Janice Kay - Snowbound

Snow still floated from the sky, obscuring the landscape. The steps he’d shoveled last night had disappeared again.

There seemed to be a free-for-all going on, snowballs flying, accompanied by shrieks and yells. With the snow still falling, the teenagers were indistinguishable from each other, all blurred in white. They were thigh deep and higher in the white blanket that enveloped the landscape, the shed and the cabins he could usually see from here.

John raised his voice. “Time out!”

The action stopped and heads turned his way.

“When you get cold and decide to come in, everyone go get an armful of wood and bring it. Pile’s just around the side of the lodge.” He jerked his thumb toward the north corner.

“Girls, too?” a voice squeaked.

“Girls, too.”

He went back inside, where Amy was elaborating on what pigs all boys were, while Fiona soothed with common sense. As far as he could see, the girl was a spoiled brat, but what did he know?

Not that much later, the kids did all carry in wood, and all three boys and one of the girls willingly went back for another load.

John nodded his approval as they dumped split lengths in the wrought-iron racks. “That should keep us going for a bit.”

“It’s a really big fireplace,” the girl said. “Have you ever had to cook in it?”

“No. The generator hasn’t failed me yet.”

“God forbid,” Fiona murmured.

He silently seconded her prayer, if that’s what it was. He’d be okay on his own with just the fire. But trying to feed ten of them? No ability to do laundry for who knew how long? He remembered all too well what it felt like to go for days without a chance to do more than sponge your underarms and genitals with lukewarm water, to get so you couldn’t stand your own stink, to have sand in every fold of skin and gritty between your teeth.

Somehow, he didn’t think the spoiled girl would take even three days of sponge baths and half-cooked food stoically.

“I get the first bath,” Amy declared, staring a challenge at the others.

Dieter pulled off his wool hat and shook his head like a wet dog. “We just had baths. Why do you want to take another one?”

“Because I’m cold,” she snapped, and stomped off.

“Why’s she so upset?” Hopper asked in apparently genuine puzzlement.

Nobody leaped to explain. The teacher was too tactful to say, Because she didn’t get her way . The others were either indifferent or perplexed as well.

“Maybe she’s just having a delayed reaction to the fact that yesterday was pretty scary,” Fiona said.

“But we’re okay,” one of the other girls protested.

“Some people are more resilient than others. It’s also possible that getting stranded this way reminds Amy of something that happened to her in the past. We all have different fears.”

John shook his head. Damn, she was good. He wondered if she believed a word she was saying.

“Now,” she said, more briskly, “let’s get everything that’s wet laid out in front of the fire to dry. Neatly,” she added, when one of the boys dumped socks and gloves in a heap. “Then the lunch crew can get started. Ah… who did I assign?”

“You!” they all chorused in glee.

She laughed with them. “Okay, okay! And, uh, Tabitha and Erin, right?”

Erin nodded with composure John suspected was typical, and Tabitha made a moue of displeasure.

“Next question.” Fiona smiled at him. “What’s on the menu?”

“Soup and sandwiches.”

“That we can handle. Right, gang?”

He accompanied them to the kitchen to show them where everything was. Fiona disappeared to the laundry room to move a load to the dryer and start another one while the girls opened cans of cream of mushroom soup and dumped them in pans.

John loitered for a few more minutes, waiting for Fiona to come back. Despite his earlier discomfiture at imagining her naked, he couldn’t resist watching Fiona competently slice cheddar cheese and slather margarine on bread to make the grilled cheese sandwiches she’d decided on. He doubted she or the girls were even conscious of his presence. This past year, he’d discovered he had a gift for invisibility.

Damn it, he could have spent most of the morning hiding out in his quarters, reading in front of the woodstove. But Fiona Mac-Pherson intrigued him.

What he couldn’t decide was whether it really was her in particular, or whether he’d been quietly healing without realizing it and she just happened to be the first attractive woman to come his way in a while.

Not true, he reminded himself; two weekends ago, a quartet of women in their twenties had spent two nights at the lodge. Apparently they’d been getting together a couple of times a year since they graduated from college. Each took a turn choosing what they did.

A couple of them were married, he’d gathered. One of the two single friends in particular had flirted like mad with him. He hadn’t felt even a flicker of interest, and she’d been more beautiful by conventional standards than this slender teacher with the river-gray eyes.

He’d thought rather impassively that the woman who kept making excuses to seek him out was attractive. He’d been bothered then by the fact that he’d felt not even a slight stirring of sexual desire. He hadn’t had had a woman since the night before he’d shipped out for Iraq. He’d missed sex the first months there. At some point, he’d quit thinking about it. That part of him had gone numb.

It wasn’t that he felt nothing. Grief was his constant companion, anger looking over its shoulder. He had unpredictable bursts of fear. Once in a while, he allowed himself to be grateful that he was alive and that he’d found sanctuary.

Fiona MacPherson’s pretty gray eyes and cloud of curly dark hair wouldn’t have been enough to draw him from his preferred solitude. Not if something else about her hadn’t sliced open the layer of insulation that had kept him distant from the rest of humanity.

So what was different about her? What had he sensed, from the moment their eyes first met?

He kept following her around in search of answers, not out of lust.

John gave a grunt that might have been a rusty laugh. Well, not entirely out of lust , he amended.

The sound he’d made brought her head around, although neither of the girls seemed to hear. When Fiona saw him leaning against the wall, she smiled. As if glad he was still here.

There, he thought in shock, might be his answer. She saw him. Really saw him. Not as a Heathcliff she was bent on seducing as part of a weekend’s adventure, but as if she were interested in him as a person. As if she might even like him.

In fact, she was the only person outside family and old friends who’d ever bothered to wonder if he suffered from PTSD—and he could tell she had been curious, even if she hadn’t meant to ask. He’d only admitted to having served in Iraq to a couple of other veterans who’d stayed at the lodge over the past year. They had recognized each other. If others had speculated after seeing his scar, they’d kept the speculation to themselves.

What he didn’t know was whether Fiona MacPherson looked at everyone the way she did at him. Why that mattered, he didn’t know. In a few days, she’d be gone.

But he still wanted to know.

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