“Okay.”
“We can report the accident in the morning, but there isn’t much they can do now, anyway. It’ll eventually have to get towed. If they can even reach it down there.”
My mind spun. I hadn’t even thought of getting the car out.
“Thanks.”
I closed the door behind me, bathed in a sudden chill. This little cabin clearly didn’t have central heating, and the window didn’t keep out the cold. JJ had set a few more blankets and a pillow on the bed. I fluffed the pillows and climbed in. When I tugged the blankets all the way to my chin, I realized that the pillow smelled like JJ. Was it his?
My body molded to it like mush.
4 JJ
Mark appeared from the attic thirty minutes after Lizbeth went to bed. He tilted his head toward the spare bedroom. “Bed?” he mouthed.
I nodded.
Once she’d left, I’d sunk into food preparation. The smell of marinara and pasta filled the room. Mark gravitated to the food naturally.
“She okay?” Mark asked in a quiet voice as he approached. “She didn’t look so great when you arrived.”
“Fine, I think.” I rubbed a hand over my face, suddenly exhausted. I recounted the story, with the scariest parts emphasized appropriately. While I told it, Mark grabbed dishes for dinner.
“Seriously?” he whispered and clapped a hand on my shoulder. “JJ, you’re a freaking hero. It’s all those climbing muscles. I always knew you had a knight in shining armor buried underneath all those layers of hippie.”
“I couldn’t have done anything if she hadn’t gotten herself halfway out already.”
“You look shaken up.”
He leaned back in his chair, spaghetti piled high in a bowl. I felt shaken up. Reality had set in. Tonight could have been a tragedy. I loosed my hair and let it fall to my shoulders, relieved to ease the pressure from the hair tie.
“I am shaken. I almost didn’t get her.”
“Well done, brother. You saved her.”
He decked me lightly in the arm as he dove into his food. My mind wandered to Lizbeth. She still seemed to be in shock. Her overall mien was a bit too calm. I wasn’t the one who’d dangled over a white-capped river, seconds away from death, and even I felt it all the way to my gut.
“I made you some hot chocolate,” I said. “It’s in the microwave staying warm.”
“But not because you made it in there.”
“Don’t insult me.”
“You’re the best brother ever. Real, made-from-scratch hot chocolate on a blizzard night? You’ll always be my fave, JJ. What would I ever do without you? Fortunately, we never have to know. Hey, I had an idea tonight and started putting out some feelers. You want in on it?”
His voice faded into the background as I turned my attention back to my food. Mark rarely wanted me to respond—he just wanted a listening ear—so I let my mind drift.
Thoughts of a certain terrorized redhead circled my brain in an endless loop for the rest of the night.
5 Lizbeth
When I woke up, my neck felt as tight as the spine of a new book.
I straightened carefully. My collarbone protested each millimeter where it had pressed against the seat belt. My stomach felt a bit sore from lying on the windowsill before the car fell. A quick inventory confirmed I was fine. Alive.
A wooden ceiling loomed overhead. Behind me, the warm crackle of a dying fire filled the air. I blinked away a dream of tangled steel, grating metal, and deep ravines.
Yet here I sat in . . . Adventura.
Memory returned quickly. With a groan, I rubbed a hand over my face. At some point in the night, I’d slipped out to the living room, too cold to sleep. The Bailey brothers had already gone to bed, so I’d made a little nest on the couch closest to the fire and slept there.
Nightmares had replayed every second of the crash in excruciating detail all night long. As if my brain wanted to process it in slow motion. In the dream, my car hadn’t just been sliding. No, I’d dangled on the edge, one finger on a rock. I screamed and screamed and screamed, stuck in the awful sensation of almost dying.
It left me feeling cold.
I blinked and forced my thoughts back to the present moment. The clock said 7:34, but the room lay in shadows. Little light made it past the ongoing storm outside. But the wind seemed to have lessened. A quick look at the windowpanes confirmed that snow had frozen to the glass.
What a perfect setting for a romance novel.
I’d read my fair share of mountain romances. Handsome stranger fetches feisty woman from inevitable death in a whirling snowstorm. Forced to stay in the same cabin, they secretly connect and realize they’ve never been so disarmed by someone else before.
I stared at the ceiling and blinked.
Odd.
I’d read almost every romance novel in existence. Dreamt of the day I’d live my own because, frankly, I’d dated almost no one in college. Now I sat in a literal storyline for a perfect romance. And all I could think about was my pale eyelashes. Or the awkward fact that, when I read romance books, I often pictured JJ as the love interest.
Which just made all of this totally surreal and weird.
A quick review confirmed it: I was definitely stuck in a cabin, in a storm, having been saved by the one man I couldn’t have but always wanted. Last night should have been far sexier. Really, it had just been terrifying.
So . . . when would the ultra-giddy romance vibes hit me?
Soon.
Maybe after the crushing reality that I’d almost lost my life—and definitely lost my car—faded. Not only the car, but my phone with pictures of little baby Shane. The keys to the coffee shop. Some newly purchased winter clothes. My laptop.
The surge of panic that swelled in my chest ebbed quickly this time. All of that didn’t matter. The pictures
