Love on the Edge of Reason Read online

  Love on the Edge of Reason

  a Pine Harbour novel

  Zoe York

  www.zoeyork.com

  About This Book

  Tom Minelli doesn't know why Chloe Dawson has fled Pine Harbour, but she's pregnant with his baby and he wants her back. Not just back in town. He wants Chloe back in his life, and not as the casual hook-up friends they were before. But finding her proves harder than he expected—and when he does track her down, a snow storm rolls in right behind him, trapping them together in a cabin on the lake.

  !Welcome to Pine Harbour

  Tucked into a hollow half-way up the Bruce Peninsula, on the eastern shores of Lake Huron, Pine Harbour is where cottage country meets northern living. For generations, the Foster family has been a rock in the community. All the Foster men serve in the local Army reserve unit and the youngest adult generation is no exception.

  Meet the Foster boys: Dean, Jake, Matt and Sean. A cop, a contractor, a paramedic and an adventure racer. All soldiers. None of them looking for love, but it’s coming!

  Their best friends are the Minellis: Zander, Rafe, Tom and Dani. A full-time soldier, a cop, a park ranger and a paramedic. Dani’s the only girl in the entire bunch and she’s not sure how she feels about that. When Rafe got married, she was thrilled to have a sister–and even though he and Olivia have split up, Dani’s not giving up that bond. (And neither is Rafe, for that matter).

  The Books of Pine Harbour

  Love in a Small Town

  Rafe and Olivia

  Six years. Two break-ups. One divorce. They should be over each other…

  * * *

  Love in a Snow Storm

  Jake and Dani

  Never fall in love with your best friend’s little sister…

  * * *

  Love on a Spring Morning*

  Ryan and Holly

  Duplicity. Desire. Denial. They were doomed from the start.

  * * *

  Love on a Summer Night

  Zander and Faith

  Sometimes saying goodbye is just the beginning.

  * * *

  Love on the Run

  Dean and Liana

  She needs a bodyguard. He needs a job. But there’s nothing strictly professional about their attraction.

  * * *

  Love in a Sandstorm

  Sean and Jenna

  It was supposed to be a fling. Two weeks in the south of Spain before they returned to war. They weren’t supposed to fall in love…

  * * *

  www.zoeyork.com

  * Ryan Howard’s brother, Finn, lives in a town a few hours south of Pine Harbour. If you like this series, you’ll probably love Wardham, too! Finn’s book is #4 in that series, Beyond Love and Hate.

  * * *

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  This one is for myself

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  What to Read Next

  Also by Zoe York

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Christmas Eve

  It was a wonderful, magical night—for everyone except for Tom Minelli.

  For reasons that had nothing to do with the event at hand, he left his best friend’s wedding so angry he wasn’t sure he should drive. He’d arrived the same way, but he’d buried it down deep until the groom—after kissing his bride—noticed something was wrong and dragged the truth out of Tom.

  Now he stood on the frosty, snow-lined street in front of Matt and Tasha’s house and glared at the fat, white flakes falling gently through the golden glow of the streetlight. Somewhere, Chloe Dawson—town librarian and the bravest, smartest, sexiest woman he’d ever met—was alone tonight, and it was all his fault.

  “Hey, are you heading out already?”

  Tom turned around. His oldest brother, Zander, was standing on the front porch. He hadn’t even heard the door open or close. He dragged in a ragged breath. “Yeah. No. I don’t know. I just needed some fresh air.”

  “Matt said as much.”

  “Did he?” Tom felt his cheeks heat up, embarrassed that his older brother was involved now. He should have kept the news of Chloe’s pregnancy to himself, but Matt had caught him off-guard and it slipped out before Tom realized what he was saying. Way to screw up the wedding celebration. “What else did he say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I doubt that.”

  Zander jumped down, his feet crunching on the snow. “He said he was worried about you, and you shouldn’t be alone right now, but it’s his wedding night, so he had to deputize someone to babysit you. What the hell is going on?”

  “I need to go.”

  Zander didn’t ask where. He just nodded. “I’ll come with you.”

  Tom’s chest ached. “Matt really didn’t tell you?”

  “I know nothing.” Zander held his arms out wide. “See? I’m wholly unprepared for whatever Christmas Eve mission we’re about to depart on. Will you stay put while I go back inside, tell my wife I need to go and kick someone’s ass, and maybe grab my coat? It’s freezing out here.”

  Tom gave him a tight nod, but inside his chest his heart thumped harder and faster at the reminder. It was bitterly cold tonight, the first really good freeze all week. The only ass that needed to be kicked was his own.

  Where is she?

  Matt had told him to trust Zander. His brother had resources and connections. But could Tom confess just how much he’d screwed up? It was hard to admit even to himself—that he’d been carrying this secret around for a week, that he didn’t fix it sooner, that he waited too long to tell Chloe he was in, and most of all that his first reaction had been stupid and wrong and absolutely not cool.

  His brother would rightfully think Tom had failed her. He had.

  Zander stopped at the door, shooting another concerned look in Tom’s direction.

  “I’ll wait for you to get your coat,” Tom ground out. It was all he could say right now. Zander nodded, then quietly slipped back inside, leaving Tom alone with his dark thoughts. But when the door opened again, it wasn’t his brother.

  It was one of his sisters-in-law. The first sister-in-law, the one who had known him the longest.

  “I’m fine,” he said, and Olivia waved her hand, like she knew he was lying and didn’t really care. It doesn’t matter, her hand said.

  Unlike Zander, she was already bundled up. Smart woman. It was cold and getting colder by the second. She marched right over to him. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You led with I’m fine, which is a telltale sign that you are not.”

  He huffed in frustration. He hated that he was that transparent. “I don’t want to detract from the evening. It was a really beautiful wedding.”

  Her face bloomed into a soft, happy smile. “It was, wasn’t it? We really rock the holiday weddings in this group, if I do say so myself.” Olivia and his other brother, Rafe, got married—for the secon
d and last time—in a similarly intimate ceremony on New Year’s Eve a few years ago.

  But before he could pat himself on the back for distracting her from whatever she’d come out to say, the smile dropped and she gave him a serious look. “Is this about Chloe?”

  He opened his mouth to deny it, but given the circumstances, lying wasn’t in his long-term best interests. Or Chloe’s.

  But the truth wasn’t his to share freely, either.

  He pressed his lips together.

  Olivia sighed. “Yeah, you guys have really stuffed that whole thing up,” she said softly. “I saw her the other day, you know. She looked pretty miserable.”

  No, he didn’t know. He didn’t know anything, and the proverbial knife in his chest twisted a little harder. And the words that would have spilled out a week ago—we’re just friends, that’s her choice, no comment—all died in his throat.

  None of that felt true. Hadn’t for a while, but he’d been a fool and hadn’t seen the warning signs. “Where did you see her?” He leaned in, thirsty for any scrap of information Olivia might know.

  His sister-in-law rolled her lip between her teeth and looked to the side, evading his searching gaze.

  “Olivia.”

  “If you dumped her—”

  “We weren’t dating!” He hated that it burst out like that. It was technically true, but technicalities didn’t matter at this point.

  “You were something.”

  “Yeah, we were. And we still are.”

  Doubt twisted across Olivia’s face.

  He knew that feeling, too. Because he’d found Chloe’s apartment empty just before the wedding, when he’d gone to ask her to come with him as his date. But before he could explain any of that, Zander opened the front door, and behind him came Rafe.

  Great, now it was a party.

  He lowered his voice. “Do you know where she is? I want to fix it, I want to make everything right.”

  “I don’t know,” she whispered back, her eyes now as big as saucers. “But Tom—”

  “What’s going on?” Rafe stopped behind his wife and gave Tom a concerned look.

  Olivia looked back and forth between her husband, and Tom, and then Zander. It was hard to read her expression, but not hard to read the way she shook her head after a minute and stepped back. “Come on, Rafe. Let’s go back to the party. What is our daughter getting up to while we’re both out here?”

  Rafe laughed, but Tom cursed under his breath. Olivia wasn’t giving up whatever she knew, because she thought she was protecting Chloe. That was supposed to be his job.

  He had so much to fix.

  Which left Zander.

  I’m sorry, Chloe. But I can’t just let you disappear. Not when I have so much to apologize for. So much to make right.

  After Liv and Rafe were back inside, he looked at his oldest brother. “I need you to do something questionable, both ethically and legally. And don’t ask a lot of questions, because time is of the essence.”

  Zander tugged on his gloves. “I’m your guy. Where are we going?”

  Chloe had thought of nearly everything. Everything, it turned out, except for matches.

  She’d packed three kinds of hot chocolate mix, more socks than she’d worn in the last month, an entire bag of cozy sweaters, and a stack of books to read in front of the fire.

  She just didn’t have any way of making that festive blaze.

  She’d been looking forward to this moment for days. Four days, to be precise. From the moment she’d realized she couldn’t stay in Pine Harbour a second longer, except it was four days before Christmas and how exactly did one move at the last minute during holiday shutdowns?

  It turned out, one did it right before a holiday shutdown.

  She’d found a moving company that could box up her entire apartment—except for hot chocolate mix, socks, sweaters, and a stack of books—and stow it all in a shipping storage container. She’d also found a cottage that wasn’t going to be occupied over Christmas, because the owners—the Vances, loyal library patrons when they were in Pine Harbour over the summer—were heading south instead.

  Mrs. Vance had been a peach when Chloe had called her and asked for this favour, breaking all kinds of librarian code rules. Except she’d been an apologetic peach, because while she was happy to let Chloe use the cottage, it was empty.

  Completely bare.

  The kitchen had been swept clean—every shelf, every drawer—in preparation for a renovation that would start in the new year.

  So yes, Chloe had the run of the cabin, but she’d been warned to bring everything herself.

  And she’d forgotten matches.

  Tears welled up as she moved back to the couch. Hot, frustrated, definitely hormonal tears. The kind of overwhelmed feeling she vaguely recalled from her teen years and had been happy to leave behind ages ago.

  Hello, weirdness, my old friend.

  Pregnancy hormones were some kind of crazy, that was for darn sure.

  She pressed her hand to her belly. Her head swam, as it always did when she thought about what—who—was growing inside her. The size of a pea now, but it wouldn’t be long before it was a lime. A grapefruit. A little person, cells duplicating over and over until there was a foot jammed into her cervix and all her organs had been completely moved to places they shouldn’t be.

  She was pregnant.

  Pregnant.

  Ms. Take-A-Pill-Every-Morning-At-Seven.

  She’d never missed a pill in the past. Never. Before Tom, a period now known as BT. Because she didn’t want a baby. But now she had a baby, or the start of one, she loved it.

  She was still wrapping her head around how she’d gotten knocked up. In hindsight, of course, she knew. In the last few months—well into the Age of Tom—there had been a few times where it suddenly didn’t matter quite as much that she didn’t have her pills in hand at seven in the morning. She’d missed a couple by a few hours, because of an early morning booty call the first day, and sleeping in the next day, and she hadn’t really cared.

  Not enough to get a morning after pill. She’d gotten comfortable in her non-relationship relationship. And she’d never had a scare in the past.

  When her period was late, she’d been genuinely confused.

  And then she’d felt profoundly dumb, because what had she been thinking? That it might be okay. That’s what she’d been hoping.

  Deep down, she’d been okay with the surprise.

  Except it hadn’t been okay. Tom had reacted exactly as badly as she imagined her father had, back in the day, and she’d felt like a fool.

  But she was a fool who still wanted her pregnancy. Maybe, deep down, stumbling through a re-do on her mother’s path in life was the only way she’d ever have a child—fucked-up as that thought might be.

  Chloe was nothing if not fucked-up, and frankly, she was fine with that. Because happy-ever-after endings were fantasy and foil. Fiction. She knew, deep down, that her own happiness was hers to control and create and contain.

  So, she knew without a doubt that there were three things that would absolutely not happen:

  1. She wouldn’t marry Tom Minelli out of some misplaced sense of family values if he ever came around to suggest that. Fuck that noise.

  2. She wouldn’t raise her baby the way she’d been raised. This baby was—now that she’d gotten over her shock—wanted. When he or she or they arrived, Chloe would hold them in her arms and the first thing they would hear in this world was that they were wanted. No afterthoughts. No shuttling back and forth between parents bound by obligation.

  3. She wouldn’t put up with any judgement from the tiny town of Pine Harbour, population six hundred, seventy-five percent of whom cast serious side-eye at single moms. It wasn’t that she couldn’t handle it. She was a bad-ass and didn’t care what anyone thought of her. But she didn’t want to raise her child somewhere they could get any flack for her choices in life.

  Rolling her neck, she tossed up h
er options. She could go to bed early. This was never her first choice, but the master bedroom had a gas fireplace. It didn’t have blankets, though, and the one she’d brought fit better on the sofa than the king-sized bed upstairs.

  Next time she invaded a fancy cottage, she was going to be better prepared. Next time she wouldn’t do it right before an overnight storm was due to arrive, and she couldn’t safely get back across the narrow causeway to the mainland. The last thing she wanted to do was drive into the icy waters of Lake Huron.

  For a split-second, she thought of Tom’s flannel covered down-filled duvet, on his big bed in his little cabin, not that far from here. The last time she’d been at his house, she’d burrowed in the flannel, newly added to the bed in honour of the colder weather, because it felt so good. Light and warm and endlessly soft all at the same time.

  No more burrowing. No more Tom.

  She’d had her fun and now it was time to face the consequences. On her own.

  She decided to hunker down on the couch with a cup of cocoa. She could imagine the flickering flames. But when she headed back into the main room, she pulled up short. The outside light was on.

  It hadn’t been on when she went into the kitchen, she was sure of that. It was possible the wind had somehow turned the light on. But if she saw evidence of anyone out there, when nobody was supposed to be here, she’d call 911 in a heartbeat.