“Shit.”
She pushed off, one ponderous step after another in a halting gait that made her think of zombies. Open space between the Ponderosa and white pines created a natural path. So cocooned were the trees by the last three days’ storms, only sparse glimpses of their reddish-brown jigsaw bark were visible, while drifts more than a story tall in some places all but swallowed the younger trees. Sunlight touching the odd stretch of exposed trunk high above the snowline, warmed the sap, and a scent like baking cookies wafting down to her on the sugared slope. If the situation weren’t so dire, she’d enjoy this.
Bryce again paused for her to catch up, about a quarter of a mile in from the ski patrol hut. He waited at the bottom of a steep incline.
“Oh, God,” she said. “Do I have to go up that?”
“It’s the quickest way to reach him,” he said. “I know you’re trying, but you need to go faster.”
“Faster?” Already she breathed hard from the workout the shoes gave her and the altitude to which she was unaccustomed. “You want me to go faster?”
“If you want to save a life, yes.”
“We can save two right now if we turn around.”
“Why is it you can’t believe me?”
A little more than a year ago, Niki had asked the same thing of Dante. He’d not just been the person to free her from her mother’s vampiric influence; he’d been her lodestone, the only one with whom she felt safe sharing her secrets. After they’d become engaged, she’d known she would have to come clean about the biggest one.
* * *
They lay entwined in bed after an especially invigorating and ultimately enervating round of world-class sex, when she opted to spring the truth on him.
Lazily, he listened to her recite her cautiously worded speech, absently twirling a lock of her hair. He seemed far away and even as the explanation spilled out, in the back of her mind she found herself wondering, what’s he really thinking about?
Once she said the actual words—I have an ability to create heat from nothing—he dropped her hair, pulled away slightly and laughed.
“You mean, like if we were stranded on a desert island, and I couldn’t find any wood, you could heat my pasta water for me?”
“I can show you,” she said.
“No, that’s okay.”
“Don’t you want to see?”
“Never fear, bella, I believe you.”
He sat back against the pillows, fingers laced behind his head, and eventually fell asleep.
* * *
Back then, his lack of a strong reaction had puzzled her. Viewing the conversation from the perspective of a year’s distance, she thought she finally understood. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe her. It was that he truly hadn’t cared.
Niki frowned at Bryce and hoped she didn’t sound like a Dante clone. “I’d like to believe you,” she said, “but you haven’t given me much to go on. All you’ve said is there’s someone buried under the snow out here. Where? When? How?”
His gaze was direct. It didn’t beg. She already knew that about him, that he never would. Rather, his demeanor asked her to trust; sought communication with her better angels.
“Start climbing and I’ll tell you.”
With a dramatic huff, she jabbed one pole and then the other into the steep wall of white, and launched one foot upward to get a grip on the snow.
Each stride higher brought her closer to her personal limits. What happened when she exhausted them and couldn’t climb another foot? How much farther up this hellish alp should she humor the man? Not far. Making an effort to help another was all well and good, but newscasts were full of people who tried and died in the attempt, swept away by a riptide while trying to save a beloved pet, reaching for a friend in danger and plunging 1400 feet together over Yosemite Falls.
She may not have ever taken a class on mountaineering, but she could guess what the experts would say. Your safety first. If she got lost or in trouble out here, she feared she might never get home. Who was there to come looking for her?
No one.
Niki had only her own mother left, the one person she hoped never to share the same space with again in her life if she could help it. A year since Dante and Iris had died, and she remained isolated from others. She’d become a widow before she’d had the chance to marry. Friendless.
* * *
Christmas morning she sat in her condo, back home in San Francisco’s East Bay. Her dining room window had the most perfect view of the salt marshes. Even though Dante wasn’t here to share it with her, she felt him in spirit. She threaded his Christmas gift, a classic diamond tennis bracelet, through the fingers of one hand. Lazily, her thumb traveled over the stones, exploring their individual faceted surfaces. She didn’t play tennis and had never liked diamonds, but she wouldn’t tell him that.
Niki’s doorbell rang.
Two members of the California Highway Patrol stood on her doorstep. Dante was dead, they informed her, and Iris with him. Her name and address were the only contact information responders could find in Dante’s wallet.
“Could you give us his next of kin?” the female officer asked.
They’d died together in a one-car crash just before midnight. Dante’s trip to New York and Iris’s trip home for the holidays had been a sham, an act for Niki’s benefit. The pair had never left Sapphire Ridge, and were returning to the resort after a day of gambling and drinking at the casinos on Tahoe’s south shore at Stateline. Dante was at the wheel of his SUV when it spun out on an ice-slicked road. Neither he, nor Iris, had been wearing seat belts. Restraints would have gotten in the way. Dante was found with his pants unzipped. Iris, in one of the more embarrassing deaths Niki had heard of, was discovered with a swipe of Dante’s cum drying on her cheek.
Of course, the cops didn’t tell her this. She had to learn it later that day, from Dante’s mother whom, incredibly, blamed Niki for her son’s death.
Another ring of her doorbell. Another unwelcome surprise.
“You couldn’t manage it, could you?” Kathryn Ribaldi said.
Lost in mourning, Niki barely heard her. “I’m sorry, what?”
“It’s your fault.”
His mother sat across from her at the dining table, cool, composed, livid. Without asking, she’d gone to the kitchen, picked up the bottle of wine Niki had opened to water down her misery and poured herself a glass. It was Dante’s wine, another Stags Leap Cask 23. He’d stashed it here for New Year’s. When he’d brought it over, Niki had wondered if she’d be allowed a glass of it this time. Well, she was drinking it now, and she resented his mother having any of it.
“If you’d been woman enough to keep him interested,” Kathryn said, “he wouldn’t be dead now.”
Chapter 8
Their sheer angle of ascent up the ridge brought out the worst of Niki’s acrophobia. She risked a quick glance back toward the bottom to see how high she’d climbed, and paled.
Would her mother miss her if she really did get in trouble out here?
Hardly.
Or at least not for months. They’d had no plans to spend Christmas together, and no longer acknowledged one another during the holidays. Up until now she’d been fine with that, thrilled, ecstatic even that her mother showed no interested in getting reacquainted. Seriously, who needed the vampire’s bite back at their neck? Niki would almost rather have had an alcoholic or a drug addict for a parent, than one who could literally control and drain the will from almost everyone with whom she came into contact.
So, she couldn’t count on family to care she’d gone missing. Perhaps the staff back at the timeshare building? No, she wasn’t due to check out for another two days. They wouldn’t notice a missing guest until her belongings became an inconvenience to the next person to move in. Even then, authorities might surmise she’d been outside at the time of the avalanche and died under tons of snow, her body among those still to be recovered. They wouldn’t think to look out here.
Enough. Get off it.
“You said you’d talk,” she called to Bryce. “Now talk.”
“All right,” he said, though it was several more strides before he continued. “Your first question…where? You’ll see as soon as we make it to the top of this ridge. He’s not that far from the resort as the crow flies. Maybe nine-tenths of a mile from that golf course back there.”
“How far as the crow doesn’t fly?” she asked, as in how long was the easier way to reach him?
“The slide took out the best route. So, I’m guessing three miles longer than the one we’re on.”
“Oh.”
Bryce led as usual, and after the first few minutes, climbing up the mountain behind him mesmerized her. Dressed for the backcountry in high performance gear that put function ahead of fashion, she wouldn’t have classified his attire as sexy. His navy blue snow pants were loose, as opposed to the glove snug fit that jeans would have given his well-toned glutes. That looseness, however, couldn’t disguise the body moving within. Powerful and assured, his legs conquered the ridge.
To keep herself from thinking about how far she could now fall if she slipped, she made a game out of watching his ass. She pretended she was a sculptor eyeing a block of stone. Just as an artist looked at formless rock and magically saw the shape waiting to be revealed within, Niki studied each of his strides, analyzing his movements for clues to the precise shape of the taut muscles under all that Gore-Tex.
If she were ever given the chance to be with and physically undress him…
Please. Not going to happen.
Thus far he hadn’t given her any hint he found her attractive. And why would he in a situation like the one facing them? Not appropriate.
But…
If she were given that chance, once all the layers were peeled off and they each threw aside their clothing with sex-mad abandon, she felt confident she knew down to the last ripple of muscle what that body would look like.
Effing a-maz-ing.
Bryce’s loose snow pants incited her fantasies in a way that Dante’s ultra-skin tight bike shorts never could.
Dante.
The game ended, guilt landing on her with enough weight to make climbing another step impossible. She stopped.
“How much farther until we reach the top of this stupid thing?” she said between ragged gasps.
Bryce halted when she did. Though he didn’t dare move his feet from their dug in positions, he twisted around his upper body so he could look at her.
“You can see the top as well as I can.”
“Wrong, Bryce. You were supposed to say, not far, just a few steps more, something reassuring like that.”
“Not far. Just a few steps more,” he said.
“Thanks,” she said, allowing her sarcasm free reign.
It occurred to her he’d only answered one of her questions, the victim’s location. It was a half-answer at that.
“When?”
“Will we get there?”
“No, when did you find him? How long has he been buried under the snow?”
“It was still dark when the avalanche–”
Niki’s anxiety spiked. “Dark? As in early this morning? Sometime around 3am?”
“I don’t know the exact time.”
“He’s been buried for hours. Hours, Bryce.” She recalled the words of the man in the crowd that morning in her condo building. Avalanche victims had 35 to 40 minutes when buried. After that, survival rates plummeted.
“He’s got air,” Bryce said.
“You mean he’s not completely covered. His head is sticking out?”
“Not exactly. He’s buried enough that he can’t move and I need another person.”
“Explain.”
He hesitated. Frowned. She had the idea he wasn’t sure how to answer.
“The wall of a hut like the one back there. It came apart in the slide and he’s wedged underneath it. We need to dig him out, but it created an air space with an opening.”
“Okay.”
“Hypothermia is the danger, not suffocation.”
“Okay, but Bryce, the middle of the night? What were you doing out here?”
“I heard him calling for help.”
“Out here? How could you even hear him, presuming you were back at the resort?”
“I was.”
“Then how? He called you? Like on a cell phone?”
“No.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I have a gift, Iris. Like yours at that snack bar with the ice on the table.”
“What?”
Suddenly afraid, Niki instinctively leaned back away from him. She’d had to hug the hill the entire way up in order not to fall. Now, standing up straight and pulling away sent her off balance. Her poles came out of the snow, gravity shifted her weight, and her arms began to windmill.
“Iris!”
Suddenly Bryce’s warmth enfolded her, steadying her.
“Quick. Stick your poles in hard. Pull yourself into the hill.”
She did and gradually relaxed, feeling more secure.
“Now kick one of your snowshoes toe first into the snow and stamp down.”
Careful not to kick back at him, she jammed the shoe’s toe into the snow pack.
“In deep snow like this, you’ll end up making a platform for your next step,” he said.
Her racing heart, which she’d swear had climbed into her throat at the same moment she began to fall, slowed back to something approximating normal. She calmed within Bryce’s embrace and glanced up and over her shoulder to thank him.
She expected the slight, quiet smile of an instructor. What she got was intensity and concern, but mostly intensity. His dark grey gaze met hers and her pulse rate shot off like a cheetah. If she’d been hooked up to a heart monitor, alarms would have been screaming. The vital, sexual energy rolling off him was intoxicating.
“There you go. You’re fine.”
“Yes.” She said. “Yes, yes. I’m fine.”
He stepped away and his warmth immediately left her, thrusting her back into the cold blast of wind skirling around up here. He resumed scaling the ridge.
It took her one, two beats, to compose herself, and realize he’d dropped that terrifying bombshell of his with zero follow up or explanation.
He saw me. He knows. He can tell others.
Discovery was the one thing she’d feared most in this age where anonymity was a thing of the past. Once on the Internet, information about someone never disappeared from public view. It existed forever.
For Mom to see.
Chapter 9
Delia climbed into the black SUV first, their driver holding the door and waiting for Niki to follow her into the luxe interior with its generous mini-bar and backseat theatre, complete with Internet access.
“I still can’t believe Tom couldn’t manage a limo,” Delia said.
A limo would have had a fully stocked bar, one with booze and not the water or juice they’d be treated to on the 75-minute ride to KSAC, Sacramento’s executive airport. Even one of the shorter limos would have had the space necessary for the elfin actress to stretch out full length, close her eyes and “meditate” with vodka in hand. Meditating was always necessary for Delia after a public event like the one just concluded.
“I think he was concerned there might be snow up here tonight and a limo couldn’t handle it,” Niki said.
“Do you think they don’t have limos in Tahoe? In New York during snowstorms? In Chicago?”
Her mother didn’t make eye contact with her daughter. That was reserved for specific occasions. Instead, Delia busied herself rearranging the lacy hand-dyed, hand-knit winter wrap she’d purchased for an obscene amount in L.A. Utterly impractical for keeping the wearer warm, it appeared to have been designed by someone whose idea of a high altitude environment was the Hollywood Hills.
“Of course they have limos in Chicago,” Niki said, “but it was thoughtful of him–”
“I’m sorry?”
“And there you go again, being sorry. Why are you always sorry, Nicola?”
“It’s an expression. I meant I didn’t understand–”
“I know what it means, darling. You really do think your mother is a simpleton, don’t you? Just another ditzy starlet.”
Ditzy isn’t exactly the word I’d choose, Niki snarked in silence. Or starlet either, she added and then chided herself for being uncharitable. Delia Lusk was every diminutive ounce the star and young enough, thanks to a waxen level of plastic surgery, of playing the late 20s. Or the 30s. Or…maybe the late 30s. With appropriate lighting, naturally.
“Thoughtful is something you are toward a stranger,” Delia said. “Using your head to actually think about, to intuit what your lead will need, is essential in a decent executive producer.”
“So Tom isn’t a good exec producer?” Niki asked. “Does that mean you won’t be taking the part?”
Secretly, Niki doubted her mother would be offered the role for which she’d just spent the last two weeks sucking up to Tom Rebelard, boy prince of Hollywood, including the charity function they’d left half an hour before. At Tom’s request, Delia had chartered a private jet and flown up to northern California, to the historic mountain town just above the snowline that was his home, and where her appearance helped him raise money for his pet cause. Niki had grown up just one county south of here, in a similar small town, where Delia had moved with her second husband, Niki’s father, twenty-three years ago. Tom was Niki’s age, yet her mother had used her trademark vulnerable sexuality and leveraged her years living in the Sierra Nevadas to connect with the producer. Not to mention prostituting her gift in pursuit of her goal. Delia had been working that one hard on Tom, on everyone attached to the film, the crowd at the function and even their driver. The only person she hadn’t used her talent to manipulate yet today was Niki.
“I am going to be Maggie Quince,” Delia said, naming the movie’s main female character. “That doesn’t mean Tom doesn’t need to be whipped into shape. Hurry up and get in. I’m freezing and you’re going to give me pneumonia. As much as I could use some pity promo in the media, I can’t afford to get sick right now.”
Spirits of the Season: Eight Haunting Holiday Romances Page 25
