Mail-Order Millionaire (15 page)

The woman rolled her eyes and pointed to a slim telephone book on the desk.

“Thank you. It will only take a minute.”

She leafed through the phone book until she found the number. But it took an eternity for him to answer. The phone rang and rang before he finally picked up.

“Max, I found your boots,” she said breathlessly.

“Really, where?”

“At the post office in Mount Henry. The boots are here and they’re about to close. They won’t release them to me because you told them to hold all your packages for pickup. That’s why they didn’t deliver them. They’ve been here all the time.”

“Oh Lord, of course. I remember now. I sent my anemometer in for repair and when it came back it still wasn’t fixed. So I told the post office not to send any more packages up here until I came down and checked them out first. But that was months ago.”

“Tell the lady it’s okay, and I’ll bring than up to you.”

Miranda held the receiver up so the postmistress could hear Max give his approval, then she heard Max talking to her. “Don’t come up, I’m coming down. Stay where you are. I’ll meet you there.”

Miranda took the boxes and went out the front door, which they locked behind her. She stood looking up and down the street without seeing the houses with their snow-covered peaked roofs. Her mind was whirling, thinking of seeing Max in a few minutes.

She stamped her feet on the snow-packed sidewalk to keep warm until she saw his car coming down the street. Inside her gloves her palms perspired as she saw his tall angular figure get out of the car and cross the sidewalk. He was smiling broadly, a look of anticipation on his face that for a brief moment she thought might be for her, until she remembered the two packages at her feet, the boots he’d been waiting for for so long.

She picked them up and held them out to him. To her surprise he wrapped his arms around her with the packages squashed between them. He brought with him the smell of cold mountain air, of fir trees mixed with his own masculine scent, and her heart began to race. Suddenly she was warm, a radiant warmth deep inside her for the first time since he’d left her weeks ago.

He pulled back and looked deep into her eyes. “I missed you,” he said.

She gulped, not knowing whether to admit she’d missed him, too, or to keep up the pretense of self-sufficiency. So she didn’t say anything.

Max took the packages out of her arms and dumped them into the trunk of his car. To make room he had to shove his duffel bag and two pairs of short cross-country skis to one side. He stood with his hand on the open trunk door, looking at her for a long moment. “Do you ski?” he asked.

She cleared her throat and found her voice. “Ski? No, I don’t.”

“You’re from Vermont and you don’t ski?”

She gave him a half smile. “People from Vermont don’t ski,” she explained. “They can’t afford it. Skiing is for people who come up here from New York, or... Georgia.”

“Wouldn’t you like to learn?”

“Sure, of course, someday. After I get some extra money for the skis and the boots and the lift ticket and...”

“I was thinking of cross-country. You don’t need a lift ticket and I’ve got an extra pair of skis here for a guy I know. I was supposed to meet him at the lodge at Cranmore, but he had to cancel at the last minute. His wife.”

Miranda frowned. “His wife what?”

“Wouldn’t let him go. It’s always that way. He works at a station in Maine, one week off and one on like me. This is his week off, and she wants him home. And since he doesn’t want to end up in divorce court like me he’s going home.”

Miranda twisted her fingers together, not knowing what to say. Not knowing who to feel sorrier for, the wife, the husband, or Max, who stood there on the snow-packed sidewalk next to her, looking at the mountains in the distance with a faraway look in his eyes. Deliberately he brought his gaze back to her.

“What I’m getting at is that I’ve got the extra skis, you can rent boots up there and Jack’s already paid for his room and it’s too late to get the money back. So I think you should take his place and come with me.”

“To Cranmore?” Her voice went up a notch until it turned into a squeak.

“It’s not the moon,” he assured her. “Cranmore is right here in the White Mountains, only two hours away. What’s the matter, is it your foot?”

She shook her head. “My foot’s fine, but it’s...the horses. I’ve got to get back to feed them.” Overnight at a ski resort with Max? Her mind was spinning. Her heart rate was accelerating. She couldn’t go. She shouldn’t go, but oh, how she wanted to go.

“Can’t your sister do it?”

“No, but maybe Howard could. He’s my closest neighbor.”

Max closed the trunk with a bang. “Call him.”

Miranda called him and he said he’d feed them. Then she put her car in a parking lot behind the drugstore, bought a few personal items in the store and got into Max’s car.

Relaxing in the warm, upholstered interior at last, she studied Max’s profile while his attention was on the road. Had his jaw always been so jutting, his hair so thick and soft she wanted to push it back from his forehead? All the pent-up doubts about spending more time with him rose to her throat and threatened to choke her.

“What am I doing?” she asked softly, more to herself than to him.

He slanted a glance in her direction as he left the town of Mount Henry and turned onto the turnpike. “You’re taking the weekend off, that’s all. And it’s about time after you’ve worked so hard. I’ve got the skis and the room and you’ve got the time, for once. There’s no sap to collect, is there, nothing to plant this time of year and nothing to harvest?”

“No,” she agreed. “But. . .” She hesitated. How was she to explain that she didn’t want to go through the cycle of loving and losing again? Wait a minute, she told herself. Who said anything about love? Certainly not her. And how could she lose somebody she never had? Maybe this was what she needed, a weekend with Max on neutral ground, not his weather station or her farm. That way when it ended there’d be nothing to remind her of him, not the horses or the close confines of the sugar shack or the hearth in her living room. Yes, this weekend she’d see that he was just another man, an ordinary man who could teach her to ski, but not take over her everyday life as he’d done before. Then at the end of the weekend she’d walk away knowing that it was nothing special, just a weekend off, and she was no one special, just a last-minute replacement. He was looking at her, waiting for her to finish her sentence.

“Nothing,” she said. “You’re right.”

As they drove through the snowy foothills, Max asked Miranda about the syrup and she had to admit that she hadn’t made as much money as she’d hoped.

“It’s the middleman,” she explained. “I sell to Green Mountain Merchants and they repackage my syrup into cute little jars with checkered gingham covers and sell it in the retail store for twice what I make because I don’t have a store or a customer base to sell direct.”

“What if you had a store, do you have anything else to sell?” he asked.

“Some apples. Grandma made wonderful apple butter, but that was a long time ago. The trees just don’t produce the way they used to. I ought to prune them, but I don’t know how. I have to face it, I need Green Mountain Merchants, but sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it. All that work we did for so little money. Which should be half yours, by the way.”

Max’s headlights illuminated the narrow country road ahead. “I don’t need  any money. I did it for fun.” He gave her a swift glance. It was dark now, so dark he couldn’t make out her expression. He could only see the soft curve of her cheek and the faint outline of her breast under the soft camel-colored sweater with the little buttons up the front. He’d almost forgotten how the smell of her skin and her hair could take his breath away and make it impossible for him to speak. He didn’t know what to say anyway, or he couldn’t say what he wanted to say. That she’d been on his mind constantly these past weeks.

That he’d picked up the phone a dozen times to call her under the pretense of ordering something, but that he’d put it down again, knowing be couldn’t hear her voice without unleashing the floodgates to his memory. That without half trying he could conjure up pictures of her riding Gretel bareback, her blond hair blowing in the wind behind her, her cheeks the color of her bright red jacket, her eyes laughing at him plodding along behind her.

He didn’t need to hear her voice on the phone to remind him how she looked sitting next to him on that lumpy couch in the evening, half asleep, her head so close to his shoulder he could reach out and pull her to him. But he never had. He couldn’t have done that to her or to himself. Because if he had, he wouldn’t have stopped there; he would have kissed her until he couldn’t stop and they’d passed the point of no return. And there they’d have been in the morning, tangled in each other’s arms, sated, fulfilled and full of remorse. Because she trusted him and they both knew this relationship was destined to go nowhere.

If she hadn’t found his boots, he’d be by himself now, headed for Cranmore. Instead, miracle of miracles, she was here beside him, one more time, one last time and then it was goodbye. If he needed to be reminded of what would happen if he considered falling in love again, he had only to think of Jack. He didn’t feel sorry for him, he envied him. He had someone who cared about him enough to want him to come home. But how long would it last, a half-time marriage? Max’s had lasted two years.

“Is that why you got divorced?” Miranda asked quietly as if she’d read his mind.

“What?” he asked startled.

“Your wife wouldn’t let you go skiing?”

He shook his head. “Toward the end she didn’t care where I went as long as I didn’t come home.’’ He turned the car into a driveway under the sign, Nordic Ski Area. “It wasn’t her fault she couldn’t deal with my schedule.”

Miranda’s eyes followed the signs that pointed to the ski lodge. “You mean she didn’t know you’d be away so much?”

“She knew, but experiencing it is a different matter. Things happen, things come up, and I wasn’t there. I don’t blame her for finding someone else who’d be around all the time. I don’t blame him, either, even though he was my best friend.”

“Oh, Max.” She reached for his arm and rested her hand on his shoulder.      

“Don’t feel sorry for me. It was my fault. Everyone agreed on that. Her parents, my parents. They wanted me to get another job. So I did. I got this job, the same kind as before, but as far away as possible. I had to make a choice, my wife or my job. I chose my job. That’s the kind of guy I am.” He felt Miranda’s hand slide away from his shoulder.

“Well, here we are,” he said, pulling up in front of a rambling stone lodge.

The lobby was flanked by an enormous stone fireplace with a fire burning brightly to welcome them. People in sleek apres-ski outfits were sitting around the fire. The smell of hot mulled wine filled the air. Max sniffed hungrily and asked the desk clerk if they were too late for dinner.

After being assured they served until nine, Max carried his bag to his room, which adjoined hers. When he saw the connecting door between them, he felt a momentary panic. He wasn’t made of New Hampshire granite. There was just so much temptation he could take.

Their eyes met and then looked away, she at the overhead light from the ceiling, he at the key in his hand. “See you in, what, a half hour or fifteen minutes?” he asked.

She nodded, went into her room and closed the door behind her. She turned on the hot water and sat on the edge of the tub, inhaling the steam and trying not to think too much about Max and his ex-wife and his feelings about marriage. For the moment she would concentrate on washing her hair and body even though she didn’t have a change of clothes. What she would do without ski clothes she didn’t know. She’d worry about that tomorrow.

Fortunately the management provided fluffy terry-cloth robes for the guests, which she was wearing when Max tapped on the door between their rooms. She leaned against the connecting door, pressing her forehead against the rich-smelling cedar wood. “I’m not ready,” she said.