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in general. Jane shuddered.
    “Do you have the keys?”
    While Lars unlocked the door, Jane watched
him from where she stood in front of the house, arms crossed,
sucking on her lollipop, glad her sunglasses shielded her eyes. For
all he knew, she was evaluating the cottage. But, she wasn’t. She
already knew everything she needed to know about this disaster of a
housing debacle. And she had a feeling it wasn’t going to get any
better when he unlocked the door and showed her around the inside.
No, Jane was checking out his long legs in worn jeans and the way
the muscles in his back flexed when he reached forward to unlock
the door. She sighed, finally removing her sunglasses and heading
up two concrete steps into the living room of the small
cottage.
    She couldn’t help it. She had this sudden
mental picture of Samara’s face in her head and she burst out
laughing.
    The room had a cream, low-pile, wall-to-wall
carpet, a living room set from JCPenney or Sears, a modest dining
room table with four chairs, and a kitchen area with a white
linoleum floor. The two cheaply paneled walls in the living room
had several stock photographs of elk, deer and wolves blown up and
framed without mats in serviceable medium-wood frames.
    Lars crossed his arms, his eyes wide and
surprised, a sour expression puckering his lips.
    Jane stopped laughing.
    She gestured to the four picture windows
that spanned the length of the room, offering sweeping views of the
vast meadow and mountains beyond.
    “The view is very nice,” she said quietly,
putting the lollipop back in her mouth.
    “It’s brand new,” he answered coolly. “It
was just an empty cottage before. We had it…fixed up.”
    “Yes. So you said.” She swallowed, looking
at him. She felt ashamed of herself for laughing, for making him
feel bad.
    He turned toward the door. “Maybe I should
start bringing your stuff in.”
    “Lars,” she started gently, stopping him,
but he didn’t turn around. She took the lollipop out of her mouth
and crossed the room, touching the bare skin of his upper arm with
her free hand. He turned around slowly, looking down at her hand
first, then into her eyes. “Just so you know…If it were me staying here, I’d be thrilled. The views are beautiful, and”—she
spread her arms, gesturing to the furnishings and decoration—“I
have pretty simple tastes. I’d be happy here. Very happy.
Very pleased.”
    “ She won’t like it?”
    Jane shook her head slowly, adjusting her
cap and putting the lollipop back in her mouth.
    “Anything we can do about it?”
    Jane sighed and walked to the back of the
cottage, peeking into the small bathroom, master bedroom and
smaller guest bedroom. Lars leaned against the front door, probably trying to look nonchalant, his feelings betrayed by his arms
still crossed protectively over his chest.
    The simple answer was no. No, there was no
way in a million years that Samara Amaya was going to happily stay in this 600-square-foot, flimsy, third-class
vacation cottage. Didn’t matter that the carpet smelled new, and
the linoleum was spic and span. Didn’t matter that no one had
probably dared sit on the toilet yet, and the views were gorgeous.
Didn’t matter that good people had gone out of their way to make it
as comfortable for her as possible.
    Lars tilted his head to the side, raising
his eyebrows in question, and she couldn’t bear to disappoint him.
She smiled at him with unforced warmth.
    “We’ll just have to make it work.”
    ***
    In the end, Lars upended the bed in the guest
bedroom and put all of Samara’s luggage in there. It would serve as
her dressing room, and Jane told him that she would get a room at
the motel with the rest of the crew, coming back to the cottage
early in the morning to be on-hand for Samara before she woke up
each day. Lars said he’d have an extra key made so that Jane could
come and go freely.
    To save his life, Lars couldn’t understand
the fuss. For heaven’s sake, it