to have resorted to only figuring out how to open another whiskey bottle.

“You will,” she answered calmly.

He didn’t answer, just gazed out at the water.

Her stomach grumbled again and she sighed. “We should probably head back.”

“Yeah. Before the mosquitoes eat us alive. It’s a little tough for me to scratch these days. Hey, how do you get a one-armed man out of a tree?”

He didn’t wait for her to answer. “You wave at him.”

He seemed to think that was hilarious and was still giving that hard-sounding laugh as he turned down the trail toward his house.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE NEXT MORNING, the sun was barely a pink rim along the black silhouette of the mountains when Charlotte laced up her tennis shoes in her entryway.

Every morning it was the same. She had to force herself out of bed when what she really wanted was to curl up under her nice warm blankets, hit the Snooze on her alarm clock and capture a few more moments of bliss.

Instead, here she was in her oh-so-flattering reflective performance capris and T-shirt, no makeup, her hair yanked back into a ponytail.

She rotated her head a few times, then her shoulders to work out some of the kinks before opening the door and pushing herself outside.

Rain or shine she ran, either here or on her treadmill at home or, when she really needed motivation, at the gym.

She felt no small amount of pride at how far she had come. Even walking had felt like torture when she first started on this journey more than a year ago. With all the extra pounds she had been packing around, it had taken all her strength and will to complete a mile and a half in an hour. She had finished with twitching thigh muscles, achy calves and complete exhaustion.

After about three months of making herself walk an hour a day and increasing her pace so she was covering three to four miles, she had begun to add intervals to her workout using her cell phone as a timer, one minute of running for every two minutes she walked at a regular pace, until eventually she was jogging most of the time.

Together with a far healthier diet than the fast food and her father’s café delights she had existed on, the numbers started dropping on her scale and her clothes began to hang much looser.

After the first few moments, she discovered she actually enjoyed working out. She enjoyed being in the fresh air and the wind, and she liked taking a moment to ponder and meditate as she jogged through her beautiful surroundings. She especially savored the feeling of knowing she was doing something good and right for herself, that she was trying to repair bad habits of a lifetime.

It wasn’t yet 6:00 a.m. and most of Hope’s Crossing still slept. Here and there, a few lights were on and she could see glimpses of people moving behind curtains, the flicker of a television screen at one house, a car backing out of a driveway at another.

Even in July, the high altitude air was crisp. Tourists in her store often remarked at the temperature span. It could be mid-eighties in the afternoon but drop to just above freezing in the hours before dawn. That was good chocolate-dipping temperature. In a short time, her employees would be busy creating delicious things to sell at Sugar Rush.

She ran down the hill, past Alex’s restaurant in a renovated old fire station, then took a side street and circled around back up toward Sweet Laurel Falls.

By the time she finished the first mile, she forgot about how badly she hated working out. Who wouldn’t love this surge of endorphins, the invigorating wind in her face?