Chapter 1
Once upon a time,Natasha Scott thought as she guided her car along the winding mountain road,coming back here would have felt like complete failure.
What a difference fifteen years made.
When she’d left, Natasha had sworn she’d never come back to Girdwood Springs – she’d honestly felt at the time that there was nothing for her in the tiny mountain town she’d grown up in except boredom and misery. Oh sure, it was fine if you were content to see the same people every day, do the same things, and work in the same small store. But Natasha had always dreamed big – and her dreams just couldn’t be contained by Girdwood Springs.
That had been almost half her life ago, though.
She’d applied to a prestigious college in the city, and she’d gotten in. She’d worked her ass off, gone to every networking event she could find, and spent untold hours doing unpaid interning to make a name for herself. Her efforts had definitely paid off: she’d been head-hunted the moment she graduated by a huge marketing and advertising company, without her even having to apply for a job.
And after that, it’d been ten years of climbing the corporate ladder – working long hours hunched over her computer putting together advertising campaigns, staying at her desk until the dawn had begun to lighten the sky through her office window. Attending cocktail events and schmoozing clients until her feet in their strappy heels had ached. Driving the team she headed hard to do their best work – but driving herself even harder.
She’d liked it, she had to admit. Natasha knew she was good at her job, and her meteoric rise to head of marketing had proved it. She knew what she was doing, and she knew she was good at it.
Well, Iwas,anyway.
She’d never imagined she could get so sick of work she loved – or soburned out.
That was really the only word for it, she thought grimly as she carefully steered her car around a sharp bend. Snatching only a couple of hours of sleep per night for years had taken its toll, as had all the stress and the long hours.
She didn’t mind a few gray hairs – even at her relatively young age! – but the constant bags under her eyes, the knowledge that living on microwaved meals was doing nothing for her health, and the constant, unending feeling of fatigue… well. That was something else.
But still, she’d pushed on. She hadn’t spent ten years building her career just to quit because she was a bit tired! She wasn’t about to admit defeat – or, to put it another way,failure.
Because I guess that was what I saw it as.
Sighing, Natasha shook her head.
She’d been a fool, she now knew. If she’d just taken a little time off when she’d first needed it instead of pushing herself even harder than before, she wouldn’t be in this mess now.
Not that it was really amess,she supposed, pursing her lips. Being ordered by her boss to take a break after he’d walked in on her snoring at her desk hadn’t really been her finest hour, though, and nor had the fact that she’d apparently sent her boss seventy-three emails, the entirety of which had been some variation of
jhgjkdfgfhgf doiDf hghghgh?!
or
*hjghhhhj olgkfdghjf;
or
bnkdfgfd7g7777777777777777777777777
All of them sent with her face while she’d been passed out on her computer keyboard, until finally her boss had come to find out just what the hell was going on in her office.
Thathad been a dressing-down she hadn’t really needed, Natasha thought, cringing a little at the memory.
But at the end of it, her boss, Charlson – and he insisted, for some reason, on being called justCharlson, like he was Madonna or something – had told her in no uncertain terms that she was taking some time off.
But I can’t just –she’d started to argue with him, even as her heart had sunk with the knowledge that there was no getting out of this one.
I don’t want to hear it,Charlson had told her, in his most no-nonsense voice.Don’t make me force the issue by firing you. Imagine if you’d emailed a client all of that rubbish, instead of me.
Natasha gulped, mortification running through her veins at the merethoughtof that. Client relationships were delicate, and her firm had spent years and years building its reputation. The idea she could have damaged it by falling asleep with her face on her keyboard was not something she even wanted to think about in too much detail.
But it’d all meant, in the end, that here she was: back in Girdwood Springs after fifteen years away.
And looking out of the window at the beauty of the surroundings, Natasha was honestly having trouble remembering now why she’d ever left.
