Crushing on Love (The Bradens of Peaceful Harbor, Book Four) (15 page)

“That’s what you said last night, and you did just fine.” He waggled his brows and she swatted him.

She took a bite and closed her eyes, moaning at the sweetness of the chocolate melting into the smoky marshmallow. She could feel the heat of Steve’s gaze boring into her and opened her eyes. His eyes turned impossibly darker. He licked his lips, and a gratified smile appeared on his handsome face.

“You and that mouth of yours will be the death of me,” he said in a gravelly voice.

She swallowed her bite and they both leaned in for a kiss. Just as their lips touched, she pulled back.

“Crowdfunding!”

He blinked, his brow furrowing in confusion.

“Crowdfunding! You
have
to do it now. It’s the best way to get the land. Oh my gosh, Grizz!” She set the s’more on the plate and jumped to her feet. “You have to do this. You
have
to! I’ll be right back!” She took off running, and he jumped to his feet and caught up to her in three long strides.

“Wait. Where are you going?”

“To get my laptop. I have to show you. This is the right thing.”

He laughed, and she rolled her eyes.

“Seriously. You’ll see.” She tried to pull away, and he tugged her against him and kissed her—hard and deep, with a little bit of laughter.

“Shan, I have a laptop.”

“Oh. Right. Let’s get it!”

He looked at the fire, and she knew he was thinking about safety first.

“I’ll get it,” she offered. “Where is it?”

“On my desk, but it probably won’t get a connection out here.”

“Hot spot,” she said over her shoulder, and headed for the cabin.

“Hot what?” he called after her.

She laughed and waved him off as she climbed the porch steps, excited to be able to help him after he’d gone to so much trouble for her.

With his laptop and her cell phone in hand, she sat beside him on the blanket and connected to the hot spot on her phone.

“A little lesson in the real word, Grizz.” She held up her phone and pointed to the hot spot icon. “This is called a hot spot. It uses cell service to connect to the Internet. Watch. This is how you connect it to your computer so you can work anywhere.” She connected the laptop to the service and searched for crowdfunding sites.

“That’s cool for a person who wants to carry around their laptop.”

She rolled her eyes. “It’s cool for a lot of reasons, but I’m not going to debate the value of technology with a guy who hugs trees for a living.”

He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “Thank you for not making me have that painful conversation.”

“Oh, you’re not off the hook yet. I’m just not going to get into it
now
. We have far more important things to go over.”

“Right, like begging for money.”

“Ha-ha.” She pulled up a list of campaigns on the FundMyProject website. “These are called campaigns, which is what you need to develop. A campaign.” She clicked on one of them. “See, this singer is trying to raise twelve thousand dollars to make a music video.”

“Do people really give money to someone they don’t know? Twelve thousand dollars is a lot of cash. What if she’s a flop?”

“What if she’s a star?” She smiled and scrolled down the page. “See this list? These are things people get for donating certain amounts of money to her campaign. Five dollars gets an autographed photograph download. It costs this chick nothing to give them a downloadable image, and probably tons of her fans would pay five dollars for that. See how she offers a bigger gift for higher donations? A five-hundred-dollar donation gets a signed CD, a signed picture, a T-shirt, and a fifteen-minute group Skype. Oh, Steve! That’s a great idea! You’re so knowledgeable about the area and so passionate about preservation. You definitely need to do this!”

“I don’t know, Shan. There’s a big difference between a musician and 2.4 million dollars for conservation land.”

“You should talk to Treat, even if you don’t want to. He’s a business genius, and he not only has the money to help, but he loves Weston.”

“We already talked about that.”

She crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes. “I don’t understand you. You’re willing to bend over backward and put yourself out there to save this land for generations to come, but you have too big of an ego, or too much pride, or
whatever
, to do the one thing that could make a huge difference.”

His eyes went flat. “Not. Happening.”

“Fine, but just for the record, you’re being a dumbass again.”

He pressed his lips to hers. “Thanks for understanding, beautiful.”

She rolled her eyes again, which she thought might become her standard answer tonight. “In that case, you’ll need to reach like-minded people. You need a hook that people will care about and want to become part of.” She mulled that over for a beat. “Can it be conservation land and still be used for something else?”

“Sure. It depends how you set it up with the county. Someone could use it to continue ranching, or turn it into a nature conservancy center.”

“Oh, Grizz! I’ve got it!” She set the laptop beside her and took his hand. “Universities are always looking for money for research, right? What about making it into a research center and allowing students to use it? You could have sessions and even give tours to the local elementary and high schools. That’s how I figured out what I wanted to do. It was a field trip to a research facility. I spoke to a field researcher who was so excited about what he was doing I wanted to know more, and more. This would be really helpful to students. When I was doing my master’s, finding places to host me to do field research was really hard and
very
political. There’s such a dire need for this sort of thing. It would take some doing to buy the property, but that would open up so many avenues.”

“Shan, it sounds like a full-time job just to figure out the details for something like that, and I don’t have six months. I’ve got sixty days to make something happen. I love your ideas, but you’re talking about running a whole facility, and the word ‘political’ has me worried. I was really thinking more along the lines of conservation.” He rubbed his chin. “This magnifies our differences, doesn’t it?”

“
Please
.” She waved her hand dismissively. “This is called brainstorming, and it’s what makes the world go ’round. We’ll come up with something awesome like the Save the Rainforest campaigns. Oh my gosh! That’s it! We can sell off the land one acre at a time, but we’re not really selling. I can totally see it. Adopt an Acre. Give the Gift of Nature to Generations to Come.” She blinked up toward the sky. “I see a beautiful website with pictures of the land, and wildlife, and…hikers.”

“Hikers,” he said with a wide smile. “Now,
that
sounds like an amazing idea. But I can’t imagine it working.”

“Hey, Mr. Doubtypants. Have a little faith, will you?”

“I don’t know anything about setting up websites, or running programs like this.”

“Well, then, I guess our magnified differences aren’t such a bad thing after all. I double majored in business and biology, and I have a master’s in natural resource management. I can get all of this figured out with a little input from my family. And Max handles all the online marketing for the Indie Film Festival in Allure. She can clue me in to what works, and I’ll call my brother Sam about how to best capture conservation peeps online. He does tons of guerilla marketing for his river-rafting and adventure company. Ty can reach out to his tree-hugging groups. I knew one day his being a world-renowned mountain climber would come in handy. He’ll love this. And you don’t realize it, but you must have oodles of connections interested in conservation. Together we can totally do this. If you don’t mind my helping, of course.”

She was so excited she could barely sit still, and Steve was shaking his head with a wondrous look in his eyes. Before he could deny her the chance, she leaned in close and said, “Do you trust me?”

“I do,” he said seriously.

“Then let me try and help you. Please?”

“What about your research? This sounds…in­surmount­able. I would never forgive myself if you threw yourself into this project and didn’t get your research done.”

She sighed but was not deterred. “I will do my research. I won’t let that fall through, I promise. I’ll just focus really hard. Besides, I can map this out while I’m watching the foxes. It’s perfect.”

“Online begging, Shan?” His brow furrowed.

Her big, badass lumberjack looked too adorable not to smooch. She pressed her hands to his cheeks and kissed him hard. “You are
not
begging. You’re not trying to buy this property to live in as a vacation home. You want to conserve the beauty of Weston, Colorado, for generations to come. You’re opening up a huge venture for other like-minded people to jump on board and do some good in the world. It’s an admirable effort.”

“You’re so jazzed about this, it’s hard not to get excited and believe that together there’s nothing we can’t accomplish.” He smiled, and her heart soared. “That’s an amazing feeling. But I want to be careful.”

“I would expect nothing less,” she said with a teasing tone, although she was serious.

“Shan, I appreciate everything you’re offering and suggesting, but I don’t want to stress you out over this just because I care about it. And crowdfunding sounds risky. There are so many worries. What if people pledge money and then back out?”

“I don’t know how that works, but I’ll research that and find out. And I
want
to do this. I didn’t go into research or study biology and natural resources because it’s the funnest job on the planet. I care about the environment and wildlife. And I care about you. Just because I’m not sure I want to do research for my whole life doesn’t mean I’m not passionate about it.”

“I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful, or like I didn’t believe you cared. I just don’t want you to feel like you have to fight this because I am.”

She laughed. “Don’t you know me at all? This excitement you see.” She drew circles with her finger in front of her face. “That’s real, and it’s for the project. It’s a bonus that we can do it together, but the truth is, even if you mentioned the project and told me I’d be all on my own, I’d still want to do it. It’s important. And all this talk has made me think of something else. You probably need to form a company, but I think we can get my family to show me how to do that, too. I wish you’d just talk to Treat. This is what he does for a living. He could walk you through everything.”

“Jo,” he said more to himself than to her.

“Jo?”

“Jo Finney. She knows the ins and outs of nonprofits and for-profit corporations. She’s well connected in several conservation communities, and unlike me, she lives in the online world.” He tapped the laptop. “She could help.”

“Perfect! Can we call her? She seemed really nice, and it would be great to have the help.”

His eyes turned serious again, and he pulled back a little. A chill ran over her skin, the kind of chill that preceded bad news.

“Shan, I need to tell you something, and you may not want to hear it, but I don’t want to keep secrets from you.”

“Please don’t tell me she really is your girlfriend and you’ve been cheating on her, because that’s a deal breaker for me. I’m not a relationship wrecker, and I’ll end us right here and now—”

He took her hand and gazed into her eyes with a serious—and concerned—expression.

“I’d never hurt anyone like that. Not her, not you, not anyone, okay?”

She let out a relieved sigh and nodded.

“Jo and I have been friends since we were kids. We’ve both never been into the bar scene, and we like our privacy. The summer after my junior year of college, we were talking about…” He ran a hand through his hair and sighed. “This isn’t easy to say, and not because I think we did anything wrong, but because I feel like I’m breaking her trust by telling you.”

With her heart aching, she said, “Then don’t. I don’t want to cause a problem between you and a lifelong friend for something that happened that long ago.”

He took her hand and moved closer. “If you feel anything close to what I feel for you, then I want you to know.”

She held her breath, unsure if she wanted to hear what he had to say, but if she didn’t hear it now, it would be all she thought about until she did.

“Okay,” she managed.

“We got to talking and realized we were basically going months without any intimacy, and we got together. We were such good friends, we thought we could be more. But we realized right away that we weren’t meant to be together in that way. It was like a platonic sexual affair, I guess. That’s the only way I can describe it. We never dated. No one even knew we’d gotten together. We were kids trying to get through the summer. We didn’t call each other pet names or buy each other gifts, or—”

Shannon had a million questions, but she tried to put them into some semblance of order. She knew how wonderful Steve was, and clearly Jo knew, too, since she’d known him so long. How could anyone be intimate with him and
not
fall in love?

“I don’t understand,” she finally said. “If you two have so much in common, why was it platonic?”

“Because sex is a physical act, and being in love is an emotional connection. I love Jo the way you love Jade or Max or any of your best friends back home. And she feels the same about me.”

“But…”

“Hear me out, please. Then I’ll tell you whatever else you want to know.” He drew in a deep breath, like she’d offered him some modicum of relief by listening.

“It was more than a decade ago, and it wasn’t anything like it is between you and me. When I hear your voice, my whole world lights up. When I see you, my heart goes ballistic, Butterfly. Like I’m on speed. And when we kiss, Shan? When we make love?”

The emotions in his eyes were so genuine, so palpable, they drew her closer.

“I’ve never lost myself in anyone the way I do in you,” he said. “I think about you endlessly. The other night, when you forgot to leave a light on, I worried about you walking from your Jeep to the house. It’s ridiculous, I know.”

He reached up and brushed the back of his hand down her cheek, and it was all she could do to swallow past the lump of emotions clogging her throat.