Now she and James were together, and that was the only bright spot in the whole affair. Henry was dying, they were still trapped in Phoenicia, and the local parks department was investigating the theft of not one, but six snowcats--someone had stolen the other five out of the same yard James had “borrowed” his from.
She thought of Henry upstairs and hurried. She loved him still, though her love was tested and tempered by knowing that he had decided they could not be together even for the time he had left. That didn’t make sense to her, but since he was going through this ordeal, she had to respect his wishes.
As she walked to the door, she looked back at James, sleeping peacefully in a patch of winter sunlight. She felt such enormous wistfulness as she gazed at him that tears came to her eyes. If she could stop time a while, she would. For all of them.
Instead, she went off to work.
She had been Henry’s assistant for under a year, but she had done her best to be indispensable. At first, she’d wanted to stabilize her job as much as possible, but then, it came from a place of pure love and loyalty. At the time, she had thought that he did all the Catskills building restorations, gave the locals jobs and funded local food banks out of the kindness of his heart. In truth, he had been trying as hard as he could to make a positive mark on the world before the cancer he had fought for years caught up with him. Two days ago, he had discovered that his illness had become fatal, that he would start to waste away soon. So now, snowed in in a strange town and living out of a bed and breakfast, she was on the job whenever Henry needed her.
She got two mochas from the downstairs cafe and came up to knock on the door of his suite. “It’s open!” called Henry’s slightly hoarse voice, and she pushed open the door and walked in, balancing the drinks carefully.
The room was twice the size of the ones Henry had rented for her and for James downstairs. He sat at the suite desk, tapping away at his laptop, his coffee-colored hair askew across sunken face. He had put on his habitual tailored suit, however, this one medium gray with a dark red tie. His eyes were the same shade of green as her sweater when he looked up at her, but she noticed right away they were bloodshot.
She sighed inwardly. He hadn’t slept at all, clearly. “Hey there, good morning.” She kept her voice warm as she offered a mocha.
“Thanks.” He took it, hand gently sliding over hers. “I’ve been trying to reconcile all my accounts. It’s giving me a damn headache, though. I didn’t use the same file name structure on everything, so searching the files has to be done by hand.”
“Want me to dive in?” She touched his shoulder, which was broad and muscular under the wool, and he relaxed slightly under her fingertips.
“Yes please, this is making me cross-eyed.”
She switched places with him. He was using a complicated code system for his financial data files, and he had slipped a bit in keeping them up to date. She made the corrections, unable to help noticing the huge amount of money he was moving from the listed accounts. He seemed to be liquidating everything. She wondered where he was going to transfer all this money. It added up to billions, especially if you included the land deeds, business shares and building deeds. She had envied his riches before, even if he was a good, hard-working man who deserved what he had. James had admitted to being jealous as well. Then again, before Henry had given him a chance as his foreman, James had been jobless thanks to a criminal record from his desperate youth. They both owed him so much, even if he had been irresponsible in how he had handled Anna’s heart.
“Okay, that was pretty simple, I have everything in order in a single file and I got rid of the duplicates. What’s next?” He had dragged over a chair and sat next to her so he could see the screen. She could smell cologne and Scotch on him.
“Uh, well, I have some company memo copy I need you to go through for clarity, and then one memo to my board. And then, I don’t know, maybe breakfast? I have to update James on some stuff about the job sites. Oh, and that reminds me. I have some permit guy on my ass asking what kind of antifreeze we use to winter pipes in our restorations and whether it’s environmentally friendly.”
“Didn’t we field a query like that last year?” She went through the document archives, and came up with a write-up on the subject. “There we go. I don’t even know why this gets brought up so often, but at least it’s already done.”
“It’s because the Catskills are the New York City watershed. Anything that can get into the water table means big fines. That includes everything from leaking fuel tanks to antifreeze.” Henry coughed a few times and she looked at him worriedly.
Ever since she had heard about his diagnosis she had felt hypervigilant about signs of Henry’s health; whether he slept, whether he ate, every cough and shift and look of discomfort. She knew that he didn’t need her fussing over him when he himself wasn’t settled with the idea of what the doctor had said, but she still found herself reacting to every little thing. “Okay, but the idea that they might take legal action if we don’t replace the antifreeze with a type they approve of, when we’re dealing with blizzard conditions up here and can’t even get to the work sites....”
He smirked thinly. “Some of the permit people in the City like to bust my chops. I usually have a lawyer deal with them, but Matt’s on Christmas break in the Hamptons.”
She felt a little jealous. She had not had much of a Christmas, having spent it wintering with Henry in that poorly heated farmhouse. Her brief time in Henry’s arms had almost made it worth it, but the absence of any celebration at all, knowing what she knew now about the limits of her time with him, now made her feel very sad. They hadn’t even exchanged gifts. Her gift for him was sitting on the kitchen table in her studio, wrapped and ready to go--and forgotten the morning they left for the farmhouse as she rushed out the door. She would have to make sure she gave it to him as soon as they got back to New York City. “Okay, well, here are the details you need to answer the query. We’re already using propylene glycol, which is about as environmentally friendly as antifreeze gets.”
They spent an hour like that, going through files, finding bits of information, answering e-mails and creating business letters. It was a typical day for them in fast-forward, plowing through a dozen tasks before Henry called a break. “Okay, that’s enough bureaucratic crap for a while, I’m hungry and need to get out of this damn room. Go see if James is ready to join?” He hadn’t commented on James sleeping in.
She nodded and rose, smiling inwardly. Of course, poor James was exhausted. Neither she nor he would have had it any other way. It felt a little awkward and strange, starting their lives together as Henry was laying the groundwork for ending his in an orderly fashion. She and James had already admitted to each other that supporting Henry through this would have been agonizing if they had not had each other.
She touched Henry’s arm as she passed him, and he smiled up at her with gentle warmth. This was so strange. She had no idea how to feel or what to think about this man who was drawing away from life in his every action. Everything they were doing was preparing for his death, every bit of it. But he was still here, alive.
She had to squash the sudden urge to hug him tight. She might cry if she did that. For all she knew, with his exhausted smile and dull eyes, so might he.
When she got back to her room she heard James humming in the shower, and her hands stopped shaking. She came in and looked around. He had made the bed and picked up their clothes, and also eaten every scrap of the leftover fried chicken they had brought up. She sighed, stomach growling, but took the bad with the good and called out, “Hey! Henry wants to walk out for breakfast, how long should I tell him?”
“Eh, ten minutes.” James turned off the water and she heard him shuffle around in the bathroom as she texted Henry with his response. “You sleep all right?”
She fought a grin. “...eventually.”
He popped his head out of the bathroom, wet hair sticking up everywhere. He wasn’t much of a sm
iler, but his pale blue eyes twinkled. “Yeah, me too.”
Henry and James got into snowball fight on the way to the pizza place down Main Street. It was one of the few businesses still open in this mess, mostly because they had taken food deliveries the day before the blizzard. They had been out of breakfast food after the first day or two, but a meatball pizza with mushrooms and extra cheese could still be had, and was ordered ahead of time from the bed and breakfast lobby. Then, the shuffling walk through the snow. Anna had just started to shiver despite her sweater and coat when Henry idly scooped up a handful of snow, packed it into a loose ball and idly flung it into James’s face.
James spluttered and wiped snow off his cheek, a gleam coming to his eye. “Oh, now you’re asking for it,” he growled good-naturedly.
Then the both of them were off while she watched wide-eyed, taking cover behind light poles and parked cars and mounds of snow, tossing snowballs like a couple of ten year olds.
In James’s case, ten year olds who swore like sailors, but the enthusiasm was there. She watched the two of them, hands clasped in front of her, and her eyes stung a little again, but her tears were happy. No matter what was going to happen, Henry was alive, and they were all together now.
Chapter 2: Tuning In
“I’m going to suggest we take another pizza up the hill to Toby and his mom, they’re both down with that damn cold now.” Henry ate his third slice and looked between the two of them. His hair was still damp from being hit with a snowball.
James shrugged, the point of his collar soaked from a return hit. “Sounds like a plan. Hey, did the Parks Department say anything further on those snowcats?”
Henry paused, and then shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing yet, but Toby called me this morning. His mom was listening to police dispatch on the shortwave, and--”
“Toby’s got shortwave over there?” Anna paused and set down her pizza slice. “Don’t the Parks guys use radios?”
“Yeah, they do; each snowcat is set up with one.” James eyed her, as did Henry. They knew the look she got when she had an idea percolating.
“Okay, well, we have five stolen snowcats and they must have grabbed them for something. We haven’t seen any rescue teams show up, so chances are this isn’t so they can pull someone off the mountain like you did with us. Whatever they are doing, they have a big team of people and they have to stay in touch in all this blowing snow.” She shrugged and took a sip of her cocoa. “Why wouldn’t they use the radios?”
“And if they do use them, then Toby and his Mom can listen in.” James looked at Henry, and then nodded.
Henry coughed into his fist. “Okay. Given that we’re the only ones that the Parks Department knows are associated with disappearing snowcats, we’re on the hook as suspects for this theft unless we can point the authorities at the guys who actually have them. So I think maybe we better make that a deluxe pizza with everything and make sure we get it, and the request, to Toby’s house while it’s still hot.”
“Sounds like a good plan to me,” James shrugged. “But first I’m finishing my own damn pizza.”
Toby’s house was on the same road as the farmhouse they had been stuck in, which wasn’t plowed out, so they ended up breaking trail up the hill until they reached the dilapidated white Victorian. Toby was an incredibly talented wood carver who was disabled due to a childhood head injury. He and his mother helped each other get through the tough winters, but this year a cold had laid them both low at the same time that Henry and Anna were trapped in the farmhouse. The pizza wasn’t exactly homemade chicken soup, but it was good eating, and they wouldn’t have to cook for themselves that day.
That far up the hill, Anna could look back and see the snow drifted over the highway just beyond the far edge of town. The sky was still leaden and dumped more snow on them at intervals, never with the strength of the last few days’ blizzards, but still enough to make plowing almost pointless yet. The crews still made runs a few times a day, engines growling by. She could see where their blades had piled up snow on either side of the highway, but just an hour after plowing, the blacktop was under another foot.
I really hope we don’t have a medical emergency. She turned to follow the others again, setting her feet in the trail they had broken.
“You okay back there?” James asked, looking back. Henry paused a moment as well.
“Well, it’s nothing like winter in Delaware, but I’ll manage…” she stumbled a little, but caught herself and walked on.
Toby yanked the door open almost before James could ring the bell. “Oh my God, hi guys!” he said enthusiastically. He was smallish and on the round side, with dark brown hair, a scraggly beard and thick round-lensed glasses. He wore a superhero t-shirt and jeans over his thermals. His cheeks were a little red, but he seemed to be mostly over his cold. “You brought food! My Mom’s still sick, but I’ll see if she’s up to visitors.”
She was, and they all piled into the kitchen while Toby devoured two slices of pizza and looked at the bracelet James gave Anna for Christmas. It was carved from wood using techniques Toby had taught him, cut from a section of branch and then carved away in a filigree pattern to expose the rings. He had polished it up and it was smooth as silk against her wrist. She was almost reluctant to take it off for Toby to see, but finally did.
“Oh wow!” He beamed at James, who gave a tiny awkward smile,, hands shoved in his jeans pockets. “Hey, this is a good job!”
“Yeah, well, you taught me the skills, I just practiced them a lot.” James was handy, in the way of many Catskills men: they possessed an odd collection of practical skills both to make money and to save it when their own homes and cars needed work. The bracelet had been a labor of love. She only a hug to give him in return, but as it had finally broken the touch barrier between them, he hadn’t complained much.
“It’s beautiful!” Toby peered at it and then at James. “You use beeswax?”
“For the final polish, yeah, all I had handy.”
“Came out real nice.” He handed it back to Anna, who quickly slipped it back on. She and James exchanged glances, and his gaze was so soft she blushed slightly.
Toby’s mom, Beth, was a lean woman in her sixties who wore a pink fuzzy housecoat who was followed perpetually by four cats. She took a slice of pizza and went over to her scanner which she had set up in the corner next to her computer. It was an old fashioned analog device, on a par technologically with the communications equipment she was generally trying to listen to. “The highway boys are saying it will be another two days before we’re dug out of here at this rate. Not pretty, but I suppose it could be a lot worse.” Her voice was a bit scratchy.
Henry nodded, and went to her. “Ma’am, I was hoping we could get your help with something.” He explained the situation with the snowcats as she munched her pizza, not even bothering to try and lie. She had piercing gray eyes and never missed a damn thing. “If we could figure out who has the snowcats we could point the authorities that direction and it will no longer be our problem,” he finished up a little awkwardly.
She peered at him shrewdly, fist on hip, then nodded once. “Yeah, well, I suppose it’s not going to do any harm to scan the frequencies. If there’s a reward for those missing snowcats, though, I want in on it.” She turned on the scanner.
“Of course, Ma’am.”
Beth sighed through her nose and started poking at the machine, twisting a large dial on the front slowly as she tilted her head and listened in. Everyone turned to watch her curious and slightly arcane fiddlings. The speakers kept coughing out static and bits of conversation, which she ran for maybe fifteen seconds each before identifying them and moving on.
“Emergency channels...road crews...there’s the cops...volunteer firefighters...power crew. You know that the groomers up on Bellayre have their own channel? Don’t know why they need it, all they’re doing is making fake snow and sometimes steering some drunk skier back down the mountain.”
�
�Avalanches, ma’am. They’re the most likely to get caught in them.” James went to the window and looked out. It was starting to snow again, and he scowled briefly at the falling flakes. “The radios are so they can call for help.”
She grunted and kept searching. “Just so you know, this could take a while. If you have places to be, I can call you when I get something.”
“We’ll hang around a little then leave you to it, then,” Henry replied smoothly. Nobody wanted to make her cold any worse by overexertion, and Toby’s mom was an introvert to begin with.
But Toby himself seemed glad of the company. He took them down to the basement, which was taken over by his woodworking tools, and showed them a snowy owl he was carving out of a chunk of white willow. The whole time Anna stood unconsciously between James and Henry, not wanting to be too far away from either of them.
Soon enough, they would have to break it to Toby that Henry was sick. Maybe Henry had it half in his head to do it tonight, but as he looked over the carving and listened to Toby go on about techniques and materials, he seemed to not want to change the subject toward his problems. Anna couldn’t blame him. She didn’t want to bring it up either, and she doubted James did. Nobody there wanted to watch Toby cry.
BILLIONAIRE ROMANCE: The Unforgettable Southern Billionaires: The Complete Collection Boxed Set (Young Adult Rich Alpha Male Billionaire Romance) Page 63
