Willowleaf Lane Read Online Free PDF Page A

instance.
    He smiled as he drove back toward the canyon, though it was tinged with a shadow of guilt. Now there was someone he should have remained in contact with over the years. Dermot had always been kind. Hell, he had given Billie Gregory a job when no one else would and had kept her on even when she showed up half the time blitzed, when she bothered to show up at all.
    Thinking of Dermot inevitably led his thoughts to Charlotte. He remembered again that shock when she had identified herself at the candy store.
    Charlotte Caine. He couldn’t get over how she had changed. All that gold hair shot through with hints of red, the big blue eyes, the sexy, curvy figure he could see beneath the apron she wore.
    Was she anything at all like he remembered?
    When he had known her before, she had been more than a little overweight and had hidden those stunning eyes behind big thick-framed glasses. While she could have moments of quick wit and she was as kind as her father, she could also be painfully shy.
    If he remembered correctly, she had been a couple or three years behind him in school though she was four years younger. She had been ahead a grade and he had been behind because of the dark time after his father had died when he was eight, when Billie had gone off the deep end and dragged him aimlessly around the country from flophouse to homeless shelter to the backseat of her car.
    He had hated being older than everybody else but still struggled in school—with English class, especially. He had never been a very big reader until long road trips with the Pioneers when he had little else to do. Charlotte, on the other hand, could have been an English teacher herself, even at twelve. She knew her stuff and he had been savvy enough to take advantage of the generous help she offered him.
    He would venture to say, Charlotte Caine had been the only reason he had been able to keep his grades up high enough to allow him to participate in school sports.
    In a roundabout way, he supposed he had her to thank for his whole career with the Pioneers—which didn’t explain the instant attraction that had been simmering in his gut since the moment he had walked into that candy store and saw her standing behind the counter looking fresh and lovely.
    What was wrong with him? He didn’t have time for this. Harry Lange had offered him one chance at redemption, one chance to move beyond the demoralizing isolation of the past year and prove he was more than lousy headlines.
    He couldn’t screw this up. He needed to focus on repairing his damaged reputation, not on Charlotte Caine, no matter how much she had changed.
    * * *
    T HIS WAS THE hardest thing she had to face.
    Other people had their Rubicons, their Pikes Peaks. She had her dad’s café.
    As she walked from Sugar Rush down the street and around the corner to Center of Hope Café after work, her stomach rumbled in anticipation. She swore she could already smell delicious things sidling through the air, tempting and seductive.
    Yeah, she worked all day in a candy store, surrounded by chocolates and caramels and toffee, but there she could resist temptation. It was her business and she certainly wanted to produce a delicious product but she supposed it was a little like being the teetotaling owner of a distillery. She didn’t mind a little fudge in moderation once in a while but she never had a desire to stuff herself until she was sick.
    This, though. The gnawing craving for some of her father’s comfort food sometimes kept her up at night.
    Gooey rich macaroni and cheese. Shepherd’s pie, with thick roast beef and creamy mashed potatoes coating the top like a hard snowfall on the surrounding mountains. Cinnamon-laced apple pie with Pop’s famous homemade vanilla ice cream.
    Her dad’s café specialized in the kind of food that numbed and sedated, that soothed hunger pangs and heartache in equal measure.
    Despite eighteen months of struggling to change a lifelong addiction to it,