Chapter One
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your
one wild and precious life?”
—Mary Oliver
Days after the fire at the inn, the smell of smoke clung to Amanda’s hair and skin, the stench pervasive despite multiple showers and shampooing her hair so many times, her scalp had begun to hurt. As she sat in front of the woodstove in Landon Abbott’s cozy cabin, Amanda noted the irony of needing the fire to stay warm when fire was the thing she was now most afraid of.
While a late-May Nor’easter raged outside, she had nothing but time to think and relive the horror of her near-death experience.
It’d been a week since the Admiral Butler Inn had burned, trapping her with a badly sprained ankle until Landon’s identical twin brother, Lucas, had come to her rescue. They’d been on the way out of the room when the ceiling had come down on top of them, trapping them.
She shuddered every time she thought of that explosive moment and how Lucas dove on top of her. He’d been the more badly injured one, suffering a broken arm that had required surgery to repair, as well as smoke inhalation.
Amanda had been briefly hospitalized to receive oxygen and IV fluids as well as treatment for her ankle. When she was released, Landon had brought her home to his place to recover, as the next closest lodging was two towns away.
Since most of her possessions had been lost in the fire, Landon had bought her new jeans, sweaters, pajamas, socks and underwear at his family’s Green Mountain Country Store, probably in consultation with one or all of his three sisters. They would’ve been able to accurately guess her sizes. He’d even gotten her a new coat and boots to navigate the lingering mud season, and his family had delivered enough food to feed ten people.
Her own mother had been in a panic after hearing about the fire. Once Amanda finally succeeded in assuring her that she was fine, her mother, who was also her boss, had sent a new cell phone and laptop. They were already configured to the company’s servers, so she could get back to work whenever she felt up to it.
She had everything she needed to resume her life already in progress, if only her hands would quit trembling. If only she didn’t see and hear and smell the fire every time she closed her eyes. If only she could shed the bone-deep fear that followed such an incredibly close call. She’d relived it a thousand times, from waking up to find the room engulfed in fire, to jumping out of bed and landing wrong on her ankle, to Lucas storming in to rescue her and shielding her from the falling ceiling with his own body.
There’d been just enough time before Lucas showed up for Amanda to contemplate the very real possibility that she might die from the flames and toxic smoke that filled the room so quickly, she barely had time to process what was happening, let alone react, before it became too late to do anything.
Prior to the fire, she’d been on autopilot, traveling through life with no attachments, no responsibilities other than work, no emotions and a stubborn refusal to reexamine her painful past. After the fire, she could think of little else but what she might’ve missed if she’d died that night.
For one thing, she’d never been truly in love. She’d been in lust that she’d mistaken for love, but that didn’t count. In the seconds before Lucas arrived to save the day, it had occurred to Amanda that she could actually die before experiencing true love. She’d never skied or zip-lined or bungee-jumped or traveled to Europe or been on a cruise or gone swimming in the Pacific Ocean. Even though she’d been to Los Angeles for work at least six times, she’d never once bothered to swim in the ocean. She’d always assumed she’d have plenty of time to do those things. There was always more time to be had in the future.
Now she knew better.
After being reminded that time was finite and how quickly the future could be stolen from her, Amanda had begun a list of the things she’d never done. She wanted to take piano lessons, climb a mountain, learn to drive a stick, have an orgasm with a man. Amanda underlined those three words multiple times. She’d had plenty of the solo kind, as well as a few from trying out her company’s product line, but never once with an actual man.
Her body shook with sobs that came over her with alarming frequency every time she thought about how much she would’ve missed, how close she came to losing everything, of dying before she ever got around to actually living.
In addition to making a list of all the things she hadn’t done, she was also listing her mistakes.
Dropping out of college before finishing my degree.
Never actually choosing a career, but falling into a job that paid the bills.
Getting a second credit card. The first one had been more than enough.
Dating both Landon and his twin, Lucas—huge mistake.
She’d caused trouble between Landon and his brother, who was also his closest friend. Amanda deeply regretted that. When they’d asked her out—at the same time—she’d panicked and said yes to both of them, not thinking it through or weighing the many ways it could turn into a catastrophe. Mostly, she’d wanted to avoid hurting any feelings since her company had just landed a major account with their family’s business.
In truth, she figured they’d asked her out because they were fascinated by a woman who spoke about sex toys the way other women discussed shoes or jewelry. She’d grown numb to the salacious nature of the products she represented, but Lucas and Landon had been seriously intrigued.
It hadn’t taken long for Amanda to realize she would’ve been far better off kindly saying no to both of them. The situation had gone from innocent fun to messy in the course of two days. After a delightful evening with Lucas, she’d truly connected with Landon, which was baffling. How could she have such different reactions to identical twins? It hadn’t made any sense to her, but the fact remained—she was attracted to Landon but not to Lucas. He was a great guy—fun and funny and entertaining.
But there was just something about Landon…
He was everything his brother was and somehow more. When she looked at his golden-brown eyes and dirty-blond hair and sweet, sexy lips, she wanted things with him that she hadn’t wanted with anyone.
Not that it mattered now. She’d made a hot mess of things by dating him and his brother, and even though Lucas had since met and fallen for Dani and her baby daughter, Savannah, things had been awkward with Landon before the fire and were even more so now.
No wonder she’d never been in love. Clearly, she sucked at dating. And now she was holed up in Landon’s house, recovering from her fire-related injuries and contending with an emotional tsunami that would freak out any man, let alone one she’d kinda sorta dated before things got weird. She ought to get the hell out of Butler and go home to her mother in St. Louis. Her mom had called daily on Landon’s house phone to check on her since the frightening night of the fire.
“I’ll send a ticket,” her mother had said. “Come home. Let me take care of you.”
Amanda loved her mother, but feared if she went home, she might hunker down, pull the covers over her head and never leave again. That was not an option. The plan was to stay with Landon until her ankle healed enough that she could get around better, and then she’d get back to work and figure out what was next. She’d given up her apartment some time ago, rather than pay rent while she traveled nonstop for work.