The side street, little more than a one-lane dirt track, petered out in an open meadow filled with grass and wildflowers that whispered around his legs. Finally he was able to see the rushing stream he had been hearing. That must be Silver Creek. He could hear the distant sound of a waterfall upstream, and herecalled there was an old silver-stamping mill somewhere along the upper creek, which he and his cousins had explored as kids.
Here at the meadow, the creek spread out into a wide, placid pool that looked tailor-made for taking a dip on a hot day. Something pale caught his eye, and as Baz wandered closer, he saw that it was a bar of soap sitting on a rock by the water’s edge. Baz smiled to himself; maybe it had been left there by some long-ago camper, or perhaps the kids from neighboring farms still came out here.
He started to pick up the soap, but was so surprised to find it wet that it squirted out of his fingers and fell into the grass.
Recent rain, maybe? Baz looked up at the clear, lightly cloud-flecked sky.
Maybe some animal had been playing with it and dropped it here, an otter or a crow; did crows do that?
Because the alternative was that someone had been bathing here just a few minutes ago.
ARDEN
Wearing a towel and nothing else,a very damp and nervous Arden pressed herself to a tree and stared at the stranger less than twenty feet away from her.
If he turned his head, there was no way he couldnotsee her. He had just picked up her soap. He looked around, and Arden ducked her head behind the tree.
She plastered herself against the tree, her cheek pressed against the rough bark. She could feel her wet hair clinging to her face. Silently, she started counting to distract herself from moving. There was a stick pressing into her bare foot, and a leaf—hopefully it was just a leaf and not a bug—tickling the back of her calf. The edge of the towel brushed her naked thigh whenever she moved. It itched.
She squeezed her eyes shut, as if that could make the stranger not seeher. Still, his image was imprinted behind her closed lids.
His hair was loose and sandy brown, catching the sun. Broad shoulders flexed under a tight gray T-shirt, the type of shoulders made for lifting boards into place at a barn-raising, or comfortably crying on—shoulders that could hold the weight of the world, or of one woman’s tears. He had been wearing jeans,not crisp new ones, but old and worn with a few stains as if from hard work.
He was not at all the rich a-hole she’d been expecting.
A few minutes ago, Arden had surfaced from a refreshing dip in the pool to the sound of voices and vehicles. It was her second bath in the cool water of the creek. The first time, she had been mainly concerned with washing off dust and travel grime. Today she’d planned a more leisurely and refreshing soak. The water was cold at first, but the air was warm, and the pool—while not exactlycomfortable—had warmed up enough in the sun that she could dip all the way under. She had no shampoo, just a bar of soap, but she firmly told herself that shampoo was really just glorified soap; she’d luxuriated in a long scrub to get all the grease and dirt out of her hair.
She felt good today. She hadn’t had as much trouble sleeping as she had feared. She’d found that the soft darkness, even devoid of lights, didn’t feel oppressive or scary. The stars overhead were like nothing she had ever known, more stars than she had realized there were in the entire cosmos. After a leisurely morning in the cabin— where even her breakfast of instant oatmeal tasted good—and a lazy swim in the pool, she had been looking forward to a quiet day to explore the town and replenish her faded energy.
And now, this.
After what seemed like an eternity standing behind the tree, with her count getting to the point where she lost track and had to start over, she heard movement receding into the distance. She peeked out just in time to see a gray T-shirt-clad back and a tight jeans-covered ass vanish between the cabins at the edge of the meadow.
Arden let out a long breath and stepped out from behind the tree. Okay, he hadn’t seen her. But these people were definitelynot gone. She could still hear voices. In fact, she could hear voices onher street.
“There you are!” A woman’s voice, calling. “Where did you get off to?”
Arden froze.
The low rumble in reply must have been Gray T-Shirt. Arden couldn’t understand his answer, but she strained her ears, discovering that something in her seemed to thrill to the calm cadence of his voice.
Also, she noticed, he had taken her soap.
The woman said something else, sounding closer. Were they coming back this way? Arden looked around wildly. She couldn’t go down her street with them there. Instead, she hurried for the shelter of the nearest house she could see through the trees. “Ouch, ouch,” she whispered, trying to pick her way through moss, long grass, and thorns. Brush tried to snatch her towel off. There were probably rusty nails back here, too.
She managed to find a halfway decent hiding place flattened against the clapboard side of one of the buildings. But she could still hear voices. How many people were here? There had to be at least three or four, if not more.
The assumption she had immediately jumped to when she’d heard noises on Main Street was that the town’s mysterious owners had showed up. But if Gray T-Shirt could be assumed to be typical of the rest, and not a hired hand or something, they didn’t look like the kind of people who would buy a town.
Campers? she wondered. Curious urban explorers from town? Hired carpenters come to fix it up for the real owners?
Until she had a better idea of who they were and whether they were likely to throw her out, she definitely didn’t want to be caught here. Especially wearing nothing but a towel.
So she just needed to get back to her cabin and hide.
Unfortunately, if she had to go the long way to avoid everyone, it was going to involve streaking through the town.
Piece of cake.
