Page 7 of Snowed In with her Mountain Men
“It’s alotdark,” chuckled Ryder. He smirked at me and shrugged. “But I don’t hate it.”
Great,I thought to myself. He’s super fucking hotandhe has the same dry sense of humor that I do. And now I owe him one for pulling my ass out of the fire. Literally.
The fire!
“I—I need to go,” I stammered abruptly. “Thank you both so much! I really mean it. But if one of you could please give me a ride home, that would be amazing.”
Home. The word sounded strange, even now. Did I really have a home? I did, once. But not for a long, long time.
“I’m sorry, but we can’t.”
An icy sliver of fear crept upward, along my spine. I set down the mug of hot chocolate and whirled on Ryder.
“And why not?”
“Well for one, because of the storm,” he said simply. “It’s been coming down all night, and it’s not supposed to stop until morning.”
I glanced to a long series of windows looking outside. Everything was white. Everything was swirling.
“And number two?” I asked trepidatiously.
"And two, right now you have nowhere to go.”
I swung my gaze to Oakley, standing sentinel in a white thermal shirt that stretched tightly over his broad shoulders. He shrugged helplessly, and I couldn’t help but notice it was tight around his arms, too.
“Of course I have a place to go,” I reasoned. “I’m renting that cabin.”
“That cabin is probably twenty degrees right now,” said Oakley, folding his arms. “The front door’s broken right off the hinges. We tried propping it shut when we left, but the wind is crazy, and who the hell knows?”
“But… but—”
“You didn’t have any firewood either,” said Ryder. “None that we could see, anyway.”
“I do so have firewood,” I protested. “There’s a woodpile out back.”
“That’s not a woodpile, it’s a small stack,” Oakley lamented. “More of a tiny bump, really.”
“Looked more like a beaver threw up,” quipped Ryder.
My eyesbrows came together in a furious scowl. “So what? I was rationing.”
“You were freezing, is what you were doing,” Oakley corrected me. “Slowly.”
I couldn’t tell if I was angry because they were making fun of me, or because they were right. Probably a little of both.
“Winter has barely even hit yet,” Ryder added, a little more gently. “What’d you plan to do when it did?”
The truth was, I had no plan. I had no money. Everything I’d brought with me from Florida had been next to useless in this climate, as I soon found out. As romantic as it sounded, writing my novel in a cozy, snowy cabin, had been nothing more than a big fat learning curve. One that had depleted my savings in the process.
“Look, the weather can’t be that bad,” I declared, looking around for my boots. “And even if it is, my cabin’s only a half mile down the road. You said it yourself. I’ll walk if I have to.”
“A half mile inelevation,” Oakley corrected me. “It’s much more than a half mile walk.”
I bit my lip and frowned. Did they really expect me to stay here, wherever here was? I didn’t even know these men.
“We’ll take you back in the morning,” said Ryder, backing him up. “Once the snow stops, and they clear the roads a little, we’ll just—”
“How bad could it be out there?” I challenged, heading for the door. “Last I looked, it was barely even—”
