Page 43 of Damaged Billionaire Daddy
“Maybe we should go in,” I suggested. “I’m starting to get cold.”
Richard carefully clambered back up onto his feet. We collected the pans of snow and went inside.
Richard shucked off his coat, dropped it on a chair, then flopped across the bed, his boots hanging off the edge. “Wow. I think I’m done,” he said. “Where do you get the energy?”
“Clean living,” I quipped, busily fishing the chilled syrupbits out of the snow and arranging them on a paper plate. Then I took a good look at him. “Richard? Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll be fine. Just need to let the hip warm up a little and take some pain meds. Fortunately, I don’t think we’ll be able to get out before tomorrow, so I won’t have to worry about driving.”
I went over and helped him remove his boots so he could pull his feet up onto the bed.
“Thanks,” Richard said. “I didn’t want to get the bed wet or muddy. I didn’t get any spare blankets.”
I considered him a minute. I remembered something in the news about an accident. “Are you comfortable?” I asked.
“Well, I wouldn’t say comfortable,” he said wryly. “I came down on the hip that has the pin in it. But if you’ll get my shaving kit and a glass of water for me . . .”
“Of course,” I said, understanding at once what he wanted. When the kit was in his hands, he took out a prescription bottle, and carefully shook out one pill. I handed him a glass of water to go with it.
“Thanks,” he said. “That should take the edge off. I’ll just rest a minute.”
“Ok,” I said. “I’ll make some hot cocoa, and maybe we should try the maple candy.”
By the time I had the cocoa made, Richard scooched himself up on the window seat, and was looking much better. “There’s some TV trays in that closet over there,” he said, nodding toward an area that I thought was a blank wall.
The door to the closet was not hidden, just cleverly disguised as part of the shiplap wall covering. It contained the promised TV tray tables. In addition was a treasure trove of board games and smaller boxes of card games.
“You’ve got Candy Land,” I exclaimed. “When I was little, I thought the game was named after me.”
Richard laughed. “Did you enjoy it?”
“I did,” I said. “Oh, and you’ve got Chutes and Ladders, and is that box Squirm? One of my cousins had it, but eventually all the cards got lost.”
“It is,” he said. “We can play a game of it, if you like. But we’d best get out the rest of the TV tables because it gets pretty big. We used to set it up on the floor.”
“I’ll put together some lunch,” I said.
“There’s stuff for sandwiches,” Richard pointed out, “Unless you just want to make something.”
I opened the refrigerator and looked inside. “Oh, wow. You’ve got all the good stuff.” There was ham and turkey, as well as liverwurst and small containers of stuff that I did not recognize. “How did I miss seeing this last night?”
“Probably because then you were putting dry goods away and making hot chocolate. I’m not sure how you missed it.”
I brought over the loaves of bread — whole wheat, pumpernickel and sour dough, along with toppings and sandwich fillings. I set them on the table so we could each make our own sandwiches. With the snow candy, cocoa, and a package of chocolate chip cookies, it made a pretty good spread.
I discovered that I had worked up quite an appetite after our romp in the snow, and Richard made two sandwiches for himself.
I couldn’t resist trying the snow candy before starting on my sandwich. It was sweet and chewy, almost like a caramel.
“Good, isn’t it?” Richard asked, picking up one for himself. “My grandfather and I visited a sugar farm in Vermont when I was a kid. One of his old army buddies owned it. I was ten or eleven at the time. It seemed the strangest thing to me that sugar would come from trees. This is good, but he cooked the syrup down to the point that the snow candy was more like hard candy.”
“It sounds fun,” I said. I then bit into my sandwich. It was just turkey and ham on slices of the rye bread, but nothing had ever tasted better. It must have been the mountain air.
After lunch, the sun went back behind a cloud, and it began to snow again. We played Chutes and Ladders for a while, then shoved four tv tray tables together and played Squirm.
The rules were not well explained, but we had a good time creating dragons with variable numbers of legs, dragons with two, or three heads, and — of course — dragons with two or three tails.
“What a cute game,” I said. “I wonder why it never took off?”
