Snowy Mountain Nights

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.