Love on a Deadline (2 page)

Red Leaf's beloved Coach—even Mac called him by his title—wasn't going to let a little thing like a blocked artery prevent him from doing what he loved. Coaching football and teaching PE at the high school. And because Mac loved her dad, she'd put her dreams on hold and moved back into her old bedroom with the glow-in-the-dark stars pasted on the ceiling, the shelves lined with books instead of sports trophies.

“There's going to be an outdoor ceremony and reception at Channing House, so I want you to get some shots of the property today. We'll run them on the Local Scenery page in this week's issue, get everyone talking about it—and next week, we'll run part two of the story.” Mac could almost see
the subscription sales rising in her boss's eyes. “Interview the caterer. The florist. The guy in the penguin suit who's going to stroll around the grounds with a violin. Anyone connected with the wedding.”

“That seems kind of intrusive.” Even as Mac voiced the comment, she remembered this was Hollis Channing they were talking about. The girl who'd been taking selfies a decade before there'd been a name for it.

“Intrusive? Here's our personal invitation.” Grant rapped his knuckles against the e-mail. “I'm sure there will be other newspapers angling to get the details, but the
Register
has an edge.”

“An edge?” Mac realized her vocabulary was shrinking in direct proportion to her level of control.

Grant leveled a finger at her nose. “You.”

“Me?” Mac squeaked.

“You lived next door to the family for years. You must have been friends with Hollis and her older brother, right?”

Wrong
, Mac wanted to howl.

When Hollis hadn't been ignoring Mac, she'd made her life miserable.

And Ethan . . . Ethan Channing had broken her heart.

After searching underneath practically every stone that lined the overgrown walkway for the spare house key, all Ethan Channing had to show for his effort was half a dozen night crawlers. Useful for catching a stringer of perch on Jewel Lake but not for opening a front door.

You can't go home again. Isn't that what the old adage claimed?

Ethan dropped a set of rusty hinges on the ground and smiled. Not true. A person
could
go home again . . . Sometimes he just had to choose an alternate route.

Like a window.

He slung one leg over the sun-bleached ledge and eased his body through the narrow opening. The thick carpet muffled his landing but didn't stop his knees from buckling as he took in his surroundings. He hadn't simply found a way into the house. He'd stepped back in time.

The study looked exactly the way Ethan remembered it. The faint scent of lemon furniture polish remained trapped in the air, along with a whole lot of memories.

Three months after his father's funeral, with the ink barely dry on Ethan's high school diploma, his mom had closed up the house and they'd moved back to Chicago, where her extended family lived.

Lilah Channing preferred city living over small towns, a complaint Ethan had heard on a regular basis while he was growing up.

He still wasn't sure why his mother hadn't sold the house in Red Leaf. She wasn't known for being overly sentimental, and when she wanted to get away for a weekend, she booked a spa vacation or a shopping trip to New York.

His cell phone rang, shattering the silence.

“And so it begins,” Ethan muttered as he saw his sister's name flash across the screen. “Hi, Hollis.”

“Where are you?”

“I'm fine. Thanks for asking. How are you?”

“I'll let you know after you answer the question,” came the impatient response.

Ethan smiled. “I'm at the house.”

A high-pitched scream pierced his eardrums. “Really? How does it look?”

“It's still standing.” Ethan heard a rustling sound behind the wall and wondered how many four-legged critters had built tiny condos in the insulation during his family's absence.

“What about the boathouse?”

“I haven't been down there yet.”

“What's taking you so long?” Hollis demanded.

“I'll walk down to the lake before it gets dark.” Ethan went over to the bank of windows that overlooked Jewel Lake. Branches littered the yard, debris left over from a summer storm, and cattails crowded the shoreline where the dock had been.

Ethan frowned. Was it his imagination or did the boathouse look closer to the water?

“You aren't saying much. Is it . . . terrible?” For the first time a note of uncertainty crept into his sister's voice.

“We probably could have used a little more time to get things in order,” Ethan said carefully. Like two months instead of two weeks.

“That's why my awesome big brother is there. To make sure everything is absolutely perfect—and to keep Mom from turning the wedding into a three-ring circus.”

In spite of the neglected condition of the property, Ethan knew which of the two assignments presented the greater challenge. “No pressure there.”

“I want to be sensitive to Connor's feelings. He's gone out of his way to keep a low profile.”

And then the poor guy had fallen in love with Hollis, whose mother didn't know the meaning of the words. Considering the guest list for his mom's annual Christmas party wasn't a whole lot smaller than the population of Red Leaf, it hadn't gone over well when the couple broke the news that they wanted to exchange their vows with only a few close friends and family members in attendance.

“There's still time to elope.” Ethan was kidding. Kind of.

“Hey, you were the one who gave me the idea, remember?”

“I remember mentioning Red Leaf.
You
were the one who decided it would be a good place for your secret wedding.”

“Funny you should mention secrets,” Hollis said sweetly.

Ethan winced. “Good-bye, Hollis.”

“Ethan? I . . . I know everything seems like it's happening pretty fast. But Connor and I . . . we just want to start our life. Is that crazy?”

Sunlight spilled through a seam in the clouds and turned the surface of the lake to gold. Ethan felt something in his soul, something that had felt off-kilter a long time, settle back into place.

“No,” he said quietly. “Not crazy at all.”

Not when he'd waited ten years to start his.

Mac took a shortcut through the hedge of maple trees that
separated the sliver of land her father owned from the Channings' sprawling lakefront property.

Like Coach, the handful of people who lived on Jewel Lake had crafted their houses out of logs and fieldstone in an effort to blend in, rather than compete, with the natural beauty of their surroundings.

Not Monroe and Lilah Channing. They'd built their home like the third little pig in the nursery rhyme. Out of brick. It rose from the shoreline like a miniature fortress, complete with twin turrets and a wall of windows that faced the lake.

Ethan's mother had waged a campaign against the native flora, gradually bending it to her will until the yard resembled a golf course. A large patio—also brick—fanned out toward the water, and an adorable wooden gazebo with gingerbread trim had been built on the hill overlooking the
rose garden. Since no one in the family ventured that far from the house, Mac decided the gazebo was more like an expensive yard ornament, its sole purpose to fill a bare spot on the property.

Well, not its
sole
purpose. Shaded by a hundred-year-old oak tree whose branches stretched over the property line, the gazebo had become Mac's favorite hideaway when she was growing up. How many times had she sneaked inside and stretched out on one of the built-in benches, listening to Hollis and her friends' laughter as they sunbathed by the lake?

She and Hollis might have been next-door neighbors, but contrary to her boss's assumption, they'd never been friends.

Mac traced it back to an unfortunate incident at Hollis's seventh birthday party, when Mac had declared she'd rather eat a minnow than have Betty Sadowski from the Clip and Curl Salon paint her fingernails pink. It was the truth, but in retrospect Mac realized she could have stated her preference a little more . . . tactfully.

That was the trouble with having been raised by a man who'd lost his wife to leukemia a week before their only daughter's third birthday.

Coach spent more time on the field or at the gym than he did at home, and he never dissembled when it came to his players. He was fair but blunt, traits he'd passed on to his only child. It wasn't until Mac was in junior high that she realized she didn't fit in with Hollis and her friends, whose primary method of communication seemed to be giggling and shaking their . . . pom-poms.

Coach had done his best, but by the time Mac was a freshman in high school, she'd attended more sporting events than dances.

Nope. Not going there.

What was it about Red Leaf that resurrected every painful moment from her past? She was no longer an awkward teenage girl, harboring a major crush on the most popular boy in school.

You're a reporter. This is a story. You have to separate feelings from facts.

But that didn't stop Mac from wincing when she swept aside a curtain of wild grapevine and saw the gazebo. Harsh winters, the relentless scrape of the wind, and the summer sun had bleached the color from the cedar posts, leaving them as dry and brittle as bones. A thick crust of moss and decaying leaves coated the shingles on the roof.

Mac felt the strangest urge to apologize for the neglect. Whoever the Channings had hired to tend the grounds had obviously stopped caring at some point. The yard had shrunk to a small patch of green that stopped a few yards short of Lilah's prizewinning rose garden.

Mac took a tentative step inside the gazebo and heard an ominous snap as one of the boards shifted beneath her feet.

Sunlight streamed through the lattice walls, creating an intricate stencil on the floor.

Focus.

Mac raised her camera and the gazebo shrank to one small frame.

And there it was. The tiny heart etched in the corner of the built-in bench. Most girls wanted lip gloss or nail polish
for their thirteenth birthday, but Mac had asked for a Swiss Army knife.

The gift had come in handy the night she'd impulsively carved Ethan's initials in the wood, all the while imagining the story she would tell their adorable green-eyed children.

This is the place where your dad and I fell in love. I was a freshman. He was a senior. He was the star quarterback of the football team. I was the coach's daughter. He was gorgeous, smart, and popular. I was . . .

Totally delusional—Mac ruthlessly shut down the memory—that's what you were.

The step creaked again—a sound that immediately caught Mac's attention because she wasn't the one standing on it this time.

She whirled around and her eyes locked on the man standing less than three feet away in the doorway of the gazebo.

Ethan Channing had just stepped out of her dreams and into her life.