“Nope.”
She couldn’t believe he was able to move around on skis. Then again he was practically born in a pair. Bum leg or not, Josh Garner knew what he was doing.
“All six of you are going down together, right?” she asked. Safety in numbers.
“Yep.” Josh slung his arm around her shoulders and walked her to where the others stood, waving.
Hannah took one look at Mary and knew that Josh’s mother thought the same as she: This was beyond crazy, it was dangerous, and ridiculously unnecessary. Josh was making great headway. A bad spill would not only set him back physically but Hannah feared that it would send him into an emotional funk. Josh wasn’t a man who had a high tolerance for failure.
“I got this, Hannah Banana.” He kissed her, which he’d been doing a lot lately, and beamed like a madman.
She struggled between begging him not to do it and putting faith in him to know his own abilities. The latter won out. But if it turned out badly . . .
“Let’s go, Team Garner,” Gray called, and the rest of the Garners lined up like tin soldiers. Some kind of signal was given and they took off.
Hannah was heartened to see that Colt and Win skied in formation with Josh, letting him set the pace. TJ and Gray took up the rear with Mary leading the way. He was protected on all sides.
It was beautiful watching the way they traversed down the mountain like a choreographed dance. There were a few other skiers on the slope who stopped to watch. From up high, Hannah kept sight of them until a quarter of the way down. Then their ski jackets blurred into colorful spots.
She used the binoculars Josh had given her to get a better view. He seemed to be holding up fine. Still, she felt on edge, like any minute something terrible could happen. Soon the trail would narrow and Win and Colt would have to leave Josh’s side to ski single file in order to maneuver the skinny twists and turns.
They did it in perfect unison, Win first, Josh second, and Colt in the back, winding down so gracefully—and fast—she began to lose track of who was who. Then one of them went down, tumbling headfirst over and over again. It happened in a split second and even though she’d been expecting something like this, it felt surreal. Out of body. The worst part was she couldn’t tell how bad he’d crashed. Her tiny slice of view had become obscured by other skiers.
All she knew was that she needed to get down there. Hannah didn’t have any skis and to try to walk the trail would be treacherous. Looking around, panicked, she spotted someone wearing a SKI PATROL jacket.
“Excuse me,” she shouted, and pointed at the scene below. “There’s been an accident. Will you take me down?”
He rode over on a snowmobile, took note of her lack of ski equipment, and told her to hop on the back of his Ski-doo.
By the time she got to the scene a large crew had cut over from another trail and had formed a circle around the downed skier. Hannah pushed her way through, knowing it was Josh, fearing that he would need to be airlifted to the nearest hospital. She worried as much about his spirit as she did his leg.
But as she made her way through the gathering crowd she found Josh sitting against a berm, a giant grin on his face. Another member of the ski patrol was checking him for injuries while the rest of the Garners stood over him like a protective ring of mama bears. He took one look at her face and stopped smiling.
“I’m okay,” he said.
She moved closer and sat with him in the snow. “What happened?”
“I ate it.” He beamed again, totally confusing her.
“Why are you smiling about it?” She wondered if he’d hit his head . . . got a concussion.
“Come here.” He pulled her closer and snuggled her under his arm, his grin growing wider. “You were right; I should’ve waited until my leg was better healed.”
“Uh, okay.” She looked at the rest of the Garners, who seemed as thrown as she was. This was not the Josh they knew. Too rational. Not hardheaded enough. “You seem . . . good.”
“I’m better than good, baby.” He pressed her into the snow and kissed her. “I made it farther than I should’ve. Next year . . . all the way. But it doesn’t really matter because I’ve got you.”
Josh glanced at the growing crowd. “You mind giving us a little space here?” Everyone but the Garner clan dispersed. “You guys, too.”
Gray gathered his flock. “Call us when you’re ready.”
Hannah watched them traverse to the other side of the trail. “Maybe sitting here in the snow isn’t such a good idea.” She feared hypothermia would set in. “They could probably bring a sled or toboggan to get you down.”
He shot her a look. “When I’m ready to go, it won’t be on a stretcher. Reach into my jacket, would you?”
She figured he must have a flask in there. Brandy to keep them warm because even bundled up she felt chilled to the bone. She searched in his pocket only to come up with a small velvet box and looked at him, her head angled, hardly able to breathe.
Josh grinned. “Open it.”
She wasn’t sure if her hands shook from the cold or from anticipation. She popped the lid, and a large marquise diamond glinted in the sun. “Oh, Josh!” Her eyes welled up.
“Will you marry me, Hannah Baldwin . . . make me the happiest man in the world? If you will, I promise you’ll never regret it. I’ll spend every day loving you . . . worshipping you.” His face split into the biggest smile she’d ever seen grace Josh Garner’s face.
“Yes! One hundred percent yes.” She threw herself on top of him, kissed every inch of his mouth, cheeks, eyebrows, and chin. Then she pulled off a woolen glove to put the ring on. “Were you planning this . . . up here on Royal Slope?”
“Well, I knew damned well I’d never be able to propose to you while skydiving or mountain climbing or rock scaling. We’ve really got to work on that fear-of-heights thing you’ve got going.”
And he pulled her down for another kiss.
Moonshine and Mistletoe
Sarah Title
Chapter One
Of all the ways Emma Fallader imagined she would eventually die, hurtling off an icy cliff in West Virginia was definitely not one of them.
And yet, here she was.
“Sorry,” her friend, Liam, said as he regained control of the sliding car.
“Don’t apologize, just drive.” She grimaced from beside him.
“How you doing back there?” Liam glanced in the rearview mirror, where two of his three passengers were slowly turning green.
Bernie rolled down her window an inch. “Sorry. It’s either this or I mess up Emma’s nice car.”
“Thanks for driving, by the way,” Emma said softly.
“Just let him drive,” Bernie said as Liam focused on the slick road in front of them. “Whose idea was it to get married at Christmas anyway?”
“That was Kevin,” Liam said to the road. “Daniel picked the place, Kevin picked the time. It’s their wedding, after all.”
“Very democratic,” Becky said from the seat behind Emma, where she was clutching the seat belt with alarmingly white knuckles.
“And Daniel finally got all of us to West Virginia,” Emma added. “If I didn’t know how much he loves Kevin, I might have thought that he’s getting married just to make us come visit here.”
Daniel was emphatic in his love for his home state, and proselytized its beauty and warmth with the fervor of the newly converted. It was one of the things that Kevin had found most annoying about him, or so Kevin claimed when they were all getting to know each other their first semester in library school. But there was so much to love about Daniel that a little home state obsession was decidedly no big deal.
Sometimes it amazed Emma, how well Daniel fit in with all of them. He was cool. Not nerdy-cool like the librarians, but actual-cool. He was an architect and he wore slim-fit suits and played guitar in a post-punk band. The rest of them were just total librarians. Obsessed with books and equity and access to information. They argued abou
t metadata. They did a lot of bar trivia.
Maybe Emma wasn’t being fair. Liam could go toe-to-toe with Daniel on indie bands nobody else had ever heard of. Becky had an artistic streak, though she rarely showed it, working in a corporate law office. Bernie was a social justice warrior in her own right, using her college library for community good.
So maybe it was just Emma who was the nerd.
She was such a library nerd that she was working her way to becoming Doctor Library Nerd. Once she got her PhD, she could teach the next generation of librarians, encouraging them to embrace and improve the small, rural libraries like the ones she’d grown up in. Her research on access and Internet speeds was being published in the Journal of the Indiana Library Association, and she hoped it would be a good jumping-off point for her dissertation. Except she wasn’t sure if her approach was broad enough....
She had to stop thinking about it. That was what she’d promised her three wedding dates when she picked them all up at the airport in Charleston. But the truth was, she could really use some more time thinking about work. Lately she just couldn’t seem to focus. She’d sit down to look at her research or outline her thesis and suddenly everything else in the world was more urgent and more interesting. Her dishes had never been so clean, her bookshelves never so alphabetized, her dissertation never so . . . unwritten. At this rate, the only thing she was going to get her doctorate in was procrastination.
Of course, none of that would matter if she went hurtling off a cliff on her way to a wedding.
Kevin was one of her best friends, so she supposed imminent death and further procrastination were worth seeing him happily off into the next chapter of his life. It was a little sad, too, because every good thing that happened meant nothing would be the same. They’d graduated from their master’s program (hooray!), then got jobs in different parts of the country (boo). That meant that last Christmas was the first one in a while that Emma’d spent away from Kevin’s aggressive holiday cheer. As much as she protested the elf shoes and the constant glitter, she had really missed it.
And so her other best guy friend who lived in upstate New York now and was theoretically better at driving in icy weather was driving her car, full of her two best girlfriends, Bernie and Becky, and more pairs of shoes than was strictly necessary, and they were all slipping and sliding to a long weekend culminating in the gay wedding of their best friends in beautiful, scenic, icy Froggy Rock, West Virginia.
Ho ho ho.
* * *
“You got a room all to yourself, as promised. It’s booked under the name Abel Zebidiah Tate, Nashville Superstar.”
“Ha-ha,” Abe said into the phone. Cousins. Hilarious.
“Thanks for doing this, really,” Daniel said. “It means a lot.”
Abe grunted. He knew what Daniel meant. Still, he and Daniel had always left their unconditional love for each other unspoken. It was easier that way. Besides, the wedding would be emotional enough—all weddings were. They didn’t need to start early.
Technically, Abe and Daniel had grown up in separate homes down the road from each other. But they spent so much time together that it was more like they each had two rooms in two different houses. Besides, being poor meant not a lot of toys, so pooling their resources made them feel rich.
They also got into twice as much trouble. At least that’s what Granny Sue always said whenever the two of them were together, which was always.
The point was, Abe was as good as Daniel’s brother, and of course he would be at the wedding. And of course he would play at the wedding. And of course he would do it for free. There was no need to get mushy about it.
He did have one condition, though.
Abe loved family reunions, but he didn’t love the accommodations. He had lots of cousins, and his cousins had lots of kids. That meant lots of kids and cousins piled into tiny rooms, and since Abe was single and allegedly tough, he usually got stuck on an air mattress, usually next to some cousin with undiagnosed sleep apnea.
So Abe agreed to play the wedding, and he’d do it for free, as long as he didn’t have to share a cabin with sixteen other people.
“Can’t wait to see you, cuz,” Daniel said.
“Me too,” Abe replied, cutting off the mush. “How’s Kevin?” If Daniel wanted to get mushy, let him get mushy about his husband-to-be.
Abe liked the guy. While Daniel was one of the most laid-back people Abe had ever known, Kevin was . . . well, Kevin was not. He liked order and he liked plans and he liked sticking to those plans. Like all good couples, Daniel was mostly blinded by love so he didn’t mind that Kevin often got more pleasure out of planning things than actually doing them. When it got to him, though, Daniel would threaten to erase Kevin’s Pinterest boards, which was their signal that Kevin needed to step back, take a deep breath, and focus on what really mattered. Which was not stressing about the right napkin-folding technique for the place settings.
“Kevin is good. He’s stressed. But we’re dealing.”
“We’ll get some moonshine in ’im. That’ll loosen him up.”
“Oh, great, that’s just what I need. A drunk, weepy fiancé who’s trying to fold napkins.”
Abe laughed.
“You laugh now, but wait till we get down there and you’re pressed into service. There are wedding favors that have to be assembled. And you have dexterous fiddler’s fingers, so you’ll be great at it.”
“Wedding favors?”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve said too much. Just get down there early, and be careful. I hear the roads are bad.”
“The roads are always bad.”
“Yeah, but you’re a city boy now, so don’t get any ideas about muddin’ or anything.”
“I’m pretty sure the Sentra isn’t going to go muddin’.”
“Not on purpose, anyway.”
“Like Kevin would allow it to rain on your wedding day.”
Abe swore he could hear Daniel smiling through the phone.
Chapter Two
“Oh my God, it’s adorable! Don’t you think it’s adorable, guys?”
Becky was the first one out of the car, which was good since she was looking kind of green. But whatever distress her stomach was in seemed to be soothed by the scene in front of them.
“Totes adorbs,” said Liam, heading for the trunk.
After a harrowing twenty minutes when the GPS decided that suddenly it had never heard of Froggy Rock and did they mean Fraggle Rock, the fictional underground TV show?, they found their way to the Froggy Rock Ski Chalet and Cabins.
After getting out of the car and looking around, Emma thought it was worth it.
The building in front of her did resemble a chalet, sort of. Maybe more like a log building with chaletlike trim. But it was decked out in greenery and lights and what it really looked like was a gingerbread house, and in the gloomy, sleety weather, it felt particularly inviting. Emma thought she might die of the cuteness. The log cabins were spread around the woods, close enough to see but not so close that you could see in. She could just imagine that if the snow that was predicted really started, the whole place would look like an enchanted gingerbread forest.
Gazing out at the little cabins, imagining smoke pouring out of the chimneys and hot toddies by the fire . . . it almost made Emma wish Kevin had booked them into one of those instead of getting them rooms in the main lodge. But the cabins were a little rustic, he told them. And a little drafty. And were basically one room with lumpy bunk beds and a tiny, tiny bathroom. Those were reserved for the various aunts and uncles and cousins with kids. The librarians were sophisticated guests. They got their own rooms.
Luxury!
As she and the sophisticated, overpacked librarians walked into the lodge, Emma let go of all her remaining reservations about staying in a campground in West Virginia for a wedding. It looked just about like heaven. The stone floors were covered in colorful throw rugs. There was a fire crackling in the fireplace, but most of the comfy
chairs were facing toward the giant picture windows that looked out over the valley. The large, open space was decorated for the holidays with more green and glitter, but it was subtle and tasteful.
“I guess they didn’t let Kevin decorate,” she murmured.
“No, but they let him make a schedule.” Becky came up behind her with a stack of gridded papers. “Looks like Kevin has a whole weekend planned for us.”
“Kevin?” Bernie asked. “Plan every detail with meticulous precision? I never!”
“Do I hear the bitter sarcasm of my spinster friends?”
“Kevin!”
They all turned to the automatic doors, where their beloved, off-the-market Kevin was striding through, looking like good ol’ Kevin in his slim khakis and peacoat.
“And Daniel!” they all shouted as Kevin was followed in by his fiancé, still too handsome for his own good, and carrying a cardboard box.
“Why does Daniel get a bigger reception than I do?” Kevin asked, as cheeks were kissed and hugs were given.
“Because I don’t call them spinsters,” Daniel replied, kissing and hugging around the box.
“I can’t believe you’re marrying this jerk,” Bernie said to Daniel.
He just shrugged. “What can I say? I love the jerk.”
“Ha-ha,” Kevin said, but he leaned in and kissed Daniel anyway. “So,” he said, turning back to his spinsters. “Are you settled in? Did you get my itinerary?”
“No, and yes,” Liam said. “Well, Becky got one. The rest of us just heard the rumors.”
“Well! Hurry up! We’ve got a cooking lesson planned in twenty minutes!”
“Uh . . .” There was a collective shuffling of feet and general sense of how-to-let-the-poor-guy-down.
“Sweetheart,” Daniel said, putting the box on the nearest table and wrapping his arms around Kevin. “Maybe give them a minute.”
Kevin looked at his watch.
“No, a metaphorical minute,” Daniel said with a smile. “They just drove in from the airport, right, guys?”
“Liam drove,” Bernie clarified. “But we all stressed.”
The Most Wonderful Time Page 18