The Black Sheep and the Princess

by Donna Kauffman

  She wished.

  “Freak snowstorm last night,” he murmured absently, his hips moving with the rhythm of her hand. “About a foot, if that’s not all drifting.”

  Kate stopped what she was doing and sat up. “It snowed?”

  Donovan opened his eyes. “A lot. Which means no one from Ralston is coming here. And we’re not going anywhere. Now, about that pain management program you were beginning there—”

  But she’d already scrambled off the bed. It said enormous things about the nature of their relationship that she didn’t even think to cover herself up. Not that he hadn’t seen her naked, but morning light was not always flattering. And yet she knew it wouldn’t matter in the slightest with him.

  Why can’t I just keep him?

  Then she looked out the window at the winter wonderland blanketing the camp property for as far as she could see, and she couldn’t help but grin. Snow day. Looked like she was going to get her wish. For a little while longer, anyway. Normally, she’d be upset at yet another delay in getting things up and running for her camp, but she could hardly fight Mother Nature now, could she?

  “It’s still snowing,” she said, squinting at the tiny flakes spitting from the leaden sky.

  “Yep.”

  He didn’t sound all that upset by the prospect either. She turned to find him still spread eagle on the bed, in all his quite estimable glory, hands propped behind his head, shit-eating grin plastered all over his face. Well, at least it appeared they were on the same page, anyway.

  Lucky her.

  She sent a silent thank-you to Mother Nature and strolled back toward the bed. “So, then, the agenda for today would be—”

  At that moment, Bagel pitched a very loud, very long, very mournful howl from the other room.

  “What, does he have radar or something?” Kate said, crossing the room to the bedroom door instead. Peeking out, she found her dog sitting by the front door, looking quite plaintive. “It’s cold out there,” she informed him. “And the snow is deeper than you are.” This did not seem to make much, if any, of an impression on him. She supposed when nature of a different sort called, it called.

  She jumped a little when she felt Donovan’s warm skin brush against hers as he came up behind her. He nibbled his way along her shoulder, and had her knees wobbly by the time he reached the side of her neck.

  “Wrestle you for who takes Wondermutt out.”

  “I’m not sure we have that long.” But her body was already in absolute agreement on his voting method. It took enormous willpower not to turn into his arms, push him right back to the bed.

  “Well, then the problem takes care of itself.”

  “Ew,” she said, laughing. “Not in my cabin, which means I guess we’re going to have to figure out what to do about it at some point.”

  “It’s not that hard.”

  She bumped her hips back against his. “I beg to differ.”

  He chuckled, and the warm sound sent tingles through her that reached places even the feel of his naked body could not. Which was saying something.

  He nipped the edge of her ear. “Quite the voracious animal, you are.”

  She looked over her shoulder. “I’m just trying to keep up.”

  He grinned, not looking the least bit abashed. She liked that about him. Even more, she liked that about them.

  Bagel continued to whimper and look longingly at the front door.

  “Yeah, yeah, we’re coming,” Donovan told him.

  “We?”

  “Sure. It’ll be good for us. A little fresh air.”

  “A lot of snow.”

  “Come on.” He tugged her back into the room, leaving the bedroom door open, and began scrounging for his clothes. “We’ll just shovel a path to the nearest tree, make a nice clearing around the base of it for him, and voilà. Porta-potty.”

  When she didn’t say anything for a few seconds, he looked up from pulling on his jeans. “What’s wrong?”

  “Well, I hadn’t exactly gotten around to buying a snow shovel. I wasn’t going to need one for a while, or so I thought.”

  “That’s okay, any shovel will do.”

  “I’m sure there are shovels around here somewhere.”

  Donovan paused, his shirt bunched in his hands. “Somewhere?”

  “Down in the service sheds. And the stables.” Which were hundreds of yards away, through very deep snow. She smiled. “Hey, you wanted the snow adventure.” She looked around the room. “I don’t even have proper boots. Just my regular work boots and they’re crusted with mud and smell like burnt cabin. I haven’t had the rest of my stuff shipped out here yet.”

  Donovan pulled on his shirt and walked up to her and slipped his arms around her waist. “How about you make some breakfast and I’ll see that the dog gets his business done? Deal?”

  She hated sticking him with the cold, wet, doggy detail, but the offer was simply too good to pass up. Her stomach chose that moment to send up a particularly distinct grumble.

  Donovan smiled. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  “I owe you,” she said, never so sincere.

  “Make mine scrambled eggs, and if there is hot coffee, we’re even.” He kissed her soundly on the mouth, groaned a little, and pushed her back against the wall to take the kiss a little deeper, before finally wrenching himself away. “Probably good it’s cold out there,” he said, then went to get his coat and boots on.

  “I can’t imagine why,” she said, a bit breathless. She was still leaning against the door to her bedroom when he and Bagel took off out into the snow.

  She smiled when she heard Bagel’s barks of joy. “Men,” she said, shaking her head and heading to the kitchen.

  A half hour later, she was just getting muffins out of the oven when the door opened and a soggy, snow-encrusted dog came trotting in. She looked up, but a soggy, snow-encrusted Donovan didn’t follow.

  “He needs a rubdown, but you’re out of rag towels on the porch. I—I’ll be back in a few minutes. Don’t hold breakfast.”

  Kate plopped the muffin pan on the stove and hurried to the front door. It was so blinding white, it took a moment for her eyes to adjust, but they did, in time for her to see Donovan wading through knee-deep snow, heading down the driveway to the road. “Wait! Where are you going?” She stepped on the porch and shouted the same question again, only louder. It wasn’t snowing hard, but the wind made it difficult for sound to carry.

  He turned. “I just need to check on something. Go ahead and eat. I’ll warm mine up. Save me some coffee.”

  She could hardly understand him, but then he turned back, head down against the elements, and kept on trudging. It was either race out there after him, or wait for him to get back and grill him then. She looked down at Bagel, who was sitting, still soggy but looking quite contented with himself, next to her feet. “What is it with you guys and the call of the wild, anyway?”

  She looked once again to the trail Donovan was leaving in the snow and debated with herself for all of two seconds. “I can wait.” But she didn’t head right back in. She watched him to see what direction he took. She thought maybe he was going to see what, if any, further damage the heavy snow had done to the cabin-slash-crime scene, but instead, he turned and headed down the path leading to the next set of cabins. He was quickly gone from sight.

  She looked down at Bagel again. “What’s going on?”

  All she got was a tail thump and a short whine.

  She sighed and stepped back inside the cabin, closing the door against the howl of the wind. After feeding Bagel, she went back to preparing breakfast, but decided to hold off scrambling the eggs until Donovan came back. She popped the muffins into a basket, keeping one out for herself, then covered the rest with a towel. Then, after slipping her coat on and jamming her feet into her fuzzy slippers, she went out on the porch again and nursed her cup of coffee while picking at her muffin. She squinted through the screen and the steady fall of tiny snowflakes, looking f
or any sign of Donovan’s return. By the time she drained her mug, she knew standing around was not going to be an option.

  “So much for a fun snow day.” He’d said they’d go looking for evidence this morning, but with the storm, Roger wasn’t likely to show, so surely he could have had breakfast first. And they were supposed to look together, although she hadn’t exactly shown a lot of excitement for going out in the snow, so she couldn’t really get mad at him for taking off without her. But still. She was getting tired of being left behind to wait.

  She brightened when she remembered stashing a pair of tall rubber barn boots in the far corner of the porch after a day spent investigating the stables a few weeks back. She dug them out, then went back inside to put on another layer of socks and another pair of sweats, before heading out.

  She kept to the trail Donovan had made through the snow, which was already getting blown in, wincing as the deep snow tipped into the sides of the wide rubber boot tops and slid down to soak her feet. She stopped and pulled one pair of sweats up and out, then tugged the elastic band down over the boots. Now her hands were numb, but at least her feet wouldn’t get any wetter. She continued down to the road toward the lower cabins closer to the lake. “What on earth are you doing down here?” she murmured.

  She got to the first cabin, and even with the wind and drifting, she could still see where he’d been around the outside, and inside as well, it appeared, as the snow on the front stoop was disturbed where the door had been dragged open. But there were more tracks leading down to the next cabin, so she just kept on going. It wasn’t until she passed the third cabin that she realized that even with the drifting and fresh snowfall, the snow looked a lot more churned up down here than it had when she’d first left the cabin. She stopped for a second and looked back, then at the cabin in front of her. Donovan’s self-made trail leading down the driveway had been pretty narrow, but down here…

  Of course, the snow was deeper this far down the hillside, but not that much.

  Had Donovan and Bagel come this far once already? And then she had another thought. Or had someone else been through the snow down here first?

  Her heart, already thumping pretty good from slogging through knee-deep snow, picked up an extra beat. She opened her mouth to call out, then thought better of it. Whoever had been here, if someone had, had come recently, to make those kinds of snow tracks. What if they were still out here? What if they found Donovan, or her, out here stalking about? Then what?

  She glanced wildly around for a moment, trying to see where Donovan might be. There were more tracks heading past this cabin, but were they just his? She couldn’t tell at this point. She waded through the snow up to the cabin in front of her, wanting to know what they might have been looking for, not that they apparently found it, seeing as they’d continued on, but she wanted to look anyway. Maybe he was just spending more time investigating these and that was why the snow looked more churned up.

  A peek inside the door showed nothing out of the ordinary. Bare bunk beds were shoved against the far wall, along with a few heavy wooden dressers and two huge oak footlockers, the same type of furniture she’d discovered in the other cabins she’d looked into. She hadn’t gotten around to inspecting the furnishings up close as yet, mostly because she imagined the years of mold, heat, and dampness would mean replacing most of it.

  She went to duck back out, then stopped, and ducked her head back inside. Her boots had left wet marks on the floorboards, but that wasn’t what caught her attention. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but something wasn’t right. It didn’t come to her until she looked back down at her damp boot-prints.

  “No dust,” she murmured. She hadn’t gone into every cabin yet, and none of the ones down here by the lake, but she had done a cursory examination of a few of the larger, more viable ones up the hill, closer to the main lodge. The one thing she remembered most from her exploration was the sneezing attacks she’d gotten from the dust.

  This cabin was musty and smelled a bit moldy, but was otherwise as neat as a pin. “That’s odd.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Kate stifled a scream and spun around with her hand clamped to her chest. “You really need to stop doing that.”

  “You really need to stay inside where it’s warm so only one of us has frostbite to cure later.”

  “You never came back, and I got curious. I wanted to know what was going on. It’s my camp,” she said, knowing she sounded ridiculously defensive, especially since he was the one out here willingly sacrificing to help her out. “I’m sorry,” she said before he could mention the same to her. “I guess I just don’t do well with the helpless female role. I’m not the sitting around, eating muffins while the big strong guy does all the work, type. It just doesn’t sit well with me.”

  “Understood,” he said. “It’s your numb toes. But next time—”

  She kissed him to shut him up, then smiled when it worked. Before he could go back to lecture mode, she stepped into the cabin. Donovan knocked his boots against the doorframe, then stepped in behind her.

  She took a slow scan of the room. “So, I’m guessing someone has been playing Goldilocks and the Three Bears in my cabins?”

  “A more accurate assessment than you could imagine.”

  She shot him a questioning look. “So you think people were living in them? Or sleeping here, or whatever? Because if they were just using it for storing contraband of some kind, why bother cleaning, right?”

  “Uh, I don’t think they’ve been storing anything here. Not in the way you mean, anyway.”

  Kate raised an eyebrow. “Meaning?”

  Donovan moved past her and pointed to the wall. “See these?”

  She had to move closer. There were a series of small holes drilled, but no hardware in them any longer.

  “And here?” He pointed to the headboard and baseboard of one of the bunks.

  Kate leaned closer and saw they’d been drilled at the corners of the headboard and footboard, only these holes still had eyehooks in them. She looked at Donovan. “I have no idea what these mean.”

  To demonstrate, Donovan smiled and flopped down on one of the bunks. He put his arms over his head and spread his legs.

  “Oh,” Kate said. Then her eyes popped wide when he wiggled his eyebrows, then pumped his hips. “Oh!”

  He sat up. “It looks like someone in town has set up a little…business out here. Of the kinky variety.”

  She walked over to the wall, looked at the series of holes, which were just above head level for her, and decided she didn’t need all the details. She turned back to face him. “So instead of a camp for special needs kids, I have—”

  “The best little whorehouse in Winnimocca.”

  “Oh, my God.” She looked back at the holes in the wall, then at the beds, trying not to imagine…anything. She wasn’t as successful as she’d hoped. “How did you figure that out? I mean, from a couple of holes in the wall, I’d have never put that together.”

  “Actually, I didn’t find those first.” He stood up and pulled an envelope out of his inside pocket. “I found these.”

  “Which don’t belong to you.”

  Kate whirled around, but Donovan was already halfway across the room, placing himself between her and their newly arrived guest.

  “And you would be?” Donovan asked.

  “Stan Harris,” Kate supplied, still frozen to the spot in shock. “Ralston Chamber of Commerce.”

  “Ah, Stan,” Donovan said. “Sorry, I didn’t recognize you without the makeup and…the heels, I think it was?”

  Stan stepped into the cabin in a swirl of snowflakes, leaving the door open behind him. He stuck out his hand. “I’ll take those.”

  Donovan tossed it to him, flustering him briefly as he tried to react quickly enough to catch them.

  “Donovan!” Kate shouted, surprised that he’d so easily acquiesced, then realized the ploy the instant Donovan closed the gap and drove Stan
into the cabin wall with one well-placed, fullback-sized shoulder.

  Stan wheezed air at the heavy contact, but he managed to still be clutching the manila envelope as Donovan pinned him in place.

  “You have a little explaining to do,” Donovan said, the calm of his tone at severe odds with the menacing look on his face.

  Kate stepped a little closer, keeping her eyes on Stan’s hands, making sure he was holding only the envelope and nothing else. Like a weapon.

  “I—I don’t owe you any kind of explanation. You don’t belong here.”

  “I belong wherever the hell I say I do. You, on the other hand, are trespassing.”

  Stan’s lip curled slightly. “You have no place telling me what I can and can’t do, much less passing any judgment, what with your drunk father and slut of a moth—”

  Donovan’s hand closed over Stan’s throat, cutting off whatever else he’d been about to say. “Careful.” He leaned in. “Now, when I remove my hand, the only words coming out of your mouth are going to be the ones explaining how and why you and some other fine residents of Ralston came to use this property for your own twisted little jollies.”

  “Go to—” Stan gagged as the pressure was increased, before Donovan relaxed his grip. But Stan doggedly continued. “I don’t have to answer to you or anyone,” he rasped. “What we do and where is our own business.” His gaze strayed from Donovan, past his shoulder to Kate. “She isn’t the owner of this property, so you have no legal right to hold me here or question me.”

  “I’m considering a citizen’s arrest.”

  “On what grounds? Trespassing? I highly doubt Gilby is going to be interested in prosecuting that.” He stretched his neck. “However, he might be motivated to arrest you for assault. Besides, you don’t have proof that anything that might have allegedly gone on here wasn’t done between consenting adults. Now, let me go.”

  “Let me ask you something,” Donovan said, not moving so much as an inch, his face still up close and personal with Stan’s. “The women in those pictures with you and a number of the other fine examples of Ralston citizenry, you know, the pictures you came racing out here in the snowstorm from hell to recover?”