Three Men and a Woman_Jubilee Read online

  Okay, he felt stupid, too. Heading out to the woods to track a big buck had seemed like a good idea. But they probably should have gone with Henry’s suggestion of a little skate and maybe a pick-up game. Only the worst city-slicker would be foolish enough to end up in a frozen creek in the middle of a blizzard, but what could he say? It happened.

  Damn lake effect.

  There was just a little bit of an upside. Every time he lifted his head out of the water—probably he had brain freeze, because nothing felt better than going under, letting the steamy-hot water of the tub surround his noggin—he got a look at a pretty woman.

  Jubilee, he thought she’d said, though his hearing might have been affected by the water in his ears.

  She had it going on despite her frumpy clothing. He liked her spiky hair and her bright blue eyes that looked at him directly and with concern whenever he surfaced. He’d noted that his pals had left him in his shorts before Henry had dumped him into the tub. It was a good thing, because now that his blood had warmed up and he was noticing those eyes, well, things were happening inside those shorts.

  He was pretty sure his Expedition was in a ditch. So, yeah, he had a master’s degree in sustainable engineering, and his little start-up company did a good business with the state, helping the Finger Lakes region’s industry green up. And maybe owning an Expedition seemed a little perverse, given his profession. But, hey, it stayed in his garage most days, he was going electric when it came time to replace the little hybrid he drove for his job-related site visits, he used his bike for a lot of his errands, and, sometimes, a guy just had to have an…Expedition.

  Ditch or no, he and his buddies weren’t going anywhere until the snow plows came by a time or two. And that probably wouldn’t be until the snow stopped falling, which, as far as he could tell, hadn’t happened yet.

  They were going to be here with this pretty woman for a while.

  His pals could thank him later.

  Finally he felt warm enough to just float there a little. She’d been busy handing out towels and giving Henry directions for hanging his gear to dry downstairs somewhere. She caught Keith looking when she came back.

  “Jubilee?” he asked, and said, “Keith,” when she nodded.

  He gestured at the swank tub he was in. “I’m glad we found you.”

  She smiled—her mouth was pretty, too, he and his dick both noticed—and folded her arms under her breasts, which also appeared to have some potential, though she certainly wasn’t making the most of them. “Me, too.” She didn’t sound as enthusiastic as he’d been.

  “Thanks for, well, saving my life.”

  “Yeah,” she said, with a little quirk to her brow. “What are strangers for?” She pointed to her side. “I’ve got towels warmed when you’re ready, and I’ll get some clothes that I think will work.”

  He nodded, wondering about those clothes. “I’m grateful.”

  She left the bathroom and, better part of valor, he stayed where he was until she came back. After setting a stack of clothing on the sleek wood countertop next to one of the sinks, she nodded, then exited again, closing the door behind her this time. He took that as his cue.

  Keith drained the tub, dried off, and dressed himself. The clothes were more or less the masculine counterpart of hers—a pair of thick fleece sweats, a long-sleeved thermal tee, and a plaid wool overshirt. The guy they belonged to was probably about his height—5’11”, but a bit less bulky through the shoulders. She’d left nice wool socks but no underwear, which was fine by him. He’d rather go commando than wear some other dude’s undies.

  He peeked around upstairs before he headed down. The master bedroom was nice, with a lot of windows and a big king bed. There was a cool turret room that looked like a kind of weaving studio—there was a big loom centered in the round turret space, a couple smaller looms, spools and skeins, if that was the right word, of yarn strewn about, and a lot of drawers and cubbies. Behind that was a small bedroom with its own little bath.

  Going down the stairs, he had a chance to appreciate the really nice woodwork of the place. The house had been built and probably updated by true craftsmen. There was a pretty curve in the solid oak banister, and the staircase and floor below gleamed with well-polished wood. Panes of beveled, leaded glass surrounded the front entryway and made up a lot of the double doors, as well. The mess the three refuge-seekers must have made there was cleaned up but for the pile of wet towels on a damp rug.

  On the first floor, the turret area was part of a nicely appointed living room. The furniture appeared to be period wood and upholstery, but it was decent-sized and both comfortable- and sturdy-looking. There were scattered family photos he planned to take a look at later and original art—mostly decent landscapes that he figured were done by local artists, since he recognized some of the settings.

  To the other side, there was a dining room/kitchen combo, and he found the rest of the gang there. Jubilee was doing kitchen stuff, Henry sat at an island barstool watching her, and Brody was coming up a set of backstairs with an empty laundry basket. Keith figured he was going for the towels. Both guys gave him a silent lift of an eyebrow for his lumberjack outfit.

  “You okay, man?” Henry asked, but the dude was talking to a pretty woman with a glass of wine in his hand, so he might have been happier if Keith had stayed in the tub longer. The guy was a half-geek, all-nerd scientist, but for some reason that didn’t mean he couldn’t get it going on with women.

  Keith nodded, and Brody gave him a good look and nodded back. He motioned to the woman. “This is Jubilee.”

  “Yeah,” Keith said. “We met. Again, thanks, Jubilee. We’re really imposing.”

  She smiled but shot him a little wink, and he quite liked her for it. “Again, you’re welcome.” She lifted the bottle of red. “Do you want some?”

  He’d already spotted an open bottle of stout from Keuka Brewing Company on the counter. He’d consulted with a bunch of the Finger Lakes breweries, including that one. “Well, if beer’s an option…”

  Jubilee smiled again as though she wasn’t surprised and went to the fridge. She saw he’d already reached for the opener on the counter and just handed him the bottle.

  “Thanks.” He quirked a lip up. “I’m afraid we’re going to be saying that an awful lot.”

  “You want to just save it for tomorrow when we get you plowed out, and give me a really big one then?”

  He grinned at the humor in those blue eyes. They were really blue. “Would that work for you?”

  “Well, it would save us getting bored with it, anyway.”

  He liked that she smiled at him again, but didn’t like that she turned back to the work she’d been doing at the stove.

  “This is a really nice house.”

  “It is,” she said. She took another glass container from the microwave and dumped it into a pot on the stovetop. Four similar, empty containers were stacked in the sink. It looked like they were using her up her frozen supply of…something white. “Potato soup,” she supplied. “I was telling Henry. This is the house I grew up in. My parents still own it, but they moved south after…”

  She trailed off and glanced over as Keith started washing out the bowls in the sink. Brody had come and gone with the towels from the entry. He came back up the stairs, retrieved his beer, and sat next to Henry.

  They all watched the woman at the stove.

  Henry was the one who spoke. “She didn’t finish that sentence for me, either.”

  Jubilee reached over, rinsed her hands under the stream of water, then turned to face the guys at the island as she dried off with a kitchen towel. “After my husband died,” she said. “Two years ago.”

  “Shit.” All eyes were on her, but Brody was the only one who spoke. He might look like a California-surfer airhead, but he had a good, sensitive soul. “Sorry, Jubilee.”

  She gave a small nod into a bit of silence.

  “You live here all alone?” That was Henry.

&nb
sp; Turning enough to stir the pot of soup, she was a bit slow to answer. “Most of the time.” After a little pause, she gave them some backstory. “As I grew up, my parents were part of a local craft and farming cooperative. It was a group of…kind of old hippies. They brought organic farming to the area, practiced folk crafts and arts like pottery, woodworking, glassblowing…they ate communally, got together and made music.”

  Keith knew of it. The Finger Lakes Guild. It was pretty famous and still a fairly successful enterprise. They were ahead of him on a lot of green practices. There was still a local legend about them—where had they hidden their marijuana field? Nobody who’d found it had ever come back. Over the years, a number of RIT students had presented their senior colloquium on the topic.

  “When I was school-aged, my parents bought this house with a few acres around it. The Guild has ‘WOOFers.’” She used finger quotes for that and offered an explanation that Keith didn’t need, but the others probably did. It was the international organization that set up opportunities for young people to have a work and travel experience. In exchange for some labor on organic farms, the kids got room and board in interesting places. The farms got cheap help. It was a nice win-win arrangement.

  Before she went on, she got out a block of cheddar cheese and a grater and set them in front of Henry. She’d already given Brody a cutting board, knife, and handful of spring onions.

  “So, in summers, I often have someone staying with me, doing some work on the land. Also, my husband was a glassblower, and there’s a studio with small living quarters in the barn. I have someone staying and working there, too, once in a while.”

  “What happened to your husband?”

  Jubilee met Brody’s question with an arch look, like she could read what was in Brody’s head. Keith could, too, because he’d had the same thought. “Not,” she said, “a glassblowing accident.” She turned back to the soup. “He got cancer. The cancer wasn’t fatal so much, but he had a rare, severe reaction to one of the chemo treatments. He died while he was waiting for a lung transplant.”

  That sucked. She’d had some bad luck.

  She went on. “He grew up with the Guild, too. He was as much son as son-in-law to my parents. After he died, well, neither his parents nor mine recovered well. All four of them have moved to a similar sort of guild in North Carolina.”

  “You stayed,” Henry said.

  “Yes,” she said, and lifted her hands around her. “I love it here.”

  “You weave,” Keith said.

  She nodded, clearly making an effort to lighten the mood. “I’m good at it.”

  “I believe you,” Keith told her.

  Jubilee smiled, and he was developing a real appreciation for the sweetness of it. She set a loaf of coarse bread on the counter along with a container of honest-to-God bacon bits. She filled ceramic, no doubt hand-thrown, bowls with the hearty soup and passed them around. They ate at the island, like they were family, adding toppings to their bowls and dipping the bread in. She drank wine along with Henry, and Keith and Brody both had a second beer.

  The guys were hungry, and for a while, eating won out over talking. They didn’t really slow down until all three of them were on their second helpings.

  Into a little silence, Keith asked the question that had been on his mind for a while. “Where do you guys suppose my rifle is?”

  Henry answered. “I think you put it in the creek.”

  “Good spot,” Brody added. “It should be fine there ’til spring.”

  Chapter Two

  Jubilee lit a few candles and settled in with a glass of wine. There were a couple softly upholstered, swivel armchairs with a large, matching, circular ottoman placed into the living room turret area, and that was one of her favorite spots to spend a quiet evening.

  Which was pretty much what all of her evenings were. Quiet and spent alone.

  It was Friday, nearly a week since three big, former hockey players had filled her home with their quite significant presence, and, for the first time in, really, almost ever, she was feeling her aloneness.

  More, that was, than just the loneliness for her husband that had been her constant companion for two years.

  She’d grown up in a communal setting, surrounded by children and adults of all ages. She’d been particularly loved by, particularly close to her parents, her brother, her parents’ best friends, and their son, Bill. Those people remained ever-present, even in the years after her parents had moved the family into this house. And during the years when Bill had become her husband.

  But her parents and parents-in-law had moved to North Carolina. Her brother, Cary, had studied glass engineering and taken the corporate route, now working at the Corning plant in Wilmington, North Carolina. And Bill had died.

  Her parents had urged her to move with them, and she thought that someday maybe she would. But she loved it here. She loved the house and the land around her. She loved her work, the shawls she sold to pricey boutiques and the tapestries that were commissioned at high-end galleries. Her art was inspired and informed by her surroundings and by the memories that were woven into the space around her.

  Often, she was content, sometimes even happy, in the cocoon those strands of memory had formed.

  Six nights ago, she’d opened her home to those three attractive, vital men. She’d fed them and found a warm place for each of them to sleep. She’d worked with them in the morning to dig out Keith’s big SUV after it had been buried by the county plows that had come through during the night. She’d watched as Joe Johnson had come to clear her drive and used his winch to get the three friends back on the road.

  Each of the men had kissed her good-bye—a kiss of thanks, on the face of it. But each of them had touched her in some way that signaled more—a bit of sexual interest. She was sure she hadn’t imagined that.

  Henry had touched the small of her back as she’d led him upstairs to the spare bedroom—formerly hers—after she’d gotten Brody situated on an air mattress in the living room and Keith on the big, TV-watching sofa in the den. He’d said goodnight as she left him at his door, but there’d been that touch. She’d learned he was a scientist, an expert in the field of artificial intelligence, but someone had forgotten to inform him that his large dose of sex appeal wasn’t to type.

  Brody had been the first up in the morning, coming to the kitchen while she started breakfast. He told her how pretty she looked in the morning light—bright sunshine after that crazy storm—and he’d touched her cheek as he’d kissed her good morning. A kiss and a touch that had held for a good few seconds longer than a simple greeting.

  He should have been easy, all California, game-industry casual. But his gaze was warm and sharp at the same time, with nothing casual about it at all.

  And Keith—he’d pulled his big, loaded-up Expedition out of the drive, then backed up, jumped out, and ran back to the house. She was still at the door, and he put his hands on her shoulders, and said, “I don’t think that last thanks I gave you was big enough.”

  She smiled and was about to tell him she thought it was, but he went on.

  “I wanted to add this.”

  He was an engineer, and she’d already figured out the way his mind worked in disciplined organization despite his sweet handsomeness. She expected an accounting of what he thought he owed her, a kind of “thank you” spreadsheet. Instead, he pressed into the doorway, into her, and kissed her. The touch of his hands at her shoulders was impossibly warm, strong, and…tender. Much like his dark blue eyes when he lifted up. “Thank you, Jubilee.”

  Then they were gone, all three of them leaving her, cocoon in tatters and her heart lonely.

  With a sigh, Jubilee reminded herself that she had only this weekend to get through. Next week was Christmas, and she had a flight booked to North Carolina on Monday. Maybe she would decide then that her parents were right and she should move there. Maybe…

  She smiled when a big, familiar SUV turned off the gravel road on
to her place. Maybe she’d been waiting for just that thing to happen.

  The vehicle came all the way up her drive and disappeared in the parking area outside the barn. A couple minutes later, a single figure came around the walk and up her porch steps—all clear now, a combination of her work with a shovel and several days of warm sunshine.

  It was Keith, she saw, as she went to the door even before he found the bell. With both arms, he carried a box.

  She opened the door, and they spent a long moment looking at each other.

  He was the shortest of the three, at something like 5’11”, which was why Bill’s clothing had almost fit him. But he was every bit as appealing as the others, very muscled and fit, and sweetly attractive with those deep blue eyes and ripples of light brown hair about his head.

  She might have been lost in those eyes when he made a small motion, lifting the box a bit. “I brought…soup,” he said with a smile.

  And flowers. She stood back to let him in and saw the pretty bouquet in the box.

  He stepped inside and handed the box over. He started to peel out of his handsome dress coat but paused until he got her nod to go ahead.

  Jubilee’s heart stuttered a little as she watched. He’d dressed for her—gray flannel trousers, blue dress shirt that matched his eyes, and a gray and black tweed sport jacket.

  She’d done the same, dressed for…well, for someone.

  She’d done it as dark came, after she’d finished her day’s work and made a simple dinner for herself. She’d showered and then dressed like she might for a winter date—a knee-length, wool pencil skirt in a crimson red over black tights, a white silk long-sleeved tee with a black, cropped cashmere sweater over it. She settled for ballet flats because heels, when she was home alone, seemed too pitifully hopeful.

  Keith noticed. His eyes were on her as his fingers found a hook on the coat tree by the door and he toed out of his dress boots. “You look good.”

  Probably he was a little surprised and relieved that she didn’t dress like his grandmother all the time.