A Cold Creek Reunion by RaeAnne Thayne Read Free Book Online

anything at all for you other than maybe a little fond nostalgia for what we once shared.”
    Oh. Double ouch. Pain sliced through him, raw and sharp. That was certainly clear enough. He was very much afraid it wouldn’t take long for him to discover he was just as crazy about her as he had always been and all she felt in return was “fond nostalgia.”
    Or so she said anyway.
    He couldn’t help searching her expression for any hint that she wasn’t being completely truthful, but she only gazed back at him with that same cool look, her mouth set in that frustratingly polite smile.
    Damn, but he hated that smile. He suddenly wanted to lean forward, yank her against him and kiss away that smile until it never showed up there again.
    Just for the sake of fond nostalgia.
    Instead, he forced himself to give her a polite smile of his own and took a step in the direction of his truck. He had a meeting and didn’t want to be later than he already was.
    “Good to know,” he murmured. “I guess I had better let you get back to your gardening. My shift ends tonight at six and then I’m only on call for the next few days, so I should have a little more time to work on the rooms you’re renovating. Leave me a list of jobs you would like me to do at the front desk. I’ll try my best to stay out of your way.”
    There. That sounded cool and uninvolved.
    If he slammed his truck door a little harder than strictly necessary, well, so what?

Chapter Four
    W hen would she ever learn to keep her big mouth shut?
    Long after Taft climbed into his pickup truck and drove away, Laura continued to yank weeds out of the sadly neglected garden beds with hands that shook while silently castigating herself for saying anything.
    The moment she turned and found him walking toward her, she should have thrown down her trowel and headed back to the cottage.
    Their conversation replayed over and over in her head. If her gardening gloves hadn’t been covered in dirt, she would have groaned and buried her face in her hands.
    First of all, why on earth had she told him about Javier and his infidelities? Taft was the last person in Pine Gulch with whom she should have shared that particular tidbit of juicy information.
    Even her mother didn’t know how difficult the last few years of her marriage had become, how she would have left in an instant if not for the children and their adoration for Javier. Yet she had blurted the gory details right out to Taft, gushing her private heartache like a leaky sprinkler pipe.
    So much for wanting him to think she had moved onward and upward after she left Pine Gulch. All she had accomplished was to make herself an object of pity in his eyes—as if she hadn’t done that a decade ago by throwing all her love at someone who wasn’t willing or capable at the time of catching it.
    And then she had been stupid enough to dredge up the past, something she vowed she wouldn’t do. Talking about it again had to have made him wonder if she were thinking about it, which basically sabotaged her whole plan to appear cool and uninterested in Taft.
    He could always manage to get her to confide things she shouldn’t. She had often thought he should have been the police officer, not his twin brother, Trace.
    When she was younger, she used to tell him everything. They had talked about the pressure her parents placed on her to excel in school. About a few of the mean girls in her grade who had excluded her from their social circle because of those grades, about her first crush—on a boy other than him, of course. She didn’t tell him that until much later.
    They had probably known each other clear back in grade school, but she didn’t remember much about him other than maybe seeing him around in the lunchroom, this big, kind of tough-looking kid who had an identical twin and who always smiled at everyone. He had been two whole grades ahead of her after all, in an entirely different social stratosphere.
    Her first real memory of