A Snowbound Scandal Read online

  “Yes, thank you for that reminder.”

  “What’d he look like?”

  “Oh, you know. Tall, dark and handsome.”

  “Ouch.” Her sister winced. “Who’s he here with?”

  “No one. Not a single soul.”

  “Really...because his wife and kids are in a Tuscan villa on holiday while he’s here writing his memoirs?”

  “There is no wife. There are no kids,” Miriam said. “At least I don’t think there are any kids. We didn’t get past him mentioning he was single.”

  “Sounds like you two had quite the conversation.” Her sister deftly raised one eyebrow.

  “We mostly stood shivering in the cold while trying to find the balance between polite and concise. His parents and siblings are going out of town over Thanksgiving weekend, so he came here to enjoy his rarely used mansion and eat frozen pizza instead.” Miriam fingered the bent corner of the recipe card her mother had given her. “He said sweet potato pie was his favorite. I never knew that. Do you know why?”

  “I’m assuming because in the short summer months you two spent boinking each other in the lake, you never broached the topic of pie preferences?”

  “Fair point.” Miriam smiled. “I was going to say it’s because we ended before sweet potato pie season. It’s been ages since I’ve thought about him... I mean really thought about him. It was a silly summer fling and I was swept up.” Her gut pinged with warning at the lie. Miriam ignored that ping. She would rather make believe she never loved him than consider that she’d been right about them living happily ever after if he hadn’t discarded her so callously. Half kidding, she added, “I could invite him to Mom’s for dinner. Bury that axe for good.”

  “Do it.”

  She faced her sister’s wide-eyed gaze. “What? Why? I was joking.”

  “Burying the axe for good would be cathartic. Once you’re around each other again you’ll both see that you are not the Miriam of ten years ago. You’re the Miriam of today. It’d do Chase good to see what he’s been missing.”

  “Thanks, Kris.” Miriam was touched, but not sure she agreed. “He’s not missing much. Other than a job I love, I have no husband, children or Nobel Peace Prize to wave in his face.”

  “None of that matters.” Kristine swept Miriam’s cell phone off the dining room table and offered it, but then frowned. “Unless... You probably don’t have his private number. I didn’t think about that.”

  “Actually, I do. He handed me his card.”

  “Bury the lead why don’t you! Why’d he give you that?” Kris was grinning, her eyes twinkling. “For like, a holiday hookup?” She blinked, then screwed her eyes toward the ceiling. “That’d be a great book title.”

  Her sister the freelance editor never shut her brain off.

  “It would be a great title for a work of fiction.” Miriam snatched her phone away and shoved it into her back pocket. “Remember that protest I did years ago with a conservation group in Houston?”

  “Big oil, right?”

  Miriam nodded and explained the letter that’d arrived last week. “He didn’t plan on seeing me while he was here, so I don’t know what the offer of calling him if I need anything was about.”

  “Told you. Holiday hookup.” Her sister shrugged. “You should invite him for no other reason than we can skewer him at the dinner table about being a dirty politician while you’re the Snow White of Bigfork.”

  Miriam had to laugh at her sister’s imagination.

  “Plus, it’d be fun to watch Mom go from simmer to boiling over while she tries to make sense of a mayor at her table.”

  “It was a dumb idea. Forget I mentioned it.” Miriam just hadn’t liked the thought of him alone on a holiday. How ridiculous was that? She wasn’t in charge of his well-being.

  “Spoilsport.”

  Topic dead, they went back to chatting about everything but sexy mayors and summer flings.

  Two hours later, the pies had finished baking and were cooling on the stovetop. Miriam had poured herself a glass of red after Kristine left, and camped out on the sofa, laptop and charts spread on the coffee table for work. But the website she’d pulled up had nothing to do with work. It was the City of Dallas website, particularly Chase’s headshot. He looked merely handsome in that still frame. He’d been devastatingly gorgeous in person.

  Chase’s business card in hand, she rubbed her thumb over his phone number.

  One glass of wine was all it took to weaken her resolve. That and the smell of sweet potato pie in the air.

  “Damn him.”

  She swiped the screen of her phone, dialed the first eight digits of the phone number, then paused.

  Why should she care if her ex-boyfriend ate alone on Thanksgiving? Shouldn’t she embrace the idea of the jerk who broke her heart spending the holiday alone in a way-too-big-for-one mansion? Except she’d always been horrible at holding grudges, and even the blurry, faded memories of her broken heart couldn’t keep her from completing the task.

  She dialed the remaining digits and waited patiently while the phone rang once, twice and then a third time. When she was about to give up, a silken voice made love to her ear canal.

  “Chase Ferguson.”

  “Chase. Hi. Um, hi. It’s Miriam.”

  “Miriam?”

  “Andrix,” she said through clenched teeth. Was it that he’d had so many other women in his life over the last decade that he couldn’t keep track of them? Or was it that he’d forgotten her already even though she’d bumped into him yesterday afternoon?

  “I know. I think of you as Mimi.”

  That husky voice curled around her like a hug. He’d always called her Mimi, and to date had been the only person who had, save her best friend in the third grade. Her family either called her Miriam or Meems.

  “Is everything all right?” If that was concern in his voice, she couldn’t place it. His tone was even. His words measured.

  “Everything is fine. I, um.” She cleared her throat, took a fortifying sip of her wine and continued. “My mother lives about twenty minutes north of Bigfork. We make enough for Thanksgiving dinner to feed ten extra people. You’re welcome to join us tomorrow night.”

  She pressed her lips together before she rattled off what would be served and how she’d baked two pies that were presumably his favorite. She wasn’t begging him to show up, simply extending an invitation as an old acquaintance.

  Silence greeted her from the other end of the phone.

  “Chase?”

  “No. Thank you.”

  She waited for an explanation. None came. Not even a lame excuse about having to work like she’d used tonight. Though she truly did have to work. She scowled at her laptop and his handsome mug before snapping the lid shut.

  “Will there be anything else?” he asked. Tersely.

  At his formal tone, ire slipped into her bloodstream as stealthily as a drug. Her back went ramrod straight; her eyebrows crashed down.

  “No,” she snapped. “That concludes my business with you.”

  “Very well.”

  She waited for goodbye but he didn’t offer one. So she hung up on him.

  “Jerk.” She tossed the phone on the coffee table and rose to refill her glass. She’d called out of the kindness of her heart and he’d made her feel foolish and desperate.

  Just like ten years ago.

  “This is who he is, Miriam,” she told herself as she poured more wine. “A man who owns a sixteen-million-dollar mansion he rarely visits. A man whose only interest is to increase his bank statement and buy up beautiful bits of land because he can.”

  She swallowed a mouthful of wine and considered that, as much disdain as she’d had for Chase’s mother then and still, Eleanor Ferguson had been right.

  Miriam and Chase were better off apart.


  Four

  Miriam hadn’t been in her mother’s kitchen for more than five minutes before she started airing her grievances about Chase and the phone call from last night.

  Kristine was placing freshly baked rolls into a basket and her brother Ross snatched another one and dunked the end of it into the gravy.

  “He’s the mayor of what?” their older brother asked around a bite.

  “Dallas, dummy,” Kris replied. “And stop eating my rolls. I made three dozen and you’ve already snarfed three of them.”

  “Four.” He argued. His mouth curling into a Grinchy smile.

  Kristine sacrificed one more that she tossed at him, but Ross, former college football player that he was, caught it easily, struck a Heisman pose and absconded to the dining room.

  “He doesn’t act thirty-nine,” Kris grumbled. “Anyway. Chase is a jerk and I’m sorry you had to deal with that.”

  “Yeah, well. I’m sorry I didn’t say what I thought to say until after I hung up.”

  “Such as.” Kristine motioned with a roll for Miriam to go on.

  “I would’ve informed him that I wasn’t one of his underlings and I deserved better treatment than a haughty No. Thank you.” She dipped her voice into a dopey tone that didn’t sound like him, but made her feel better. “I’d have told him that I became a success without his billions and in a field where I wasn’t causing global warming. My line of work is admirable.”

  “It is, sweetie.”

  “Thank you.”

  Miriam had completed her degree in agricultural sciences, going on to do compliance work behind a desk for a few years until she realized how wholly unsatisfying it was to push papers from one side of her desk to another. Five years ago, she’d found the Montana Conservation Society and stumbled into her calling. She’d started as program manager and was then promoted to director of student affairs. She mostly worked with teenagers. She taught them how to respect their environment and care for the world they all shared. She found it incredibly rewarding to watch those kids grow and change. Several of the students who came through MCS wouldn’t so much as step on an ant if they could help it by the time she was through with them.

  And yet Chase had dismissed her like she was a temp on his payroll.

  “I should’ve gone over to his big, audacious house and told him what I think of his wasteful habits and egomaniacal behavior.”

  “Who, dear?” Her mother stepped into the kitchen and gestured to the basket of rolls. “Kristine, to the table with those, please. We’re about to start.”

  “No one,” Miriam answered. “Just... No one.”

  Kris shuffled into the dining room and Judy Andrix watched her go before narrowing her eyes and squaring her jaw. Since Miriam’s father, Alan, had died five years ago of complications from heart surgery, her mom had taken it on herself to play both the role of mom and dad. It wasn’t easy for any of them to lose him, but their mother had taken the brunt of that blow. Thirty-nine years of marriage was a lifetime.

  “Miriam, would you grab those bottles of wine and take them to the table for me?”

  “Sure thing.” Relieved the conversation was over, she did as she was asked.

  Halfway into dinner, however, her wine remained untouched and her food mostly uneaten.

  “Meems, what’s going on in your world?” Wendy’s girlfriend, Rosalie, asked conversationally.

  Miriam blinked out of her stupor and realized she’d been staring at her mashed potatoes, Chase on her mind. “Work. That’s about it.”

  “How did the camp go this summer? I meant to ask but I was so busy.”

  Busy being a surgeon. It happened.

  Miriam filled her in on the camp for eighth graders she’d cochaperoned. “You haven’t lived until you’ve been in charge of thirty hormone-riddled teens in tents.”

  Wendy nudged Rosalie with her shoulder. “That’s what I keep warning her about every time she brings up having children.”

  “Children are great,” Ross’s wife, Cecilia, said at the exact moment their five-year-old daughter Raven threw her butter-covered roll on the floor.

  “Raven!” While Ross went about explaining to his daughter that the food belonged on her plate and not on the rug, Wendy and Rosalie answered questions from Kristine about having children. Surrogate, they agreed, but they weren’t against adoption.

  Mom interjected that she didn’t care how any of them went about it so long as she was given another grandchild.

  “Or two,” she added with a pointed look at Kris and Brendan, who wisely filled his mouth full of stuffing rather than comment. “Meems, have you been seeing anyone?”

  And that’s when the last strand on the rope of Miriam’s dwindling patience snapped.

  “I’m sorry.” She stood abruptly from the table and the room silenced. Even Raven seemed to sense the importance of the moment and stopped her complaining. Every pair of eyes swiveled to Miriam. “I have to run an errand.”

  “What? Now?” Her mother’s voice rose.

  “I’ll be back in an hour, tops. That leaves plenty of time for dessert. Feel free to start playing games without me.” She could easily make the round trip to Bigfork and back before the traditional board game battle began. And she didn’t mind at all ousting herself from a conversation involving families and children when there was a man very nearby who was going about his evening as if she didn’t matter. Been there, done that. She didn’t care to suffer a repeat of ten years ago.

  Miriam rushed into the kitchen and rifled through her mother’s cupboard for a plastic storage container. She sliced one of her pies and slid three large wedges into the container before snapping on the lid. She’d show him what he was missing all right.

  She was pulling her coat over her shoulders when her mother appeared in the doorway of the kitchen. Judy eyed the pie in the container.

  “Where on earth are you going in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner?” Her mother was a narrow, thin woman whose supermodel good looks couldn’t be ignored, even if she was in her early sixties.

  “I don’t expect you to understand.” Miriam gave her mother’s arm a squeeze. “But there’s someone I have to talk to or I won’t be able to enjoy a single second of my holiday. I just... It’s something I have to do.”

  “And a phone call won’t cut it?” Judy leveled a knowing smile at her third child.

  “No.” Miriam wouldn’t risk a repeat of that robotic blowoff from last night.

  “It’s snowing again.”

  It was, but... “I have four-wheel drive.”

  “I suppose if I stand here and try to talk you out of it, you’ll go anyway, only a little later than you intended on account of my keeping you.” Her mother folded her arms over her chest. She knew her daughter well.

  “One hour. Tops.” Miriam repeated, wrapping her hand around the doorknob.

  “At least take the mayor a plate of food,” her mother called before Miriam could escape. “You can’t only show up with pie.”

  “How did you—?” Miriam leaned around her mother to glare beyond the doorway where Kristine sat in Dad’s former seat at the table.

  Kris blew a kiss and waggled her fingers in a wave.

  * * *

  Only a year old, the Ford F-150 was equipped to glide through snow like it was popped corn. But as she drove closer to Bigfork, the visibility dropped and it was more like trudging through wet sand. It wasn’t “her” truck, per se, but had been provided graciously by MCS. She’d been begging for two years for a vehicle that could haul, tow and not give out if she had to drive up a mountain and rescue someone’s lost dog. Sure, that had only happened once, but she’d had to hike most of it on foot since her compact car hadn’t been equipped for the elements. It was practical for her to have a vehicle that could handle Montana’s terrain.

  Thanks to those element
s, the twenty-minute drive to Bigfork was stretching to sixty. She’d encountered traffic and low visibility, and on top of that her gas gauge was dangerously close to E. At a top speed of twelve miles per hour, she was getting nowhere slowly. Because she’d underestimated the weatherman and overestimated her F-150, there was no way she’d make it back to her mother’s house in this mess.

  But Miriam still intended to make her way to Chase’s. She wasn’t giving up a scant few miles from his house. No way.

  At a stoplight, she keyed in a quick text to Kris. I’m going to be celebrating at home alone tonight! Bigfork is buried. :(

  Before the stoplight turned green, Miriam’s phone rang.

  “You have to come back!” Kris said in greeting.

  “It’s a mess out here.” Windshield wipers swiped away the gathering snow and Miriam turned right toward Pinecone Drive and the mayor of Dallas.

  “I thought that storm was supposed to miss us.”

  “Yeah, well, evidently Bigfork caught the edge of it. I’m in a winter wonderland.”

  “You’re still on the road?” asked her downtrodden sister.

  “I am, but I’m almost home. Tell everyone I’m sorry. I’ll call later when I get settled.” She forced a smile as she mentally kicked her own butt for leaving her mom’s house. “Hey, maybe you can video chat me in later.”

  “Is that Miriam? Is she all right?” their mother called in the distance.

  “She’s fine!” Kris called back. Then to Miriam, “I’ll let her know you’re all right and home safe... That is where you’re going, right? Home?”

  “Of course.”

  “Meems.”

  “I have to go.” Miriam hung up on Kris, who clearly could not be trusted with sensitive information, and resumed her drive to Chase’s mansion. If Miriam didn’t go to him like she’d vowed, the entire trip would be a waste.

  Once she looked him in the eye and made sure he understood who she’d become, she could be on her way. Who was she? A woman who didn’t take crap from anyone. A woman who’d found herself and her way in the decade that separated them. Her biggest worry was that she’d remained a still frame in his mind: standing next to a private plane, tears running down her face, begging him not to leave.