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him.
Olivia suppressed a shiver when the cold air coming in the open window overtook the warm air blowing out of her car heater. “You aren’t planning to do all this work yourself, are you?”
He stabbed the tip of the shovel into the gravel and squinted at her in the bright sunlight. “Not if I can help it.”
Maybe, she thought, she should mind her own business. “I’ll leave you to it.”
“Where’s Buster?”
“Who knows. I threw caution to the wind and let him have the run of the house instead of locking him in the mudroom.”
Dylan’s deep blue gaze settled on her. “Is that fair warning?”
Olivia laughed. “If you want to look at it that way.”
She rolled up her window and continued into the village and on to Frost Millworks, located on a wide, rock-strewn brook. The building was just ten years old and occupied a section of flat land above the brook, its exterior designed to fit with the rustic surroundings, its interior modern. Jess lived in an apartment in the original nineteenth-century sawmill overlooking the rock dam and millpond. It was one of the few surviving sawmills that had once dotted the streams and rivers of the region. As kids, Olivia and her sister used to swim in the millpond. The water was clear, clean and ice-cold, even on a hot August afternoon. They’d grown up a half mile down the road in the same house where their parents still lived.
By the time Olivia parked in the small lot, she had decided she didn’t have the whole story about Dylan McCaffrey and his intentions in Knights Bridge. Whatever they were, her reaction to him was perfectly normal. He was sexy, and there was no point in denying otherwise, at least to herself. His presence up the road from her was her doing, and if he complicated her life, it was her own fault.
She found her mother at her cluttered rolltop desk in the office just inside the mill entrance. Louise Frost smiled brightly at her elder daughter. “How’s your road?”
“Not a problem, except for the potholes. They’re brutal this year.”
“Do you keep a bag of sand in your trunk, just in case?”
Olivia shook her head. “I figure I can always call you or Dad if I get stuck.”
“That’s true, but sand makes sense.”
Her mother stood up from the desk. At five-five, she was shorter than either of her daughters. She worked out most days and was in good shape, wearing a fleece vest over a thick turquoise corduroy shirt, jeans and mud boots. She had dyed her hair auburn about five years ago and kept it cut short and, with her green eyes and round face, reminded Olivia of her younger sister. She tended to favor their father.
She peered at a new photograph taped to the top edge of the antique desk, this one of palm trees, sandy beach and ocean. It joined a dozen others her mother had printed off the internet of the famous 123-mile Pacific Coast Highway in central California: Monterey, Carmel-by-the-Sea, San Simeon, Cambria, Morro Rock, sea otters, sunsets, surf crashing on sheer rock cliffs.
“That’s the beach in Santa Barbara,” her mother said.
“It’s beautiful.”
“We’re going to fly into Los Angeles and spend the night in Beverly Hills or Malibu, then head up to Santa Barbara for at least one night. I’m investigating hotels and inns. I haven’t made reservations yet. I’d do a bed-and-breakfast, but I don’t think your father would like it.”
Olivia smiled. “You could try. It’d only be a couple nights, right?”
Her mother nodded, staring at the pictures on her desk. “They say driving south-to-north isn’t as unnerving with the cliffs and water as north-to-south, but people do both. Driving south you hug the coast. You see more, I guess. I think we’ll see plenty.”
“Are you going as far as San Francisco?”
“I think so. It depends on how much time we have.” She shifted from the photographs to a map of California she had tacked to the wall, with pushpins marking various stops she wanted to make. She seemed transfixed,