Spirit Lake Read Online Free PDF Page B

attorney."
    His brain came alert. The condemnation sign. “When?"
    “They could choose to burn it just about any day now. It has to be gone before the end of summer."
    His mind raced. Any day? What if he needed more time? And what about the legal papers on this place, folded now in his pack next to him? Come to think of it, he hadn't read them carefully. He assumed Mike knew what he was doing. Would he have to see this sheriff after all, and now an attorney?
    Panicked, Cole fished for information. “Doesn't somebody own the place?"
    She scoffed and pulled her jacket closer around her, the knife still in her hand. “An older lady owned it a long time ago, but she's dead now. There's been plenty of public notice in the papers, but nobody wants to pay the back taxes for, well, that thing."
    The hand with the knife jabbed at the rotting house. Her obvious disdain for the property ruffled him. Didn't she remember how it used to look? He wanted to ask, but couldn't. Then there was his pride. This house had been in his family. Great-aunt Flora Tilden had come to them via a brief marriage, but still, she had been shirt-tail relation.
    He probed some more, playing the innocent. “The old woman, she lived alone? No relatives to pay the taxes?"
    “Nobody who cares."
    That stung. Instinctively, Cole knew she wasn't condemning just a house. She was condemning his whole family. No. Try him. Just him. Guilt rose and he wanted to rush off the verandah, take Laurel in his arms and explain away the years. But he couldn't. He didn't want to drag her into his messed up life again.
    She turned and started a stiff walk through the tall grass and brush, fading into the mist hanging over the lake.
    Clenching his jaw against the pulsations in his leg, he limped after her. Reaching the top of the embankment, he peered down at Laurel in her small craft. After three yanks, her boat coughed and started.
    “Could use a tune-up.” It came out of his mouth before he could stop himself. “I could do that for you."
    She glanced up, scorn deepening the shadows across her eyes. “Don't hang out here. You hear me?"
    A definite warning. The chill of it tightened the imaginary vise on his leg until he couldn't breathe. “A couple of days.” He felt like he could sleep for a whole week.
    “Two days,” she snapped, turning her face back to the water. “Then I call the sheriff about your trespassing."
    Then she motored away, and he watched her until she became a murky, watercolor rendition of herself. When the boat's sputtering stopped on the opposite shore, he arched a brow. So she lived in the log cabin. Alone? He remembered when her father started building it. Cole helped lay flat rocks for a walkway, but he never got to finish the job.
    Fire lanced through his calf then. He leaned down ... and found his leg wrapped in a woman's undershirt under his jeans. So that's what those busy hands had done last night. He shook his head, thinking about her comforting a stranger even as she must have feared for her life. Didn't she learn anything from what happened fifteen years ago?
    He straightened up, turning to stare at the old house. That “thing,” she'd called it. The reason he'd returned. Or was it? He could have hired a detective to scour the place first, but he hadn't.
    No, it wasn't just the house he'd come back to explore. He'd come back because of his own feelings of emptiness that had gnawed at him since the day he'd left this place. Like wearing the wrong size clothes, he'd walked through life uncomfortably, making do with a murky memory that never quite allowed him to touch it.
    He shivered again. Then the heat came with the new memory of the grown woman lying beside him last night.
    He closed his eyes against a damnedable thought.
    He wanted to take her up to the attic in that old house before him now, crush her in his arms, and kiss her until all of his ills were cured.
    Opening his eyes, he looked at the decrepit house again. It was the