Lindsay Evans - Snowy Mountain Nights

“I’m pretty sure Reyna has dibs on him already.” Marceline’s voice seemed tinged with regret.

“Hmm,” Bridget chimed in. “He is a cutie! Isn’t that the guy from the train?”

“Most definitely.” Louisa grinned. “And I don’t see a ring.”

She was the most perceptive of them all, but was also the most cruel, using her insight to play games that most people were not ready for. Louisa gave Reyna another annoying look, but Reyna didn’t bite. She only shrugged and tasted her cider. It was perfect, the heated cinnamon, sugar and apples coating her tongue with delicious flavor. Just the perfect thing on such a cool and spectacularly beautiful day.

Reyna kept her eyes on the cider and not on the man her friends refused to stop staring at.

“You know that a ring doesn’t mean much these days,” Bridget said, picking up from Louisa’s earlier comment. “Some married men travel without theirs just to pick up some stranger before going back home to the wife.” Bridget nodded in Garrison’s direction, although he was far from the only man in the lodge. Reyna was willing to bet, though, that he was the most...appealing. With the gray heads, men who were obviously with their lovers and the immature-looking boys, Garrison was unfortunately the hottest thing in the room.

“Yeah, what’s that about?” Marceline muttered. “I know plenty of girls who would love to land a married man. If he had on a wedding ring, it’d be like catnip.”

“Maybe they don’t realize exactly what they’re trolling for,” Bridget said. “Territorial women can be vicious.”

Louisa gestured with her cup. “That’s not the only thing they have to watch out for. Some of these hot-ass married men have diseases they’re ready to pass on to anyone, including their wives.”

A chorus of agreement went around the table.

While the women got distracted from Garrison with the talk of cheating married men, Reyna watched him from the corner of her eye. So she noticed that he sat at the empty seat closest to the fire, his booted feet nearly nudging the grate. And she also noticed when he started watching her.

He took a sip of his drink and looked at her over the edge of his cup. She ducked her head, but not before his penetrating gaze managed to scatter her senses.

She came in on the tail end of her friends’ conversation about cheating. “I don’t know why anyone would want to have an affair with a married man. Seems like a recipe for heartache to me. And not just for the actual wife whose husband is doing the messing around.” She knew from experience how awful that was. “These girls might get attached and then fool themselves into thinking their lovers are going to leave their wives.” Ian had been cheating on her, but as far as she knew, he never married or lived with any of the women he’d cheated with.

“Some women just like to gamble.” Louisa shrugged.

“Pardon my intrusion, ladies.”

They all looked up. Reyna’s fingers twitched around her cup of cider, and she had to clutch it tighter to stop from accidentally spilling it.

Garrison stood near their table. He seemed perfectly at ease in his thick gray sweater and jeans. And by at ease , Reyna’s mind supplied, she meant sexy as hell . He stood with a hand in his pocket, his gaze trained firmly on her.

“I’m Garrison Richards.” He looked at all the women before bringing his eyes back to Reyna. “I want to apologize to Ms. Barbieri—”

“I don’t go by that name anymore,” Reyna interrupted. “It’s Allen now.”

“My apologies.” He dipped his head. A spark of something flared in his eyes, but his face remained cool. “But please allow me to apologize again when I didn’t recognize you earlier.”

“No apologies necessary,” she said. “It’s been five years, and we only met a couple of times.”

“You are quite unforgettable,” he said.

His hawkish gaze tightened something low in her belly. She swallowed and tried to ignore it.

“I’m frankly surprised,” Reyna said. “You must have been through hundreds of women like me.”

She felt the shocked gazes of her friends. They knew it wasn’t like her to be so rude.

But Garrison wasn’t fazed. “I doubt there’s anyone like you.” A small, unamused smile touched his mouth. “I’d like to invite you to dinner one night this weekend, if I may?” He pulled a card from his wallet and held it out to Reyna. A calling card, she noticed, one without his business information.

When she didn’t take it, he put it on the table in front of her. “You don’t have to give me your answer now, but be sure to call me when you decide to accept.” After another nod at Reyna and her friends, he turned and headed back to his table.

Marceline and Bridget stared at her with their mouths hanging open. Louisa only smiled. Like the Cheshire Cat, she sipped from her glass of cider and waited for what Reyna had to say.

“You have to tell us where you know that fine-ass guy from!” Bridget aimed a far from subtle gaze at Garrison’s table. “Oh, my God! I bet he’s tasty.”

The sadness in Marceline’s face receded with her curiosity. “Yes, fess up. Our not-so-little Reyna has been keeping secrets.”

She tried not to wince at the reference to her height, something she had always been self-conscious about. Instead, she shrugged.

“He is someone I met—”

A ripple went through the lodge just then.

“It’s Ahmed!”

Her friends all turned toward the door. Ahmed Clark had walked into the room and given Reyna a temporary reprieve. She wasn’t ready yet to tell her friends how she met Garrison.

It was not that she was ashamed of it. But that was a time in her life filled with such pain and betrayal that she’d rather not revisit it. They all knew the pertinent details of the divorce and what happened afterward. They had been there for her when she found out Ian had been sleeping around, when she confronted him, when he demanded a divorce, telling her she wasn’t the kind of wife a TV star like him should have.

It seemed so ridiculous at the time. So surreal. The boy she had known in high school, pimply faced and gangly. The one whom no other girl had paid the slightest bit of attention to, but had been her friend, then lover, then husband. They had blossomed from their teenaged awkwardness together, Ian becoming more beautiful than anyone had ever imagined, the swan in his duckling family.

He’d never seriously considered acting, but when an uncle in the business suggested that he try out for a TV role, Ian dived in and never looked back.

Dismissing the past, Reyna turned with her friends to watch Ahmed Clark stroll into the restaurant with a tall beauty at his side. He was pretty enough to be a movie star himself. So was the woman with him.

“Damn, he’s fine!” Bridget made a show of licking her lips and moaning his name. “Give me five minutes, Ahmed, and I’ll make you forget all about that skinny red bone on your hip.”

Reyna chuckled. She didn’t doubt that her friend’s boast could come true. Bridget was beautiful and determined enough. Across the table from her, Louisa picked up Garrison’s card and tucked it into her pocket. Her smile was pure mischief.

* * *

After another round of hot cider, Reyna and the girls left the lodge and took the ski lift to the top of the mountain. In the glass-and-steel lift, Reyna marveled at the lush spread of the Adirondacks beneath and around them. New York City was incredible, and Reyna couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. But she loved the wildness of the mountains, its fierce beauty, the evergreens drooping with the cold, white weight of the snow.

Once at the top of the mountain, her friends hit the slopes on their skis and left Reyna to her own devices. Around her, children played with snowballs and with each other, giggling and rolling down the abbreviated slope. Couples and groups hiked up the hill, the sound of their conversations floating back down to Reyna as she watched her friends, one after the other, disappear down the ski slope.