Snowy Mountain Nights

“Yeah. I’m good.” She forced a smile and cleared her throat. “What did I miss?”

Louisa gave her a concerned glance but didn’t press it. “We’re playing blackjack. The winner gets a massage at the resort.”

“I could definitely use one of those.” She lifted her tight shoulders with a sigh of anticipation. “Prepare to lose your shirts, ladies!” Reyna pushed her encounter with her ex’s lawyer to the back of her mind and focused on the card game.

An hour later, the train arrived at their stop. Although she hated that she was paying attention, Reyna noticed Garrison getting off the train with her and her friends, immediately walking toward the taxi stand. She breathed a quiet sigh of relief and clambered from the train. Garrison wasn’t going to the resort with them. She didn’t have to worry about seeing him again.

Outside the climate-controlled train, the day was crisp and cold. The sun had cleared away the snowy clouds, covering the white-and-green landscape in warm gold. Reyna breathed a lungful of crisp mountain air. It felt good to be at Halcyon again.

“He’s cute!” Bridget looked over her shoulder at Reyna as she followed Louisa and Marceline into the black SUV that the resort had sent for them.

Reyna gave her rolling duffel bag to the driver and claimed a seat by the window. “Who?”

Louisa made a disbelieving sound. “The guy you’ve been staring at for the past five minutes.”

Reyna blushed and turned her attention to the window as the Range Rover powered through the snow and up the hill toward the ski resort. Bridget and Louisa laughed while Marceline gave her a reassuring smile.

“He is a cutie,” her friend said. “There’s nothing wrong with looking.”

Reyna clenched her back teeth but didn’t say anything.

It was a gorgeous morning in the Adirondack Mountains. With the windows up, the heater on and the driver playing a lively Beyoncé song, the women were comfortably isolated from the outside chill. Reyna sighed and relaxed into the heated seats, ignoring Bridget and Louisa’s chatter. The SUV growled up the path toward Halcyon Ski and Mountain Resort, a sprawling circle of cabins on a hilltop that overlooked majestic mountains and wintry fields of white.

In Halcyon, the air was crisp and sharp, a welcome change from what Reyna experienced every day in the city. With the company of her girls, being there always made her feel refreshed, even if she was in one of her bad moods.

The resort was one of the lesser-patronized places of the “it” crowd that Bridget and Louisa knew. It was beautiful, exclusive and scenic, with just about every amenity available. And it was a place people came to for the privacy as much as they did for the skiing.

Halcyon was the one truly big splurge Reyna allowed herself every year. The resort had become the place for her to get away from all the things worrying her in the city. Her career at the tattoo parlor where she’d worked since her divorce, the MFA degree in Graphic Design she’d gotten during her marriage but never used, the decision of what graphic arts jobs to apply for, if she did take the plunge.

Working at the tattoo parlor was fun, but every day she felt more and more like the only girl in a college fraternity. The boys who worked there—although over twenty-five—were all about picking up women, going to bars and getting more ink on their bodies. She’d outgrown the place a long time ago but was nervous about making the necessary change.

“God! This place gets more and more beautiful every year.” Louisa sighed as they drove past a grove of naked trees. Their barks were a dark brown against the white landscape, branches covered in snow and stretched out above them like lace.

Reyna agreed with a silent nod, staring out her own window.

“Hopefully there’ll be hotter guys up here this year,” Bridget said as she freshened up her bright lipstick with the help of her compact. “Last year was a bust.” She pressed her lips together then snapped the compact shut.

A woman who always did whatever she wanted, Bridget was more than willing to have a fling at the resort and never look back after the weekend. Reyna could never do that. Sleeping with a man at the place that had become her sanctuary from drama just seemed like a very, very bad idea.

“I hear that Ahmed Clark might be up here this year.” Marceline shared the information with the slightest of smiles.

At one time or another, the women had all drooled over the rising basketball star. Unlike his teammates, who they all thought were freakishly tall or had too many tattoos, Ahmed was just perfect. He was six and a half feet tall, wore a wide and frequent grin while on the basketball court and regularly gave money and time to charity. His body wasn’t half-bad, either.

Bridget chuckled. “I guess I know who I’ll be hooking up with this weekend.” She pouted her freshly reddened lips and winked.

“If rumors are reliable.” Louisa raised a skeptical eyebrow.

“If he’s up at Halcyon, that man will be under me before the weekend is through,” Bridget said.

Reyna laughed and shook her head at her friend. If only Bridget was that relentless about figuring out her life, she wouldn’t still be living at her parents’ place and steadily burning through her trust fund.

“Honey, why do you have to make this weekend about sex?” Marceline looked as if she was only partially joking. “It’s supposed to be about us, remember? You and your girls.”

“Yes, but you girls like to sleep, and I don’t. I have to fill the time somehow.” Bridget gave Marceline a saucy wink then started fiddling with her phone.

They arrived at the resort a few minutes later. The lodge where they would check in, eat, drink and socialize was a big and beautiful old-fashioned log cabin straight out of a mountain woman’s dream. The two-story lodge contained a restaurant upstairs and the shop and front desk downstairs. The restaurant’s wide glass windows overlooked a dizzying view of the mountains.

Far back and behind the lodge, although they couldn’t be seen from the main path, sat over two dozen log cabins, each with two to four bedrooms, a fireplace, wireless internet and a kitchen in case anyone was intrepid enough to cook.

After Reyna and her friends checked in at the front desk, another driver chauffeured them in a covered golf cart down the snowy path to their cabin. They tumbled into the heated cabin, stretching and groaning from the long morning of sitting on the train and then in the SUV. The driver dropped their bags, complete with ski equipment, by the front door before quietly leaving with his tip.

“This isn’t our usual cabin.” Bridget looked around, hands on her hips.

“You’re just now noticing that?” Louisa grabbed her bag and walked toward one of the bedrooms.

“It’s fine, Bridg.” Reyna patted her friend’s shoulder and headed for the other bedroom. “There aren’t any bad cabins up here anyway.”

The frown didn’t leave Bridget’s face when she followed Reyna into the room. But she quickly forgot her dissatisfaction when Louisa appeared in their doorway wearing a teal ski suit, complete with furred hat and boots. Very black Russian sex kitten.

Louisa posed in the middle of the bedroom. “Who’s ready to go check out the place?”

“That’s not fair!” Bridget said, eyeing Louisa’s clinging and questionably warm outfit. “I want to be sexy, too.”

Reyna groaned. “Then change already. There’s a glass of hot apple cider waiting out there for me.”

After Bridget got sexed up to her satisfaction, the four women made their way to the lodge. As their booted feet crunched through the snow, Bridget teased Marceline out of her funk while Reyna and Louisa walked behind them.

“So who was that guy you were checking out on the train?” Louisa asked.

She kept her voice low, but at a conversational level so the other women wouldn’t think she was trying to hide anything from them.

Reyna shrugged. Lying about Garrison Richards’s identity would be a waste of time. Louisa was smart and had a husband named Google. If those resources failed, her brother worked high up in the FBI and could get her any information she wanted. Sometimes she was a little scary.

“He’s someone I knew years ago,” Reyna finally said. “From the divorce.”

“Ah.” Louisa grinned, her eyes sparkling as if she’d just found out a secret. “That explains why you didn’t look exactly glad to see him.” She squeezed Reyna’s waist. “But you couldn’t look away from him, either. I don’t blame you. He’s a sexy beast.” She growled playfully.

Reyna paused, surprised that Louisa didn’t throw around any of her usual adjectives for people she found appealing: hot, handsome, fine. Maybe because Garrison was none of those things. He was too stern, too cold, to be anything but sexy. And a beast. She swallowed thickly at the thought.

While in that conference room with him five years ago, she hadn’t paid any attention to his looks. He had been all shark, cool and efficient. Presenting her with the facts of her impending divorce after drafting the awful document that allowed her ex-husband to toss her out on the streets with nothing. Admittedly, she had been young and foolish, naively relying on Ian to do the right thing.

Reyna sighed. “Yes. He is sexy. If you like that sort of thing.”

“That sort of thing? Girl...” Louisa chuckled. “What man-loving woman with a working libido wouldn’t be into that sort of thing?” She fanned her face and grinned.

Reyna had to silently agree. Garrison’s understated dress only emphasized the belly-quivering masculinity of him. The subtle swagger in his walk, the way he appeared to see clearly everything around him. Those small details made her wonder wicked things. Like what kind of focus he would have in bed. Would he please his woman first and take his own pleasure at the end of a long and sweat-dripped night? How would it feel when his...? She cleared her painfully dry throat.

The fur on Louisa’s hooded jacket fluttered around her face as she laughed. “You don’t fool me one little bit, honey.”

At the lodge, they found their usual table near the window and beneath one of the heater vents. Unwilling to wait for table service, Bridget went to get them a round of hot apple cider. Reyna stretched her legs under the table next to Marceline’s, more than ready for the relaxing weekend.

The lodge’s restaurant, which could comfortably hold at least fifty people, was already a quarter full on that Friday morning. Conversation wound through the airy space, mixing with laughter and the clink of cups and saucers. The guests were a mix of couples, singles and groups all gathered at their tables to enjoy the morning and the beginning of the weekend.

“Here you go, ladies.” Bridget came back to the table with a silver kettle and four matching cups on a tray. “The first round is on me.”

A collective sigh of appreciation went around the table. At first, Reyna thought it was for the apple cider, then she noticed that none of the women were paying any attention to the drink. Instead, their gazes were fastened on something over her shoulder. Ahmed Clark, Reyna guessed without looking. But she was wrong. Instead of the basketball player, it was Garrison Richards who had walked through the door.

She drew a breath of surprise. What was he doing here? She thought he had... Reyna shook her head. It didn’t matter. All she knew was that her friends were acting like hormonal teenagers.

She wanted to slap them all. But while pouring a glass of cider for herself, she snuck a look at Garrison from under her lashes. Yes, he was sexy. There was no denying that. There was also no denying that she should stay away from him. It took a ridiculously long time for her friends to stop staring at him like vultures at the sight of new carrion.

Louisa poured drinks for the rest of the women and slid Reyna a private, provoking glance. “He’s a nice specimen,” she said to Marceline. “Maybe that’s just what you need to get over your broken heart this weekend.”

“I’m pretty sure Reyna has dibs on him already.” Marceline’s voice seemed tinged with regret.

“Hmm,” Bridget chimed in. “He is a cutie! Isn’t that the guy from the train?”

“Most definitely.” Louisa grinned. “And I don’t see a ring.”

She was the most perceptive of them all, but was also the most cruel, using her insight to play games that most people were not ready for. Louisa gave Reyna another annoying look, but Reyna didn’t bite. She only shrugged and tasted her cider. It was perfect, the heated cinnamon, sugar and apples coating her tongue with delicious flavor. Just the perfect thing on such a cool and spectacularly beautiful day.

Reyna kept her eyes on the cider and not on the man her friends refused to stop staring at.

“You know that a ring doesn’t mean much these days,” Bridget said, picking up from Louisa’s earlier comment. “Some married men travel without theirs just to pick up some stranger before going back home to the wife.” Bridget nodded in Garrison’s direction, although he was far from the only man in the lodge. Reyna was willing to bet, though, that he was the most...appealing. With the gray heads, men who were obviously with their lovers and the immature-looking boys, Garrison was unfortunately the hottest thing in the room.

“Yeah, what’s that about?” Marceline muttered. “I know plenty of girls who would love to land a married man. If he had on a wedding ring, it’d be like catnip.”

“Maybe they don’t realize exactly what they’re trolling for,” Bridget said. “Territorial women can be vicious.”

Louisa gestured with her cup. “That’s not the only thing they have to watch out for. Some of these hot-ass married men have diseases they’re ready to pass on to anyone, including their wives.”

A chorus of agreement went around the table.

While the women got distracted from Garrison with the talk of cheating married men, Reyna watched him from the corner of her eye. So she noticed that he sat at the empty seat closest to the fire, his booted feet nearly nudging the grate. And she also noticed when he started watching her.

He took a sip of his drink and looked at her over the edge of his cup. She ducked her head, but not before his penetrating gaze managed to scatter her senses.

She came in on the tail end of her friends’ conversation about cheating. “I don’t know why anyone would want to have an affair with a married man. Seems like a recipe for heartache to me. And not just for the actual wife whose husband is doing the messing around.” She knew from experience how awful that was. “These girls might get attached and then fool themselves into thinking their lovers are going to leave their wives.” Ian had been cheating on her, but as far as she knew, he never married or lived with any of the women he’d cheated with.

“Some women just like to gamble.” Louisa shrugged.

“Pardon my intrusion, ladies.”

They all looked up. Reyna’s fingers twitched around her cup of cider, and she had to clutch it tighter to stop from accidentally spilling it.

Garrison stood near their table. He seemed perfectly at ease in his thick gray sweater and jeans. And by at ease, Reyna’s mind supplied, she meant sexy as hell. He stood with a hand in his pocket, his gaze trained firmly on her.

“I’m Garrison Richards.” He looked at all the women before bringing his eyes back to Reyna. “I want to apologize to Ms. Barbieri—”

“I don’t go by that name anymore,” Reyna interrupted. “It’s Allen now.”

“My apologies.” He dipped his head. A spark of something flared in his eyes, but his face remained cool. “But please allow me to apologize again when I didn’t recognize you earlier.”

“No apologies necessary,” she said. “It’s been five years, and we only met a couple of times.”

“You are quite unforgettable,” he said.

His hawkish gaze tightened something low in her belly. She swallowed and tried to ignore it.

“I’m frankly surprised,” Reyna said. “You must have been through hundreds of women like me.”

She felt the shocked gazes of her friends. They knew it wasn’t like her to be so rude.

But Garrison wasn’t fazed. “I doubt there’s anyone like you.” A small, unamused smile touched his mouth. “I’d like to invite you to dinner one night this weekend, if I may?” He pulled a card from his wallet and held it out to Reyna. A calling card, she noticed, one without his business information.

When she didn’t take it, he put it on the table in front of her. “You don’t have to give me your answer now, but be sure to call me when you decide to accept.” After another nod at Reyna and her friends, he turned and headed back to his table.

Marceline and Bridget stared at her with their mouths hanging open. Louisa only smiled. Like the Cheshire Cat, she sipped from her glass of cider and waited for what Reyna had to say.

“You have to tell us where you know that fine-ass guy from!” Bridget aimed a far from subtle gaze at Garrison’s table. “Oh, my God! I bet he’s tasty.”

The sadness in Marceline’s face receded with her curiosity. “Yes, fess up. Our not-so-little Reyna has been keeping secrets.”

She tried not to wince at the reference to her height, something she had always been self-conscious about. Instead, she shrugged.

“He is someone I met—”

A ripple went through the lodge just then.

“It’s Ahmed!”

Her friends all turned toward the door. Ahmed Clark had walked into the room and given Reyna a temporary reprieve. She wasn’t ready yet to tell her friends how she met Garrison.

It was not that she was ashamed of it. But that was a time in her life filled with such pain and betrayal that she’d rather not revisit it. They all knew the pertinent details of the divorce and what happened afterward. They had been there for her when she found out Ian had been sleeping around, when she confronted him, when he demanded a divorce, telling her she wasn’t the kind of wife a TV star like him should have.

It seemed so ridiculous at the time. So surreal. The boy she had known in high school, pimply faced and gangly. The one whom no other girl had paid the slightest bit of attention to, but had been her friend, then lover, then husband. They had blossomed from their teenaged awkwardness together, Ian becoming more beautiful than anyone had ever imagined, the swan in his duckling family.

He’d never seriously considered acting, but when an uncle in the business suggested that he try out for a TV role, Ian dived in and never looked back.

Dismissing the past, Reyna turned with her friends to watch Ahmed Clark stroll into the restaurant with a tall beauty at his side. He was pretty enough to be a movie star himself. So was the woman with him.

“Damn, he’s fine!” Bridget made a show of licking her lips and moaning his name. “Give me five minutes, Ahmed, and I’ll make you forget all about that skinny red bone on your hip.”

Reyna chuckled. She didn’t doubt that her friend’s boast could come true. Bridget was beautiful and determined enough. Across the table from her, Louisa picked up Garrison’s card and tucked it into her pocket. Her smile was pure mischief.

* * *

After another round of hot cider, Reyna and the girls left the lodge and took the ski lift to the top of the mountain. In the glass-and-steel lift, Reyna marveled at the lush spread of the Adirondacks beneath and around them. New York City was incredible, and Reyna couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. But she loved the wildness of the mountains, its fierce beauty, the evergreens drooping with the cold, white weight of the snow.

Once at the top of the mountain, her friends hit the slopes on their skis and left Reyna to her own devices. Around her, children played with snowballs and with each other, giggling and rolling down the abbreviated slope. Couples and groups hiked up the hill, the sound of their conversations floating back down to Reyna as she watched her friends, one after the other, disappear down the ski slope.

“See you at the bottom!” Bridget flashed a brilliant white smile and took off after the others.

Boots planted firmly in the snow, Reyna waved her off.

She didn’t ski. After a disastrous lesson a few years ago that ended with a broken wrist, she gave up trying to learn. But that didn’t mean she enjoyed their annual ski retreat any less. She just got her pleasure a different way.

She climbed carefully through the snow and over the craggy rocks toward an even better view of the slopes and Halcyon’s lodge and cabins at the bottom of the mountain. As she climbed, she left more and more people behind. Her footsteps dragged through the thick snow, and her every breath misted the air.

Reyna was breathing hard when she finally found the perfect place to sit—a jutting dark rock she brushed the snow from to settle into the dip made perfectly for her butt. She was slightly breathless and warm under her clothes. Even her daily trek through New York streets had not prepared her for the impromptu hike.

From her perch out in the open, she watched the anonymous bodies whipping down the slopes and through the snowy fields far below. Their whoops of joy broke into the air like the sound of champagne, happy and celebratory. The sun reflected brightly off the field of white and into her eyes shielded by dark glasses. It was a gorgeous day.

Reyna took off her hat to better feel the bright sun on her head. She took a sketchbook and pencil from her backpack and pulled off her right glove. The air was cold, but bearable on her fingers as she began to sketch. Soon, she lost herself in the movement of her pencil across the page, the sweeping and scratching rhythm of it as she captured the mountain on paper. A blurred shape flew past her, whipping the nearby snow-laden spruce in its breeze. She lifted her head.

A snowboarder. Tall and graceful, dressed in head-to-toe gray. He whipped past her, a contained storm. And it had to be a he, with his very masculine silhouette and the aggressive way he took the mountain. Flecks of snow flew up under his board. Reyna watched as he soared off the mountain and hung in the air for a moment, one hand gripping the side of the board, the other outstretched. He was a dark outline in the bright landscape, a wild and beautiful thing, before landing once again among the white then disappearing around a bend in the mountain and from her sight.

A few more lightning-quick shapes whipped past her, each in brightly colored clothes that made them stand out against the snow, but it was the man in gray who caught and held her attention. The other snowboarders zipped down the mountain, as exuberant as children, calling out to each other, shouting in masculine camaraderie.

Distracted from her sketches, she searched for the man in gray. Ah, there he is. She followed his somber presence down the mountain, the way he sliced across the snow, beautiful and untouchable.

Before she was aware of what she was doing, Reyna began to sketch him, the sharp grace of him racing down the mountain, knees bent, arms outstretched as if he was flying, his entire face covered up. She lost herself in the rhythm of sketching, the world as she saw it coming to life under her fingers. Long minutes passed.

“Aren’t your fingers cold?”

Reyna stiffened at the sound of the shouted question. It was Garrison Richards. Again.

“No,” she said. “They’re fine.”

But she put down her pencil—her hand was actually damn near frozen—and curled it in her lap. Only a few feet away, Garrison was slowly skimming down the hill toward her...on a snowboard? Her mouth fell open.

If she wasn’t seeing him with her own eyes, she would have thought a sport like snowboarding completely unlike him. He seemed best suited for cold and emotionless things like chess, polo or even rowing. Not this howling and graceful sport that was all adrenaline, physical power and falling down in the snow. She couldn’t even see him falling, being messy and human enough to tumble and get up and try something again. She imagined that he always did everything right the first time.