“Thanks,” Bret said.
Leroux simply held out the keys. “Be careful up there.”
Bret handed him the keys to the Mustang in return, so he wouldn’t be leaving Scott short a vehicle.
Scott eyed the Mustang with a crooked grin. “Now, that’s the trade of the century. If you ever want to swap straight across—”
“If I find Chloe I may just take you up on that.” Bret climbed into the cab of the big truck. He heard what he’d said and corrected himself. “When I find her.”
Before he could close the door, a small procession emerged from The Snowed Inn.
Scott’s wife, Liv, came to the side of the truck and handed up two big plastic lidded cups of coffee. “One for you, one for Chloe, when you find her.”
“With lots of cream. I told her. Here’s some extra.” Mandy handed him a thermos, along with two heavy blankets.
Jake was last. “I found two heat packs,” he said. “She’s going to be cold.”
He wasn’t kidding. The parking lot of The Snowed Inn had taken on a gray cast in the rapidly fading daylight, and a savage wind whipped at them from down the mountain. The storm was headed this way. And he was heading up into it.
Bret looked down at the four people who’d pulled all this together on fifteen minutes’ notice. Three of them, he rarely even saw. There was no time to thank them adequately.
If I ever have a Christmas card list again . . .
He settled for, “You guys are amazing.”
“Tell us about it.” Leroux slammed the door of his truck and stepped back with a wave.
Bret waved back and gunned the motor. He had a lot of ground to cover.
* * *
Chloe tried to think about something besides the freezing air that seemed to close in around her and work its way past her skin. People used to survive in the elements with a lot less shelter than this car. In the pioneer days, mountain cabins probably weren’t much warmer than this. Except that they’d undoubtedly keep a fire going.
A nice, roaring fire. She clung to the image, tried to take some warmth from it. She pictured herself building a roasty campfire on the floor of the passenger seat. No, she wasn’t crazy enough to do it. Yet. But she was definitely getting loopy. She pictured laying twigs and needles for the kindling, building a tent of branches over it to let the air circulate, touching a match to it and watching the fire come to life—
Fire. That reminded Chloe of her lone flare in the road. She peered through her window and saw no light. It must have gone out some time ago.
She felt in her pocket for the remaining flare. It meant going back out there, and that sounded like the worst kind of masochism. But if she didn’t, there was that much less chance of being seen.
Grimacing, she put on her wet socks and shoes and trudged back out. She ventured through the snow to the side of the road, legs growing number with every step, and walked past the rear of the car. She saw no sign of the first flare. It must be buried in the snow. She stepped farther down the road and lit the second flare. The blast of heat inches from her fingers was enticing, but it wouldn’t do her any good. Still, she briefly savored the heat as she held it.
It wouldn’t be long before this flare, too, was extinguished or buried by the snow. Chloe said a silent prayer and set it down in the road. As she struggled her way back to the car, she felt a buzzing in her pocket.
Her cell phone. Holy crap, a text.
She dug the phone out of her pocket with frantic, numb fingers. It was from Bret. Are you all right?
Of course he hadn’t gotten her first text, because she hadn’t been able to send it. Chloe did her best not to move from the spot where her phone had buzzed. She retrieved the message from her out-box and re-sent it, holding her phone high over her head, hoping to catch whatever reception there was out here. After several seconds, she lowered the phone to check her screen.
The message had gone through.
She shut her eyes tight and prayed again. Her phone buzzed three more times. They were all texts from Bret, all more than an hour old. The first two relayed his growing concern. The third offered her some much-needed hope.
Looking for you. Stay warm.
As she read the last line, she nearly burst into maniacal laughter.
* * *
Bret worked his way up the mountain. The first part of the drive was torturous because he knew it wasn’t likely he’d find Chloe this close to home. Still, he had to look, his eyes scouring both sides of the road for any sign of a white car in trouble.
Then he hit the snowstorm, and it got harder. It forced him to slow for safety’s sake, and it made it that much harder to divide his attention between the road ahead and the search for any sign of Chloe alongside it. The snow grew heavier as he drove on through true darkness.
Awhile ago, he’d offered Scott Leroux his Mustang if he found Chloe. Soon, Bret was ready to promise him the Mustang, his firstborn child, and his immortal soul. A half-buried sign at the right told him he was ten miles from Mount Douglas.
Give me a break, Lord. A little help here?
Probably not the right tone for a prayer. Bret clutched the wheel a little harder, peered a little harder through the windshield.
And his cell phone, propped up in the console of the truck, notified him that he had a text.
Bret set his jaw. It could be important. Really, really important. White-knuckled, he waited for the next turnout and stopped, flashers on, while he checked his phone. If this was a notification from his carrier about some exciting new calling plan—
It was from Chloe.
Stuck in the snow coming home from Mt. Douglas.
Please call Roadside Assistance. I’m somewhere south of Rabbit Trail.
Rabbit Trail?
The time displayed on the text was twenty minutes ago, but with the erratic mountain reception, that could mean anything. At least he had a location to watch for. Bret turned off his flashers and moved forward, eyes searching the other side of the road.
Five minutes later, he came to a half-buried sign for the Rabbit Trail turnoff. His heart lurched.
He’d missed her.
Bret swore softly and looked for the next place to turn around. Coming back down the hill, he traveled at a crawl, watching the side of the road for something. Anything. His eyes strained.
There.
Lying in the road, near the ever-growing bank of snow, was a guttering flare.
* * *
She was starting to doze again.
Chloe shook her head and rubbed her hands together vigorously, trying to force feeling back into them. Even the ache from the numbness was starting to fade. Within minutes, despite her efforts to fight it, she felt herself start to drift again. She bit her tongue, hard, until it bled. But soon she was sinking back against the upholstery of the car as the feeling of cold receded.
She jerked awake. The car was shaking, something rattling at the door. A rescuer, she decided, or a hungry bear.
The door opened with a crackle from the icy snow that coated it, bringing in a brutal blast of cold. At this point she would have been glad to see any human being short of a serial killer. She’d even take her chances with the bear, as long as it was warm.
But it was Bret who pulled her across the seat, into his arms. She curled up tight against him and buried her face in his coat to shut out the cold. His voice was the most welcome sound she’d ever heard.
“It’s okay,” he murmured. “I’ve got you.”
Chapter 20
As Bret loaded her into the front seat of a truck she didn’t recognize, Chloe felt as mobile as a sack of flour, and not nearly as useful. He heaped some heavy blankets on her and—not surprisingly for Bret—stopped to buckle her safety belt.
He started to step back when Chloe remembered something. She put a hand on his arm.
“My shoes.” Her voice came out weak and rough.
“Your shoes?” Bret echoed incredulously.
“They got w
et.”
Bret studied her, his face in shadow under the dome light. She thought she saw something soft there as he nodded.
“Be right back.” He closed her door. Chloe hunkered under the blankets and tried to absorb some warmth from them. She felt cold from the inside out. She clenched her hands between her legs.
A moment later Bret climbed into the driver’s seat and closed the door. He deposited her shoes on the floor at her feet. “Two very wet shoes.” He reached over and opened the glove box. “Two heat packs. You can thank Jake Wyndham.” He pressed the buttons that activated them. “I’m putting these on top of your shoes. I think the socks are history.”
He wrapped the blankets around her feet and rested them on top of two spots of heat that she could actually feel. Chloe let a sigh escape. Bret pulled off his coat and slid it under the blankets, the inside facing her, still warm from his body heat.
“You need your coat,” she protested. Her voice cracked.
“Not like you do. And the heater’s cranked.”
Chloe couldn’t tell.
Bret pulled off her gloves, finger by finger. “Okay. Basics.” He took her hands and rubbed them together between his. His eyes stayed on hers, as if to make sure she was tracking on his words. “You have one job. Keep your circulation going. Move your fingers, toes, arms, legs, as much as you can.”
He turned away, squinting at the thick snow that blew at the windshield. “And I have one job,” he said. “Getting us back down the hill in one piece.”
Before he put the truck in gear, he dialed a number, then maneuvered back onto the road. While Chloe diligently tried to feel her fingers and toes enough to move them, she listened as he spoke through the Bluetooth.
“Mrs. Davenport? I found her.” Chloe heard the relief in his voice. God bless him for calling her mother first.
He listened, then glanced at her. “Really, really cold. But she’s talking. I think she’s going to be all right.”
He paused again and nodded. “That’s what I told her.” He sent her a sidelong glance, and Chloe rubbed her hands together harder. “We’ve got a tricky drive ahead of us, but I’ll get her home as soon as I can.”
His next call was more succinct. “Chuck? Bret. She’s all right. Or she will be, once we get down the hill. Can you pass the word?”
There it was again. When it came to brevity, Hemingway had nothing on him.
He disconnected the call and looked her way again. “Fingers and toes,” he reminded her, and focused his eyes ahead as they moved on through the darkness.
* * *
There was no way to get ahead of the storm. Bret could only keep going and hope that the worst of it didn’t catch up to them. From time to time he spared a glance in Chloe’s direction to make sure she was moving and alert. When some time had passed, she started to shiver, which he took as a good sign: the body’s way of warming itself.
She’d felt so limp when he pulled her out of the car, barely moving. Except for the way she pressed her face against his chest, if only to escape from the cold.
“There’s coffee in front of you, when you’re ready,” he said. “I’m not sure how warm it is anymore, but it should help a little.”
He’d never touched his own coffee. He needed both hands on the wheel.
Now certainly wasn’t the time for apologies, or repercussions, or any of the things that he wanted to say to her. He didn’t even know how to start. Especially not when he had to keep watching the ever-more-obscure road and avoid the disorienting trap of staring into the white flakes that rushed at the windshield in an eerie, white-on-black 3-D effect.
Chloe had gone still beside him. A quick glimpse showed that her eyelids had fallen shut. He didn’t know how dangerous dozing would be for her at this point, but he wasn’t taking any chances. Fixing his eyes back on the road, Bret reached over and poked her arm sharply with one finger. He heard a quick breath as she straightened with a start.
“Hey,” he said. “No sleeping. Let me hear . . . the alphabet. Backwards.”
“Z, y, x . . .” She rattled it off in about twenty seconds.
That defeated the purpose. He felt half a laugh escape. “How’d you do that? It’s supposed to force you to concentrate.”
“I got really bored one day in second grade.” She sounded more like herself.
“Okay.” He needed for Chloe to concentrate on something else to stay awake, so he could concentrate on the drive. Bret made the next turn slowly and carefully. “How about . . . an animal for every letter of the alphabet. Backwards.”
“Zebra . . . Yak . . .” Chloe paused. “Xylophone?”
“Good enough. Keep going.”
“Walrus . . .” Another pause. “Vixen . . .”
Bret tightened his knuckles on the wheel, but something inside him relaxed. For someone who’d spent several hours in a freezing car, Chloe appeared to be doing remarkably well.
He didn’t know how much longer he’d driven into the interminable night, or how far he’d gotten, when a call came through on his Bluetooth.
“Bret? It’s Jake. I wanted to let you know, you only need to make it as far as the Inn tonight. We’ve got rooms for you both, and Chloe’s parents are on their way here to help take care of her.”
A handy thing, having a mother who was a retired nurse. Bret already knew he’d have to face Chloe’s family after what had happened, but this brought the reality that much closer.
“Thanks, Jake.” Bret set his jaw as he rounded another precarious curve. “How hard is it snowing in Tall Pine?”
“It’s . . . coming down.” Jake sounded as close to being evasive as Bret had ever heard. “But don’t worry. You’ll make it.”
Intellectually, he believed it, too. But he’d be glad when this drive was over.
Jake’s offer did make Bret’s mission easier. If he could just hold out until the road straightened, all he needed to do was watch for the turn off the highway for The Snowed Inn. He just hoped the snow hadn’t covered it yet.
Chloe sat forward and reached for her coffee cup, another good sign.
He tightened his grip on the wheel, and this time it wasn’t just the truck he was trying to control. Focus. Get her home first. If he let himself think about how he felt, how much danger he’d put her in—it would be the ultimate irony if he ended up driving her off the road when they were almost home.
They had to be close by now. Didn’t they?
Bret made one more turn, and the road straightened. He released a long, slow exhale. Just a few more miles, in a straight line. The dizzying flakes still rushed at them, but as long as he spotted the turn for The Snowed Inn, they’d be all right.
“Almost there,” Chloe said.
Bret leaned forward and squinted at what looked like lights up ahead. Two lines of lights.
Chloe leaned forward, too. “An accident?”
With that many lights, it would have to be an ugly one. But it looked too orderly for that. Almost like an airplane runway. “What the—”
As they got closer, Bret realized, with astonishment, what the lights were.
“Headlights,” Chloe breathed.
It was unmistakable now. The lights came in pairs, on either side of the road, angled so that they illuminated the road leading to the turnoff.
“When Chloe Davenport gets lost in the snow, word gets around,” Bret said.
Up to now, the grueling drive had made any real conversation impossible. Suddenly, it looked as if they were minutes away from being surrounded by people. Now, while they were still alone, he wanted to say something to Chloe. Something about what he’d put her through, what she meant to him, how desperate he’d been to get to her.
Words, idiot. He made his living by words. They were his stock in trade. But he’d spent over two hours white-knuckling the steering wheel, and now his tongue was thick.
All he could think of was, “If you think you can walk, you might want to get your shoes on.”
“Right.
” Chloe bent forward, groping down at the floor in front of her.
They reached the double line of cars, snowflakes dancing erratically in the headlights. Bret recognized some of the cars, some of the faces behind the windshields, and realized they weren’t just there for Chloe. He saw people he’d known all his life, people he’d interviewed, people he never would have guessed would give him a second thought. Ed Hollingsworth and Mel Kruger sat together in an old Thunderbird, their differences apparently patched up for the moment. Scott Leroux, behind the wheel of Bret’s Mustang, flashed the high-beam lights on and off as they drove past.
At the turn, Jake Wyndham waved them into the driveway with an elaborate sweep of two flashlights. The cars ended there, but the Christmas lights that framed The Snowed Inn glowed ahead, and white-bagged luminaries lined the driveway. He would have had to be blind to miss it.
But for some reason the last few yards did look blurry as Bret pulled into the driveway, aware of the procession of cars following them. He brought the truck to a safe stop before he blinked hard, and the picture sharpened again.
Just in time, because the doors of each side of the truck were being pulled open.
When Bret’s feet hit the ground from the unaccustomed height of the truck, his legs wobbled—whether from exhaustion, emotion, or just the length of time sitting tensed up in the vehicle, he wasn’t sure. He covered by grasping the door of the truck with one hand and regarded the people approaching him.
Including his father, who’d opened the door.
Bret summoned awry smile. “What, Rudolph wasn’t available?” he said. He added, quietly, to the group clustered around him, “Thank you.”
His dad grabbed him in a hug. He couldn’t remember the last time they’d done that. “I should have known you’d find away to worm out of church tonight,” David said.
Over his father’s shoulder, he glimpsed Winston Frazier and Millie Bond, and he found room to be grateful he’d grabbed the scarf Millie had made.
“Merry Christmas, Dad,” Bret choked out. And turned to look for Chloe.
Do Not Open 'Til Christmas Page 24