“Okay. Sure.”
It was the most adorable cabin Victoria had ever seen, like something from a postcard. The bottom half was built of large rounded river stones, a wide stone chimney rising past the steeply gabled roof. Four broad steps led to a covered porch beneath which firewood stood neatly stacked. The front door was painted a cheery color of red, the window casings bright blue.
He led her around to the right. “Taylor and I built this deck a few years back. The owners bought the materials, and I got a discount on my rent for doing the work.”
A few simple Adirondack chairs sat on the deck, and Victoria could imagine the two of them kicking back with a few beers here on a summer evening.
Then she saw it. “Look! You have your own creek.”
It ran down from the hillside about thirty feet from the cabin, babbling its way over rocks and through groves of aspen before heading off down the mountain.
“It’s not really mine, but, yeah, it’s nice. Sometimes deer and elk come down at night to drink.”
“It must be wonderful to live that close to nature.”
He grinned. “It is—until there’s a forest fire or the creek floods.”
“What a beautiful place.” She crossed the lawn to the creek’s edge and just stood there, breathing in the stillness, a bittersweet ache in her heart. She didn’t want to leave Scarlet. She didn’t want to leavehim.
He led her to the back of the cabin, where a big electric log splitter sat beneath a tarp, firewood stacked in big, circular piles. “I’ve started getting in my wood for the winter. It gets pretty cold up here, so I’ve usually got a fire going in the woodstove.”
She liked the sound of that. “I bet it’s beautiful when it snows.”
He gave her hand a little squeeze. “Why don’t you come back and find out?”
Oh, she planned on it.
Inside, the cabin was clean and simple—and very Eric. A blocky leather sofa sat in the living room across from a flat screen TV. Magazines with titles likeOutside,Rock and Ice,Climbing, andFire and Rescuesat in neat stacks on a coffee table of polished pine around a glass vase of flowers that looked like they’d come from the wedding—sprigs of lavender, eucalyptus, purple lisianthus, and white roses.
She bent down, sniffed. “Did Lexi give you these?”
Eric looked at the flowers as if he’d never seen them. “Oh. Yeah. Nice, huh?”
There was a single bookshelf that was stacked two deep with books, DVDs, and CDs, a Bose iPod dock on the top shelf charging an old iPod classic. Photos of mountains hung in simple frames on the wall. A small wooden table sat on the far end of the room across from a small galley kitchen, its white Formica countertops sparkling clean.
“The bathroom is right there. There’s a tub and shower—the usual. The bedroom is through there. Like I said, the place is small.”
“It’s not much smaller than my condo.”
He looked surprised at this. “Really?”
The bedroom had a single four-poster bed, its handmade quilt pieced together in shades of green and brown with applique moose across the bottom.
Vic ran her hands over it. “Did your mom make this?”
“It was a Christmas present a few years back.”
“It’s amazing.”
A photo of his mother sat on a chest of drawers made of unfinished pine, the bright smile on her face and the affection in her eyes telling Vic that Eric had taken the photo himself.
“Where do you keep all your climbing gear?” She had half expected to find herself stepping over coils of rope, but so far she hadn’t seen anything.
He pushed back the sliding door of his closet. “It’s all here.”
The closet was full from floor to ceiling with neatly arranged boots, ropes, helmets, harnesses, axes, and a bunch of stuff Victoria didn’t have names for. “Wow. Okay, let me rephrase this. Where do you keep your clothes?”
He chuckled and pointed to the chest of drawers. “But, hey, no peeking at my underwear.”