Tara arched a brow in Chloe’s direction, like look at our little mouse now. But she obeyed and poured three glasses of wine, handing one to Chloe and another to Maddie. Finally she took her own and lifted it. “To a hell of a day and a very pretty bottom line.”
Tara and Maddie drank deeply to that. Chloe watched them, an unexpected warmth spreading inside her chest. So much had changed so quickly. Tara and Maddie, Ford and Jax, the spa, and of course, Sawyer, who’d made an indelible mark on her life, more than anyone else ever had. She still didn’t know what would become of them, and imagining that someday he’d tire of her hurt like hell, so she let her thoughts spin back to her sisters. They would always be here for her. She knew that now. It wasn’t just a concept anymore. It was a fact. They were her anchor in a lifetime spent free-floating.
Chloe set aside her untouched wine. She wanted a clear head for this. But more than that, she also wanted to be able to drive herself to Sawyer’s later tonight. Thanks to their very busy schedule, it’d been six nights since she’d last been in his bed, na**d in his arms, panting his name, letting him take away everything but what they gave each other. Funny, because she’d gone a whole year without sex, and now six days was too long. Or was it simply Sawyer himself that she missed?
“I can’t believe it, really,” Maddie said.
Chloe started guiltily. “What?”
Maddie began to paint her own toes with the baby-blue polish. “How far we’ve come. I can’t believe it.”
Okay, good. They weren’t talking about Chloe’s sex life.
Tara nodded. “Do you realize that we’ve each managed to bring a vital part of ourselves to the inn?”
Chloe stared down at her sparkling toes. “Is that it?” she wondered. “Or is it that this place has given each of us something we needed?” When nobody spoke, she looked up. Both her sisters were staring at her, eyes moist.
“Oh, Christ.” Chloe sighed and grabbed some napkins, shoving one at each of them. “I swear, if either of you cries, I’m giving out more wet willies, followed by wedgies. I mean it.”
“I have a better idea.” Maddie stood up. “Our first night here together we stayed up all night decorating our poor Charlie Brown Christmas tree. Do you remember?”
“Hard to forget,” Tara said. “Chloe turned our faces and hair green with her facial and conditioner masks, remember?”
“Hey,” Chloe said in her defense. “It improved your skin, didn’t it?”
“Excuse me.” Maddie tapped a fingernail against the wineglass to get their attention, then cleared her throat dramatically. “I’m trying to recount our adventures here, so pay attention. And I do have a point.”
“You going to get to it anytime soon?” Chloe asked.
“Do you or do you not remember when we decided to make this place a B&B?” Maddie asked. “We—”
“We?” Tara interrupted, laughing. “If we’re remembering, then let’s remember how it really happened, shall we? We didn’t decide anything, Maddie. You two corralled me into the B&B thing, specifically the chef part. And you did it by dangling Ford in front of me.”
“Oh, and that turned out so awful, right?” Chloe responded dryly. “And let me guess—you hate being your own boss. You hate ordering us around in the mornings to do your bidding. Is that what you’re saying?”
Tara smiled. “No, I really like that part. A lot.”
“Hello,” Maddie said sternly. “I’m talking here!” She paused for dramatic effect, but when Chloe and Tara just rolled their eyes, she sighed. “Don’t you get it? We need to do something. We need a ceremony for this milestone!”
“It’s too early for a Christmas tree,” Chloe said.
Maddie tossed up her hands. “Something new! Something unique. To celebrate you,” she said. “To celebrate the spa thing.” She scrunched up her face to think, then grinned wide, and then slumped. “I had something. But I forgot.”
Chloe laughed. “That cheap date thing must be hereditary.”
“Yeah,” Maddie admitted with a laugh. “Half a glass and I’m gone. Wait, I think I remember. Maybe.”
“Uh-oh,” Chloe said to Tara. “I feel something inadvisable coming on.”
“Well, sugar, if anyone’s going to recognize it, it’d be you.”
“Recognize this,” Chloe said and flipped Tara off.
“We need to mark this milestone,” Maddie insisted.
“We can go to the mud baths,” Chloe said, knowing damn well that they’d both shoot her down, tell her she was crazy, and then she could finally go jump Sawyer’s bones.
And he had such fine bones, too…
“That’s brilliant!” Maddie stood up and grabbed them each by the hand. “We’re going to the mud springs!”
“Wait—what?” Chloe asked.
“It’s a great idea,” Maddie said, tugging them both along.
Chloe dug in her heels. “Hold up.”
“Why?” Maddie asked.
“Because first, you’re drunk. Second, I was totally kidding.”
“Tell me that it wouldn’t be the perfect thing to do.” Maddie let go of them to clasp her hands together and jump up and down. “Oh, come on! Do this for me and…and I won’t make you get me a present for my wedding shower!”
“But it’s pitch-black outside,” Tara said.
“Actually,” Chloe said, “it’s a full moon.” Too late, she clamped her mouth shut. Dammit, she had plans for Sawyer and his na**d bod beneath that full moon.
“Yeah,” Maddie said to Tara. “It’s a full moon, pansy ass.”
“You know what?” Chloe shook her head. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“You suggested it, genius,” Tara reminded her.
“Yeah, but I was joking.” But it was the disappointment shining in Maddie’s eyes that killed her. “Okay, don’t do that. Not the Bambi eyes.”
“I thought you’d appreciate the fact that I’m willing to do something that’s so you,” Maddie said. “After all, the spa was your baby.”
“Yes, and I do appreciate it.” And only a few weeks ago, Chloe would’ve been the first one out the door, not sitting here considering the fact that it was late and not altogether safe to be slipping and sliding around the springs. She glanced at Tara, then back to Maddie, and sighed. “Fine. Jesus. Why the hell not?”
“Yay!” Maddie polished off her wine, grabbed another bottle, then pulled them through the inn to her car, tossing Chloe, the only sober one, the keys.
Chloe thought for a second, then ran back inside for everything she’d wished she’d had the first time: towels, three spa robes, flashlights, and even though it took another trip, she hauled out three big gallons of fresh water to clean off with. When she returned, still laughing at herself a little for being the only grown-up of the bunch—how scary was that?—she found Tara still standing outside the car.
“Did she really call me a pansy ass?” Tara asked in a hushed whisper that the people of China could have heard.
“We have to get her a present for her wedding shower?” Chloe whispered back as she tossed the stuff into the trunk. “Because I thought the wedding shower was the present.”
They got to the trailhead just after eleven, and Chloe felt like a pagan white witch leading her sisters up the trail by flashlight.
Once at the mud springs, they had no trouble seeing. The moon had cast the meadow in a pale blue glow. Steam rose off the mud into the night, and Chloe shivered. “I don’t know—”
“And you call yourself the wild child,” Maddie chided and stripped down to her tiger-striped panties and bra. “I think we should switch monikers. You be the mouse. I’ll take wild child, thank you very much!” So saying, she dipped a toe into the mud, then holding the bottle of wine like she was of the highest royalty, waded in up to her waist and sighed in bliss. “Warm.”
“Since when do you have tiger-striped underwear?” Chloe asked.
Maddie blushed, her face lighting up like a glow stick in the night. “They were a present from Jax. Isn’t it gorgeous out here, all silvery and mysterious? You can almost see the forest fairies.”
“Okay, no more wine for you,” Tara said. She eyed the mud and sighed. “I must be insane.” But she followed suit after Maddie and stripped. Though, of course, she took the time to carefully hang her dress over a branch. Her underwear was not tiger-striped but a pale, silky cream and lace that screamed sophistication and elegance. Or at least as much as one can scream sophistication and elegance while standing in your underwear in the woods at eleven.
Chloe was hands on h*ps staring at them. “For the record, I have never called myself the wild child.”
“Come on in, Mouse,” Maddie called.
“Nor did I ever call you the mouse.” At least not to her face. Chloe kicked off her shoes. “Though I think we should call you Queen Bee-yotch. Damn, it’s cold out here!”
“Only until you get in,” Maddie promised, tossing back some more of the wine right out of the bottle before handing it over to Tara.
Chloe wriggled out of her jeans, then hesitated there in her panties and sweater. She wasn’t wearing a bra.
Tara made the sound of a chicken.
Chloe rolled her eyes and tore off her sweater. When she was up to her chin in the mud, Tara grinned at her. “You took out your nipple ring.”
“Last year,” Chloe said, watching as Maddie snatched the bottle of wine back from Tara.
“Really?” Tara asked Chloe. “Why?”
“I don’t know. It kept catching on my bra.” Which was true, but it’d been more than that. Somehow, at some point, she’d realized she’d outgrown the need to be so wildly different. It’d been right about the time that the three of them had agreed to stick together and renovate the inn. They’d been halfway through the renovation when there’d been a bad fire, forcing them to start over. The fire had been devastating in many ways, but by some miracle, they’d survived. And it’d been that night, lying in the ER, suffering from a smoke-induced asthma attack, with a sister on either side of her, that Chloe had known.
She’d been singed nearly to a crisp, lost everything including the clothing on her back, but it hadn’t mattered because she had her sisters and she loved them. “I do,” she said softly to herself, nodding. “I really do.”
“You believe in fairies?” Maddie asked, confused.
Tara took the wine from her. “Shh, sugar. I think Miss Wild Thang’s having an epiphany. Let’s leave her to it.”
Chloe stared at them. Tara was in the middle of carefully streaking the mud on her jaw in order to get the maximum benefit from it. Maddie had done her face already and looked like a zebra. And Chloe felt a smile bloom both in her heart and on her face. “To us,” she said softly.
“To us,” Maddie said, and drank to that.
Sawyer got the call from the forest service about midnight. It was Matt, reporting flickering lights had been seen on the trails out at Yellow Ridge. Matt was on Mt. Jude, the far side of the county, a good hour away, and couldn’t respond to the call. “I’m contacting you,” he said, “because the caller gave a description of a hopped-up shiny black truck going off-road, and it sounded like Todd’s. I know you’re watching him. I can call another ranger, but it might be morning before I can get anyone out there, and as you know, those trails are supposedly closed at nightfall, thanks to the fire season.”
“I’ll go,” Sawyer said, already in his truck, knowing this was it. If he caught up with Todd, he’d catch whoever Todd was working for. It was the break they were looking for. He was already on call twenty-four seven for the DEA until they closed in on their drug case, which most likely involved Todd one way or the other. Twenty minutes later, he was shining his flashlight on the car in front of the mud springs trailhead, shaking his head in disbelief.
Maddie’s car. What the hell was she doing up here? He flickered his flashlight in the window and saw a purse on the passenger floor. He thought maybe it was Tara’s. There was a phone on the backseat. He was pretty sure it was Chloe’s iPhone, which explained why she hadn’t picked up any of his calls. “What are you three up to?” he murmured.
No doubt the three sisters would have an explanation that would make him dizzy. Chloe might just be the most impulsive person he’d ever met, but she was also one of the sharpest. She had a reason for most everything she did, although sometimes the reason was to turn the world on its ear. But Tara and Maddie? He’d have figured them more sensible than to follow her up here.
Hell, it was fall. Bears were on the hunt to store up their winter fat. Coyotes were doing the same. Not to mention that in spite of the combined efforts of the forestry service and his own county department, there’d been plenty of illegal camping and hunting going on during this long, late Indian summer.
He needed to let it go. They were three grown women and could handle themselves. His job was Todd. If he was out here, he was up to no good, but the demands and conflicts of his job had never been stronger as he caught sight of the iPhone in the backseat of Maddie’s car.
Fuck.
He eyed the trailhead, and the sign there, posted by the forest service.
TRAIL CLOSES AT NIGHTFALL.
Swearing beneath his breath, he headed up the path. There were several forks, and he methodically worked his way along each until twenty-five minutes later he came to a clearing and stood staring in utter disbelief. Three heads appeared to be floating disembodied in a mud spring by the light of the moon.