They’d been two adventurous souls, kindred spirits. Or so he’d thought. He’d always been the glue that had kept his family together, and with her he didn’t have to work so hard. It had been easy, and he’d felt real contentment. Being with Lily, he could relax and just be. When she’d left, he’d lost all that, and nothing had come easy to him ever since.

Not that any of it mattered now. He’d gotten over her a damn long time ago, a fact he had to remind himself of several times as the worn tires on her car spun a little pulling out of the lot. A city car, not meant for the narrow, treacherous mountain roads and conditions in the Colorado Rockies.

Maybe she’d forgotten how they did things up here. Maybe she wasn’t staying long, though there’d been that cryptic “No” when he’d asked if she was visiting.

It didn’t matter. What she did was none of his business.

He pulled out his cell and checked to make sure he hadn’t missed any calls. His schedule for the fire season was three days on and one day off, which was today. But S&R had no such schedule. He was often on call for S&R and when notified, he’d go at a moment’s notice if he wasn’t already on a fire call.

Since he hadn’t missed anything, he called his older brother. Gray ran Cedar Ridge Resort and knew everything about everyone in town. He was an eighty-two-year-old lady hiding in a thirty-one-year-old man’s body. And he had some ’splaining to do, since he’d apparently known about Lily being back but hadn’t mentioned it.

“Mom okay?” Gray asked, in lieu of a greeting.

Their mom, Char, had taken a fall last week and reinjured her bad hip, not that she’d let either of them know how much pain she was in. The woman might look frail on the outside, but on the inside she was The Rock.

“This isn’t about Mom,” he started. “It’s—”

“If it’s not about Mom, you’ve got two seconds,” Gray interrupted. “Penny’s on a twenty-minute break, I haven’t seen her all week, and I have plans for every single one of those twenty minutes.”

Aidan could hear Penny’s soft laugh in the background and grimaced. Gray had been married to his high school sweetheart going on seven years now. Apparently afraid they were starting to act like old marrieds, they’d decided to spice up their marriage. Just last week Aidan had walked into Gray’s office without knocking and found them role-playing Fifty Shades of “Gray.”

There was some shit you just couldn’t unsee. The next day Aidan had installed a dead bolt on Gray’s office door and begged him to use it. He could only hope they would.