On the Edge (Blue Spruce Lodge Book 1)

by Dani Collins

  “Will you teach Macy how to make a decent cup of coffee when she’s filling in?” His hands released her arms and went to the small of her back.

  “I could teach you.” She tilted her hips into his.

  “Such a wonderful imagination you have. But you’re definitely staying here to exercise it, right?” His hands went lower, taking possession of her butt.

  “I have to go back to Seattle for my things. Do you want to come with me?” She rubbed her mound into the thickening flesh behind his fly.

  “I do.” He kissed her, once, twice, hands hardening on her as he drew her even closer. “I missed you.” Another kiss. “I do love you.”

  “I love you, too.” It hurt because it opened her wide. She was utterly without protection against him, but the way he held her, the way he slanted his mouth with such tender familiarity over hers, was reassuring and healing and sweet.

  Sometimes it’s true, she thought. Sometimes romance novels got it right.

  Then he backed her into the filing cabinet and something dug into her back. She ignored it and lifted her thigh against his hip, wishing she had changed into her dress so he could—

  Light flashed across them as the door flew open.

  “Fuck, dude. Learn to lock a door. It’s this button right here. Fuuuck.” Trigg twisted something on the knob then started to slam out. He paused. “You sticking around?”

  “Not if you’re going to keep walking in on us,” Glory retorted. Rolf kept hold of her thigh, maybe to hide the fact he was tenting his fly.

  “I’m leaving in a few days. Be gone a while. We’ll work out a system when I get back. As you were.” He closed the door on them.

  “Your brother is an idiot.”

  “Don’t talk about him when we’re making out. It’s weird.”

  “Are we really doing this here? I quit taking the pill.”

  “I don’t have a condom on me. Do you want to get pregnant?”

  “Let’s save that for the epilogue and go upstairs.”

  “Is that writer humor?”

  “Trust me, it was hilarious.”

  Epilogue

  “Before we go down…” Glory bit her lip, still ridiculously scared to reveal herself to him, but she made herself overcome it because he never disappointed her. Which wasn’t to say they didn’t fight. He was damned pigheaded sometimes, and she was still on the defensive side a lot of the time, but one way or another they worked things out.

  And sometimes she was so in love with him, she didn’t know how to process the vastness of it. How to express it. She only hoped he somehow understood it in this gesture, which suddenly seemed really silly and small yet was a huge deal for her.

  She dug the wrapped gift from her underwear drawer and handed it to him.

  “First you get mad that you were outvoted about waiting for Christmas morning, then you buck the system and want to do it before dinner?”

  “Vivien and Trigg are both American. What are they doing voting for opening presents on Christmas Eve?”

  “No patience, I guess.” He turned over the gift, probably already guessing it was a book. “Now?”

  She nodded. “Please.”

  “Thank you,” he said, dropping a kiss on her mouth before he so much as picked at the tape. Then he showed zero finesse and ripped off the red and silver paper.

  He looked at the cover with its scroll of ‘Blessed Winter,’ its hero with a flannel shirt and pregnant heroine embracing before a tree. He ran his fingertips over the ‘by Glory Cormer.’

  Something she thought might be pride softened his features. He turned it over to read the back, seeming absorbed.

  Her stomach couldn’t get any tighter without disappearing. She waited and waited and finally he looked at her with his steady warm gaze. “This is mine? I’m allowed to read it?”

  Heart in her throat, she nodded. “Read the dedication.”

  He did. ‘We all need a champion. I found mine in Rolf.’ Her hand had trembled when she had signed the title page ‘All my love, Glory,’ It was her very first author copy.

  He hooked his arm around her and drew her in. “I’m so proud of you.”

  “Thank you.” She was moved beyond words and hugged him around the waist, holding her eyes closed to press back the tears. Savoring the press of his lips to her temple.

  She could tell he was still looking at it, turning it over behind her. “I want to read it right now,” he said ruefully.

  “Please no. Can you—I’m not ready for anyone else to see it yet.”

  “I don’t want to put it down. I’m so—Fine. But Glory, this is amazing. Look what you’ve done.” He kissed her name on the cover and set it on the night table. Then kissed her before they went down the stairs, arms around each other.

  She was grinning goofily when they caught up with everyone in the lounge. The guests were whittled down to family. Nate would be back the day after tomorrow and a bunch of Rolf’s ski buddies were coming in for New Year’s Eve and heli-skiing. The place would be hopping from now until forever. This was the first and last family Christmas they would be able to swing as a private event, Glory was quite certain.

  Which is why the tree in the corner had real presents under it.

  Rolf walked her over to it, rather than steering her toward Trigg and Vivien, both sitting at the bar while her father stood behind it, ecstatic in his position as barkeep.

  Rolf looked and looked at the tree. She watched him, curious.

  “There. For a second, I thought someone had taken it.” He picked up a bauble sheened like a soap bubble with rainbows and a frost of glitter with something inside it that sparkled like a—

  “Oh, my God! You left that on the tree? When?”

  “This morning, once I knew it was only family left.” It swung back and forth like a hypnotist’s watch as he held it before her nose. “Will you marry me?”

  “I will marry the hell out of you.”

  He grinned, then hooked his hand behind her neck and dragged her in for a hot kiss. The crew at the bar cheered them on and he drew back to give the bauble a twist. Then they both tried to untie the ring, which was knotted firmly, making them bicker and eventually give up and ask her father to use a knife to release it.

  Vivien clapped her hands as Rolf finally put the ring on Glory’s finger. “When?”

  Rolf scratched his brow and said to Glory, “That probably depends on Trigg’s schedule, since he’ll be my best man.”

  “July, likely. I’ll let you know,” Trigg said. “But this is a serious question, Glory. What do you see in him?”

  Glory wrapped her arms around Rolf’s waist and played with her new ring behind his back while she gazed up at him. She wanted to say something cheeky, but the real stuff flooded in, making emotion swell in her heart. He was protective and supportive and made her believe in herself. For some reason, he thought she was special enough to share himself with her when he didn’t like to do that with anyone else.

  They had this precious, wonderful thing between them that was still so new, it made her eyes hot. She was scared to look too closely, in case she broke it before it had a chance to fully take root and flourish.

  He knew her well enough to know her private feelings were sensitive, delicate things. His mouth quirked in something close to a tender smile as he cuddled her into a shielding embrace.

  “Lay off. It’s Christmas Eve and I just got engaged.” His voice ruffled her hair. “Santa’s not real, by the way. It’s time you knew.”

  He was her hero. That’s who he was. She hugged him hard and buried her laugh in his chest.

  The End

  The Blue Spruce Lodge series

  Book 1: On the Edge

  View the series here!

  Book 2: From the Top

  Buy now!

  Book 3: Coming soon

  Here’s a sneak peek of From The Top,

  Book Two in Dani Collins’s Blue Spruce Lodge series!

  Or buy now!

&
nbsp; Secretly, deep down, Ilke Lundquist was a romantic.

  Not that she could afford to be. She had tried at every turn to curtail it and God knows, the world had certainly done its best to beat that streak out of her. She possessed classic Nordic beauty, which should have been an angelic asset, but in reality, it meant she was treated like a dumb blonde or easy, most often both. Women in sports were taken almost as seriously as pigtails on a goat, especially when they were pretty, and her mother’s example of Happily Ever After was an abomination of the phrase.

  Out of self-preservation, Ilke had put away childish dreams that included knights on white chargers. She had pushed herself to become resourceful, disciplined, and logical. A realist. A cold bitch, some called her, which didn’t bother her. Much. She made sure no one knew it bothered her. Besides, it meant less was expected of her and allowed her to focus on her goals. The one dream she did allow herself to have.

  And yes, living this way was lonely as hell, but she didn’t want to need anyone. That was her mother’s way—financially dependent, afraid to be alone, seeing what she wanted to see so she could believe she had everything.

  Every woman’s marrow-deep fear was to turn out like her mother so, no. Ilke wasn’t going to be that. She allotted herself one passion, one crazy aspiration that crowded out everything else. The podium was her happily ever after. All the moves she made were aimed at standing there. If an action didn’t serve that dream, it didn’t need to be taken.

  So why was she overcome by a swell of hot emotion when she arrived at Blue Spruce Lodge? Not misery at this detour, either. Her eyes stung with something like homecoming. She was here. She hadn’t cried in years, even in this last few weeks as her life crashed and spilled itself in pieces across media outlets around the world.

  She turned off the engine of her rented SUV, squeezing the wheel as she tamped down on the swell of anxiety that lurked beneath her carefully restrained surface.

  Maybe the way the feathery flakes swirled rather then fell was affecting her. If she did have a home, that’s where it was, in the snow. Not inside some throwback lodge glowing like a scene in a child’s snow globe.

  She leaned forward, taking in the low, flat ceiling of dull gray and what looked like a cut-out of snow-covered peaks forming a backdrop behind the lodge’s blue roof. Floodlights tucked into the landscape at the front of the building cast pale funnels of light upward, bathing the laden branches of the shrubs in hints of gold, warming the creamy daffodil color of the building’s walls. With the amber glow through the yellowed glass on either side of the door, the lodge was a beacon of welcome on this gloomy March morning.

  Not much had changed since she’d been here at the turn of the year, but it was significantly improved from the eyesore she’d seen last July. At that time, she had privately wondered what the Johanssons were thinking.

  For decades, this had been a family run lodge on the Whiskey Jack ski hill. The resort was off the beaten track and only had a handful of day buildings and a chalet for overnighters. Oskar Johansson, founder of Wikinger Sports, had seen a diamond in the rough and bought it to develop as a training facility for his sons.

  That had been fifteen years ago and an avalanche had promptly wiped out everything except this old lodge, which had been shuttered until last year.

  That was when Rolf and Trigg Johansson took up the challenge of resurrecting the resort. They had the pockets, the passion, and the capacity to build a world-class winter destination from near-scratch, but they had left the refurbishing of the only on-site accommodation in the hands of an ex-professor from Seattle and his romance author daughter, Glory.

  Progress was being made, Ilke supposed. She folded her hands on the wheel, noting that since last summer, all the broken uprights in the exterior balcony had been repaired. The rails and shutters had been painted Bavarian blue to match the roof. With the muted light turning all the colors mellow and quaint, Blue Spruce Lodge looked like an enchanted place straight from a fairytale.

  But fairy tales weren’t real. She knew that better than ever now. The ones where children were eaten? Those were legit. In the last few weeks, her hopes and dreams had been spat out like broken bones and wasted years, completely without regard.

  Just when she had begun to believe she was done with rundown chalets and clawing her way into better circumstances, here she was all over again.

  Because of one stupid night.

  It was supposed to be a virus. That’s what she had told herself she had, trying to explain why she was sluggish and nauseated and forgetful. That’s why she had had so many slow starts and fudged a gate, getting herself disqualified from one event. Once she had started second-guessing herself, the whole thing had gone to hell and her finish times had sucked balls.

  This was supposed to be her year. Her arrival on the podium.

  Instead, she’d come away fifth and seventh and nineteenth. They’d scratched her from a team event because she’d been performing so poorly.

  How was she pregnant? How? She barely even had sex. People whispered that she was a closet-lesbian, she turned men down so consistently.

  Yet the stars had aligned two months ago. She had impulsively shared her bed with a man who had—apparently—worn a faulty condom while the prescription she’d started as a travel precaution had rendered her birth control patch useless.

  She had fallen twice since then. Not bad falls, but she could have miscarried any time over the last weeks, maybe without even knowing she was pregnant. Instead, she’d hung onto that baby and embarrassed herself in front of the world, lost the backers who would have given her a full ride if she had medaled and soon, the entire alpine racing world would know why she had choked.

  Still time to end it, she kept thinking, but what was the point? This baby had already cost her the most important four years of her life.

  And she wanted to have it, which didn’t make sense to her at all. This wasn’t a book where everything worked out in the end. It was real life. From the day she had become sexually active, she had always believed she would terminate an unplanned pregnancy. Her goals were too important, her trajectory impossible to interrupt. Not to mention there was no such thing as a man good enough with whom to procreate.

  Even so, after the team doctor had quizzed her with routine questions and she had assured him that, no, she couldn’t be pregnant, she had taken a test on the sly. She had then skipped the closing ceremonies, too chagrined by her failure, too astounded she was expecting, to stay in South Korea. She hadn’t even considered going to see her mother in New Zealand, which was far closer than Stockholm or the Montana Rockies.

  No, she had bolted on the first available flight, taking her gear back to Sweden and leaving it in storage with the club that would likely expel her for someone who knew how to ski. Then she had declined to renew the lease on her furnished apartment, since her income was dropping like a barometer before a hurricane.

  In a move that had truly gutted her, she had flushed her season down the toilet by pulling out of the World Cup finals, to which she’d been invited. Her point standings had put her in a contender’s position for overall champion. If she had done what she was supposed to do in PyeongChang, she would have pulled herself into the lead in the rankings and finished the season with precious medals around her neck and a crystal globe in her hands.

  Instead, she had to set all of that aside and reconfigure her entire year. She had to talk to the father of her baby. That was the only decision she had been able to make.

  Two days and three stopovers later, she felt like hell and not just from the travel. She had woken with morning sickness after a restless night in a cheap motel in Kalispell. She was feeling trapped in a way she hadn’t felt in a long, long time and hated it.

  What was she doing here?

  But what was her alternative? Fly to Queenstown and ask her mother for help?

  That thought was so repulsive, she threw herself out of the car to get away from it. Not bothering with her luggag
e, she turned up the collar on her insulated jacket, tucked her chin against the wind and kicked her knee-high boots through the inches of snow that had accumulated since the last time the lot had been cleared.

  How was this place keeping the lights on? There were only two snow-covered vehicles in the far corner of the lot.

  Would they even give her a room? She planned to prevail on Vivien, a friend of her mother’s, kind of. Maybe she was Ilke’s friend, not that Ilke encouraged close relationships, but Vivien had reached out once, a long time ago, when Ilke’s mother had been turning a blind eye.

  Ilke had been too afraid to let Vivien interfere at the time, but a thread of something had remained between them. Trust? She wasn’t sure what it was, only that each time she crossed paths with the older woman, Vivien acted happy to see her. She made Ilke feel seen and valued. Even though Vivien was Vivien. She was entitled and demanding and overbearing. Not in a hurtful way. She simply made assumptions that she would get what she wanted and always did.

  Somehow Vivien had talked Ilke into bringing her here last summer, so Vivien could see what her ‘boys’ were up to. Then she had invited Ilke to join a heli-ski trip over the new year. Ilke didn’t know why Vivien was so nice to her, but Ilke was a slut for powder so she had accepted.

  Was Vivien even back from South Korea? She’d been there to watch her son, Trigg, win a hat-trick of gold in his snowboard events along with two silvers. The bastard. Must be nice not to worry about a stowaway taking up residence in your uterus, throwing off not just your stamina and coordination, but your entire life.

  The lobby was warmed by the gas fireplace that separated the lobby from the adjacent lounge. The fireplace was made of gorgeous stonework and held a sweet cuckoo clock on its high mantle. Comfortable-looking chairs were arranged to face it, but they were empty.

  She paused to take in the staircase that rose on her right, fully restored with polished woodgrain and new carpet in a rich red with gold accents. A sparkling chandelier hung over it. On the far side of the lobby, paneled-glass doors formed a wall that closed off the dining room.