by Dani April
“You know, guys, we missed a couple of these all-men winter getaways during the Gena years, but we all ought to make a promise that we’ll do this every year. You know that’s what Dad would have wanted,” Scott told them from the backseat. Skipper barked again as if in confirmation. To Ethan, Scott sounded wiser than his twenty-one years.
Brad raised his beer can. “I’ll drink to that, bro.”
“Guys, have I got a treat for you.” Ethan thought he would try changing the subject and try getting them to their dad’s cabin in one piece. “I brought my entire solid gold DVD porn collection. That’ll give you two losers with the ladies something to think about while you shovel snow all week.”
“Right on, bro.” Brad sounded approving. Ethan patted his brother on the back, then reached around the seat and gave Skipper a pat between his floppy ears. “It’s going to be an incredible week, guys,” he told them.
* * * *
Up ahead about two hundred yards a car had slid off the side of the road and into a giant snow embankment already formed in the first couple hours of the storm. Ethan saw it first and immediately began to slow. From the fresh tire tracks against the virgin snow, the car had obviously just slid off. If it had been going any faster and glided another twenty feet, it would have gone off into the chasm below.
“What kind of asshole would be out driving on a night like this?” Scott asked from the back.
“Assholes like us, bro,” Brad answered him.
“Let’s see if we can help this guy out,” Ethan told them as he brought the truck to a tentative stop right behind the troubled vehicle. It was a little car and clearly didn’t have enough traction to be out on the road that night.
Ethan flipped on the outside floodlights of the truck and turned them onto the car ahead. Skipper barked at them all, angry to be stopping.
“Might as well let him go to the bathroom now, man,” Ethan told Scott.
They opened their doors and stepped out into the freezing cold. The wind blasted their faces. Caught between the mountains on each side of them, it was blowing at close to fifty miles an hour when it gusted. Each of the men quickly zipped up their coats and pulled them tight, but nothing was going to save a person for long in that torturous wind.
Scott trudged across the deserted road with Skipper, accompanying the dog so he wouldn’t get lost while he took care of his business. Ethan and Brad continued forward to the little car in distress, their way lit by the floodlights. Not another car or any living thing was in sight, and the driven snow was even obscuring the mountain peaks that towered a thousand feet straight above them.
Other than the bright flare of the floodlights, all they could see was white, and not very far at that. When Scott and Skipper waded through the snow to the other side of the road, they were quickly lost from sight in the intensity of the storm.
The first thing Ethan heard as he approached the other vehicle was the tiny yapping of what sounded like two small dogs inside the car. The snowdrifts had manhandled the car and nearly turned it on its side. Ethan had to climb up a few feet of a frozen, white hill to get to the driver’s door. This poorly equipped little vehicle clearly was not going anywhere else that night.
Inside the window of the car Ethan saw a young woman. She was beautiful, one of the most striking women he had ever seen. Long, full-bodied, blonde hair fell down well past her shoulders, and she was wearing a thick, black fur coat. She was alone in the car except for two little poodles that were seated together in the passenger seat, making pests of themselves with their repeated yapping.
He tapped on her window. After a few seconds’ delay, the automatic window slid down, the electronic buzz lost against the howl of the wind.
“Have you been stuck here long?” Ethan asked the girl.
She looked very confused and did not say anything. Brad climbed up the snow pile next to Ethan and stared in at the girl with him. She looked like she had been crying, but what girl wouldn’t cry trapped out here in the middle of nowhere in this ferocious blizzard?
“Were you hurt when you slid off?” Ethan tried to reach her again. He found he had to shout over the wind gusts.
“I’m Chrissie…”
Ethan thought she was going to say more, but then she stopped herself. He nodded a friendly greeting to her.
“I’m Ethan, and this is my brother, Brad,” he told her. “I’m sure glad we happened along when we did. This road is probably going to be closed for the rest of the night. We’re probably the last two cars on this stretch.”
“I think my car is stuck,” the girl said. Ethan and Brad looked at each other and would have laughed, but it was just too damn cold and the wind was too noisy. This girl obviously had a knack for stating the obvious.
“You’re stuck all right,” Ethan told her. “You’re not likely to get out from behind this snow all night.”
“Couldn’t you just give me a push?” the girl asked him, and he noticed how beautiful her blue eyes were as she looked up into his face.
“Chrissie, even if we could push you out, you’d just get stuck again. We’ll be lucky if we can get our truck started again. This is a pretty bad storm. Look, do you have a phone with you?”
“I do, but I don’t have anyone to call.”
“You can call nine-one-one and get the highway patrol. They’ll come out here, but it’ll take them a while tonight.”
“Well, what am I going to do if I can’t get out of this awful snow?”
“My brothers and I own a cabin about ten miles from here. If you want, you can wait there with us and have the highway patrol meet you there.”
“I guess so…” The girl looked uncertain.
“Look, I promise my brothers and I aren’t weirdoes or anything.” Ethan laughed and looked over at Brad. “Actually, my brothers are kind of weird, but I’m the nicest guy you’ll ever meet.”
“Do you have any luggage or anything you need us to help you with, Chrissie?” Brad stuck his head in and asked her.
“No. I don’t have anything of mine in this car,” she told them. “This is just a rental.”
“Well, I hope you didn’t have to be any place important tonight because it might be a while before you get there in this weather,” Brad told her.
“I wasn’t going anywhere in particular.”
Again Ethan looked over at Brad. Was this crazy girl just out taking a joyride by herself during this blizzard in a rented car? Something wasn’t quite adding up here.
He opened her door for her. The snow had already drifted so high that even opening the door was a struggle. The two little poodles started barking at him. He reached in a helping hand for the girl. Her fur coat looked real, and if it was, it must have cost a small fortune because it fell all the way to her ankles, completely covering her. Well, at least she would have some good protection from that wind when they walked her back to their truck.
She was wearing dainty little black shoes that barely covered her feet. She was obviously wearing a dress under that coat and no stockings. So she was going to get pretty cold after all. To Ethan it looked like she was dressed up to go to some fancy party somewhere.
He started to take her arm and help her down, and she stopped him. “Can you take my babies first?” she asked them.
“Your babies?” Ethan repeated, not sure what this crazy girl meant. Brad reached in behind her and grabbed up the little dogs confidently in his arms. Obviously he was one step ahead in reading this strange girl’s thoughts.
“Watch your step,” he told her, taking up her arm again and helping her down the snowdrift and away from the little car. “Those shoes really weren’t made for walking in this.”
“Be careful with Peaches,” the girl called back to Brad over the wind. “She has a bad hip, and you have to hold her real gently.”
“No problem.” Brad gave her a wink and a smile and carried the little animals back to their truck.
“Oh, this storm is just horrid,” the girl whined as she
buried her face against Ethan’s coat. He slowly made the trip back to his truck with her under his arm. He could smell her perfume. The blasting wind seemed to blow it up into his face. It was the sexiest fragrance he had ever had a whiff of.
Brad had gone ahead of them and opened the backseat of the truck to place the little dogs in. Several steps along the way the girl almost fell. At last Ethan brought her up and helped her into the back with her dogs.
* * * *
Ethan climbed in behind the wheel. He looked in the rearview mirror. Brad was still back there helping the strange girl to get sorted. He’d had to shove a couple empty beer cans out of her way so she could sit down with her dogs on her lap. Ethan smiled to himself. It was just like Brad to become taken by that beautiful girl.
“I’m sorry about that, Chrissie,” Brad was telling her as he helped her put her seat belt on. “My brothers are slobs. I apologize.”
After he had helped her, Brad crawled back up to the front with Ethan. The other door to the backseat opened, and Scott came crawling in with Skipper. All three dogs started barking at each other for a very loud moment. Scott thumped Skipper on the head, and the girl protectively held her two little dogs to her chest.
Ethan took it all in from the rearview mirror. Scott seemed to be amazed that there was a beautiful woman now sharing the back with him. In fact, Scott’s eyes had grown wide, and he was staring, almost rudely, at the girl.
“Chrissie, this is Scott, our kid brother, and his mutt Skipper. Be careful. Neither of them are house broken.” Ethan interceded to make light of Scott’s rude entrance.
Ethan felt his tires spin beneath them as he tried to pull the truck back out onto the road. At this point in the storm, one could not even tell there was a road left there anymore. He just had to go on faith that there was concrete under all those white flakes. The big treads of his tires finally gained traction, and the truck slowly pulled back out and started forward. Ethan put his bright headlights on so he could see better against the flying snow.
“Our cabin isn’t too far from here,” Brad tried to reassure the girl. “We should be there in about fifteen minutes. Don’t worry. We have a fireplace there and can get it pretty toasty and warm on a night like this.”
The strange girl in the backseat had reached out in a shy gesture to Skipper and was now quietly petting him, getting him behind the ears where he liked it. The girl seemed to like Skipper, too, and was holding her little dogs up to him so they could sniff each other. All three dogs were wagging their tails and seemed to be making friends.
Ethan took the route slow but sure. No other traffic was on the road to further impede their progress. He kept tabs on what was happening in the backseat through the mirror. Scott, who had not said one word so far, had still not found his manners and was staring at the girl like he had just seen a ghost. Ethan winced inwardly. No wonder his baby brother always struck out with the girls if this is how he acted when he got around an attractive one.
“Were you hurt in the accident back there, Chrissie?” Brad was all smiles when he leaned over the backseat to speak with her.
“No. I wasn’t hurt,” she told him. “But my babies were awfully scared when the car started sliding like that. I thought maybe we would fall off the mountain or something horrible like that.”
“You were real lucky. There’s a ravine just off the side of the road here. I think it goes down about a couple hundred feet.” Ethan could tell Brad was enjoying making eye contact with the gorgeous girl in the backseat. “Really you shouldn’t have been out here driving in that little car tonight. I hate to think what might have happened if the three of us hadn’t been coming along when we did. We haven’t passed a thing on this road in the last two hours, and we’ve been driving it all the way since Emery.”
“What could have happened?” When the girl spoke, she sounded like she was younger than she looked or, more correctly, like she was inexperienced in life.
“Well, let’s just say something bad,” Brad told her. “But thank God we came along when we did. I hope you hadn’t been stuck there too long.”
“Just a few minutes, and I was so frightened I didn’t know what to do.”
“Everything’s going to be fine now.” Brad was still putting on the charm. “We’ll get you back to our cabin and you can call the highway patrol, and we’ll see what they can do about getting you on your way again.”
The CD player had just flipped over to another heavy metal track from Scott’s new wave group. The sound was loud. Brad quickly apologized and flipped the CD off and the radio back on. A country western song came sadly over the speakers.
“Sorry about that, Chrissie. Let’s see if we can get something more pop for you.” That was so like Brad, already anticipating what kind of music the girl liked. He punched around on the preset buttons until a pop station came on, although it was covered in static because of the storm and their proximity to the mountains.
The song that had just started to play on the radio was ‘Cute Love’ by the pop diva Chrissie Murphy.
Ethan had always hated that song. “That’s crap,” he said and laughed. “Let’s just turn that thing off. Anyway, we’re almost there.”
He punched off the radio. Even before he had finished, Scott had come up over the backseat and attacked him, striking him on his arm as if he meant it.
“What the hell!” Ethan pushed his brother away.
But in the backseat, Scott had already turned to the girl. “I’m really sorry about my brothers. They are the world’s biggest idiots…and they don’t know a thing about music.” Scott met Ethan’s eyes in the mirror, and there was something like real anger there. Ethan could not understand what had come over his brother. “I really liked that song,” Scott told the girl. Ethan didn’t know why that would be important.
“It’s okay,” the girl told Scott, and she gave him a little pat on the arm of his coat. “I’m used to it.” Her voice was sad.
Something had just gone on back there, and Ethan had no idea what it was. At the moment he didn’t really care. All he wanted to do was get to the cabin, call the highway patrol, and hopefully get rid of this crazy chick so he and his brothers could get back to their week of male bonding in the mountains.
Ethan looked over at Brad. He shrugged, not knowing either what their baby brother was up to in the backseat with the weird girl. Brad turned back to the girl, apparently wanting to use his charming personality on her some more.
“Hope you weren’t headed anywhere important tonight, Chrissie,” Brad said.
The girl thought about that for a moment. She stole another glance over at Scott. “I wasn’t going anywhere,” the girl answered Brad. “But I was going away from somewhere.”
“Must have been something pretty damn urgent to bring you out on this old road tonight.”
“It was,” the girl answered. She had gone back to petting Skipper.
“Be nice to her, Skipper,” Scott told the dog, but it was unnecessary because the dog was friendly to everyone.
Ethan slowed down to a crawl, the thumping of the wipers and howling of the wind making him feel like he was about to get a headache. The access road to their cabin was just up ahead. Finding it in the whiteout of the blizzard was going to prove difficult. Fortunately, he had the terrain well memorized since he had been coming to the cabin ever since he had been a boy. There was a sloping hill and a huge fir tree set off at an odd angle from the road, and just on the other side of that was the access road to their cabin.
He had to take it real slow driving down the hill, and there were a couple of tense moments when he didn’t even know if the heavy traction of his monster truck would be enough to hold them on the road. When he made the turn onto the access road, the truck spun out and fishtailed. It was a good thing they were making it in when they were. If they had even been an hour later, the snow accumulation would have been so heavy that it was unlikely they would have made it to the cabin at all that week.
A bad thought occurred to him as he drove the rest of the way to the front door of their cabin. If no one else could make it in to them, how could they get this weirdo chick out?
Chapter Three
They parked thirty feet away from the front door, not even able to make it all the way up the drive before the piles of snow being pushed before the monster truck brought it to a halt. The truck was now just as snowbound as the little car they had left behind them out on the road. Ethan was the first to hop down out of the truck, his legs sinking down into the snow to above his knees.
He trekked through the snow and had the key to the front door ready. He climbed onto the porch, wiped some frost off the doorknob, and opened up. When he got the light of the front room flipped on, everything looked warm and inviting, and they hadn’t even started the fire yet. He only wished that it was just him and his brothers arriving here alone and that they didn’t have their strange guest tagging along with them.
When he came back outside, Skipper was already loping across the snow and running up the front steps. The dog’s tongue was hanging out as he gladly ran inside to the warmth of the cabin. Behind Skipper, both Brad and Scott were assisting the girl across the snow, one on each side of her. The girl was carrying those ridiculous little poodles in her arms. Ethan sighed. This might be a long and awkward time ahead.
He didn’t even wait for them to arrive on the front porch. He just turned around and went back into the front room and began hefting up wood for the fireplace. Fortunately, the last time he had been here he had left the wood stockpile next to the hearth well provided.
“You guys go out and bring in our luggage,” he called from his kneeling position by the fireplace. “By the time you get back, I’ll have this thing started.”
Brad and Scott had just escorted the girl inside. They both looked at each other as if neither of them wanted to leave her. Finally, Brad relented and headed back out into the wind and blowing snow. Scott was still in La-La Land staring at the pretty girl. Ethan would have to give his kid brother some pointers later on about women and find out what was up with him.
