Recognizing them, he waved back. “That’s Doug and Sandy Stern, the ski coaches at the high school.”
“Married ski coaches?”
“Yup. Stern and Sterner, that’s what the players call them. He was an alternate at the Olympics once. She was a champion biathlete. They’re the reason why Lost Harbor High has such a great ski team.”
“So they might be Jason’s coaches? Maybe I should butter them up with some hot chocolate.” She held up the giant thermos she’d brought.
“They’re going to be his coaches. I got an email from them basically guaranteeing Jason a spot. They said he’s ‘surpassed all their expectations’ and they invited him to practice with the team for the rest of the school year.”
“Wow. Jason must be so psyched about that.”
“He’s already planning his cross training regime for the summer. They actually want him to work out with the team before school, but—”
He broke off, because something had just occurred to him. When he’d emailed back, he’d explained that Jason would only be available for afterschool sessions. Early mornings were out of the question because of the drive and the carpool schedule.
The Sterns had pushed back on that, suggesting various options for transportation, even offering gas money. Although he’d been pretty offended by that, he’d kept it simple and answered, “When he’s on the team we can discuss it again. For now, that’s the most he can do.”
They’d dropped it with a gracious, “We understand.”
But it had been weird.
He looked over at the coaches again and saw that Jason was jogging over the snow toward them, looking eager and excited. The way he only looked while skiing.
He sorted through everything he knew about the Sterns, which wasn’t much. They were a dynamic couple with a big fancy house close to town where they threw fundraising parties for the ski team. They were a hundred percent focused on skiing. They had plenty of money, lots of connections in Lost Harbor and beyond. They had no children of their own, but they often took in ski students and foreign exchange students.
Was the “other option” Susan Baker had referred to … them? Or was he just being paranoid?
“Zander!” Gretel nudged him with her elbow. “You look like you just saw a ghost. Is everything okay?”
“I—” he shook it off. “Yeah, fine.”
The ski coaches couldn’t just take Jason away, could they? They were a family. They needed to stay together.
“I need to make a quick phone call,” he told Gretel. He had to get to the bottom of this or he wouldn’t have any fun sledding.
He stepped away from Gretel just as another car pulled over at the top of the hill. He waved at Lucas Holt and his fiancée, Megan Miller, along with her eight-year-old, Ruby. Ruby went racing ahead while Lucas and Megan unloaded their sleds. A perfect nuclear family with a twist—Ruby’s father lived in California and sometimes Ruby flew down there for advanced math tutoring.
No one would try to take Ruby away from Megan and Lucas. Zander knew that Megan and Dev, Ruby’s father, had run into some custody issues—how much time Ruby would spend with each parent, and where. But they’d worked it out and now Megan, Lucas and Ruby had a beautiful little family.
He dialed the number Susan Baker had left with him. All he got was a voicemail.
“Hi, this is Zander Ross and I’m calling with an urgent question. Please call me back. If someone is trying to—if there’s a threat to—sorry, I just need to know what’s going on. Please call me back. I have a right to know.”
When he ended the call, he swung around and surveyed the scene of happy kids gliding down the snow, shouting and laughing. Stern and Sterner were gone.
Where was Jason? He panicked when he couldn’t locate him. Then his brother’s curly brown head popped up from the bottom of the hill, way past the point at which they usually stopped. He was making his way up the long hill with his sled held over his head. It was probably an extra workout he’d devised—climb the hill without using his hands.
The kid was crazy.
The panic faded and the world tilted back to normal. Jason wasn’t going anywhere. Their family needed to stay exactly the way it was. Losing one brother was not an option.
Gretel and Petey were flying down the hill in the sled he’d restored for her. Gretel sat in back, with Petey between her legs, which meant that she had the controls.
They spotted Jason and aimed toward him, shouting something he couldn’t make out. It looked as if Petey was leaning to the right to make the turn happen. As they passed Jason, he jettisoned his own sled and jumped on behind Gretel.
Everyone shrieked and the toboggan tilted on one runner and they all went tumbling into the snow in a laughing pile.
Not proper sledding protocol.
But what the hell, everyone was fine and Zander was tired of being the prison warden.
He grabbed a round foam sled—those things could really move—and jumped onto it in a kneeling position. Using a paddling motion of his hands to gain speed, he raced down the hill in their direction. The three of them were trying to untangle themselves, but every time one of them got free, someone else would tug them back down into the snow.
Petey was gathering up snowballs and winging them every which way—at Gretel, at Earl zooming past with the toddlers, at the sky. Jason was still trying to get the snow out of his face but he was laughing too hard to manage it. Gretel spotted Zander first.
“Watch out, boys, here comes trouble!” she shouted. “Get those snowballs ready.”
“He’s probably gonna be mad,” Zander heard Jason say as he careened toward them on his spinning perch.
“Watch out!” Zander shouted as he shifted his weight on the sled. Timing it perfectly, he made a rooster tail of snow spurt from under the sled—right onto Gretel and his brothers. They all tumbled back into the snow, bright splashes of winter coats against the white.
“It’s on!” Jason howled.
Exhilarated, Zander kept going. He let fly a long whoop of pure joy at the speed and the wind against his face and the snow whirling around him.
When he finally spun to a stop, he glanced up the hill and saw Gretel standing up, legs braced apart, brandishing a fist at him.
“You’re going down, Zander Ross!”
After that came chaos. They turned the sled on its side and used it as a shield while they pelted him with snowballs every time he tried to come up the hill. But then Ruby felt sorry for him and joined his cause, using herself as a human shield while he crawled behind her.
“Double fudge sundae, what do you say, Ruby?”
“You don’t have to pay me in dessert. I fight injustice wherever I see it.” Her dark eyes shone down at him over her widespread arms.
“Lucky for me.”
But even Ruby could only do so much, and when they reached the sled his brothers gave a war cry and attacked with armfuls of snowballs, while Gretel whirled Ruby out of the way.
Then Gretel raced back to her battle station and the snowballs rained down and it was all a blur up until the point when he and Gretel found themselves behind the sled, with his brothers and Ruby on the other side.
Completely sheltered by the sled and the snow fortifications the boys had built around it, the two of them paused to catch their breath. Gretel’s flushed face was the deep rose of a peony, smudged with snow. And it was only a few inches away.
The last time, outside the Noonans’ house, she’d kissed him and he’d been stopped by the dog before he could kiss her back.
He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it since. All of that desire came rushing back tenfold. It would have taken an avalanche to stop him from hovering his face over hers, scanning for sign of an objection.
Her lips parted and she tilted her face toward his. “Quick,” she whispered.
He dipped down and brushed his lips against her mouth. Her lips were soft and chilled, with the flavor of snowflakes and chocolate, but they qui
ckly warmed under his kiss. Even more quickly, he lost control of his common sense, and what was supposed to be a quick peck went much deeper. His tongue swept against hers, seeking her sweetness, the hot tender velvet.
She responded by eagerly opening her mouth under his. Every movement of his tongue met a willing sparring partner. The kiss became a waltz, a tease, a dance, as if they were spinning down the hill together on the smoothest, silkiest ride of all.
The sound of his brothers shouting about snowballs faded away, along with any thought of other sledders. Right here, right now, in this little patch of sheltered snow, they were alone and the world was theirs. He could hear the beating of her heart, the flutter of her breath.
Gretel, he thought, then wasn’t sure if he’d said it out loud or if her name had simply taken over his brain. Gretel.
Then a snowball landed on the back of his head and smashed into a million bits of snow, half of which went down the back of his neck.
He pulled away with a gasp of shock. Just in time, too—Petey peered over the edge of the sled.
“Gretel, get up! I have a plan! You can be on my side.”
Petey disappeared and a second later he plopped next to them in the snow. Gretel’s face flushed even deeper red as Zander helped her up and brushed the snow off her suit.
“Smart kid,” he murmured. Then, his voice rising so that Petey could hear him too, “But you’re still going to lose.”
Yup, it was the most fun he’d had in the snow in—forever.
Chapter Eleven
After that day on Wolf Pack Hill, Gretel gave herself a stern lecture about keeping her distance from Zander. He was a serious person with real responsibilities and…well, she wasn’t. It couldn’t possibly work between them, no matter how wildly attractive she found him.
Even if she made it through the winter—which she totally would, just to hear him grovel on the Bush Lines—she had no idea what was next for her. Would she stay in Lost Harbor while Bethany and Nate started a family? Would Auntie Gretel be a thing? Or would she get itchy feet and start dreaming about Argentina or New Zealand? Or would she finally go to college—assuming she could find a way to pay for it? Or would she cave into her mother and accept one of her weekly offers of a plane ticket somewhere? Or—
The point being, she had no idea what her future held. How could she inflict that kind of uncertainty on Zander? It wouldn’t be fair.
Besides, this winter was about focusing on herself and trying to make good on her donation pledge. It was about standing on her own two feet and relying on herself. Not other people, not clubs, not champagne cocktails.
Lost Harbor had a very active AA meeting, she discovered. Drinking problems were pretty common in a town like this. The group met in a back room of the Unitarian church every Tuesday and Thursday evenings. The first time she went, she tiptoed in and grabbed a chair at the very back of the room. By the time the facilitator noticed her, she’d already listened to several people’s stories and had to wipe tears off her face. One older woman had blacked out while babysitting her grandkids and hadn’t been allowed to see them since. A younger guy had lost his license after injuring his best friend. The guilt was eating him up.
When it was her turn, she’d introduced herself and said, “I’m trying to be a better person, and I don’t think I can be if I drink to escape. Does that make sense?”
The silent sympathy and lack of judgment meant so much to her.
She’d been back three times since then, and always left feeling moved and…real. Grounded. As if the people at the meetings saw past her frivolous exterior and knew that it was just one part of her, and there was so much more.
Sometimes she forgot about that.
She needed to focus on herself, not get distracted by her hunk of a neighbor. She came up with a strategy—every time she started craving Zander, she strapped on her snowshoes and worked off her lust with exercise instead.
She got quite good at snowshoeing. The woods around the Noonans’ became almost a second home.
That was where she was one afternoon when she heard a strange sound coming from the direction of the road. She was fairly deep into the forest, picking her way up the side of a valley dotted with alders buried under several feet of snow. The only way she knew there were alders under her feet was that Earl had mentioned it. He’d also told her that there was a stream wandering through the valley, though it was probably frozen solid by now.
The sound was a loud crashing thump, followed by silence. She was in the midst of taking a photo of a baby spruce so covered by snow that she couldn’t see a single branch or spruce needle.
“Hello?” she called up the slope. No answer.
She replayed the sound in her memory and realized that there had been another sound before that—an engine. She couldn’t hear anything like that now.
Had a vehicle crashed into the forest?
Changing direction, she headed straight up the ridge, toward the approximate location of the sound.
“Hello,” she shouted again. But the shape of the slope made the sound of her voice bounce back at her instead of carrying uphill.
After that, she saved her energy for the climb. It was a good thing she’d been doing so much snowshoeing and built up her fitness. Even so, her thigh muscles were burning and she was heaving in deep breaths of chilly air by the time she crested the ridge.
Up ahead she spotted a vehicle, its nose snug against the base of a tree. From this angle, she couldn’t identify it, but she could see someone small emerging from one of the doors.
She recognized that bright red coat. “Petey?” she shouted.
Finally, someone heard her. “Gretel!” She heard the fear and tears in his voice. “Something’s wrong with Chloeann’s dad!”
Even though it wasn’t really possible to run in snowshoes, she launched into a kind of lope that took her across the snow as fast as humanly possible. By the time she reached the car, Eli had also left the vehicle. Both of the boys looked completely freaked out.
“What happened?” she cried as she stumbled to their sides.
The two boys started talking at once. “We dropped off Chloeann because she had so much homework and he was taking us home when he just--”
“He made a weird choking sound and then he jerked back, like this—”
“And we started driving into the woods.” Eli finished the sentence. “We hit the tree and then he kind of fell forward on the wheel and we didn’t know what to do. Is he okay?”
Gretel snowshoed to the driver’s-side door and wrenched it open. Jeff Durst was slumped over the wheel, his body tilted to the side. She reached past the layers of winter gear—jacket, scarf—and finally touched his neck. At first she couldn’t tell if the frantic pulse she felt belonged to her or to him. She took a breath to calm her racing heart, and decided it was his pulse, not her own heartbeat in her fingers.
“He’s alive,” she called to the kids. “We need to call for help.” She dug in her coat pocket for her phone. She always kept it zipped in an inner pocket so the cold wouldn’t kill the battery. After pulling it out, she saw that she had no service—of course. When were they going to put up that damn cell tower?
“There’s never any service here,” said Petey, not very helpfully. “What are we going to do?”
Eli and Petey were looking up at her like two scared bunny rabbits. She noticed that Petey had a bruise on his forehead. What if he’d gotten a concussion from his head bumping the window? What if they were both traumatized from witnessing a seizure—or whatever had happened?
They were counting on her to handle this situation.
What would Bethany do?
That was no help at all. Bethany was a doctor and by now she’d be administering first aid to poor Jeff Durst, saving his life and completely taking command of the situation.
“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do,” she told the boys. “You two stay in the car and try to keep Mr. Durst warm. I’m going to loosen up hi
s scarf so he can breathe easy. Then I’ll hike up to the road and wave someone down. I should be within earshot so if anything happens or you need me, just yell loudly. Okay?”
The boys looked at each other, uneasy. “What if the car explodes or something?” Eli asked.
Gretel had no idea if that was a possibility or not, but maybe it was better not to take a chance. “Then we should get him out of there.” How could she do that by herself? She didn’t want the kids anywhere near a potentially exploding car. God, this was terrifying.
Petey dropped to his knees in the snow and peered under the car. “Nothing’s leaking. I don’t smell gas. Zander taught me how to tell. The car’s not going to explode.”
He might be only ten, but the kid was smart and taught by a former Marine. Gretel believed him. “Then we’ll leave him there and get help. Come on, kids.
Petey got back to his feet. “I’m gonna stay with him in case he wakes up. He might be scared. Eli, you can go with Gretel.”
What a brave kid.
But Eli—at all times—preferred to do whatever Petey was doing. “I can stay too,” he said in a small voice.
Gretel knew he was still scared, but she’d rather the two boys stayed together then separate. And time was passing quickly. “Hopefully this won’t take long. Remember, yell if you need me.”
She gave Eli a quick hug and a whispered, “you’re doing great,” to keep his spirits up. Following the tire tracks the SUV had left in the snow, she headed up the hill. Even with a trail, it seemed to take forever to make it to the road. The last few feet were torture for her already sore legs.
Once she reached the pavement, she bent over and rested her hands on her knees while she heaved in a few breaths. Then she yelled into the woods, “Can you guys hear me?”
The answering yell from Petey sounded closer than she’d expected. They must only be twenty yards or so down the slope. Maybe her nerves had made it seem farther. Jeff’s life might depend on her getting help, after all.
She took a position facing toward town, where no one could zip past without seeing her. This road didn’t get a lot of traffic. Only a few families lived past here—the Noonans, the Rosses, and the residents of an Old Believers Russian village located ten miles or so farther into the hills.
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