Page 17 of Snowed In with her Mountain Men
No, I definitely needed to see her again. If not for my own edification, then at least to make sure she was doing alright.
“One of us should probably check on her,” Ryder suggested abruptly, as if he’d somehow read my mind. “You know, the next time we’re in town.”
Jaxon grunted. “Why?”
“Because she’s got nothing. Nobody. Barely even the clothes on her back.”
“Give her your clothes, then.”
“Don’t be such a dick,” Ryder shot back. The knuckles gripping the steering wheel turned white. “You know what I mean.”
Jaxon frowned and looked out the window; as if the conversation were boring him. He was clearly getting annoyed.
“I know this much,” he eventually declared. “That girl shouldn’t be anywhere near the Rockies. She doesn’t belong here. If she were smart, she’d go straight back to Florida.”
The Marauder fell silent, perhaps because Jaxon had a point. Even so, I stared at my friend for a while, wondering just how much compassion he was actually burying beneath that tough exterior. He hadn’t always been this way, I knew that much. I just wished I’d known him before… well…
“I have a client on Thursday,” Jaxon relented, but not without adding a sigh. “I’ll check on her then, on the way back from the shop.”
I scoffed. “How magnanimous of you.”
“Look, what would you have us do?” he growled. “Take her on? Let her in on what we’re doing?”
I thought about it and shrugged. “Maybe. I mean, it’s not like we’d have to—”
“We’re running out of time,” Jaxon spat. “We only have the skid steer for another two weeks, and we need to be doing all we can with it. After that, it’s back to picks and shovels.”
“The ground’s too frozen for that,” Ryder argued.
“Bullshit. It just takes longer.”
“It takesforever,” growled Ryder. “We should be waiting for spring anyway. It’ll be ten times easier.”
“Easier?” Jaxon’s lip curled back in a snarl. “You’re lucky Sarge can’t hear you right now. He’d kick your candy ass, then make you dig with your hands.”
I watched as Ryder’s knuckles grew even whiter. At some point he’d pull over, roll up his sleeves, and there would be an epic fight on the side of the road. I wouldn’t know whether to break it up or pelt them with snowballs.
“If Sarge were here, we wouldn’t have to dig,” I eventually pointed out. “That crazy old bastard’s probably laughing his ass off right now.”
At that, all three of us looked upward into the swirling gray sky.
“Amen to that,” smirked Ryder.
~ 9 ~
CAMRYN
I closed my eyes and crunched down, my mouth protesting but eventually obeying the strict orders of my growling stomach. This wasnotthe breakfast of champions. Half the bites I sank my teeth into were rock hard, while others were worrisomely soft.
And that’s because the granola bar — as well as the vending machine that had reluctantly given birth to it — was probably a thousand years old.
“Fuck this.”
I hurled the second half of the bar away, before it sucked the remaining moisture from my mouth, then looked around in despair. The room I’d been renting for the past two days was dingy and eternally cold. As if that combination wasn’t bad enough, it was cramped, the lighting was bad, and it smelled like two possums had killed each other while fighting under the bed… but not before evacuating their bowels, first.
“C’mon,” I sighed unhappily. “Enough with the distractions, already. Focus.”
I stared into the glowing screen of my new laptop, which was really an old, refurbished laptop picked up at the pawn shop up the block. It was the same basic brand as the one that got slagged into magma, even if the screen itself was several inches of magnitude smaller.
