Free A Bride For Crimson Falls by Cindy Gerard

he’d poured himself another glass of wine and nursed it with a growing concern over the tangle of emotions one small, self-reliant woman had managed to evoke.
    He tried to convince himself he was preoccupied with her out of boredom. He wasn’t used to having so little to do...and so much free time to do it in. The prospect of having a blank slate for the next thirteen days added to the problem.
    Generally, he had far more to occupy his mind. Whether he was in New York, working at his corporate headquarters, or out of state or abroad on a buying trip or site inspection, his days began at five a.m. with a five-mile run at the closest private health club available. He was on the job at seven, rarely called it a day until seven or eight at night, and even then most evenings ended with a business dinner. Weekends were spent on the fax or with his lap-top reviewing bids and cost estimates. He was the hands-on CEO of his own corporation, and he intended to keep it that way.
    None of that made him a workaholic—not in his eyes, at least. He worked hard, yes, but that’s the way he liked it. His work was his life. It grated on him that he increasingly found himself defending that position. He didn’t want anyone but himself deciding how much he worked, or if the number of hours he chose to work was healthy. As long as he didn’t expect long hours from anyone else who worked for him, it wasn’t anyone’s business.
    After all, he was content. He was productive. What more could a man want out of life?
    A woman like Scarlett Morgan.
    That unwelcome conclusion popped into his mind before he had a chance to waylay it. And since he didn’t want to deal with why it had slipped in so easily, he woke a softly snoring Geezer, helped the old man to his feet and made sure he made it out of the bar.
    Alone, and unused to the quiet and the idle time to think about something other than business, he walked to the lakeshore. For over an hour he just stood there.
    The faint sound of the falls tumbling over the bluffs in the distance infiltrated a quiet he’d thought to be absolute. There were sounds here—they were just different from the sounds of the city. Like background rhythms to a slow, hypnotic dance, the water made a soft, lapping babble as it gently mated with the shore. From a far corner of the bay, a loon called, the cry reminiscent of an old Henry Fonda, Katherine Hepbum movie his mother had been particularly fond of. Actually, the entire area, with its towering pine and glacier-carved boulders and moodily shifting water, reminded him of the setting for that classic film.
    Accompanying the night sounds was a blanketing sense of...of what, Slater? he asked himself with a scowl, as the explanation eluded him. It was something he couldn’t pin down. Solitude, yes, but not so much a sense of isolation as it was... serenity. That was the word that finally came to mind, surprising him. Serenity . And peace . That word surprised him even more.
    Neither concept appealed to him. Well, maybe now that he was experiencing them they didn’t seem so bad—just. abstract from his point of view. He’d never had the time for either.
    He drew in a deep breath, let it out, then wandered onto the dock and looked out over the lake. So this is what Hazzard was always harping at him to experience.
    “It’s like no place on earth, man,” J.D. had said more times than Colin cared to count. “It’s like you go up there and a door closes on the rest of the world. You forget your ambition, you forget your drive—you forget about fortunes to be made and lost and you just experience .”
    It had always sounded like a sinful waste of time to Colin. Until now, he realized, in a cathartic moment of truth. Until this exact moment, as he stood there, soaking up the essence of the feeling J.D. had preached with the zealousness of an evangelist, he hadn’t been able to fathom the allure of not having one single, solitary thing to accomplish except