Page 1 of Finding Happily Ever After
ChapterOne
Was she being punished?Had she done something wrong?
Natalie Collins took a deep breath and tried to force out at least some of the feelings that started to crowd into her consciousness. No. She wasn’t being punished. She was beingrewarded. That was the worst part.
Ed Walker, who was still the acting fire chief—at least for a few more weeks—was rewarding his rookie firefighter—her—for all of her hard work in the last week.
A reward would be a few days off to sleep in and binge watch Netflix, but with an understaffed fire department in the small mountain town of Glacier Falls, time off was a luxury that wasn’t usually extended to a brand-new recruit in the department.
Hero or not.
Ugh.Natalie groaned inwardly at the word.Hero.
She was definitely not a hero. Not any more so than any other firefighter. Sure, she’d dragged her partner, Jeremy Davis, out of the burning hotel a week earlier, only a day before responding to a medical callout where she’d delivered an unexpectedly early baby who had no plans to wait until they got to the hospital. But that wasn’t a hero.
That was a first responder.
But as uncomfortable as she was with the word, she was even more uncomfortable with the attention she’d been getting from both of those events.
Glacier Falls was a small town, and as such, not a lot of really exciting things usually happened, let alone within a few days. And that was the only reason she was getting attention. Because really, Jeremy had all but rescued his second victim of the fire before getting knocked out by the debris. He was only a few feet away from fresh air, when Natalie dragged him out to safety. He’d done the hard work. Jeremy was absolutely therealhero. Which was kind of perfect, considering he was about to be appointed as the new fire chief, too.
And delivering the baby? Anyone would have done it. She just happened to be the one to respond to the call at Ever After Ranch. Hope Langdon was eight months into a high-risk pregnancy when her labor started. It came hard and fast. The only option as the first one on the scene was to deliver the baby, because it was coming with or without Natalie’s help. It had been dramatic and stressful and not at all what Natalie had expected when her shift started, but that was how these things went sometimes.
She’d moved to Glacier Falls for a slower pace of life—at least that was the reason she told people. Less than three months later, Natalie was finding her new home and the new friends she was starting to make were anything but boring.
Which was no doubt why the chief had given her the assignment he had. So she’d have a little bit ofboringin her life for at least a few days.
Little did Ed Walker—or anyone, for that matter—know that being assigned to attend the local high school to teach first-aid classes was not Natalie’s idea of boring or arewardor an easy assignment or anything short of torture.
High school had definitely not been a positive experience for her, unless you considered the terrible rumors, exclusions, and gossip a positive experience. And she didn’t. Worse, growing up in a small community, the drama of Natalie’s four years at high school had followed her for many years afterward. A traumatic experience was a massive understatement and the idea of setting foot in the big brick building, walking down the locker-lined hallways that smelled vaguely like a mixture of old gym shoes, pencils, and drug store perfume made Natalie want to turn around and run in the opposite direction or throw up. Or more likely, both.
She was definitely being punished because nothing was worse than returning to a time in her life that she would rather block out entirely.
It didn’t matter that Natalie hadn’t attended high school in Glacier Falls, but instead hours away in an equally small town on an island off the Pacific Coast, Port Hadlow. A high school was a high school, and as far as she was concerned, Glacier Falls High would be just like her alma mater. Hellish.
Still, she didn’t seem to have a choice. Natalie put the pickup truck into park in the guest parking spot and stared at the building in front of her.
She took a deep breath and silently chastised herself.
You aren’t a kid anymore. This isn’t Port Hadlow. You are a successful woman. They can’t hurt you.
She closed her eyes and exhaled slowly before once more opening her eyes and fixing her gaze on the building in front of her.
“You got this.” She almost laughed at herself as she opened the door and gathered her supplies from the back of the truck. When she’d been assigned to teach first aid to a group of Outdoor Ed students, she hadn’t expected to be so nervous. Not really. It wasn’t until she actually realized she’d beinthe school and then when she saw the building that all the old feelings rushed back. It had been almost twelve years since her own high school experience, yet somehow those memories had really stuck with her.
Natalie shook off the negativity and refocused her thoughts the way she’d been practicing for over a decade. She wasn’t that scared, wounded girl anymore.
By the time she walked up the pathway, with her big duffel bag of supplies and CPR dummy in hand, pulled open the heavy door and set foot in the school, Natalie once again had her signature smile on her face and was ready to go back to school. This time as the teacher.
Aiden Adams shuffled the stack of papers in front of him again before turning his attention to the open laptop on his desk and the calendar up on the screen. How was he supposed to fit it all in? Once again he looked to the stack of papers he needed to mark by the next day and then to his calendar.Maybe there was a small chunk of time after dinner? Before he got a bit of sleep?With a sigh, he typedmarkinginto the empty block on his schedule.
His Netflix binge would have to wait. Just the way it had been waiting since September, when he’d started teaching at Glacier Falls High. He should probably just go ahead and cancel the membership altogether. It didn’t look as though he’d actually be using it.
Not that Aiden minded. Not really. He loved being a high school teacher. The challenge of communicating with the kids in a way that got through to them that there was more to life than parties and who was dating who. Not that those things weren’t important. But it wasn’t that long ago—at least not in his memory—when Aiden was a seventeen-year-old who was obsessed with girls—or at least trying to get them to notice him—parties, and hockey games. He’d grown up on the ice in Ottawa, Ontario, playing goalie for some of the best junior hockey teams. There’d been a time when Aiden thought he’d go all the way to the NHL. School didn’t matter. Grades didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was hockey. He had big plans for his life and none of them included school.
Until it all changed on a cold, snowy night coming home from practice on New Year’s Eve. His car was hit from the side by a drunk driver who’d been celebrating early. Aiden was lucky to survive at all, not that he would listen to anyone who told him that when he woke up in the hospital with a knee so shattered it would take two surgeries to put it back together. He’d never skate again, at least not competitively. And as far as Aiden was concerned, it would have been better if the woman who’d gotten behind the wheel of her minivan that night had killed him outright.
Without hockey, he had nothing.
