Snowbound

“You can’t do anything.”

She tried to smile. “I can worry, can’t I?”

They’d been standing here in the hall too long. He was becoming uncomfortably aware of her. Of little things: the palest of freckles on the bridge of her nose, the fullness of her lower lip, the single strand of dark hair that curved down over her brow. He resisted the urge to lift his hand and smooth it back.

The effort made his voice curt. “Worrying won’t help.”

Her pointy chin rose. “No. It won’t. Hadn’t we better get started? I figure they’ve already been out there five minutes. By your estimate, Amy will be coming in the door in another five minutes.”

“I didn’t mean…”

“It’s okay. You’re trying to help. I know.” She smiled, a benediction.

His fingers curled into fists at his sides. She wouldn’t be so forgiving if she knew about the death he’d rained on the innocent.

The road to hell was paved with good intentions.

She took the girls’ bathroom, he took the boys’. From long habit, he cleaned fast, and then carried a pile of towels and washcloths to her. She was wiping the countertop, which took longer than in the other bathroom because of the amazing array of toiletries and cosmetics scattered there. All of which had presumably come out of their purses and bookbags.

“Oh, thank you,” Fiona said, seeing the pile in his arms. “More loads of laundry in the making.”

His laugh felt rusty. “You don’t look like the half-empty kind.”

She smiled impishly. “In this case, the washing machine is going to be a lot more than half full.”

Still smiling, although it felt unnatural, John said, “And I seem to remember you promised to load it.”

“Yes, I did.” Fiona began hanging towels on racks, leaving part of the stack on the counter between the pair of sinks. “What you said earlier, about Iraq… Was it awful? I know a lot of the returning veterans are suffering from posttraumatic stress, just like after Vietnam.”

PTSD—Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—was a fancy way of saying that you’d seen things you shouldn’t have, in John’s opinion. It was ridiculous to talk about it as a disease, as if the right pills would cure it.

He cocked a brow at her. “Are you asking if I’m one of them? Maybe. Most soldiers do have some symptoms.”

She flushed. “I’m so sorry if you thought… I really wasn’t asking, even obliquely. You haven’t given me any reason… Oh, dear.”

Great. He’d been a jackass again.

“That’s all right. I…hinted.”

“If you need help you can get it from the Veterans Administration, can’t you?”

“I don’t need it.” The gravel in his voice startled even him. He cleared his throat. “What I need is to…decompress. This is my way of doing that. Be around people in limited doses. Get over being jumpy without a barrage of noise around me all the time.”

She looked doubtful even though he could tell she was still embarrassed. “Is it working?”

Some days he thought so. On others, when he awakened from a nightmare with his heart pounding and a bellow raw in his throat, he wasn’t so sure.

“I feel better than I did when I tried to go back to work at Robotronics.” Which was truth, so far as it went.

“It is peaceful up here.” Shouts from outside drifted up, and her mouth curved. “Or was, until we darkened your door.”

“You’ve been good guests,” he forced himself to say.

“Why, thank you.” She sighed. “I suppose I’d better go check on the kids.”

He stepped aside and let her pass him, a flowery scent lingering for a moment even after she’d disappeared into the hall. Had she brought perfume…? No, he realized; she’d used one of those fragrant bath beads.

John glanced toward the old-fashioned tub, picturing her letting her bra drop to the floor, then slipping off her panties before stepping in. He’d seen her long legs when she changed yesterday in front of the fire. Imagining the rest of her naked body came easily. Had her hair been loose, to float on the water when she sank down into the tub? Or had she bundled it up?

Loose. Definitely loose. Her hair had still been wet when she came down for breakfast.

A groan tore its way from his throat. Damn it, what did he think he was doing? He had a shaky enough hold on reality.

He forced himself to scan the bathroom with a practiced, innkeeper’s eye before following her downstairs.

As predicted, Amy was the one to have come in and was shedding her outerwear in front of the fire. Water pooled on the plank floor around her boots.

“It’s freakin’ cold out there.” She shivered and hugged herself.

“It was nice of you to go even though you didn’t want to, for the sake of everyone else,” Fiona said.

Reaching the foot of the stairs, John paused to hear the girl’s answer to the teacher’s kindly retooling of motives he was pretty damn sure hadn’t been that altruistic.

“Even though I went out to be nice, Troy,” she said the name with loathing, “made this big snowball and smashed it against my face. He’s a…a creep.”

“Well, you did go out to have a snowball fight.”

“But he walked right up and did it! He’s such a jerk. Him and Hopper, too.”

How sad romance was when it died. A grin tugging at his mouth, John crossed the huge great room, opened the heavy front door and went out on the porch.

Snow still floated from the sky, obscuring the landscape. The steps he’d shoveled last night had disappeared again.

There seemed to be a free-for-all going on, snowballs flying, accompanied by shrieks and yells. With the snow still falling, the teenagers were indistinguishable from each other, all blurred in white. They were thigh deep and higher in the white blanket that enveloped the landscape, the shed and the cabins he could usually see from here.

John raised his voice. “Time out!”

The action stopped and heads turned his way.

“When you get cold and decide to come in, everyone go get an armful of wood and bring it. Pile’s just around the side of the lodge.” He jerked his thumb toward the north corner.

“Girls, too?” a voice squeaked.

“Girls, too.”

He went back inside, where Amy was elaborating on what pigs all boys were, while Fiona soothed with common sense. As far as he could see, the girl was a spoiled brat, but what did he know?

Not that much later, the kids did all carry in wood, and all three boys and one of the girls willingly went back for another load.

John nodded his approval as they dumped split lengths in the wrought-iron racks. “That should keep us going for a bit.”

“It’s a really big fireplace,” the girl said. “Have you ever had to cook in it?”

“No. The generator hasn’t failed me yet.”

“God forbid,” Fiona murmured.

He silently seconded her prayer, if that’s what it was. He’d be okay on his own with just the fire. But trying to feed ten of them? No ability to do laundry for who knew how long? He remembered all too well what it felt like to go for days without a chance to do more than sponge your underarms and genitals with lukewarm water, to get so you couldn’t stand your own stink, to have sand in every fold of skin and gritty between your teeth.

Somehow, he didn’t think the spoiled girl would take even three days of sponge baths and half-cooked food stoically.

“I get the first bath,” Amy declared, staring a challenge at the others.

Dieter pulled off his wool hat and shook his head like a wet dog. “We just had baths. Why do you want to take another one?”

“Because I’m cold,” she snapped, and stomped off.

“Why’s she so upset?” Hopper asked in apparently genuine puzzlement.

Nobody leaped to explain. The teacher was too tactful to say, Because she didn’t get her way. The others were either indifferent or perplexed as well.

“Maybe she’s just having a delayed reaction to the fact that yesterday was pretty scary,” Fiona said.

“But we’re okay,” one of the other girls protested.

“Some people are more resilient than others. It’s also possible that getting stranded this way reminds Amy of something that happened to her in the past. We all have different fears.”

John shook his head. Damn, she was good. He wondered if she believed a word she was saying.

“Now,” she said, more briskly, “let’s get everything that’s wet laid out in front of the fire to dry. Neatly,” she added, when one of the boys dumped socks and gloves in a heap. “Then the lunch crew can get started. Ah… who did I assign?”

“You!” they all chorused in glee.

She laughed with them. “Okay, okay! And, uh, Tabitha and Erin, right?”

Erin nodded with composure John suspected was typical, and Tabitha made a moue of displeasure.

“Next question.” Fiona smiled at him. “What’s on the menu?”

“Soup and sandwiches.”

“That we can handle. Right, gang?”

He accompanied them to the kitchen to show them where everything was. Fiona disappeared to the laundry room to move a load to the dryer and start another one while the girls opened cans of cream of mushroom soup and dumped them in pans.

John loitered for a few more minutes, waiting for Fiona to come back. Despite his earlier discomfiture at imagining her naked, he couldn’t resist watching Fiona competently slice cheddar cheese and slather margarine on bread to make the grilled cheese sandwiches she’d decided on. He doubted she or the girls were even conscious of his presence. This past year, he’d discovered he had a gift for invisibility.

Damn it, he could have spent most of the morning hiding out in his quarters, reading in front of the woodstove. But Fiona Mac-Pherson intrigued him.

What he couldn’t decide was whether it really was her in particular, or whether he’d been quietly healing without realizing it and she just happened to be the first attractive woman to come his way in a while.

Not true, he reminded himself; two weekends ago, a quartet of women in their twenties had spent two nights at the lodge. Apparently they’d been getting together a couple of times a year since they graduated from college. Each took a turn choosing what they did.

A couple of them were married, he’d gathered. One of the two single friends in particular had flirted like mad with him. He hadn’t felt even a flicker of interest, and she’d been more beautiful by conventional standards than this slender teacher with the river-gray eyes.

He’d thought rather impassively that the woman who kept making excuses to seek him out was attractive. He’d been bothered then by the fact that he’d felt not even a slight stirring of sexual desire. He hadn’t had had a woman since the night before he’d shipped out for Iraq. He’d missed sex the first months there. At some point, he’d quit thinking about it. That part of him had gone numb.

It wasn’t that he felt nothing. Grief was his constant companion, anger looking over its shoulder. He had unpredictable bursts of fear. Once in a while, he allowed himself to be grateful that he was alive and that he’d found sanctuary.

Fiona MacPherson’s pretty gray eyes and cloud of curly dark hair wouldn’t have been enough to draw him from his preferred solitude. Not if something else about her hadn’t sliced open the layer of insulation that had kept him distant from the rest of humanity.

So what was different about her? What had he sensed, from the moment their eyes first met?

He kept following her around in search of answers, not out of lust.

John gave a grunt that might have been a rusty laugh. Well, not entirely out of lust, he amended.

The sound he’d made brought her head around, although neither of the girls seemed to hear. When Fiona saw him leaning against the wall, she smiled. As if glad he was still here.

There, he thought in shock, might be his answer. She saw him. Really saw him. Not as a Heathcliff she was bent on seducing as part of a weekend’s adventure, but as if she were interested in him as a person. As if she might even like him.

In fact, she was the only person outside family and old friends who’d ever bothered to wonder if he suffered from PTSD—and he could tell she had been curious, even if she hadn’t meant to ask. He’d only admitted to having served in Iraq to a couple of other veterans who’d stayed at the lodge over the past year. They had recognized each other. If others had speculated after seeing his scar, they’d kept the speculation to themselves.

What he didn’t know was whether Fiona MacPherson looked at everyone the way she did at him. Why that mattered, he didn’t know. In a few days, she’d be gone.

But he still wanted to know.

CHAPTER FOUR

FIONA COULDN’T BELIEVE John Fallon had thought she would come right out and ask if he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. She didn’t know him anywhere near well enough to be that personal. The embarrassing part was that she had wondered, and he could probably tell.

In the privacy of the laundry room—where she was shifting loads again perhaps an hour later—she groaned aloud. He must think she had no better manners than Amy! She couldn’t even blame him.

Should she apologize once more? Or would it make things worse if she brought the subject up again?

Definitely worse, she decided.

Folding towels in the same style he did, lengthwise in thirds, she couldn’t help thinking about what he’d said. He needed to decompress, which must mean he was having trouble with… She didn’t know. People, noise, nightmares? Of course, there was his limp, too. She’d seen how much his leg hurt him on occasion. He’d go utterly still, his jaw muscles locking, and a sheen of sweat would break out on his face. Was he continuing to do physical therapy, or had he recovered as much as he was going to?

“Gee, why don’t I just ask him?” she said aloud, rolling her eyes.

His voice came from behind her, mild but impossible to ignore. “Ask him what?”

Fiona froze. Her fingers tightened on the towel in her hands and she said the first thing that came to her. “Oh, um, whether you have more laundry soap.”

“Why? Are we running low?” He came closer to her and peered into the tall plastic bucket. Which was half full.

Even more flustered by his nearness and the woodsy scent that clung to him, she babbled, “No, no, I’m just afraid we’ll use it up. I thought maybe we should start hanging the towels after baths instead of washing them incessantly.”

“We have plenty of soap.” He nodded past her, where half a dozen plastic buckets were stacked against the wall.

“Oh.” She gave a weak laugh. “I’m practically tripping over them. Well, now I feel dumb.”

“Don’t.”

Her laugh became slightly more genuine, if a touch hysterical. There he went again. Anybody else would have said, It’s okay, you were being considerate. Or, Anybody could have missed seeing them. But if John Fallon could compress twenty words into one, he did.

She grabbed almost at random for something to say. “You must get sick of laundry during your busy season.”

He reached for a towel from the basket and folded with quick efficiency compared to her more deliberate efforts. He was reaching for another by the time she was half done with one, even though his hands looked too large to be so deft.

“If you’re here for long, we’ll put the kids to work on laundry, too.”

Her embarrassment was fading, thank goodness. She chuckled. “The beauty of unpaid guests.”

“Maybe I should lower my rates in exchange for labor.”

“You could make the whole stay do-it-yourself,” Fiona suggested. “Kitchen privileges, bathroom privileges, but leave ’em clean.”

“You can’t imagine how appealing that is.” His tone was heartfelt, less guarded than usual.

“Oh, I don’t know. After a few days of cleaning up after them—” she nodded toward the kitchen “—I’m sure I’ll be in complete sympathy.”

“They’re done in the kitchen.”

A non sequitur? Or not?

She braced herself. “Is it clean?”

“I’ve seen worse.”

“But you’ve seen better.”

He shrugged. “They’re kids.”

She should have continued supervising. “I’ll finish up.”

“I already did.”

She winced. “I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

He raised his brows. “Do what?”

She forgot she held a towel in her hands. “Work nonstop. I feel guilty.”

“You’ve worked nonstop today, too,” he pointed out.

“But they’re my job. My responsibility.”

“And the lodge is mine.” While folding the last towel, he made it sound inarguable.

As, she supposed, it was. He couldn’t want a crowd of teenagers trashing Thunder Mountain Lodge, even though he seemed less than enthusiastic as an innkeeper.

“What are they up to now?” she asked.

“I offered some games. Most of them are in front of the fireplace playing them. I think a few are upstairs.”

Not one boy and one girl, she hoped.

“Amy?”

“Last I looked, sulking because someone else already took Boardwalk.”

“Oh, dear.”

He frowned. “Quit worrying about them.”

“But they’re…”

“Your responsibility. I know. But they’re not toddlers.”

“No, they’re teenagers, which is almost worse.”

Why did he look irritated? Was he tired of her fussing?

He picked up the piled towels before she could. “I’ll put these away.”

“I can…”

He ignored her, of course. Frustrated, she watched him limp out of the laundry room, leaving her to the sound of running water in the washer and the spinning dryer. Why did the wretched man have to be so hard to read? And why couldn’t he be, oh, fifty years old, balding and potbellied? Or the wizened old man Dieter had said used to own the lodge?

Fiona sighed and went to see what the kids were up to.

She found them sprawled in chairs and on the floor around a couple of different gameboards. Dieter, Hopper, Tabitha and Amy played Monopoly, Kelli and Troy Chinese checkers. Erin was curled like a cat in an upholstered chair reading. Only Willow was missing.

“Anybody seen Willow?”

They hardly glanced up.

“Nope.”

“Not in a while.”

“Uh-uh.”

Fiona hesitated, hating to look as if she was following John, but finally started up the stairs. He was just closing the door to the linen closet when she reached the top.

“Missing a kid,” she said. “Seen one?”

He shook his head. “Let me know if you need help.”

Fiona glanced in the first bedroom on the girls’ side—beds still unmade, she saw—then knocked on the door to Erin and Willow’s room. “Willow, you in there?”

“Yes.” The voice sounded small.

“I’d better feed the fire.” John passed her, his shoulder brushing hers.

Even that minor, incidental physical contact made her heart jump. Darn it, he was the sexiest man she’d ever met, even with a scar and limp. And she must be feeling a little more vulnerable than usual.

The kids. Think about the kids.

She took a deep breath. “Can I come in?”

“If you want,” Willow agreed.

Fiona pushed open the door. Willow lay on the bed, curled on her side around a pillow she clutched to her middle. Fiona sat on the edge of the bed.

“You okay, kiddo?”

Face wan, she nodded. “I have cramps.”

“Period starting?” Thank heavens for the tampons John had produced yesterday.

“Not yet. But it must be.”

“Have you taken anything?”

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