Page 5 of Wren's Winter

I sucked in a breath at her. She had large warm eyes and a smattering of freckles across her nose and full lips. Her face brightened as she saw my car. My stomach pitched at the warmth of her expression. It had been a long time since I reacted that way to a simple smile. In the town of Icicle Creek, I knew everyone’s face, but this one—this was bright and cheery, and damn if I didn’t feel a little funny from it.

“Hi!” She made her way down the front porch. “Are you Agatha? I can’t get into the house with the code and…”

Her sentence dropped off as I climbed out of the car, standing a head above her.

“Oh, I’m guessing you’re not Agatha.” She took a step back, her grin dropping.

“No, I’m not,” I grunted out, my voice more gravelly than normal. Did I strain it on the mountain? Why did it sound like that? No taking it back now. Best to get this woman off my porch so I could spend my evening in solitude. She was obviously a tourist, and while I had my share of tourists in my apartment in town, I had never brought someone back to my grandparent’s cabin. I pointed at the house across the street. “Agatha’s house is there. You’re some visitor renting the cabin?”

My neighbor, Agatha Dawes, was a pleasant woman, but technology had never been her strong suit. No matter how many times I told her I would help her fix her vacation listing, my address was still the one that was listed. Her frequent trips down to Nevada in the winter to visit her daughter meant I was often stuck with wayward travelers. On a normal day, I might be more willing to help, but something about this woman set me on edge. Who did she think she was standing on my porch—in a thin sweater and large suitcase, with her too-bright smile and eyes so warm they made my cheeks heat—jiggling my doorknob?

“Yeah, was it the suitcase that gave me away?” She put out her hand. “Wren Alexander.”

Wren. It fit her. Small bird. I took her hand, the softness of her palm sending shivers up my arm. “Adrian Winter.”

“Winter. In the winter.” Her smile quirked at the corner.

“Little Bird lost.” I quipped back. I wasn’t sure why I said that. While I flirted with women at bars, come-ons on my front porch were a bad idea. Plus, the line sounded cheesy at best.

She wrapped her thin sweater around her body, hiding what I could tell was a lush body. I trained my eyes not to look at her cleavage. She seemed to be waiting for me to say something. On her feet were white pristine snow boots with fuzzy stuff coming out of the top. I wondered if this was the first snowflake they had seen.

A rush of annoyance ran through me. I hated those snow boots and needed this woman away from me. Pushing past her, I stomped up the front steps and grabbed the handle of her suitcases, lifting them up.

I ignored the “Oh my” comment from the woman and made my way across the street. I was almost on the front porch of the other cabin before I realized that the woman wasn’t following me.

“Are you coming or not?” I barked, setting the suitcase under the porch and walking back to the middle of the road.

She scurried behind me, slipping slightly on the patches of black ice on the street. The snowplow didn’t make its way down my road, so it was up to me to shovel the snow away.

“Careful. Slow down.” I wasn’t normally this bossy. Well, okay, maybe I was. But typically, that tone was reserved for my students at the high school, not for beautiful out-of-towners who were very obviously not in high school.

“I’m fine. I do all my own stunts.” The smile she gave me as she jumped over a snow pile set off an odd feeling in my stomach. I shouldn’t have eaten that chicken sandwich from the galley. It had to be heartburn.

Once she cleared the worst of the snow and ice spots, I turned back to the door, where I typed in the code to get in. Agatha had given me all the codes years before. Opening the door, I set the suitcases down in the foyer.

Years before, a construction company had planned a line of these identical cabins along Sitka Lane, but after building the two at the end, the company went belly-up. The floor plans of the cabins were mirror images of each other. Agatha had bought this cabin with her late husband, Ernest, and my grandparents bought the opposite one. When they passed, they left it to me, their only grandchild.

“The kitchen is there, bathroom down the hall. The master bedroom is up the stairs in the loft. There’s a side door that leads out to the hot tub and...”

“You really don’t have to do all this. You’re obviously not the owner of the house and don’t have to help me.” She glanced at the dark road between the two houses, worrying her lip between her teeth.

A rush of embarrassment ran through me. Of course she’d be worried about me knowing how to get into the house. She was a young woman, alone in a strange place, and I showed her I knew everything there was to getting around this house she was supposed to stay in. “If you’re worried about anyone getting in, there’s a strong deadbolt on the door. Lock it up tight once I leave, and no one can get in. Instructions for the alarm are in that binder.” I pointed at the notebook on the coffee table.

She eyed the binder with trepidation. “Does this place have Wi-Fi or a landline phone? I need to call a tow truck for my car. And it doesn’t seem like I have service.”

So, that was her car on the street. I should have known. She seemed like the type to not know how to drive in the snow. Most people don’t. The snowfall for the lowlands in Western Washington was middling at best, the cities decimated to a standstill with a few inches.

With my arms crossed against my chest, I frowned. “Of course that was you.”

“Are you going to help me or make fun of me for my driving? Because I got to tell you, I feel dumb enough about this whole trip without you chiming in.” She pulled off her beanie, tossing it to the counter. Her curly hair sprang loose around her face, little wisps of mahogany spirals and static. With her elbows on the kitchen counter, she ran her hands through her hair, covering her face.

“Service out here is pretty bad, but there should be Wi-Fi.” I opened the binder and flipped through the pages. Glancing up, I saw her hand leave her forehead and come away with blood. “What happened?”

She blinked at me, frowning. “What? Oh, this?” She held up her hand. “I bumped my head on the steering wheel. It’s not…”

Placing a hand on her shoulders, I pushed her down onto a stool and then pointed a finger at her. “Stay there. Do not move.”

Finding the first aid kit took me a few tries, as Agatha didn’t have it in any of the spots that made sense but instead in the pantry beside an expired box of dry tortellini. Returning to Wren, I was happy to see she hadn’t moved, though she was typing on her phone and looking through the binder.