A Little Too Late (Madigan Mountain)

I suppose it’s possible I won’t set eyes on Reed Madigan again before he goes back to California. Those two minutes in my office might be the last time I ever see him.

And that’s as it should be.

But my heart doesn’t care. Suddenly, the resort is a minefield of potential Reed Madigan sightings. When I cross the hotel lobby after work, I’m surreptitiously checking my peripheral vision for a pair of broad shoulders. When I walk over to the ski school office to pick up a folder, I expect our paths to cross.

And when they don’t, I’m both relieved and disappointed.

I am a fool. We’re not even friends. Reed Madigan is just a man I used to know.

Intimately.

Very intimately. So intimately that I can’t stop thinking about him while I bake a double batch of my cream cheese brownies for girls’ night. And when I find myself digging for my eyelash curler at the bottom of my makeup bag, I realize the situation is truly dire.

Reed is the only man on the planet who has ever made me want to pinch my eyelashes with a metal torture device, before carefully applying eye makeup. I ransack my closet for a nice top, even though I’m going to put my coat over it before the fifty-yard walk to Callie’s apartment.

He’d better fly back to Silicon Valley before I totally lose my marbles.

I think I’m halfway there.

The minute those brownies are cool enough to handle, I grab the tray and my keys and step outside. I live on the second floor of my little apartment building, and the exterior walkway has a nice view. Night has fallen on Madigan Mountain, and the resort is lit up in the distance. Steam rises off the heated pool, the mountain a big, dark shape beyond.

I take a deep breath of cold air and try to settle my nerves. This is my home now. It’s not Reed’s. That’s been the case for a long time. Maybe I ended up here because I was grieving him. And, yup, coming to Colorado was a crazy thing to do.

But that was ten years ago. I have roots in this place. It’s mine now. And I don’t have anything to apologize for.

I walk past two other apartment doors and hustle down the wooden staircase. At the bottom, I hurry along a short pathway to reach Callie’s building, where I knock twice before turning the doorknob and letting myself in.

She comes running across the generous room toward me. “Holy crap, Ava,” Callie says, taking the brownies so I can remove my coat. “You look like a total babe tonight. What is the occasion?”

“It’s girls’ night,” I say stupidly.

My friend blinks back at me. “The last time you came over for movies at my place, you wore track pants and a ski hoodie that says I Do All My Own Stunts.”

She isn’t wrong, so I change the topic. “Look, I made brownies! A double batch.”

There’s a loud squeal of approval from the sofa, where Callie’s daughter, Sutton, is perched with Raven, our friend who runs the ski school.

“The ones with the cream cheese?” Raven asks, clapping her hands together.

“Yesss!” Sutton says, bouncing on the sofa.

“You can have one brownie before you brush your teeth and go to bed,” Callie says.

The little girl is already on her feet and following me into the open-plan kitchen. Her mom goes back to scraping frozen wine out of a pan and into the blender.

“Ava! I have a question for you,” Sutton says.

“Does it have to do with the size of your brownie?”

She laughs. “No, but good idea. Can you make it triple sized?”

“No way,” Callie says. “One normal-sized brownie is all she gets.”

I give the kid a shrug that says, hey, I just work here. “What else were you going to ask me?”

“Can I be in the Opening Night Parade? Pleeeeeeeease. I’m a better skier than, like, half the grownups who work here.”

“Sutton!” her mother scolds. “That’s bragging.”

“Not if it’s true,” the little girl argues.

“Can you ski in formation in the dark and hold the torch high enough for everyone to see?” I ask her.

“Of course. It’s just the lower bowl. I could do it with my eyes closed.”

When I glance at Callie, she looks resigned. “If you can get someone to partner with you, then you can do it. Callie might be too busy running the show to ski with you.”

“You can come with me,” Raven volunteers. “No problem.”

“Yay!” Sutton cheers. “Thank you!”

Raven winks a blue eye at the little girl just as the front door flies open. Halley, our friend who tends bar at the hotel, enters the apartment looking flushed and beautiful. “You will not believe what I just heard,” she says, whipping a beanie from her curls. “We’re kicking off this season with some excellent mountain gossip.”

“Ooh, tell us,” Callie demands. “My body is ready.”

My stomach drops. Mountain gossip is like small-town gossip, but worse. It travels faster than an avalanche, and no one is exempt.

Also, I think I can guess what this is about.

“Reed Madigan showed up today!” Halley says, tossing her coat at a hook and missing. “Rumor has it that he looks fiiiiiine.”

There is a collective gasp, and I make myself very busy plating up a brownie for Sutton.

“He just showed up out of the blue?” Callie asks. “After all this time?”

“That’s right!” Halley says gleefully. “Hardy—the new bellhop? He didn’t recognize him. Says Reed gave him an evil look. So now Hardy’s hoping he won’t be fired. Especially with all these rumors swirling about the mountain being sold to some investors. Maybe Reed is one of them!”

“Ohh,” Raven gasps. “You know, I heard he’s some kind of investor.”

Nope. Reed is not the buyer, and bite your tongue. As much as I’d like to offer up that tidbit of information, I don’t. The deal details are in the vault. Mark Madigan trusts me with all kinds of secrets, and I’d never betray the boss.

“Was his father expecting him?” Raven asks. “Wait—Ava!” She turns to me. “You must have met the Prodigal Son. Is he hot?”

My face heats as all four women turn to stare at me, including the nine-year-old one. “Well, yes. He’s, uh, very attractive. If you like the obnoxious corporate type.”

Halley’s sharp eyes give me a once-over. “Hang on. Are you wearing makeup?”

I attempt a casual shrug. “Maybe. So?” I offer the brownie to Sutton.

She pounces on it. “You do look extra pretty tonight. Do you usually wear gold eyeshadow?”

“Sometimes,” I mutter as my face gets even hotter.

“Ava,” Callie says in her best this-is-your-mother-speaking voice. “Why do you look guilty? What aren’t you telling us about the elusive Reed Madigan?”

I shrug helplessly. “You know I can’t dish out corporate office secrets.” And then I wince, because I’m a terrible liar and always have been.

“Corporate secrets?” Callie asks, adding strawberry syrup to the blender. “Nobody here is asking for private documents, Ava. So just spill.”

“We all want to know why you’re dressed to kill, and why you look guilty as h—” Raven glances toward the child in the room, who’s speed-eating a brownie and listening to the grownups’ conversation with every fiber of her being. “—heck,” Raven finishes. “Spit it out already.”

“It’s not, uh, an appropriate topic of conversation,” I say, and then instantly realize my mistake when Callie takes the empty plate from her daughter’s hands and points toward the staircase.

“Teeth. PJs. Now.”

“You always send me to bed at the worst times,” Sutton grumbles. But she’s a good girl, so she heads for the stairs and trots upward. A moment later, we hear the bathroom door close with a firm click.

Three women turn to me. “Out with it,” Raven whispers with a toss of her dark hair. “Did something interesting happen between you and Reed?”

“Not today,” I whisper back.

There is a collective gasp, and Halley pats the sofa cushion. “Sit right down. You don’t get to have frozen pink wine until you start talking.”

Oh boy. That’s a dilemma, because Callie’s frosé is pretty fantastic. I sit down on the couch with a sigh. “Fine. Junior year. Ceramics class at Middlebury College.” I already knew who Reed was by the time we first spoke. If he hadn’t sat down beside me, I never would have had the guts to approach him myself. But then luck put me in his path. “He couldn’t get the hang of pottery. We, uh, bonded over it.”

Everyone’s eyes light up like Christmas trees. “Ohhhhh,” Halley says on a sigh. “Please tell me you reenacted that sexy scene from Ghost.”

“N-not exactly,” I stammer.

They let out a whoop, and the bathroom door flies open. “What did I miss?” Sutton yells through a mouthful of toothpaste foam.

“Nothing!” Halley says, smiling sweetly.

After Sutton disappears again, Callie puts a glass full to the brim with pink wine slushy into my hand. “Quick,” she says. “What does ‘not exactly’ mean?”

“It means…” I take a fortifying sip and wonder how I could ever put into words the way Reed and I were together. “Until Reed, I thought I was an awkward girl. I thought it was a permanent condition. But then we just clicked, right from the first time we sat next to each other in that art studio. And then…” I break off again, because the truth is that I can’t even remember what we talked about the second day when the teacher introduced the pottery wheel.

We had both struggled with it. But the struggle had been fun. Every moment of it. “We spent a couple of classes getting to know each other while we tried to get the clay to behave. Then he asked me to come over after class to share a pizza.”

“Oh baby,” Raven whispers, her eyes wide.

I guess my face tells the whole story. “We had sex on his coffee table before the delivery guy even showed up,” I whisper. “And we didn’t stop for a year.”

There is a beat of deep silence.

“Holy crap!” Halley hisses. “It’s always the quiet ones.”

“Wow, Ava,” Callie says under her breath. “I would never have guessed you were a wild child in college.”

I take another sip of the miracle that is Callie’s frosé, and I realize it’s still hard for me to believe, even though I lived it. The time I spent with Reed feels like a dream I once had.

Where did I get the nerve?

Confidence with men was never my strong suit. But that first day—in the stairwell of Reed’s dorm—he’d taken my hand. And when he’d led me into his single, I still hadn’t let go of it.

That’s all it takes, I’d think later. When you find The One, you take his hand, and you don’t let go. It had felt so natural when he’d leaned in to take my mouth in a slow kiss, before even getting around to flipping on the lights.

Then we were just…gone. I’d thought I had some experience with boys. But I’d been wrong. Reed had kissed me with the crackling heat of a well-built campfire. He’d kissed me with his mouth and his hands and his whole soul until I felt weak in the knees.

I’d put my hands under his T-shirt.

He’d pushed me down on the sofa.

Our clothes began to come off in quick succession. “Is this okay?” he’d asked as he’d unzipped my jeans.

“Yes,” I’d breathed. “Yes.”

It had occurred to me to slow things down, just to enjoy the moment. But neither one of us could manage it. We kept upping the ante. I’d popped the button on his jeans, and he’d kicked them off. He’d unhooked my bra and had thrown it aside. I’d yanked his boxers off and shamelessly palmed his dick, while he’d hissed his approval.

Not ten minutes later he’d surged inside me while I’d clutched his body and rocked beneath him. Nothing had ever felt so good, or so right.

“So what happened?” Raven whispers. “A year is a long time, especially when you’re young. That’s a relationship.”

“Yeah.” I exhale.

“And then?” Callie prompts.

I gulp. “And then I got pregnant.”