Clearly, the lake property couldn’t sustain itself in its current iteration. It was a drain on town resources with little on the positive side to balance the scales. Aside from the fact that it was a fabulous resource no one seemed to want to use. So, one of the problems to be solved was how to make the lake and surrounding park and wilderness area a vital, necessary attraction again. “That shouldn’t be too hard.” It might just be a matter of refurbishing worn out equipment and sprucing up the trails, maybe updating the Web site. She made a note to have Avery look into that. Heck, find out if Firefly Lake even had a Web site.
If the council members balked at spending the money to fix the place up with no guarantee of success, and they’d have a pretty good argument there, she conceded, she’d bet between Vivi and Addie Pearl, they could get a coalition of townsfolk willing to pitch in and do most of the labor, maybe donate new equipment. Surely it could be a tax write-off or something. After all, look what they’d done with the mill. She made a few additional notes and started feeling a bit more optimistic.
She reverted to tapping her pen on the notebook, and her enthusiasm waned when she realized it wasn’t going to simply be a matter of revamping the town’s recreational area. Vivi had said the businesses in town were suffering the same neglect. With the new tourist draws largely outside the town proper, folks didn’t have to drive through Blue Hollow Falls to get to the winery, the music center and mill, or even their lavender farm. She would have thought that the taxes being collected from the new endeavors would balance the scales, but apparently those funds weren’t trickling down to the businesses themselves.
She picked up her phone and checked the time. Well, that had been a whopping ten minutes she’d spent not thinking about Wyatt. She let her head drop back against the headrest. “Go me.”
Her thoughts returned to his confident assessment that he could help turn the town around. He knew people. She stared at the dark screen on her phone for the longest time. She’d spent the past decade-plus actively and quite specifically choosing not to look for him. Not to see what he was doing, or where he was doing it. Or with whom. Be honest.
That was true, also. She wished him happiness. Always had. No one deserved it more than he did. She’d hoped he’d left Zachariah behind and had struck out on his own to find what made him happy. Her good wishes for him had been sincere and unwavering. She’d cared about him deeply. Always.
But that didn’t mean she had to torture herself by watching him while he was doing it. What did they call it these days? Self-care? Yes, she’d been well ahead of the trend, practicing self-care.
Only, now he was here. Where she could hardly avoid seeing him do . . . whatever it was he’d be doing. She put the phone down, then picked it up again. Her finger hovered over the screen, then finally she tapped it with determination. You’re going to find out anyway, she told herself.
Tory knew what he’d been up to, why he knew people. Why he’d changed so dramatically, and all for the good, at least as far as Chey could tell. Tory had known enough to figure out how to track him down and get him to travel halfway around the world to come get his horse back. And what had he been doing in Nepal, of all places? When Chey had thought about him and what he might be doing, she’d pictured him with some small spread in Montana, raising cattle, maybe still raising bulls, with a few horses. Maybe go wild and add in some free-range chickens, a few goats. She’d figured at some point he’d have met someone who would love him for the amazingly sweet, gentle, and kind man he was. Someone who’d be a hell of a lot smarter than you were and marry him when he asked.
Somehow Nepal had never factored in to her visuals when she tried to picture Wyatt Reed all grown up and on his own. Heck, she wouldn’t have imagined him anywhere he couldn’t have gotten to without a horse trailer in tow. “Possibly you were projecting a little,” she murmured dryly; she’d just accurately described her own future, postrodeo.
She pulled up the search engine on her phone, then took a deep breath and typed in his name. “What have you been up to for the past dozen years, Wyatt Reed?”
To say her jaw dropped open when the answer to that question popped up immediately on her tiny phone screen was an understatement. “Reed Planet,” she read aloud, that title coming up repeatedly in the first few pages of hits. Pages. A quick glance at the total number of hits floored her all over again. The count didn’t number in the millions or even the tens of millions. “Holy jumping Sherpas,” she murmured again, almost afraid to click on any of them. “What in the world did you go off and do?”
The bulk of the first string of hits were connected to YouTube videos, all of which started with the words “Reed Planet,” then included whatever part of the planet he’d been visiting, where, presumably, the video had been shot. There was a clever logo of a planet, with the title emblazoned on a Saturn-like ring around it, with all kinds of beautifully drawn critters and plants and people popping up from spots around the globe. This was no small enterprise. “Clearly,” she said under her breath, still scrolling through the first dozen pages of hits.
She would have perhaps guessed this was some other Wyatt Reed, but clicking on images showed that logo and his handsome, smiling face staring back at her, with a variety of background settings showing the picture had been taken in any number of the same far-flung spots noted in the titles and captions.
“Reed Planet: Wyatt Goes Wild in Micronesia!”
There were dozens of them. More than dozens. She quickly lost count.
“Well, twelve years seems like long enough to procrastinate,” she said, then scrolled back to the top of the first page. “Guess we might as well start here.” She clicked on the video, turned her phone sideways so she could view it in as large a format as possible, turned up the sound . . . and sat there, utterly slack-jawed and transfixed for the next twenty minutes.
He was bold, confident, and so charismatic. And don’t forget sexy as all hell. Where was the Wyatt of her childhood? And how had he transformed himself into this? The only connection to the boy she knew, the young man she’d realized she loved far, far, too late, was the reason behind Reed Planet. She was watching a tape of what had originally been livestreamed, as it happened, while he explored the most amazing places, talking to people, going off into jungles, and down rivers, into canyons and up on top of impossible peaks. Revealing little-known issues about certain cultures, animal species who were in danger of losing their home turf, plants, flowers, foliage of all kinds that were threatened with extinction. Entire villages full of people who relied on some of those other things for their survival.
He drew attention with his broad smile, easygoing nature, palpable excitement as he talked to the camera as easily and charismatically as he did the people he was interacting with. She could see immediately why he’d gained the following he had. He was compelling, almost impossible to look away from. And he staged his streams, set them up, so that something was always happening, and the viewer was seeing it all, live and unedited, right along with him. It careened from thrilling, to funny, to touching, to dramatic and informative, then back to funny, then thrilling. She felt as if she was on the edge of her seat, front row on a roller coaster, right there in a lake parking lot in the middle of nowhere, fully transported to wherever he was, hanging on his every word, following his every action.