Page 17 of Snow Balled

But it was also inefficient. Why build if you’re just going to have to build again later? Inefficiency was laziness personified, and I hated it.

That was one of the reasons I’d gotten some work done after lunch when Drew was fawning all over Sierra, providing her with toiletries and clothes and whatever he could think of. It was kind, of course. Drewwaskind—he was sort of the human version of my dog. Far too excitable at times, but overall endearing.

Like Tristan, he didn’t seem to question Sierra’s presence up here on the mountain. It was obvious he thought she was pretty, but he didn’t view her as a mystery, even though the first clue was right there, literally in front of his face.

Because Sierra wasn’t just pretty. She wasn’t just beautiful. She was fucking stunning. The kind of woman who could make a fortune as a model. With no makeup on, her hair in a haphazard ponytail, and Drew’s oversized clothes on her, she was one of the most perfect women I’d ever seen, and that was saying a lot.

Back home, I had no shortage of female company. Redheads, blondes, brunettes… all were beautiful, and Sierra blew them all away. What the fuck was a goddess like her doing out in the middle of nowhere?

It just didn’t add up, and it was going to bother me until I figured out what was going on. Our time up here was too important to waste on distractions—even one as tempting as Sierra.

9

SIERRA

After days of working on my screenplay in total isolation at my cabin, it felt weird to be working side by side with Drew and Tristan at the long table under the skylight. They were both quietly typing on their laptops, but I couldn’t tune them out entirely. The sound of their large hands on the keyboard, the way their clothes rustled when they moved… hell, even their breathing tugged at my attention. I was used to total silence, and there was no way I was going to get that here.

Still, at least the men seemed to take their work seriously. At lunch, I’d seen all the beer in the fridge and half wondered if they’d come up here just to drink and party. But Tristan and Drew seemed focused—far more so than I was, at the moment. And Carter had excused himself fifteen minutes ago to make a call upstairs. I still didn’t know what they were working on, but they seemed to take it seriously.

Zeus whined by the door and made us all look up.

Drew stopped typing and stretched his arms out to the side. “I’ll take him out.”

“You sure?” Tristan asked.

“Yeah. I’m at a good stopping point.” He hopped off his stool and raised his arms above his head. From the corner of my eye, I caught the way his sweatshirt rose up, revealing a tan stomach and a smattering of dark hair. Then that strip of skin disappeared when he walked away—though it didn’t stop me from watching that view, too.

Once he and the dog were gone, it was quieter. Tristan typed away, but his fingers were softer on his keyboard than Drew’s. It took me a few minutes, but I actually got into the scene I was writing. In it, the protagonist had just been berated by her boss.

It hadn’t been hard to paint him as an unreasonable jerk—I had lots of experience with directors like that in Hollywood. But I wasn’t sure how to write the next part where she quits. My main character was a badass, but I wasn’t, so that part of the writing didn’t come easily.

For a while, I managed to forget where I was and who I was with—at least until a string of curse words reached my ears.

Tristan and I automatically looked toward the stairs at the end of the hall. Then he met my eye and winked. “Don’t worry, I’m sure he put the call on mute first. Probably.”

The vivid blue eyes in front of me were impossible to look away from. “Um, does he do that often?”

“Often enough.” Tristan grinned. “It’s a real problem since he’s in charge of our public relations.”

“He is? Seriously?” Seemed like Drew, with his easy-going, boyish charm, or Tristan himself would be better for that role.

“No. We don’t have a PR department yet, but we will—and he won’t be allowed anywhere near it.”

Oh. I felt a little foolish that I’d believed him. “So, um, you three are in business together?”

“We will be,” Tristan confirmed. “After years of planning, we’ve finally got financial backers and things are moving in the right direction—mostly.”

I’d assumed that most of the people who stayed in these cabins were artists of some sort, but it made a certain amount of sense to get away from it all and nail down the details for a new company. “What kind of business will you do?”

He explained briefly, and I had to admit, it was a surprisingly worthy cause. When I was a kid, before I started earning steady money from various acting projects, my mom had dragged me from one low-rent apartment to the next. Half had had black mold on the windowsills, flaking paint, substandard plumbing, or all three. I was very familiar with shoddy buildings, and I admired these men for wanting to build things the right way.

Still, it surprised me. At lunch, I’d nibbled at the sandwich Tristan offered me, while the three of them had chowed down like it was their last meal on Earth. At times, they seemed like loud, immature, overgrown boys, even though they were all older than me. But still, they were trying to do something that would help people and help the planet, and I had to admire that.

“So, what’s your book about?” Tristan asked. “Can you name a character after me?”

His question pleased me somehow. It seemed like the kind of thing one would ask a real writer. Of course, as far as he knew, Iwasa real writer. That’s what I’d told them, and it wasn’t like I had a sign on my forehead that read: “I’m secretly an actress.”

Still, working on this screenplay was proving to be one of the hardest things I’d ever done, and the fact that he seemed to casually accept that I was a writer gave me a boost of confidence, somehow. So much so that I found myself telling him more than I’d planned to.

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