Christmas in the Mountains (Mountains Series Book 4)

by Phoebe Alexander

  Sarah was so stunned he didn’t answer that she didn’t know how to respond. She thought for sure this hell was nearly finished, and yet it seemed to only be intensifying. “He has service,” she finally managed. “That means his phone is on, and he just didn’t answer.”

  “Maybe his ringer is off, and he’s driving,” Zora suggested, trying to keep a bright tone in her voice.

  “Driving what, though?” Sarah didn’t like the sour feeling gnawing away at the pit in her stomach. It didn’t seem right that it had now been six hours since James walked out, and she hadn’t heard anything from him, especially if he had cell service. Shouldn’t there be a text or missed call from him? she reasoned.

  “I think we should go back,” Charlie decided.

  Panic stabbed a hole right into Sarah’s heart. “No!” she screeched, surprising even herself with the blood-curdling quality of her pitch. “My husband is out there, and it’s Christmas Eve, and I am NOT going back. I will drive if you don’t feel comfortable doing it. And if you don’t want to go, you can go back to the cabin yourself.”

  Charlie shrugged. “Fine, you drive. If we go off the cliff, at least you’ll be the one responsible, not me.” He climbed out the driver’s side door and joined Sarah in the back seat.

  “Are you sure? Do you want me to take you back to the cabin?” she asked, her heart still thundering against her ribcage.

  His gaze pinned on hers as he took her shaking hands into his. “I’m sorry about earlier, Sarah. I was way out of line. I know you have every right to be pissed at me, but I just want you to know that I had the very best of intentions. I think you’re a really special person.”

  “Why are you telling me this now? We need to get moving! James is out there!” Sarah said, breathless.

  “I’m sorry, but if we’re going to go with you, I need to clear the air first. I’d never be able to live with myself if something happened, and I hadn’t apologized.”

  “Quit fucking talking like that,” Sarah said. “Just shut up, and I’ll drive.”

  She took a deep breath and climbed out of the back seat, slamming the door behind her. When she got in the driver’s side, she handed her phone to Zora. “Keep trying to call him,” she directed, then placed her hands at 10 and 2 on the steering wheel. She tightened her jaw and pinned her eyes to the buried road. “Let’s go reunite my family.”

  She carefully pressed on the gas pedal, and the truck lurched forward. With her high beams on, she creeped along the gravel road where no car had been since the first snowflake fell. She was blazing her own trail, but she was fairly certain based on the rocks and the trees, that the clear areas were the road.

  The ride was bumpy and treacherous, and a few times she slipped on a patch of ice, but she gritted her teeth and continued to descend down the mountainside. Driving through the unknown on a mission to find James reminded her of when she’d followed him down to North Carolina after he’d left his fiancée Maggie. Sarah had driven through the mountains all night to be with him. It’s always fucking mountains with us, isn’t it? she thought as she creeped along.

  Meanwhile, Charlie was using the flashlight through the window to search the side of the road that stretched off toward flatter, walkable land. Every once in a while, the landscape would change, and he’d scoot to the other seat to survey from that vantage. Zora dialed James’s number every five minutes, and each time she hung up at the sound of his voicemail kicking on, her frown became a little more pronounced.

  Sarah ran a thousand questions through her mind, asking herself a million different ways how she could have avoided this mess. How she could have found herself curled up next to a merrily twinkling Christmas tree with her son and two daughters on Christmas Eve instead of inching down an ice-covered road in the dark, searching for her missing husband. But she kept coming back to the same conclusion: things had never been easy for her and James. Why should they start now?

  Oh, James, how do we get ourselves into these predicaments? We just need another tiny golden chance. She felt like they had already gotten so many. What if their chances were all used up?

  They reached an area where a thick pine grove sprung up from the snowdrifts, and Sarah remembered that the road curved around it. She hoped she could maintain enough traction to drive around the curve without sliding. If they slid; that would be the end. On the other side of the wicked curve was the bald, rocky face of the mountain and a drop straight down into a tree-lined ravine.

  She held her breath as she began to turn the wheel, so gently, so carefully, with the precision of a race car driver at the Indianapolis 500. She was fairly certain that after this bend, there was a lodge they could stop at and ask if James had been there. Not only that, but she suspected the roads would be clear from the lodge the rest of the way down the mountain.

  Charlie gasped and jumped up in his seat. He was waving the flashlight all around as he yelled, “I see something; I see something!”

  She couldn’t stop mid-curve, so she finished in the direction she was headed until it straightened out, and sure enough, the road had been cleared from that point down. She threw the truck into park and jumped out alongside Charlie. She snatched the flashlight out of his hand, and as he yelled, “Be careful, Sarah; it’s really slick!” she had already begun to bound down the rocky canyon.

  She scanned back and forth with the light until the beam fell upon an army green parka. “Oh my god, James!” she screamed, running toward him. Charlie was right behind her, and they both reached him at the same time.

  She threw herself onto the ground, which was hard with packed snow, freezing over in the burgeoning moonlight. Charlie had grabbed the flashlight from her and was shining it at a point just beyond them, bathing Sarah half in light and half in shadow.

  “James!” she yelled into her husband’s ear. The slight amount of skin on his face that was exposed was cold, but she wanted to believe it was just from the elements. “James!”

  She was sure she heard him breathing just before a precious sound came from his lips, a groggy, rasping, “Sarah?”

  “Oh my god, James, oh my god!” she answered, stumbling over all of her words. “Is anything broken? Can you move your legs and arms?”

  He groaned a bit as she watched him move his right leg and the arm he hadn’t landed on. “I think something’s broken,” he managed, wincing when the realization set in.

  “Let’s help him up,” Charlie suggested. “Carefully now.” He crouched under James’s shoulder and supported him until he was up, all his weight balanced on his right leg.

  “Your arms?” Sarah asked.

  He wrapped one around Charlie’s shoulder as Sarah positioned herself on the other side of him. “My left wrist hurts, but I think it’s okay, maybe sprained. I lost my damn phone!”

  “How long were you out? You could have frozen to death out here!” Sarah gasped as the seriousness of the situation crystallized.

  “Couldn’t have been very long. Twenty minutes maybe,” he answered. “Just enough time for the sun to finish setting.”

  Sarah didn’t want to think about what would have happened if she hadn’t persisted in their expedition down the mountain. She just couldn’t. Even a remnant of that thought made a huge, sick lump bulge in the bottom of her throat. And if she’d had anything in her stomach at this point, it might have made another appearance.

  They helped James into the truck, and this time Charlie took the wheel back over. “At least I can see the road now!” he joked.

  “We need to head straight to the ER,” Sarah decided as the truck began to descend back down the mountain past the rustic lodge, which was festively decorated with colored Christmas lights all along its porch and windows.

  “I’m okay,” James insisted as he stretched his arm around his wife. “I’m just so glad you found me. I guess I lost my damn phone though.”

  Sarah scoffed, “Who cares about your phone?! And yes, you are too going to the ER. James, don’t be ridiculous, okay
?”

  He knew better than to argue with her when it came to things of a medical nature. “How did you get the truck out, anyway?” he asked, squeezing her tightly to his body.

  “Sheer grit and determination,” Charlie answered for her. “She was pretty hell-bent on finding you.”

  “And salt. Salt helped too,” Sarah admitted with a grin.

  No one expects to be surrounded by their loved ones in the ER on Christmas Eve, but Sarah was delighted with that outcome. In comparison to the alternative outcomes of being stuck at the cabin or dead from exposure, the emergency room was just fine with her. At least she would soon have her beautiful baby girl in her arms again. When she was finally able to make contact with her best friend Rachel, she grasped how much panic had set in among everyone waiting for them to arrive home from their romantic getaway.

  “What the hell happened to you?” Rachel gasped into the phone. “Where are you? It’s almost 6 o’clock! You’re never late! You’re always early!” Each statement seemed to be punctuated by multiple exclamation points.

  Sarah took a deep breath before trying to soothe her friend’s nerves. Rachel was definitely the type to wear her heart on her sleeve; she didn’t do anything calmly. “We’re fine now, but we got snowed in up there and were just able to get out today. It’s a long story, but James is in the ER getting his leg looked at. We think it’s broken.”

  “Broken?!” Rachel gasped again. “Sarah! What the hell were you guys doing up there, trying to walk home?”

  “Uh…” Sarah thought it best not to answer that question.

  “Jack and I almost tried to come up there in his truck to see what your deal was. I guess I didn’t realize you got so much more snow up there than we did down here.”

  “Well, we were a few thousand feet higher in elevation,” Sarah explained. “But we’re okay now. I just want to see my kids, though. And I don’t want to wait for us to get home. It may be a while.”

  “What do you want me to do? Round up the whole fam and bring them to the ER?”

  Sarah was silent for a moment. Rachel knew Sarah would do anything for her; she could only hope her longtime best friend would return the favor.

  “Say no more,” Rachel answered. “We’ll be there in ten minutes. Or however long it takes us to get Ly bundled up.”

  Sarah hated it when Rachel shortened her daughter’s name to “Ly,” but at this point in time, all she wanted was her baby, so she didn’t say a word in reply except a hearty, “Thank you.”

  They’d only been in the ER for ten minutes, and James had yet to be seen. Judging by the size of the crowd in the waiting room, they were in for a long wait. Zora stepped back through the automatic sliding glass door at the entrance to the emergency department still grasping her phone in her hand. She had a little smirk on her face as she wove her way around the roomful of waiting patients.

  “What’s up?” Charlie asked, his eyebrows raised with hope.

  “I got ahold of them, and they ended up crashing last night at that lodge we went by! Can you believe it? They were going to come back up this morning to get us, but the roads were just too bad. And they couldn’t get ahold of us since our cell service was out,” she explained.

  “That figures,” Sarah remarked. “We could have just dropped you off when we were right there!”

  “Yeah, I didn’t even think of calling them then. I figured they were down here in the city, or they stayed in Denver near the airport after they dropped our other friends off.”

  Charlie rubbed his hands together and stood up, as if impatience for their ordeal to finally be over was settling in. “So, are they coming for us or what?” he asked his wife, shifting his weight to one foot.

  Sarah noticed once James rejoined their group, Charlie seemed quiet again, just like he had when he and Zora first arrived at the cabin. Or maybe that was because Sarah was so busy grilling James about what had happened in their brief time apart, not to mention telling him what had transpired on her end.

  Zora nodded, but there was still a bit of worry reflecting from her eyes. “I feel bad just leaving you guys here in the ER,” she said, turning to Sarah.

  “Ohhhhh,” Sarah replied, trying to suppress a giggle. “No, we’re totally fine; aren’t we, James?” She glanced over at her husband for confirmation, and he gave a curt nod. “Our family will be here soon, too, so no need to worry about us.” Sarah hadn’t admitted to James that he had been right about Charlie’s feelings for her, but it appeared he’d already gotten the message loud and clear just from his wife’s body language and tone.

  Zora pursed her lips as though she was a bit dismayed by Sarah’s amusement, but Charlie unfolded his arms from across his chest and stepped a little closer to Sarah. He reached out his hand to her, and she glanced back to her husband in a flash before hesitantly accepting it. When she was pulled to standing, he wrapped her in a warm embrace. She swore she could feel his heart pounding even through his thick sweater, but she knew it was likely just her imagination.

  Isn’t it funny how quickly we can form an attachment to people? she reflected. Charlie didn’t turn out to be exactly like she thought he would… She certainly didn’t expect him to confess he was falling in love with her. But after all they went through together in the last day and a half, it seemed really odd to think they might never see each other again. We haven’t even exchanged numbers, she realized.

  Charlie whispered in her ear, “I’m so sorry about the things I said earlier today. I was totally wrong to assume anything about you and James. You two obviously love each other very much and have a strong marriage – an enviable marriage,” he added, “at least from my vantage. I know I apologized before, but I want you to believe I’m sincere. I still think you are an incredible woman, Sarah, and I hope we can still be friends.”

  When she pulled back to look at him, she thought she saw just a tiny glisten of a tear in the corner of his eye. “Well, we’ve shared too much as survivors of this ordeal to part as enemies,” Sarah replied, smiling, hoping to ease whatever hard feelings were circulating through his veins and causing the wrinkles on his forehead.

  He pushed his glasses back up his nose as a huge grin spread his lips toward his ears. “Truer words have never been spoken,” he agreed.

  “I hope your offer for help with connections in the field still stands,” Zora interjected, joining her husband next to Sarah. Her eyes darted down to Charlie’s arm, which was still encircling Sarah’s waist. But if she was bothered by it, it didn’t reflect on her face.

  “Oh, of course!” Sarah smiled graciously. “Of course. Any time. As a matter of fact, here’s my card.” She reached into her purse and withdrew an old business card she’d had from when she taught at the University of Maryland. She took a pen and scribbled her cell phone number on it.

  Charlie reached into his pocket as well and took out his card. Handing it to Sarah, he said, “You know, if you guys are ever in Boulder, we’d love to see you again.”

  He reached down to shake James’s hand, insisting he not get up when he made an attempt. “Hope you both have a lovely Christmas,” he said. Then he put his arm around his wife, and in a flash the two disappeared out the sliding glass door.

  Sarah glanced at the card that now rested in her hand and ran her fingertips over the embossed printing: Charles A. Fox, Software Engineer, Benson, Carlyle & Associates - Boulder, Colorado. There was no number listed, but there was an email address and a website.

  “What a strange couple, huh?” James asked, reaching out for his wife and gesturing for her to sit in the chair next to him.

  Sarah was silent as her mind filled with a barrage of images from the past thirty-six hours. It was mind-blowing how Charlie and Zora had come into their lives like firecrackers and then just evaporated into thin air like smoke, almost as though they’d never existed. When she looked down at her husband’s hand, which he was resting on her knee, she realized there was still a faint mark around his wrist from Zora’s res
traints.

  “Yes, they were certainly different,” Sarah agreed. “Do you think we’ll ever see them again?”

  James pursed his lips as though he were in deep thought for a moment. “I’d say no, but knowing us…I don’t think it’s safe to make any bets.”

  Eleven: Reunion

  Sarah was beginning to wonder if something was wrong. It had been nearly an hour since she spoke to Rachel on the phone, and they had yet to arrive. By the time James was finally called back to see the doctor, she was in full-on panic mode. Her texts to Rachel went unanswered, and she was about to call. James insisted she stay in the waiting room to meet the family when they showed up. She hated having her heart split in two like that, wanting to be with her daughter and husband at the same time. Love is nothing but a series of hard choices, she noted as the automatic glass door slid open revealing an assembly of familiar faces. Hard choices that are totally worth it.

  As soon as little Lynnea’s eyes landed on her mother in the crowd, her face lit up with a smile as bright as a thousand suns, and her tiny feet began to kick and flail with excitement. She was lifted high in the air in the arms of James’s father, who was completely smitten with the little princess. But it didn’t take anyone long to notice that she was screaming for her mother, almost leaping out of her grandfather’s arms in impatience.

  When she was nestled against her mother’s chest with her soft, dimpled arms wrapped around her neck, Sarah felt a wave of relief crash over her. She knew she’d missed her little one, but she had no idea how much better she’d feel once she was holding her again. She pulled back to gaze into Lynnea’s bright blue eyes, the very same ones that belonged to James, and completely melted as she leaned in and planted a sloppy wet kiss right on her mouth.