Chapter 4

4

HAYDEN

E verything inside me screamed for me to return to Laurel’s cabin. I fucking hated to leave her, but I convinced myself to give her a little time with the reassurance that she wouldn’t be able to leave town for a while.

I jogged back to the inn and hurried inside, taking a deep breath of the warm, sugary-scented air. Damn, either Raven or her amazing pastry chef were baking cookies.

“Mayor Douglas.”

Turning around, I grinned at the sight of my old boss, Bethenny, holding a baby in her arms. “Bethenny,” I greeted in response. “It still feels weird using your first name instead of calling you mayor or boss.”

She laughed and hoisted the little one—who wasn’t quite a year old—onto her shoulder. “Raven tells me you have a friend staying with us?” Her emphasis on the word friend made me sigh.

“Don’t let her pull you into her matchmaking schemes, Bethenny,” I growled.

She blinked innocently at me before smiling and walking past me into the kitchen. Unable to resist the lure of freshly baked treats, I shed my coat and hung it on a hook before following her.

Raven looked up from the oven as I entered and smiled. “Couldn’t resist, huh?”

I rolled my eyes. “Name one person who can resist the cookies you and Vivienne make?”

She grinned. “These are new. Chocolate and peanut butter cookie batter mixed with chunks of sugar cookie and dark chocolate, then swirled with smoked marshmallow cream.”

My mouth watered as I snatched a cookie from the cooling racks on the island and shoved it in my mouth before she could yell at me to put it back.

“Howy funkee hillll,” I groaned around a mouth stuffed with cookie. I swallowed and grabbed another. “These are amazing.” Then I quickly devoured the second one.

“That’s all you get, Hayden,” Raven scolded, smacking my hand with her spatula. “These are for the guests.”

“Hey!” I yelped. “I’m a guest!”

Raven snorted, but before she could toss back something snarky, Colin interrupted us.

He’d come strolling into the kitchen with his trusty clipboard while I was eating my first cookie, daring to grab one while Raven was distracted by me.

“Actually, he’s right, Raven,” Colin drawled before eating another cookie.

“Hey, how come you aren’t smacking him for eating the cookies?” I grumbled.

“Because I own half this place, and she couldn’t run it without me,” he said matter-of-factly.

Raven glared at him, then shrugged. “Maybe,” she muttered as she moved to the opposite counter and scooped balls of dough out onto an empty cookie sheet. “But you don’t have to be so smug about it.” She pointed the scooper at him with narrowed eyes. “Hot chocolate and whipped cream are the best combination, but it can be replaced with cinnamon.”

Colin scoffed. “I don’t?—”

“Wait,” I cut in, his earlier comment suddenly sinking in. “What did you mean about me being right?”

“Oh, about you being a guest,” Colin explained, narrowly avoiding Raven’s spatula after stealing another cookie.

“I’m not staying. I’m headed home.”

Colin shook his head while perusing his clipboard. “Not possible. They just closed the road down the mountain. A tree fell and caused a huge snowdrift to shift onto the road.”

“Well shit,” I muttered, grabbing my phone from the pocket of my slacks. I had about a dozen texts from my deputy, the sheriff, and the meteorologist at our local news station.

Colin scratched a few things on the paper and frowned. “You’ll have to give me a little time to figure out where to put you.”

“You don’t have a room I can stay in?”

“You called in a favor for our last room,” Raven informed me, munching on one of the fresh, warm cookies. “And we’ve already been shifting people around to free up space for people who were up here skiing but not staying at the inn.”

“Why doesn’t he stay with his friend?” Bethenny piped up.

I’d almost forgotten she was there, and I turned to glare at her. “We don’t even know each other,” I grunted.

Bethenny’s eyes moved in Raven’s direction, and her lips tipped up.

Hell fucking no . I was not about to let these two play matchmaker. They’d take credit for the romance between Laurel and me, and I’d never hear the end of it.

“That’s a great idea,” Colin announced, smirking at me.

That bastard was a fucking dead man.

“Look, I’m not going to pretend that I don’t intend to keep Laurel,” I admitted begrudgingly. “But we just met this afternoon.”

“And now you have a perfectly legitimate reason for spending more time with her so you can make her fall in love with you.” Bethenny grinned, and I swung my gaze to Raven, who was trying not to look smug.

“Stop looking like this was all your doing,” I snapped. “You did not play matchmaker! I’m not going to let you women take credit for this.”

Colin snorted, but he didn’t look up from his clipboard.

Raven sighed dramatically. “Do you really think I just happened to have one more cabin available, Hayden?”

My spirits sank. Fucking hell . I was going to have to let these little busybodies claim that they’d had a hand in bringing me and Laurel together.

“Where the hell is Jake when I need him to take your devious minds off me?” I groaned.

Raven’s nose scrunched in annoyance. “He’s using my sister’s cabin to…well, I don’t know what…fight? Do the sleigh ride slide? Whatever it is…with his secret wife.”

“His what?” I choked out.

Raven frowned. “Yeah, I don’t know what the candy canes is going on with all the men in my life having hidden wives.” I knew Colin had shown up with a surprise wife the same year Raven had married Caleb. But this was the first I was hearing about her brother being married.

“You don’t know what’s going on with them?” I asked, a little shocked that the woman who seemed to know everything was clueless about her brother’s apparent marriage.

“Caleb won’t let me interfere,” she grumbled.

Speaking of the devil, Raven’s husband walked into the room and made a beeline for his wife. “What is it you’re blaming me for, baby?” he asked as he put his arms around her.

“Not letting me help Jake when I could?—”

“No.”

“But I could?—”

“Forget it, baby.”

“But what if?—”

“Let them work it out.”

“If I could just?—”

“Do you remember what happened the last time we had this argument?” he murmured. Raven’s skin flushed, and she practically melted into Caleb.

My face screwed up in disgust. “For fuck’s sake. I don’t want to see this shit. She’s like my little sister, Caleb.”

Raven’s husband grinned at me. “You’ll understand when you have your own woman.”

Raven perked up. “Oh! So I helped?—”

“I’m leaving,” I announced as I stole another cookie before turning on my heel and marching out of the kitchen.

I was shrugging on my coat when Colin came into the hallway. “All joking aside,” he stated. “I was serious about the road closure.”

“Yeah.” I held up my phone to show him the missed calls and texts. “I got that. I’m going to go return the calls in Raven’s office.”

Colin cocked his head to the side and studied me for a moment. “I was also serious when I said there is no other place for you except the cabin we gave to your friend. Even the couches and sleeping bags are spoken for.”

My lips slowly curved into a wicked smile. “Even if they weren’t, I’d still be using that excuse. Although, I haven’t figured out how the fuck I’m going to keep my hands off her.”

“Ah.” Colin chuckled. “You just didn’t want the girls to know you were happy to take advantage of the situation.”

“These women—and that includes your wife, jackass—need to find something better to do than trying to ‘help’ people find romance. Why can’t you fucking control your women?”

Colin burst into a belly-shaking laugh, and I watched him in confusion until he finally caught his breath. “Seriously? They let us put on a good show of being in charge, but do you really think a single one of us isn’t completely whipped by our wives? Yeah…we’ll see what you have to say after you’ve put a ring on your girl’s finger.” Then he walked away, still chuckling.

Rolling my eyes, I finished donning my coat, hat, scarf, and gloves. I would treat Laurel like a fucking queen, but she certainly wouldn’t be leading me around by my jingle balls.

For fuck’s sake. You’re starting to sound like Raven .

I pulled open the back door and sucked in a breath of frozen air when a blast of wind hit me. Quickly, I wrapped my scarf around the lower half of my face. In the short time I’d been inside, the snow had turned to huge, fast-falling flakes, and it was impossible to see even a foot in front of me. After spending my life in Winter Falls, I wasn’t caught unprepared. I withdrew a pair of ski goggles from my inner coat pocket and put them on so I could at least keep my eyes open.

The walkways had been heavily salted, so I could just make out the path on the ground despite the furious snowfall. I knew the resort's layout like the back of my hand, so I slowly made my way toward the cabin where I’d left Laurel.

By the time I reached it, I was so covered in snow that I most likely resembled the abominable snowman or a yeti. It was too fucking cold to spend time trying to shake it all off, so I just pounded my gloved hand against the door. Since the fabric obscured my knuckles from rapping sharply on the wood, I had to thump on the door really hard.

A few seconds later, it swung open, and my hands flew up to cover my ears at the piercing sound of a scream.