Before he can respond to that I lower my head, wrapping my lips around him and taking him as deep as I can.
He instantly starts murmuring in Turkish and, if I weren’t kneeling, my knees would have buckled. This man is perfect. His taste. His response to me. I’m tempted to go with him. To spend hours, maybe days, in his hotel room, enjoying this feeling.
Days?
That doesn’t sound like me. But this kind of desire isn’t usual for me either. Excitement thrums through my body and I suck harder on his shaft, drawing a raw, arousing sound from histhroat. I’m going to spend the night with him. Something tells me I’ll regret it forever if I don’t.
A minute later, as I feel the tension rising in him, his hands tightening tellingly, deliciously, in my hair, a furious pounding on the office door breaks through the passion clouding my brain. “Win! Win, damn it, are you in there?”
I pull back, blinking up at my now-scowling dragon in confusion as the pounding continues. “Win, please!”
“Connor?” That’s when I hear a woman shouting raggedly somewhere outside the office. It sounds like Kate. “What the hell?”
I’m on my feet in an instant, racing for the door. When I throw it open, Connor is standing there, looking terrified. Is that blood on his hands? “Win, you’ve got to come now. It’s Bex.”
CHAPTER THREE
Two months later…
“I’m lost.”
It needs to be said out loud. The situation is too ludicrous not to be shared. So farfetched, you would think it was a movie instead of real life.Scrappy social studies teacher leaves city to visit mountain resort for stupid reasons. Accidentally freezes to death and probably won’t get paid.A play within a play within a ski lodge.
If I survive this, Bex is really going to owe me.
“The movie will be an instant classic though,” I say, shivering as I shamble through the snow like a one-legged zombie. “They’ll call itSkinny Winnie and the Ski Lodge Mistake. Or maybeSecrets, Spies and Stupidity. Timothée Chalamet can play the lead. Tom Holland, if I’m lucky.”
I’m not that lucky.
I know this because I’m currently a limping cautionary tale of what can happen when you get tangled up in other people’s problems. I should never have agreed to this.
It’s a long story. But the next time I go for a walk to rethink my friend’s plan, it won’t be in a fancy topiary garden. Seriously, the artistically shaped bushes had a creepyThe Shiningvibe that made me stupidly head for the tree line while I debated my next move. I hadn’t been ready to go back to the lodge yet, and by the time I realized my mistake, it was too late.
Never head for the treesis my new motto.
I’m not used to walking through a world without recognizable markers and street signs. Without sidewalks and corner stores filled with impatient, occasionally helpful people who could point me in the right direction. So I panicked a little.
After trying to call Connor at the lodge and realizing I’d forgotten to charge my phone last night? I panicked a lot.
So, that’s where I’m at. Limping on a twisted ankle—don’t ask—with a dead phone and no idea how to find my way back. Because of creepy topiary.
It’s snowing so hard I couldn’t find my hand right now unless it slapped me in the face. Is this a blizzard? A white out? I have no idea, but it isn’t like the sporadic snow we had back home this winter, or the barely-there layer that was already on the ground when we arrived. It sure as hell isn’t the magical flurries that show up at the end of every winter romcom to someone’s delighted cry of “Oh look, it’s snowing because love!”
This isnotlove snow. Instead, heavy flakes mixed with small ice bombs stick to everything like frozen burs, and this new and exciting temperature drop has me worrying about all kinds of things. Like hypothermia and hungry, sleepy bears who might be looking for a snack.
Worry about the fact that no one is looking foryoubecause they don’t even know you’re gone.
I sag against a scruffy pine, it’s branches heavily laden with clumps of ice as I struggle to catch my breath after that mental sucker punch. The band I’m supposed to sing with hadn’t arrivedat the lodge yet, and Connor won’t be looking for me for at least a few hours because he’s too busy enjoying the amenities that were supposed to be mine this weekend. The ones I bribed him with so I wouldn’t have to come up here by myself. He's scheduled for a hot stone massage right now. And after that? A facial. I would be enjoying the idea of the rough-and-tumble football coach getting pampered like a princess if I weren’t so damn cold.
I groan, stepping out from under the tree and resuming my death march—maybe we should call it a slog—unwilling to give up on the possibility of finding my way back to civilization. What I wouldn’t give to be curled up on Val’s couch with Bex again. To go back in time and tell her, “No, thank you” when she asked me to come here.
Bex never asks for favors. Though after what she’s been through, I’d offer her a kidney or the blood of her enemies if it would make her smile again.
She hasn’t smiled in a while.
I’ve been spending the last two months keeping her company while she recovered, and finishing my college course. She’s healing physically. Emotionally, I’m not so sure. But this situation? It got her attention. Sending me here got her brain working on something other than her injuries. Even Val wanted me to follow her lead, and he’s been anti-Finn since the night everything went down.
Did I mention that this ski lodge is full of Shawn and Ellen Finn’s family? That Kate the Calamity and most of her cousins are here celebrating the couple’s anniversary? They hired me to be the entertainment, which was definitely something I could do. Bex, however, had asked me to be her spy on the inside… Something I suck at.
