by Zoe Chant
He was stripped to the waist and utterly gorgeous, with snowflakes melting in his curly black hair. He had shoulders to die for, visible pecs, a trim waist, and was strolling along as if he hadn't even noticed that he was half naked in the middle of a blizzard. He didn't appear to have seen them yet, and for that first instant, until he turned their way, she thought the cold was making her hallucinate.
"—taker," she managed faintly.
Mauro
It was an absolutely fine day to go for a scamper in the snow. At least Mauro's grison thought so.
Mauro's animal was a lesser grison, ferret-sized and ferret-shaped, with a lean gray body and a black face mask, and right now, all it wanted to do was burrow its lean weasel body into the fresh new snow.
So much snow! So many things to sniff! So many small quivering furry animals under the snow to investigate!
So many things to do at the lodge, Mauro retorted.
He had been up on a ladder behind one of the lodge's outbuildings, taking down an abandoned string of Christmas lights. Christmas was over a month ago, but there were always too many maintenance tasks to do, and never enough time with lodge guests underfoot.
So now, with no guests at the lodge and none expected until after the spring thaw, was the perfect time to catch up on long-deferred maintenance. He had taken off his coat earlier, and was just now starting to get a bit chilly. Shifters, in general, ran a bit hot and were a little tougher than humans, and it was refreshing to be able to work shirtless when he felt like it. Just another perk of being on his own at the lodge.
A couple of times he'd thought he heard an engine, but it was probably just a trick of the weather making it sound like the road down in the valley was closer than it really was. The wind was blowing hard, banging things around, picking up some sounds and erasing others.
Anyway, he had spent most of his time up on the ladder having a friendly argument with his grison about not just diving off the ladder headfirst into the snow.
Humans can't do that; we'd die.
Shift in midair, his grison suggested.
Do you really want to strangle us on Christmas lights?
He stashed the lights in the shed, and took the ladder with him back to the lodge. There were a ton of decorations to take down in the lodge's main lobby, all left over from the big Valentine's to-do they'd had to cancel. He had left them up for a while because putting them up had been a hassle, but now, the day before Valentine's Day, he was starting to find all the hearts a little bit too overwhelming. It was a reminder that he was all alone out here without a true mate and none on the horizon either. Mauro liked his solitude, but the hearts were still a bit too much of a reminder.
He was whistling to himself and thinking generally about thawing out some steaks for dinner—that was another thing he had to deal with, a ton of food left over for guests that would be freezer-burned or otherwise spoiled by spring—and then he saw the car.
It was a small car, a sedan, parked a bit crookedly in the snow-covered parking lot. It wasn't the kind of car that anyone in their right mind would choose for driving in the mountains in the middle of a snowstorm.
There was only a thin layer of snow on top of it. As hard as the blizzard was coming down out here, the car couldn't have been there for long. It was still running, the headlights spearing the lodge's front porch. Snowflakes were melting on the warm hood and windshield.
He followed the headlight beams to a pair of people on the porch. They were bundled in winter gear and, with his sharp shifter vision night-adapted, he couldn't see them that well.
"Hello?" Mauro called.
"Oh, hi!" one of them called back. Female voice, teeth chattering slightly.
But it was the other person that Mauro was interested in. Drawn to, in fact, as if by magnets. Also a woman, he was pretty sure, although her face was half hidden by a large, loosely knit hat.
Inside him, his grison was standing up and quivering at attention.
"Hi there!" Mauro said on pure instinct. He wasn't an unfriendly person, but he also wasn't used to dealing with guests all on his own. Especially when there weren't even supposed to be guests. "You folks must be lost."
"This is Heart Mountain Lodge, isn't it?" the woman asked. She was tall, with a voice that was firm and no-nonsense. It wasn't rude, but it was the voice of someone who was used to getting people to do what she wanted.
"It is, but we're closed," Mauro said.
He started up the steps, just as the tall woman started down, and nearly beaned her with the ladder.
"Sorry, ma'am!" Hastily he set it down, leaning it on the steps. He could always get it later.
Both women were staring at him, even after he put the ladder down. It took him a moment to realize—right. It wasn't just the ladder. Shirts. Usually a thing. That people wore.
"Aren't you cold?" the tall woman asked.
"Mom! Don't tell me you're going to offer him a coat too."
The woman with the oversized hat had a soft voice that he found strangely thrilling. He wished he could get a better look at her. She was in the shadows beside the door.
"He's standing there without a shirt on in the snow, Hester."
"He can hear you, Mom."
"Anyway ... we have a reservation," the tall woman said with no sign of embarrassment.
"There must be some mistake," Mauro said, genuinely baffled. "All our reservations this month were cancelled."
"Ours wasn't."
"Mom," said Hat Woman—Hester, the other woman had called her Hester. "Mom, please. It's just like Ralph to do something like this, isn't it? I'm tired, I'm done, and if there's nowhere to stay, we need to get moving. I don't have much more driving in me today."
"You can't drive down the mountain in this," Mauro said promptly. "Don't even think about it. Listen, just let me get the door for you."
"Oh," the tall woman said as he opened it. "We thought it was locked. It looked locked."
"Easier to just leave it unlocked when I'm coming and going," Mauro explained.
The interior was dim and chilly. He'd been keeping the heat turned as low as it could go to save on heating bills while the hotel was empty. The rooms were all shut up.
"Hang on, let me just get some lights on," he said while they stamped snow off their feet and unzipped their coats.
He had to fumble around for the light switches in the glow coming in from the porch. There was still some dim blue twilight outside, but in here it was almost completely black.
The lights came on.
Both women gasped.
Oh. Right.
He was used to it, of course, but the lobby was a bit much when you saw it for the first time. Especially decorated for Valentine's Day.
The lobby was built to impress visitors with the lodge's grandeur. It soared three stories high, with giant windows towering above the entryway to look out on—well, not much of anything at the moment, just whirling snowflakes in the porch light, but there was a stunning view by daylight. The massive fieldstone fireplace was normally lit to welcome guests with a crackling fire, but even cold and vacant, it was impressive, with its large stone-paved hearth and the massive chimney rising up one wall.
Huge wooden beams supported the ceiling and crossed in a great "V" above the desk, which was blond wood to match the rest of the interior. The lodge's decorators had decided to forgo putting any mounted trophies on the walls, to Mauro's secret relief. Instead there were huge paintings on the walls, showing various mountain scenery, and old mining equipment from the area's gold-rush past. In pride of place was a genuine WWI-era biplane, painted bright gold, suspended by cables so that it dangled above the entrance area, drawing guests' eyes and providing a conversation piece.
And right now, the entire place was decked to the nines for Valentine's Day.
Since the lodge specialized in being a cozy romantic getaway in the mountains, Valentine's was their next big holiday after Christmas. Showers of pink and white and red hearts an
d streamers of crepe paper covered the biplane and swooped over the rafters, draped the balcony looking down from the second floor onto the lobby, covered the front of the desk and even dangled from the ceiling fan. A huge banner on the balcony read WE "HEART" YOU, VALENTINE'S!
Hester gave a tiny moan and pulled her oversized hat down to cover her face to the tip of her nose.
"It is the Valentine's weekend, dear," her mother said, patting her arm. Turning to Mauro, she asked, "Why isn't the lodge open? It's all decorated and everything."
"The owner had an illness in the family and had to travel," Mauro explained. "So we cancelled everything."
This was the short answer—the easy answer. It was easier than explaining that the lodge had suffered from a steady decline of guests in recent years. The current owners were elderly, not very internet-savvy, and less interested every year in running the place.
With only a couple of reservations for the Valentine's weekend, they had cancelled the season completely and didn't plan on reopening until May.
"Yes, well, did anyone here even try to contact your guests and tell them the whole thing was off?" Hester's mother demanded. "Because no one contacted us!"
Hester gave another tiny moan from the depths of her hat, and said something so faint that even Mauro's sharp hearing couldn't pick it up.
"What's that, sweetheart?" her mother asked.
Hester said it a little louder. It sounded like "Ralph."
Her mother looked puzzled. "I don't understand."
Hester heaved a tremendous sigh and pushed her hat back.
"I said, they must have Ralph's contact information, not mine. I didn't even think of that. They probably did call him, or email him, or whatever." She gave a short little laugh. "And of course he wouldn't tell me. Probably just deleted the email or the voicemail, and never thought about it again."
The shaky bravado in her voice pierced Mauro's heart. And here the two of them were standing around in their damp clothes, in a room that felt like an icebox—was the hot-water boiler even fired up enough to provide them with hot showers and warm rooms?
"I'll get a fire going," he promised. "And get a room ready. I don't see why you can't stay for free. It's not like anyone else is here or is going to ..."
Going to know, he was about to say, but then Hester turned to look at him, and her wide eyes, brown with flecks of gold, met his.
And recognition struck him down to his core, a shock that went to the bottom of his soul.
She was his mate.
Hester
He's like me.
It was all Hester could do not to pull the hat down over her face again out of sheer overwhelmed shock.
He had a shifter animal too. He was like her. And the electric zing between them of instant connection resonated in her brain, pleasant and startling all at once.
Hester had been impressed from the beginning, of course; who wasn't going to be impressed by an incredibly well-built handyman who had appeared out of a blizzard to rescue them? She still couldn't believe that he didn't seem cold at all. There was a little gooseflesh prickling his arms, but otherwise he seemed entirely unaffected by the cold of the storm or the chill in the lobby.
She had been trying not to stare at him, because first of all it was kind of rude, and her mother was right there, but also because just looking at him was like a hard kick right to her reptile hindbrain. It went straight past her conscious mind, her intelligence, and her common sense, all of which were trying to remind her that the last guy she'd fallen for had lied to her, cheated on her, and left her sense of self-worth in tatters.
But there was no place for second thoughts every time that her eyes returned to his sculpted chest, his broad shoulders, or the face that she hadn't dared do more than glance at so far.
She had been able to see that he was astonishingly good-looking, with high cheekbones and a strong jawline. But she was afraid of what else she might see in his face.
Kindness. Humor. Warmth.
She had glimpsed enough to know that if she stared too long, she would be gone.
But it so happened that one of her little peeks was when he turned to look directly at her—and she was right.
She was gone.
And she didn't care.
His eyes were green-shot hazel, bright and vivid as sunlight-dappled shade in a summer forest. And there was something in his gaze that seemed to reach into her heart, right to the wounded core of her, as if his strong, capable hands wanted to cup around her bitter, defensive little hedgehog soul: cradle it, and protect it, and tell it that everything would be all right.
Also, she wanted to plaster herself all over his chest like one of those spa mud masks.
Come to think of it, this looked like the kind of place that probably had that sort of thing.
"Is there a spa here?" Hester asked inanely, before she could stop herself.
And then it began to dawn on her that she was standing here staring at the half-naked man of her dreams while wearing a scruffy old ski jacket and the world's worst hat, with her cheeks raw and red from the cold. The only good thing about the hat was that it hid her wind-scruffed, tangled hair.
Her nose was running, too. Just to add the final indignity.
"We do have a spa. Uh." Gorgeous Guy looked suddenly embarrassed. "I don't know how anything works there, though. I'm the handyman."
"And you do look very handy," Peony said briskly, and Hester decided to fling herself out into the snow to her doom. "I'm Peony Hatherill and this is my daughter Hester."
"Right, um, I'm Mauro Rivas. Handyman. Which I already said."
"You said something about a fire?" Peony prompted.
"Oh. Yes. Of course." Mauro managed to tear his eyes away from Hester's, and she was both relieved and sorry.
Relieved, because she could think clearly again.
Sorry, because the livewire that had snapped between them as soon as their eyes met was the happiest and most alive she'd felt since Cheating Ralph had walked out of her life.
Also, she still had no idea what his shifter animal was, and she desperately wanted to know. She wanted to know everything about him.
"Let me just turn the heat up and get a fire started, and I'll get your bags." Mauro was stumbling over his words now, slightly tongue-tied, and it occurred to Hester with abrupt sympathy that he hadn't planned on visitors tonight, and had probably never had to do all of this on his own. Or any of this, really.
"We can get our bags while you start warming up the lodge," she said. "Can't we, Mom?"
"Of course," Peony said, through chattering teeth, and Hester realized that her mother was much colder than she was, standing here half freezing to death.
But HE'S not cold.
Because he's like me.
But Mom wasn't. And Mom couldn't handle the cold at all.
"Come on, Mom," she said, suddenly worried. "You need to sit down and get warm."
She started to take Peony by the elbow. Mauro moved into to help at the same time, and they almost collided.
"Sorry!" he said.
"Me too!" Hester said.
Especially since she was now very closely adjacent to his sculpted man-chest. He had just a little bit of chest hair, curling pleasantly around his pecs. His skin had a hint of bronze that made him look like a sculpture.
"I'll just," she said, flailing wildly at the door. "Bags. I, uh. Get them."
"Wait—" he said, but she fled into the storm before he could finish.
Her heart didn't slow down until she half collided with her car.
Just in the short time that she'd been inside, the storm had picked up. The wind buffeted her, driving snowflakes into her face.
No, there would be no driving down the mountain in this weather.
Hester leaned into the car to shut off the engine. Without the headlights, she was plunged into abrupt darkness, lit only by the lights of the lodge, shining through the swirling snow.
She rested her flaming
cheek on her fist for a moment.
Everything was happening so fast. She couldn't figure out if it was all going wrong ... or right.
"Hey, do you need some help?"
The voice came from behind her. That voice. She had barely exchanged two sentences with Mauro yet, but just hearing him talk sent shivers all the way down to her toes.
This was bad.
She turned around and found that he had, regrettably, put a coat on. Well, probably better for him. But it was unzipped and she could still see his chest and oh no.
"I got the heat turned up and your mom settled," he said with a friendly, incredibly charming smile. Snowflakes were settling in his dark mop of curls. "Anyway, I couldn't leave you out here wrestling with your bags all alone."
"Bags," she said blankly. "Bags. Right." She leaned back into the car. "I'll just pop the trunk, okay?"
By the time she had closed the car door, he already had a bag in each hand, Hester's flowered suitcase and Peony's bright red one. "Is there anything else that needs to go?" he asked, holding the suitcases as if they weighed nothing. "Anything left in the car overnight is going to freeze."
"Oh. I better get our water bottles and stuff." She threw all of that stuff into the backpack that she took with her when she was traveling for her toiletries and things, grabbed Peony's makeup case which was loose in the trunk for some reason, scooped everything that didn't fit in the backpack into her arms, and kicked the car door shut with a snow-covered sneaker. No point in locking it; she couldn't imagine who was going to try to steal anything. There probably wasn't another person within ten miles of here.
Although he could probably have easily outdistanced her with his longer legs, Mauro waited for her, slowing his steps so that she could catch up. She tried not to feel warm about that, and failed completely.
"What's your animal?" he asked quietly.
Hester almost dropped her backpack and the armful of miscellaneous items she was juggling. It was powerfully ingrained in her that you didn't just talk about it! "I ..." she said. "You—wait, please. Wait. I want to talk to you before we go back in."