“Stay.”

He sounded rusty, as if he didn’t know how to ask for what he wanted. He tried again. “Talk to me. Tell me about…” What? Her life? What she expected the “right” man to be like? “A movie. I haven’t been to one in a long time. What’s the last one you went to?”

Fiona relaxed, as he’d hoped she would. While he measured sugar, she told him about a thriller with a huge budget, big stars and an unlikely plot.

They hadn’t even been there twenty-four hours.

How, in such a short time, had he got to the point where he had a thought like I need her? He hadn’t kissed her, hadn’t touched her beyond a hand on the shoulder, didn’t know that she felt anything at all for him.

He didn’t need her. That had been a ridiculous thought. But he wouldn’t mind if snow kept falling for another day or two.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Janice Kay Johnson is the author of nearly sixty books for adults and children. She has been a finalist for the Romance Writers of America RITA® Award for four of her novels. A former librarian, she lives north of Seattle, Washington, and is an active volunteer at, and board member of, Purrfect Pals, a no-kill cat shelter. When not fostering kittens or writing, she gardens, quilts, reads and e-mails her two daughters, who are both in Southern California.

Dear Reader,

I confess to thinking it’s great fun to tweak classic romance plots – you know, secret baby, marriage of convenience, snowbound hero and heroine… And I admit to having a special fondness for the snowbound plotline. There are so few ways, in the modern world, we can isolate two people, trapping them together for days and days as the sexual tension rises to an unbearable level…

But let’s face it, the odds aren’t great, are they? Every time I read one of those books, I’d think about how, with my luck, I’d be more likely to end up snowbound with a sexy guy and his wife and kids. Since I write (and love) romance, that’s not a workable scenario. So what can I throw into the stew to give it an unexpected taste? Not a baby – newborn babies are a common element in the classic take. They nap so conveniently, you know. I didn’t want convenient for this book, I wanted inconvenient. No, what if our heroine were to have a teenager with her? Ooh, better yet: what about eight teenagers?

Yes, the plucky heroine is chaperoning a high school trip when in the midst of a blizzard she finds herself snowbound at a Cascade Mountain lodge with eight feuding, funny, sometimes depressed teenagers for whom she’s responsible – and their reluctant host is a brooding man hiding out from the world after returning from being wounded in Iraq. Now, there’s a mix!

I hope you have as much fun reading Snowbound as I did writing it.

Best,

Janice Kay Johnson

Snowbound

JANICE KAY JOHNSON

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

FIONA MACPHERSON was starting to get scared.

The rhythmic thwap, thwap, thwap of the tire chains helped her shut out the chatter of the eight teenagers behind her. With the snow falling so hard, she felt as if she and the kids were in a bubble, darkness all around, the headlights only reaching a few feet ahead. Snow rushed at the windshield, a white, ever-moving veil.

She shouldn’t have taken this route—a thin line on the map that promised to cut north of the projected path of the storm.

“This way’s good,” Dieter Schoenecker had said, when she told her vanload of students what she intended to do. “We cross-country ski at a place up near High Rock Springs.”

Hadn’t she been a high school teacher long enough to know better than to take a sixteen-year-old’s word for anything?

Not fair. She was responsible, not Dieter, and she had had some doubts about whether the line on the map was too skinny. But it was a highway, it headed westbound, and they should have been able to make it across the Cascade Mountains before the blizzard arrived.

Only, they hadn’t. They’d left Redmond, out in the high desert country of eastern Oregon, hours ago, right after the Knowledge Champs competition had ended. They should have been close to home in Hawes Ferry south of Portland by now, or at least descending into the far tamer country in western Oregon. Instead they were in the thick of the storm. Fiona was struggling to maintain twenty miles an hour. It had been at least two hours since she’d seen another vehicle.

We should have turned back when we stopped to put on chains, she thought. And when they realized they no longer had cell phone reception.

The voices behind her had died out, Fiona realized.

“You okay, Ms. Mac?” one of the boys asked.

Despite the fact that her neck and shoulders ached and her eyes watered from the strain, she called back, “Yep. You hanging in there?”

Nobody had time to answer. A jolt shuddered through the van as it hit something and came to a stop, throwing Fiona against her seat belt.

“What happened?” Amy cried.

“We probably went off the road,” Dieter said.

Fiona made everyone but Dieter stay in the van. She and he put on parkas and got out. With the engine turned off, it was utterly silent outside, the headlights catching the ghostly, slow fall of the snow and the white world they found themselves in. Tree boughs were cloaked with white, as were rocks and shrubs and ground.

“Awesome,” he said.

She opened her mouth to snap at him, then stopped herself. He was young. She should be grateful he didn’t realize how frightening their situation was.

With the single beam of light from the flashlight that had been in the glove compartment, they could see that the van’s right front wheel rested against a mound. Turning, she cast the thin beam in a semicircle and realized that the road—or what must surely be road—curved. She’d gone straight.

“Try reversing,” Dieter suggested. “A couple of us can push, too.”

Moments later, they were on the road again. Fiona waited until the boys clambered back in, bringing a burst of cold with them and shaking off snow. This time, Dieter got in the front seat.

“You know the rules,” she began.

“Yeah, but maybe I can help you see.”

After a moment, she nodded, then with a hand that had a fine tremor put the van in gear and started forward.

Where were the snowplows? she wondered in frustration, but knew—they would be working on the more traveled highways.

I’ve endangered these children’s lives with my bad decision. She felt as if ice were running though her veins.

“What if we get stuck?” Amy asked, in a high, frightened voice.

“We’ve done fine so far.”

“But…”

Dieter said, “They don’t close passes without sending, like, a state patrolman over it to be sure no one is stranded.”

Fiona was momentarily reassured until she thought about how many roads there would be to patrol. And, because this snowfall was so heavy, anyone coming behind them might find the highway totally impassable.

Out of the van back there, she’d realized how bitterly cold it was tonight. If they got stuck, she could run the engine and the heater off and on, but none of them were dressed for more than a dash from the parking lot into a building. She, Dieter and Hopper were the only ones with real winter parkas.

“Tell me if you see any sign of habitation,” she said softly to Dieter.

Leaning forward, staring at the same white kaleidoscope she was, he nodded.

Fiona blinked hard to ease the strain on her eyes.

Stay on the road, keep going and sooner or later they’d break free of the storm.

It was the staying on the road part that was the real challenge.

JOHN FALLON hadn’t intended this trip to be a race against the storm. Once he heard the weather reports, he’d decided to move up the shopping expedition to town he had planned for next week. But the storm wasn’t supposed to hit until the middle of the night or the following morning.

He was coming out of the country store with his arms full of groceries when he saw white flakes swirling from the sky. Given that he had an hour’s drive deeper into the mountains and the blizzard, the sight wasn’t welcome.

Nodding at townsfolk when he had to, he took the time to pick up his mail, go to the tiny liquor store and then to top his Toyota 4Runner’s tanks at the Chevron station before setting out for the lodge. With the snow coming down harder, he skipped his usual stop at the library to pick out new books and check his e-mail.

Within half an hour, he was cursing under his breath. The snow was falling heavily—more like a midwinter storm than a pre-Thanksgiving one. Good thing he’d stocked up. If it kept on like this, the plows might take a week to get to his place. The Thunder Mountain Lodge, of which he was now proprietor, was the last dwelling on the west side of the mountains. Just past the lodge, the highway closed for the winter unless the snowfall was light.

If this storm was any indication, snowfall was going to break records this season.

He wouldn’t mind. When he bought the lodge in December last year, John had intended to keep it operating, but he hadn’t done much advertising and he found himself looking forward to midweeks when he had the place to himself.

Families were the most annoying. Cross-country skiers, snowshoers, hikers; they were okay. They tended to be out all day and come back tired. They’d eat quickly and gratefully, maybe sit in front of the blaze in the huge, river-rock fireplace that was the lodge’s heart, then disappear into their rooms. But families… They were another story. The mothers always wanted to talk and the kids yelled and ran around and knocked things over. Families wanted suggestions for activities, baby bottles heated at odd hours, snacks for the kids after the kitchen was closed.

He’d had a particularly hellish group in August. Ironically a church group. Teenagers. They’d taken over the lodge as well as all five of his cabins strung along the river. They sang songs, they built bonfires, they flirted and wrestled and ate like there was no tomorrow. They swarmed.

John just wanted to be alone. Didn’t seem like too much to ask, did it? He’d bought the damn place because it was about as isolated as you could get without roaming with Kodiaks in Alaska. Paying guests would give him enough income to get by, he’d figured. He would cook, serve, clean. Give him something to do. Otherwise, he’d keep to himself.

He just hadn’t realized how busy Thunder Mountain Lodge was. One person after another told him, “We love the lodge. We come every year. It has to be one of the most beautiful places on earth.” He also heard how refreshed they were after their stay.

They should have been here at the same time as the church group.

He had closed up the cabins for the winter, on the advice of the old curmudgeon he’d bought the lodge from, turning off the water and wrapping pipes. He’d done that just a few weeks ago. The lodge itself had six guest rooms along with his quarters in the back, plenty for the backcountry skiers and snowshoers who came in the winter. He had a couple scheduled to arrive tomorrow. Something told him they wouldn’t be coming.

Wouldn’t break his heart.

But he did wish he’d gotten down to town and back a few hours earlier.

The last half hour was a bitch, with the snow piling up at record speed and visibility close to zero. His mind kept flashing back to the sandstorms in Iraq, as blinding and bewildering.

Damn it, don’t do this. Focus.

He knew every turn, every landmark. Even so, with the advent of darkness, he almost missed his turn. The massive, wood-burned sign that read Thunder Mountain Lodge carried a swag of snow and was already buried up to the bottom of the letters.

The lodge was half a mile farther, down a winding driveway that dropped toward the river. This privately owned land was heavily forested, the old growth here one of the attractions.

John had left the shed doors open and now drove right in. He was going to have to get out the shovel if he wanted to close them.

Unload first.

Making several trips, he carried the groceries and booze into the big, empty kitchen. Mail he left on the farmhouse table that sat in the middle. Once he’d put away the perishables in the restaurant-quality refrigerator, John put his parka and gloves back on and went out to shovel enough to close the shed doors. Having already worked up a sweat, he cleared a path to the front steps and the steps themselves, too, even though he’d likely have to redo them come morning if he needed to go out.

Then he stood for a minute in the dark, only the porch light and dim glow coming from the windows, and listened to the eerie hush snow brought when it wrapped the world in white batting.

For that brief moment, his soul felt at peace.

IN BACK, at least two of the girls were crying, one quietly, one not so quietly. Fiona simply didn’t have the energy to try to reassure them. In fact, she’d have liked to cry herself.

They’d gone off the road twice more. With all three boys pushing, each time they’d made it back onto pavement. This last time, the snow had been knee deep. That meant the undercarriage was pushing through snow. Clammy with panic, Fiona started forward again. Now even the sound of the chains was muffled. Thank God, the highway didn’t seem to run next to a river or creek. If they slid down an incline…

Don’t think about it.

For the thousandth time, she told herself, if we keep going, we’ll eventually come out of the mountains. Studying the map all those hours ago, she’d noticed a couple of little towns dotting the line of the highway once it crossed the pass and descended toward the Willamette Valley and Portland. There would be lights. Heat. Food and safety. Although it had been scarcely noticeable at the time, they must have gone over the pass an hour or more ago, because the road was definitely descending now, although not steeply.

But it seemed, if anything, that the snow was falling harder. Or perhaps her eyes were just so tired, she was less capable of seeing through that driving veil of white. Her neck and shoulders and arms were rigid. Somebody would probably have to pry her fingers from the steering wheel.

Her frozen fingers, she thought morbidly. After the van disappeared into a snowbank and its tracks filled in. Or perhaps her fingers wouldn’t be frozen anymore, if nobody found the missing teacher and her pupils until spring.

“Wait a minute!” Dieter jerked. “Did you see that?”

She braked. “What?”

“I think…wait. Let me get out.” He reached back for his parka, grabbed the flashlight from the glove compartment and sprang out, disappearing immediately in the dark.

Fiona just sat, too exhausted to move. Too exhausted to worry, even when he didn’t come back for several minutes.

“Where’d he go?”

“Why are we stopped?”

One of the girls, voice high and rising, “Are we stuck?”

Fiona was too exhausted to answer, as well.

The passenger door opened again, and Dieter said exultantly, “There’s tire tracks. And a turn here. I think there’s a sign. I bet it’s Thunder Mountain Lodge. Remember how I told you my family comes up here?”

Tire tracks.

“What if whoever made the tracks came out?” Kelli asked. “And they’re, like, gone, and even if we find the lodge it’s cold and dark?”

A lodge. Fiona’s mind moved sluggishly over the idea.

“We could build a fire,” she said.

Voice pitched so only Fiona would hear him, Dieter said, “If this is Thunder Mountain, the next town is something like another hour. And that’s when the road’s plowed. I don’t remember much in between.”

The others were offering opinions, but she ignored them.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m going to back up. Can you guide me?”

He left the passenger door open and talked her through backing up ten yards or so. Then he shone the flashlight on the tracks in the snow. Now Fiona could see them, too. A vehicle had come from the other direction and turned into an opening between trees.

Please God, she thought, let the driver have known where he was going. Don’t let me follow someone else as desperate as we are.

“See?” Dieter turned the beam on a dark bulk to the right as she turned into the road or driveway or whatever it was. “Let me go look.”

She watched as he plowed his way through and took a swipe at whatever it was with his bare hand. Clumps of snow cascaded down, exposing writing that the dim beam picked out.

He yelled, “It is Thunder Mountain Lodge. Cool!”

When he got back in, Fiona asked, “Please tell me it’s not another five miles.”

He laughed exultantly. “Nope. It’s like…I don’t know, a quarter of a mile. Half a mile?”

“Okay,” she said. “Here goes.”

Whatever vehicle had gone before her had obviously passed by a while back; it was a miracle that Dieter had spotted the tracks, vanishing fast under fresh snowfall. She kept losing sight of them in the white blur.

The kids in back were talking excitedly now that salvation was at hand. Dieter started telling them about this great old lodge, the ancient trees and the river just below.

“There’s this huge fireplace,” he was saying, when the van lurched and the front end seemed to drop.

One of the girls screamed. Fiona braked, out of instinct—they had already come to a dead stop. Dieter jumped out again, coming back to shake his head.

“I don’t know if we can get it out.”

“Can you still see the tire tracks?”

He looked. “Yeah.”

“It can’t be that far. We’ll walk.” She turned. “Everyone, bring your stuff, especially if you have any food left over from lunch or dinner.” They had stopped at a hamburger joint on the way out of Redmond. “Put on all the clothes you brought.”

She took her purse, but left the tote that held only the schedule for the day, competition rules and her notes on questions she would drill students on in the expectation they’d be asked the same ones again someday. Once everybody was out, she made them line up single file behind Dieter, bringing up the end herself. Then, feeling silly, she locked the van.

“Lead on,” she called.

Her face felt the cold first, then her feet. Was this the right decision? she worried, as they stumbled through the dark and falling snow led by—God help them—a sixteen-year-old boy’s memory of a winter vacation.

Well, she had no choice—not after she’d gotten the van stuck. Within minutes, she was almost too cold to care.

“I see lights!” Dieter exclaimed.

Fiona blinked away the flakes clinging to her lashes and peered numbly ahead. Was that a dim glow, or a mirage?

“Keep going,” she ordered, her face feeling stiff.

Gradually she saw them: golden squares of windows. Not brightly lit, but as if there might be lights on deeper inside the lodge. Or maybe firelight was providing the illumination.

They were staggering, a ragged line of kids and Fiona, when they reached porch steps. Freshly shoveled, she saw in amazement, as if someone had been expecting them.

On the porch that seemed to run the width of the rustic lodge, her students clustered, waiting for her.

The door was massive, the knocker a cast-iron bear. She lifted it and let it fall. Once. Twice. Then again.

She was about to reach for the handle to find out if the door was locked when the porch light came on, all but blinding her, and the door swung open.

Framed in the opening was a man with a scarred face who said, “What in hell?”

Fiona’s knees weakened and she grabbed for the door frame. “Can we please come in?”

WATCHING THEM file past him, not just a couple of stranded travelers but a whole damn crowd of them, John felt a wave of incredulity. What kind of idiots had been taking the pass in this blizzard? How in God’s name had they found the lodge?

And how long was he going to be stuck with them?

They all went straight to the fireplace and huddled in front of the fire with their hands out toward it as if asking for a blessing. None made any move to shed jackets, and he realized studying their backs that most of them weren’t dressed for the weather at all. Athletic shoes and jeans were soaked to their knees and probably frozen, too.

Was he going to have to deal with frostbite?

“How far did you walk?”

One guy turned his head. “Just, I don’t know, halfway from the turn?”

The voice gave him away. He was a kid. John looked down the line. They were all kids!

“Isn’t there an adult with you?”

“Me.” The woman who’d been the first to come in turned to face him, pushing back the hood on her parka. Dark, curly hair framed a face on which he could read exhaustion. Her eyes, though, were the pale, clear grey of the river water cutting between snowbanks. She was young, not much older than her charges, her body as slight as those of the teenage girls. “My name is Fiona MacPherson. Thank you for taking us in.”

“What were you doing out on the road?”

She explained. They’d competed in a high school Knowledge Champs tournament in Redmond, and were returning home over the mountains.

“We came over this morning on Highway22,” she explained, sounding meek. “But the weather reports said a storm was coming from the south, so I thought I’d take a more northerly route back.”

“This highway closes in the winter. You’re probably the last ones over it.”

“I didn’t know that.”

And parents trusted her to be in charge? He shook his head.

“You’re damn lucky to have made it.” John waved off whatever she was going to say. “You all need to get out of your wet clothes. I don’t suppose you have anything to change into?”

Eight—no, nine—heads shook in unison.

“Get your shoes and socks off. I’ll see what I can find.”

He started with the lost and found. Seemed like every week somebody left something. Sunglasses, single gloves, bras hanging on the towel rack in the shared bathroom, long underwear left carelessly on the bed, you name it, he’d found it. If one of the girls wanted birth control pills, he could offer her a month’s supply. Bottles containing half a dozen other prescription drugs. Pillows, watches, but mostly clothes.

John dragged the boxes out and distributed socks, one pair of men’s slippers, sweatpants, a pair of flannel pajama bottoms and miscellaneous other garments. Then, irritated at the necessity, he raided his own drawers and closet for jeans, socks and sweaters.

Without arguing, they sat down on chairs and the floor as close to the fire as they could get and changed, nobody worrying about modesty. Not even the teacher, who wore bikini underwear and had spectacular legs that she quickly shivvied into a pair of those skintight, stretchy pants cross-country skiers wore these days. They looked fine on her, he saw, while trying not to notice.

“We were so lucky to find you,” she told him, apparently unaware that he’d noticed her changing. “I couldn’t see anything. But Dieter—” she gestured toward one of the boys “—saw tire tracks. I don’t know how. Then he spotted your sign. He and his family have stayed here before.”

“You’re not the old guy who was here then,” the kid said.

“I bought the lodge last year.”

“It’s a cool place! My family and me, we’ve come a couple times. Once in the summer, when we stayed in one of the cabins. Last time we skied.”

“It’s not skiing when you have to plod instead of riding up the hill,” one of the girls sniffed. Literally—her nose was bright red and dripping.

“Sure it is,” the first boy argued. He was at that ungainly stage when his hands and feet were out-sized and the rest of him skinny. Crooked features added up to a puppy-dog friendly face. “You don’t think when they invented skiing they had quad chairlifts, do you?”

“My great-great-whatever came west in a covered wagon, too,” she retorted, with another sniff. “I’d rather fly United, thanks.”

The rest chimed in with opinions; John didn’t listen. He looked at the teacher. “Anyone going to miss you?”

“Oh Lord! Yes! We were having trouble with cell phone coverage.” She gave him a hopeful look. “Do you have a land line?”

“Out here? No. And cell phone coverage is lousy for miles around even when the weather’s good. Unfortunately, my shortwave radio had an accident and I haven’t got it fixed.” If what his idiot guest had done to it with spilled coffee could be called an accident. And he should have taken the damn thing to town to be worked on, but hadn’t felt any urgency. Stupid, when a guest could have an emergency at any time.

“Well, we’ll try again anyway. Kids, anyone who brought a phone. If you reach someone, tell them to start a phone tree.”

Six out of the eight kids pulled tiny flip phones out of a pocket or bag. John suddenly felt old. When he was sixteen, nobody’d had a phone. Or wanted one.

The teacher was the only one who got lucky, although he gathered the reception wasn’t good. The kids all put theirs away, shaking their heads.

She kept raising her voice. “Yes, Thunder Mountain. You’ll call the parents?” Pause. “It’s snowing there, too?”

That caused a stir.

“Wow.”

“Cool.”

“We don’t get snow that much. I wish I was home.”

“We have more here.”

“Snowball fight!” another boy said. This one’s face caused a shift in John’s chest. He looked too much like the teenage boys hanging around on dusty streets in Baghdad. He might be Hawaiian or Polynesian. Something just a little exotic, skin brown and eyes dark and tilted.

“Yeah!” The third boy, short and stocky with spiky blond hair. Sweatpants from the lost and found bagged on him. “I will so take you down.”

Girls giggled. Like a litter of puppies driven by instincts they didn’t understand, the boys began shoving and wrestling.

Dark heads, laughter. A group of boys much like this, clowning around. A mud-brick wall. Rusty dust puffing under their feet, a couple of dirty soccer balls lying forgotten.

With a physical wrench, John pulled himself from the past. He tolerated guests at the lodge. Teenage boys, he avoided. Their very presence brought back things he couldn’t let himself remember. How was he going to endure this group?

The teacher—Fiona?—evidently sensed his longing. After telling the kids that the principal would call all their parents, she said to John, “I hope you won’t be stuck with us for long. Um… Do you have any idea when this storm is supposed to end?”

“A couple of days, at least. And I’m at the bottom of the highway department’s list for plowing. Could be a week before they get here.”

The longest week of his life.

Just like that, he was propelled into another flashback.

He was driving a truck, the sun scorching through the window and sweat dripping from his helmet, dust from the convoy ahead turning his and everyone else’s face to gray masks their mamas wouldn’t have recognized. Women walking along the side of the road in dark robes—how in hell did they stand the heat inside them? Kids giving the convoy wary, sidelong looks. Men staring with flat hostility. M-16 in his lap, John scanned the people, the side of the road, the rooftops of the sand-colored mud buildings for anything that looked wrong.

As quickly, the vivid memory faded and he was back in the lodge, only the teacher looking at him a little strangely.

Not the longest week of his life, he apologized silently, if anyone was listening. He’d lived a year of longer ones. Survived them.

If living half in the past, hiding out in the present, could be called survival.

CHAPTER TWO

“A WEEK!” the teacher exclaimed, and John had the sense she was repeating herself.

Yeah, he’d definitely tuned out.

“But…if the highway department knows we’re stranded here, surely they’ll plow this far sooner than that. You can’t possibly have enough food to keep us that long.”

“This is a lodge. I take in paying guests. Since I just stocked up, we won’t starve.”

“Oh.” She nibbled on a delectable bottom lip, full enough to make his groin tighten.

Damn. Why her? The subject of women wasn’t something he’d wasted any time thinking about since he got out of the VA hospital.

“Do you have any guests right now?” she asked.

John shook his head. “Expected a couple today. Don’t suppose they’ll make it.”

“So you have enough beds?”

This was a woman who knew how to stick to the essentials.

“We’ll have to make some up.”

“We can do it. I don’t want to put you out any more than we have to.”

You want to share mine?

Right. That was happening.

Nice, he thought somewhat grimly, to know that his libido had survived.

“I’ll show you where the bedding is.”

She ordered them all to come. “You can make up your own beds.”

“We get our own?” a blond pixie asked.

“Two to a bed,” Fiona MacPherson decreed. “We’ll stick to our buddy system.”

Made it harder for a boy to sneak into a girl’s room, John diagnosed with wry amusement. Chaperoning this bunch for a week would be a chore. The school ought to give her a nice fat bonus once she returned the kids to their parents’ custody. Unless, of course, she was in hot water for setting out in the first place on the foolhardy venture to cross the pass.

They trooped upstairs. He showed them the shared bathrooms, each boasting a deep, claw-foot tub, double sinks, piles of towels and open shelving for the guests’ toiletries.

“Oh, eew,” one of the girls exclaimed. “We don’t have toothbrushes or anything!”

He almost kept his mouth shut. Bad breath might make the chaperoning easier. But that was just plain mean. He might be a recluse, but he was also an innkeeper.

“I keep extras for guests who forget them. Remind me and I’ll go get some.”

“Bless you,” the teacher murmured, apparently not having considered the benefits of halitosis.

He handed out flannel sheets and duvet covers, they picked partners and rooms. Fortunately two of the rooms each had a pair of queen beds, so the three boys went in one of those and three of the girls in the other. Another pair of girls shared a room and Fiona claimed the first room at the head of the stairs.

John went in with her to help her make up the bed. Setting the armful of linens on a chair, she looked around with approval.

“Dieter told me the lodge was really nice. This is lovely.”

He’d bought the place as-is, but it was in good shape. Her room was typical: polished plank floors with a rag rug to add warmth, a bed built of peeled Ponderosa pine and covered with a puffy duvet, antique pine dresser with a mirror that showed a wavery reflection. The artwork varied from room to room, giving each character. She was in the one he privately thought of as the Rose Room, with cottage-style paintings in which roses smothered fences and arbors and tangled in old-fashioned hedgerows. He tended to put women in here.

With quick, efficient movements, he and Fiona made up her bed with snow-white sheets and duvet cover. When they’d finished, she looked at him over the bed.

“I don’t think you told me your name.”

“Fallon. John Fallon.”

Her smile was a thing of beauty, somehow merry and so warm he had the sudden illusion of not needing the fire downstairs. “It’s nice to meet you, John Fallon. You’re a kind man to try to hide how much you wish we hadn’t shown up on your front porch.”

He thought of himself as a decent man. Decent enough to do the right thing when he had to.

“I usually have guests. You’re not putting me out.” What was a little white lie?

“We’re just surprise guests.”

And nonpaying ones, he presumed.

Again, she seemed to read his mind.

“I’ll make sure you’re reimbursed, at least for the food. I teach at a private school.” She nodded toward the voices drifting from the other bedrooms. “Most of their parents are pretty well-to-do.”

He only nodded. “That would be appreciated.”

Again her teeth closed briefly on her lower lip. “I hate to ask, but…We ate at four o’clock. I suspect the boys especially are starved.”

John had once been skinny like the one kid. He seemed to remember eating from morning to night and never feeling full.

“Sandwiches?”

“Sandwiches would be great.” She treated him to another smile, this time relieved.

They met at the foot of the bed and had one of those awkward moments where they both hesitated, started forward, shuffled, until he finally waved toward the door. “After you.”

It seemed to him that her cheeks were a little bit pink. Did she feel some of the pull that had him half-aroused and uncomfortable?

He couldn’t imagine. With his scarred face and obvious limp, he was more likely to be an object of pity than lust. His throat momentarily tightened. Had that moment been so clumsy because she’d been trying to defer to him since he was disabled?

“I’ll get started on food,” he said shortly, and left her to the kids.

Like a bunch of locusts, they showed up in the kitchen all too quickly and began filling plates. A couple of the smaller girls barely nibbled—one was Asian, a tiny thing with glossy black hair down to her hips, the other thin and plain with braces that pushed her lips out. Those two, he remembered, had taken the room with one bed, and now were quieter than the others.

Two girls were arguing loudly about some math question, while another flirted with the stocky boy who seemed more interested in piling food on his plate. The teacher looked dead on her feet.

She swayed, and John stepped forward, but she rallied and said, “Wow! This is great. Thank you.”

They took seats around the long, farmhouse table that occupied the middle of the enormous kitchen, John at her right side.

“Everyone, our host is John Fallon.” She reeled off their names, most of which he’d likely need to hear again.

The tall, skinny boy who’d stayed here before was Dieter Schoenecker, the stocky one had the unlikely name of Hopper Daniels, and the third boy was Troy Thorsen. Nordic last name, which didn’t explain his racial heritage.

The girls were a blur. Kelli—with an i, she made sure to tell him, last name he didn’t catch, Amy Brooks, who seemed given to posing and flipping her hair, Tabitha, Erin and…that left someone out, but he couldn’t remember who. Probably the plain, quiet one.

Watching the speed with which the food disappeared, John took mental stock of his larder. They’d be okay for a week, he figured; he kept an emergency supply of canned goods he could dip into if need be.

Fiona took half a sandwich and ate it slowly, as if she had to remind herself to take a bite and swallow. Clearly they’d driven across the mountains that morning, and had probably made an early start to have had time for any kind of competition during the day. Driving for hours through the blizzard had to have wrung her out.

“Why don’t you hit the sack?” he said quietly. “They’re still wound up. I can sort them out later.”

“I’m responsible…”

“You look ready to collapse.”

Dieter Schoenecker, who sat on her other side, heard. “Ms. Mac was Superwoman today.”

She managed a grin and pretended to flex a bicep. “That’s me. Speaking of which—” she pitched her voice a little louder “—have I mentioned that I have X-ray vision? I see through walls.”

“Ahh! Ms. Mac doesn’t trust us.” The Hopper kid clasped his hand to his chest and fell back in his chair.

She just smiled. “Bathroom on the right side upstairs is for girls, left side for boys.”

“Toothbrushes.” John pushed back his chair and stood. His bad leg chose to cave, and he had to brace his hand on the back of the chair until the spasm let up. Without looking to see if anyone had noticed, he left the kitchen.

He grabbed a basket and piled it with toothbrushes, toothpaste in sample tubes, dental floss, the small bottles of shampoo and hand lotion he put out when readying a bathroom for guests, and a couple of packages of feminine products. It might embarrass the girls, but if they were here for very many days, odds were a couple of them would need something.

Fiona stood when he came back. “I’ll take that up.” She looked into the basket. “Oh, thank goodness. I didn’t even think of that as a problem. I’ll distribute all this.” She raised her voice. “I’m going to bed, kids. Help Mr. Fallon clean up, then I expect you to get ready for bed, too. It’s been a long day.”

“Do we have to turn the lights out?” Amy looked genuinely horrified.

“No. You can read, talk, listen to music, whatever. Just keep it down, and be considerate of each other.”

“If you need anything during the night—” John pointed to a door at the back of the kitchen “—that’s where I’ll be.”

Nods all around.

He walked the teacher to the foot of the stairs.

Standing one step up, she was at eye level with him. “Did I tell you when I called that our principal said they had four inches and snow still piling up even in Portland? It’s amazing that you have electricity.”

“We operate on a generator. There aren’t any power lines out here.”

“Oh. That makes sense.” She gave a small shiver. “I can’t believe how lucky we were. I didn’t want the kids to know, but…I was so scared.”

Feeling cruel, he said, “You should have been. Without winter gear…”

Her chin came up. “This blizzard wasn’t predicted so soon. And none of the meteorologists expected it to be so major. It’s only November!”

“You ever noticed how ski areas open Thanksgiving weekend? Means they’ve been getting snow for weeks.”

“That’s true, but we’re not at that kind of elevation here…” She trailed off, then sighed. “You’re right. We should have never set off without being prepared. I knew we had chains, and I’ve driven in snow, so I got complacent. But my dad kept down sleeping bags in the trunk whenever we traveled during the winter.”

“Smart man.”

“You saved our lives.”

“No. It sounds like Dieter did.”

Her face softened. “He did. He’s an amazing boy. Really brilliant. I mean, they’re all smart, but not like him. And he’s so… together. Mature and, I don’t know, comfortable with himself. Which, let me tell you, is rare in sixteen-year-olds.”

The boys he’d known in Iraq were younger in years, if older in experience. Living in a war zone did that to kids.

He jerked his head toward the kitchen. “They all that age?”

“Willow is fifteen. She’s our only sophomore. And Troy and Erin are seniors, so they’re seventeen. The rest are juniors.”

John nodded.

“It’s nice of you to take charge. I really am tired.”

“Go. They’ll be fine.”

“I know. You’re right.”

Still she didn’t move, and he thought how easy it would be to step forward, wrap a hand around the back of her head and kiss her.

Something on his face may have given away the tenor of his thoughts, because her color rose and she groped backward with one foot for the next step.

“I don’t know what I’m just standing here for. Tiredness, I guess. Um, good night.”

He dipped his head. “Good night.”

John stayed at the foot of the stairs watching until she disappeared above with the basket of toiletries. He should have offered her a nightgown; he had a few of those in the lost and found, too. All were sturdy flannel. He didn’t know if any newlyweds had ever honeymooned at Thunder Mountain Lodge, but if so the brides had remembered to take home their lacy negligees.

John frowned, trying to remember whether the kids had called her Miss. Or was it Ms.? Young as she looked, she could be married. No, he decided; if she was, she would have called her husband tonight, not the principal. And she’d asked him to phone parents. She hadn’t said anything about him calling a husband.

Heading back to the kitchen, he was irritated to realize that he felt relieved.

FIONA HAD NEVER been more grateful to be able to brush her teeth. As she did so, she thought about their host. He’d been remarkably kind so far, but he’d looked so grim all the while!

She wondered what had happened to give him the limp and the scar that ran from his jaw down his neck and beneath the collar of his shirt. It looked…not brand-new, but not as if he’d lived with it for years, either. Several times she’d seen a spasm of pain on his face, too, so the injury to his leg obviously still troubled him.

Well, she could hardly ask, and hoped the kids would be tactful enough not to. Or, more realistically, she should hope that they were too self-centered to care about John Fallon’s history.

Fiona brushed her hair with her own brush from her purse, then gazed at herself in the mirror. What had he seen when he looked at her? A couple of times she’d imagined… But that was silly. He probably thought she was an idiot who hadn’t showed any more sense than the teenagers would have.

She sighed. Sad as it was to admit, he was right. It terrified her still to think what might have happened if Dieter hadn’t spotted those tire tracks. The fact that they were safe and warm tonight was a miracle.

In the bedroom, she hesitated over what to wear—or not wear, finally leaving on the pants he’d lent her and her turtleneck. Just in case she had to get up for some reason during the night.

The bed felt wonderful, the fluffy duvet heavenly atop her. Tension drained out of her, and Fiona closed her eyes.

The moment she did, white swirled beneath her lids, as if the sight had been imprinted on them. She squeezed her eyes tighter shut and fought to picture something or someone else.

What she came up with was John Fallon’s face as they’d stood at the foot of the stairs. Lean, tanned, with strong cheekbones, dark bristles on jaw and cheeks, a fan of lines beside watchful brown eyes, and a mouth he kept compressed. The scar, puckered and angry. Maybe, she thought, his mouth was tight against pain and not from impatience or irritation.

But there had been that moment when she’d have sworn his gaze had lowered briefly to her mouth. The muscles in his jaw had knotted, and something had flickered in his eyes.

Had he kissed a woman since he’d been hurt?

How silly. He probably had a girlfriend, or even a wife who happened to be away right now. She doubted he had looked at her with desire—even momentarily.

He was being as polite as he was able, and she would have to do her very best to be sure they weren’t any more trouble than they had to be. It was absurd for her to wish that the unsmiling lodgekeeper would look at her with just a little more warmth.

Still, she held on to the image of his face until exhaustion overcame her.

FIONA AWAKENED to the sound of a squeal, then hushed giggles. Huh? She opened her eyes and stared at a strange, pitched ceiling. For a moment she felt completely blank. Then it came back to her.

Snowstorm, hellish drive, the lurch as the van dropped off the road, the tramp through knee-deep snow in the dark.

She had slept… She turned her head and found an old-fashioned clock on the night-stand. Twelve hours? Was it possible?

Galvanized, she jackknifed to a sitting position. Her students! And here she’d gone to sleep vowing to keep them out of their host’s hair.

No slippers, but she’d left her borrowed wool socks on. Fiona paused to peer in the mirror and shuddered. She’d scare the kids.

No choice. She needed the bathroom, and now.

Raucous laughter came from one of the girls’ rooms followed by someone shushing.

“Hey,” she said, flapping a hand as she went by.

“The bathtub is so-o amazing,” Tabitha called after her. “Mr. Fallon said it was okay to use as much hot water as we wanted.”

The idea of sinking into a deep tub of hot water was irresistible. On the other hand, putting on dirty clothes when she got out was less appealing.

Water splashed the floor in the bathroom and toothbrushes, hairbrushes and makeup were scattered over the counter. Dirty clothes were heaped in a corner. Sitting on the toilet, Fiona gazed at the pile wide-eyed. Had John Fallon come up with more clothes…?

Then she spotted the neat pile of folded laundry on the slatted shelving unit beside the towels. As if in a dream, she investigated. There were her jeans and yesterday’s socks, neatly rolled. He’d washed and dried their clothes last night.

“I’m going to marry him,” she said out loud.

If he had a clean shirt she could borrow, she could leave off her panties and handwash them. She could have that bath.

Realizing she hadn’t looked outside yet, she went to the window. Beyond the eaves, snow still fell and the world beyond was completely white. What if they had slid into a ditch last night, instead of making it safely here?

She shivered and turned quickly back to the bathroom.

Fiona brushed her tangled hair and went out, stopping once again in the door to the girls’bedroom. This time she saw that Hopper sat on the floor with his legs outstretched and Amy, Tabitha and Kelli lounged on the beds.

“Where’s everyone else?”

Kelli shrugged. “Still asleep, I guess.”

“I see it’s still snowing.”

“It’s really pretty outside.”

“Have you had breakfast?”

“Uh-huh. There’s a toaster, and this really great bread, and muffins, and when he saw we were up, Mr. Fallon scrambled some eggs. And then he gave us the laundry.”

“I couldn’t believe it when I saw he’d washed our clothes. It’s like…”

“The shoemaker and the elves.” Tabitha nodded. “The bread tasted like it was right out of the oven. Do you think he slept at all?”

“I don’t know.” Fiona scrutinized them. “He loaned you some more clothes.”

“They are so too big.” Amy gazed down at herself with comical dismay. Actually the flannel shirt she wore draped becomingly, giving her a waifish look but for the swell of breasts.

“I’m going to go borrow something, too,” Fiona declared. “And then take a bath. Don’t let Willow or Erin beat me to it if they appear.”

“We won’t.”

She’d barely reached the first floor when John Fallon materialized in front of her.

“Oh! You scared me. I didn’t see you.”

“I was adding wood to the fire.”

Their host was even better looking in the light of day. He’d shaved and wore a heavy, cream-colored, Irish knit sweater over jeans. His dark hair, brushed back from his face, was just long enough to curl over the collar of the sweater.

“Thank you for washing our clothes.”

He nodded. “I set some more out in the kitchen, if you want to borrow something. Once everyone’s up, I’ll run another load.”

“Are we leaving you anything to wear?”

“Enough.”

Was he always so closemouthed, or was it just Fiona who brought it out in him? Weren’t innkeepers supposed to brim with bonhomie?

“Um…I think I’ll go pick something out.” She started toward the kitchen.

He followed. “Breakfast?”

“I’m going to take a bath first, before the kids use up all the hot water.”

“The lodge has several water heaters. It’s not good for business to make guests take cold baths.”

“No, I suppose not. I should warn you, though, that unless they’re reined in, my group may challenge your capacity. Have you ever had a lodgeful of teenagers before?”

He seemed to shake himself. Or had he shuddered?

“Yes.”

“They shower a lot. They’re awfully conscious of how they look.” And smell.

“I remember.”

She sniffed. “Did you bake that bread fresh this morning?”

“Figured we’d need it.”

“Did you ever go to bed?”

His big shoulders moved. “I get up early.”

She opened her mouth.

“No more thanks.” Was that a trace of humor in his eyes? Or was she imagining it?

Like the living area with its enormous, river-rock fireplace, the kitchen was vast, the cabinets rustic, the floor slate. There was plenty of room in the middle for a table that would seat at least twenty.

Almost at random, she chose a red plaid flannel shirt from the neat piles on the table. “If you’ll excuse me…?”

He stepped aside.

Clutching the shirt, she hurried upstairs. Ugh. Nothing like letting a man you’d barely met see you first thing in the morning.

Willow had joined the others, and called after her, “I want a bath, too!”

“I had dibs on it.”

She locked the door and started water cascading into the tub before she noticed a cut-glass bowl of bath beads on an antique wood commode situated perfectly to hold a glass of wine, say, or candles.

The tub was definitely big enough for two.

She dropped a white bead in, and soon the scent of gardenias filled the steamy air.

She ached as if she’d competed in a triathalon yesterday. Sinking into the hot water was heavenly. The foot of the tub was slanted, and she barely held her chin above water. She actually floated, and gave a moan of pleasure. Someday, she, too, would have a bathtub like this.

If the water hadn’t cooled, she might never have been able to make herself get out. That, and the realization that her stomach was rumbling. She’d barely had a bite or two last night, and the hamburger she’d eaten at three-thirty or so yesterday afternoon seemed like an awfully long time ago.

Her bra would do for another day or two, but she added her panties to the pile in the corner and slipped on the jeans. She would offer to do the wash; somehow, the idea of the handsome, scarred stranger downstairs plucking her dirty panties from the pile and dropping them in the machine was too much for her.

The flannel shirt, well-worn, hung to midthigh and she had to roll the sleeves four or five times. Fiona dried and brushed her hair, leaving it loose around her face, then hung her towel on a rack and left the bathroom.

The sound of running water came from behind the closed door to the boy’s bathroom. Someone else was up, then.

When Fiona stopped in the door to the girls’ bedroom, Willow jumped up. “My turn.”

Erin had appeared now as well, and she shrugged. “I have to go get something clean to put on first anyway.”

As usual, she looked exquisite this morning, her black hair glossy in a plait, her skin smooth. Fiona had never seen her break out in acne, sweat or even frown. The only adopted child of a cardiac surgeon father and a mother who designed exquisite linens that sold at high-end department stores, Erin was invariably composed and quiet. She was a straight-A student and the star of the Knowledge Champs and Hi-Q teams, but no more than a ripple on her brow would show when she made a mistake or was outmatched. Fiona often wondered if she was anywhere near as serene as she appeared, or whether she suffered from the pressure of having to live up to such high-achieving parents.

Fiona made a face. Big assumption on her part. Maybe Erin’s parents were easygoing despite their career successes. Fiona had only met them once.

“Sleep well?” she asked, as they went downstairs.

Erin nodded. “Except Willow kept talking in her sleep.”

“Could you understand what she was saying?”

“Once in a while. But it didn’t really make sense. Like once she said, ‘Why did you fall down?’ And when I asked what she was talking about, she said, ‘You fell over that blue thing.’”

Fiona laughed. “That sounds pretty normal. Dreams hardly ever make sense.”

“I guess that’s true.” At the foot of the stairs, she looked shyly at Fiona. “Do you ever have ones where you can fly?”

“Not fly, but bounce. And stay up for a long time. Do you actually soar?”

“Uh-huh. Everything’s tiny below.”

Somehow that seemed rather aptly to symbolize Erin, who often kept herself apart from her peers. Fiona didn’t remember, for example, ever seeing her with a boy.

“Does the dream worry you?” she asked carefully, as they entered the kitchen.

“No.” Her voice was very soft. “Except I’m scared of heights. So it seems weird.”

Yes. It did.

“You okay rooming with Willow?”

“Sure. Are these the clothes we can borrow?” Far and away the most petite of the girls, she lifted garments until she found a turtleneck that was clearly a woman’s. More from the lost and found, Fiona surmised.

Unless it belonged to John Fallon’s currently absent wife.

“Come and get some breakfast after you’ve had your bath.”

Erin nodded and left Fiona alone in the kitchen. She sliced bread and popped two pieces in the toaster, then gazed at the small paned window beyond which she saw nothing but floating white flakes.

“Can I get you some eggs?”

Fiona jumped, turning. “You should clear your throat when you come into a room.”

He lifted his brows. “Like a butler? Ahem, ma’am?”

She laughed at him. “Exactly.”

“I feel like a butler some of the time. Invisible.” He looked surprised at his own admission.

“You own the lodge,” Fiona protested.

“But guests feel as if they’re paying for me to wait on them. Which puts me in the servant class.”

“Really? Do they talk as if you aren’t there?”

“Not everyone. But some do.”

She studied him. “You don’t sound as if you’re used to it. Which means you haven’t been doing this long.”

“I’m learning on the job.” His expression, never forthcoming, closed completely. “Your toast has popped up. And you didn’t tell me whether you want eggs.”

“If you mean it, I’d love some. Scrambled,” she added.

He nodded and got supplies from the enormous refrigerator while she buttered the slices of toast and slathered on jam that looked and—when she took a bite—tasted homemade.

In only moments, it seemed, John set the plate of eggs on the table in front of her.

“Will you sit down with me?” she asked. “I suppose you’ve long since eaten.”

“I wouldn’t mind a cup of coffee. You? I’m sorry, I should have asked sooner. I didn’t know whether the kids should be drinking it, so I didn’t offer any.”

“I’d love some.”

She began eating hungrily while he poured coffee and sat at one end of the long table with her, pushing a mug toward her. “I’m starved,” she admitted, between bites.

“Stressful day yesterday.”

“You can say that again.”

“This Knowledge Champs. Did your students win?”

“We actually have two teams. The A team did pretty well. They won one round and tied another. The B team got creamed. Partly because Amy and Hopper were too busy flirting to pay attention.”

“Ah.” His mouth relaxed into something approaching a smile. “Amy being the one constantly fiddling with her hair.”

“I swear, I’m going to make her put it in a ponytail before the next competition.”

Fiona finished her toast and considered the muffins.

“Applesauce or blueberry.”

“You made them yourself?”

“Yes.”

How like him. A succinct answer, no desire to expand the way most people would, admitting that they’d always liked to cook or hadn’t liked to cook but found they were good at it, no, The recipe is my mother’s.

So, how to learn something about him? Are you married? seemed too bald.

“Do you have kids?” she asked.

“No.”

Argh.

“Me, either,” she said. “Someday.”

He nodded, although whether concurring or simply acknowledging what she’d said, Fiona couldn’t guess.

“Do you usually have guests year-round?”

“Generally just weekends in the winter.”

“Don’t you get lonely?”

Again she thought she saw amusement, as much in a momentary narrowing of his eyes as on his mouth. Did he know perfectly well what she was getting at?

“No.” After a moment, he added, “I prefer the solitude.”

Fiona hid her face behind the mug and took a sip of coffee. “Then I’m doubly sorry,” she said, setting it down, “that we’ve had to impose ourselves on you.” She tilted her head. “I hear some of the kids coming right now.”

He rose, lines appearing between his brows. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

She looked at him. “Is it the truth?”

Very stiffly, he said, “I served in Iraq. When I got back…”

Behind him, Dieter and Troy wrestled to determine who would get through the doorway first. “Food,” Dieter moaned. “Let me at the food.”

When she looked again at John Fallon, it was to see that he had once again wiped his face clean of expression. Whatever he’d been going to say—and, from what she’d read about the problems of returning veterans, she could guess—would remain unspoken unless she wrenched it out of him.

Darn it, did the boys have to show up, just when the conversation was getting interesting?

CHAPTER THREE

WILLOW AND ERIN came into the kitchen right behind the boys, Willow with wet hair slicked to her head. If Erin had bathed, she’d somehow kept hers dry.

John took orders for eggs and disappeared into the pantry.

“Can we go outside after breakfast?” Dieter asked.

“Have you looked out the window?”

“Yeah, it’s still snowing. Major cool!”

“Do you know how easily you could get lost out there?”

“Come on,” he coaxed. “We’d stay right by the lodge.”

“Clothes are another problem. We can’t keep asking Mr. Fallon to wash them so we can go out and play.”

His face fell. “Oh. Wow. I wish I had my ski stuff.”

Personally Fiona would settle for a couple of pairs of clean underwear.

“We’ll see,” she said. “I’m going to offer to do the laundry this morning. Maybe we could do a load of wet stuff later.”

They cheered just as John return from the pantry with a big bowl.

“They want to go outside,” she explained to him. “I’m concerned about our limited changes of clothes.”

He thought he could come up with a few pairs of quilted pants and more parkas and gloves. “The lost and found is full of gloves. And hats.”

No surprise; those were the small items easy to misplace. She could lose a glove at home or in her car.

When she was done eating, she insisted on carrying her own dirty dishes to the sink and then he showed her the laundry room. “I’ll get a load running,” she said with a nod. “And I’ll organize the kids to wash dishes. You shouldn’t have to wait on us.”

He opened his mouth and closed it.

“What?”

He shook his head. “Just…you don’t look like a schoolmarm. But you have it down pat.”

“I’ve been teaching for five years now.”

“You don’t look old enough.”

Two personal observations in a row. Were either compliments?

“I’m twenty-seven.”

“So you started teaching right out of college.”

Fiona nodded. “I’ve been working on my master’s degree at Portland State for several years. Summer quarter and sometimes an evening class.”

“Better salary?”

She sighed. “Of course. But also, I’m learning. I used to think I wouldn’t be interested in administration, but maybe someday.”

This was when the conversation was supposed to become reciprocal. Yeah, I thought about minoring in education but…

Even though he didn’t say anything in response, he didn’t seem in any hurry to leave the small laundry room. In fact, she was suddenly aware of how close he was to her, and of how alone they were even though she could hear the kids’ voices coming from the kitchen. Not that she wasn’t aware of him every time she saw him, but now she found herself noticing the deep chocolate shade of his eyes, the fact that he’d apparently nicked himself shaving that morning—and how fresh and puckered that scar was.

When her gaze touched on the scar, something flared in his eyes and he took a step back.

Before he could speak, Fiona said hurriedly, “What about you? Before…Iraq. Were you career military?”

For a moment he didn’t answer, and she thought he wouldn’t. Then, with obvious reluctance, he said, “No. National Guard. Before, I was an engineer.”

“Really?” Oh, no; had she sounded surprised? Please God he hadn’t noticed. “What kind? Did you design bridges?”

“I was a mechanical engineer. Mainly robotics to increase workplace safety.”

“From that to innkeeper.” She’d meant the words to be light, but she could tell he didn’t take them that way.

A muscle spasmed in his jaw. “That’s right. Now, if you’ll excuse me?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…”

“Nothing to be sorry for.” He walked away, his limp pronounced.

Why had her asking about his past distressed him? Had he had some kind of breakdown when he got back from Iraq? Like the Vietnam vets who’d gone to live in the woods? Was the only difference that he’d been able to afford to buy this place?

The kids were all in the kitchen, Willow as usual looking shy and apart from the group, Erin equally apart but serenely so. John was nowhere to be seen. Fiona carried a basket upstairs and collected dirty clothes.

Going back through the kitchen, she said, “Boys, you get KP duty this morning. When everyone’s done eating, it’s your job to wash the dishes.”

Inevitably Hopper grumbled, “Why us?”

“Because we’re all going to take turns.” She surveyed the table. “Tabitha, Erin and I are going to make lunch. Willow, Kelli and Amy will do the lunch dishes. Dinner we’ll discuss when it gets closer.”

Smiling, she left them groaning and whining. Some of them had looked shocked enough, she had to wonder if they were required to do chores at home. That was the thing with a ritzy private school—the kids came from a whole different world than the one in which she’d grown up. They were more sophisticated in many ways than the teenagers with whom she’d gone to school. They compared Thai food at a restaurant to food they’d had in Thailand, snorkeling off Belize to experiences on the Barrier reef. They wore designer clothes, had every electronic gadget and drove BMWs the minute they turned sixteen.

But there were also huge gaps in their knowledge. They spoke of maids instead of having to carry out the garbage. She doubted most of them knew how to mop a kitchen floor or scrub a toilet. Maybe even how to wash dishes, although they were smart kids—they’d figure it out. They seemed not to have been expected to be responsible for much of anything. She had one student in her U.S. History class who’d wrecked two cars since March, and both times his parents had just bought him a new one.

Many of her students were great kids; some, like Erin, were clearly driven. But others were spoiled and simply marking time. She had two this year in Knowledge Champs that she suspected were merely padding their résumés for college: Amy and Troy. Amy was also one of the weakest participants. But Troy was different.

As a senior, he was on the A team. He was smart. But she’d also found him to be lazy. He often missed practice. His grades were top-notch, but when she looked at his file she saw that he had participated in very few extracurricular activities in his first three years of high school. That had changed this fall, when he joined Knowledge Champs and won a part in the fall musical.

Well, it wasn’t her business, but it would be interesting to see how they responded to her expectations if they were stranded at Thunder Mountain Lodge for long.

And even more interesting, she decided, as she set the washing machine to a normal cycle and started picking out light-colored garments, to see whether John Fallon opened up to her—or started hiding out in his quarters.

Of course, she shouldn’t care, considering she’d never see him again after the snowplows came through. What was it he’d said? I prefer the solitude. But then, with the way he looked at her sometimes, she wondered whether that was true.

Would he tell her how he’d been hurt if she asked? Or would he be offended by her nosiness?

She frowned and closed the lid on the washer. Probably the latter, and she wouldn’t even blame him.

But she couldn’t stop thinking about him. He was an enigma: an intelligent, well-educated man who’d presumably had a high-paying job and yet was now cooking and cleaning up after strangers at this remote lodge, glad when he had his midweek solitude. A man who hid his pain, who had been dismayed by the sight of the woman and kids on his doorstep but had been kind in large and small ways since then. He was a man who looked as if he badly wanted to kiss her, and yet he seemed to have forgotten how to flirt.

More assumptions on her part, Fiona thought with a sigh as she headed back to the kitchen to see how the kids were doing with cleanup. She was tantalized by him, so, ergo, he must be attracted to her.

Because she was so irresistible, of course.

Another sigh. She was pretty on a good day, which this was not. True beauty, she’d never achieve.

Face it: she was unlikely to have a shot at learning what had wounded John Fallon psychologically as well as physically. And, honestly, even if the attraction was reciprocal, where would they go with it, living several hours apart as they did?

Stick to fixing the kids’ problems.

“Watch it!” she heard one of the boys say, followed by the crash of a dish shattering on the slate floor.

Fiona winced and hoped the man she’d been obsessing about was out of earshot. Clearly she would have to supervise the kitchen crews.

It might have been far more interesting to have been stranded here without eight teenagers.

GETTING THE KIDS out the door was a chore, even after John went to the effort to round up a fair selection of parkas, gloves, hats and several pairs of boots. One girl—Amy—didn’t want to go. John was sympathetic until she started to whine.

“It’s cold.”

“Come on, you gotta be on my team,” Hopper coaxed.

“I don’t like getting cold.”

“But you ski!” one of the other girls said in apparent surprise.

Her lower lip was getting pouty. “Not when it’s snowing like this.”

Troy Thorsen grabbed a hat and put it on her, pulling it down over her ears even as she shook her head madly, fighting him. “You have to come out, or we won’t have even sides.”

She yanked it off and threw it at him, her eyes flashing. “I don’t have to do anything.”

Their teacher intervened. “No, you don’t. Amy, if you’d rather stay inside, that’s fine. Mr. Fallon has a good library. You can pick out a book and read in front of the fire with me.”

“But, Ms. Mac!” the skinny kid protested. “Aren’t you coming out?”

“Are you kidding? Not a chance.”

“Bummer,” somebody muttered.

Kelli sniffed and pointedly turned her back on Amy. “Let’s just go out. It doesn’t matter if sides aren’t even.”

“Yeah,” a couple of them agreed. All began zipping parkas and donning hats.

Amy smiled at Hopper, the boy she’d been hanging on. “You could keep me company. We could play a game. Or, like, explore the lodge.” Be alone, her tone promised.

Yanking on gloves, he missed the full wattage of her smile and possibly her implicit promise. “Nah, it’s going to be cool out there. I’ll see you later, okay?”

Standing to one side, John saw anger flare on her face.

Then, “Oh, fine!” she snapped. “I’ll come already.” She appropriated a parka the girl in braces had been reaching for, picked out a faux-fur headband that left her hair to ripple down her back and chose gloves.

“Cool!” Hopper declared, as oblivious to the cold-shoulder she gave him now as he’d been to her earlier, flirtation.

Coatless—she’d loaned hers to one of the girls—Fiona followed them out onto the porch. “Remember, you’ll stay right in front. I want to be able to see all of you whenever I glance out.”

“Yes, Ms. Mac,” they all said dutifully, meanwhile rolling their eyes.

Shaking her head, she came back inside and shut the heavy front door. “Want to bet on how long they last out there?”

“I’m going to say ten minutes for the one who didn’t want to go.”

She laughed. “Hopper may live to regret not falling in line.”

“Or be very, very grateful he ticked her off early on.”

This smile was wry. “Amy is a bit of a handful. She’s an only child, which doesn’t always mean spoiled…”

“But in Amy’s case does,” he said bluntly.

“I shouldn’t have said that.” She seemed perturbed at the idea of criticizing one of her charges. “I’m an only child myself.”

Interesting. He wouldn’t have guessed. Nodding in acknowledgment, he changed the subject, “If you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.”

“Can I help?”

He shouldn’t succumb to temptation. Spending time alone with her wasn’t smart. But she was not only the first woman to interest him since he’d landed stateside, she was also the first person of either gender he’d had any inclination to talk to.

So he said, “If you want to clean bathrooms.”

He was ashamed of himself for sounding ungracious. She’d been more than generous in getting the whole group to help out. Once upon a time, he’d known how to make pleasant conversation. Not so long ago. Before…

John willed his mind to go blank.

Fiona helped hold him in the here and now. “Our bathrooms?” She sounded horrified. “We can clean them ourselves.”

“We’ll just do a quick swipe. Before your charges come in and need hot baths again.”

“Oh, dear. They will, won’t they?” She nodded. “Fine. But they won’t have made their beds, either, and we’re not doing that for them.”

She sounded so fierce, a trace of amusement stirred in him. He hardly recognized it. He’d lost his sense of humor along with so much else in Iraq.

Climbing the stairs, he asked, “Are you going to be in trouble over this?”

“With the school, you mean?”

He nodded.

“I don’t know. I hope not. I did call my principal before we left Redmond, and he agreed that it made sense to take the alternate route. And it wasn’t snowing, and forecasters were off by hours about when the storm was supposed to reach this far north.”

She wasn’t trying to convince him, John guessed, but rather herself.

Her voice went quiet. “Maybe I deserve to lose my job. We could have all died. I used poor judgment.”

He’d been harsh yesterday, and now felt like the worst kind of hypocrite. His own misjudgment had resulted in horror. Maybe she’d been lucky, but her error had been mild in comparison.

Besides… He’d been surprised himself yesterday afternoon to walk out of the grocery store and see snow falling so soon. His own drive back to the lodge had been treacherous.

They’d reached the hallway above.

“I suspect there are travelers stranded all over. You may not be the only Knowledge Champs team that got in trouble. From what you said, high schools all over Oregon had sent kids.”

Her eyes widened. “Oh, no! I didn’t even think about that. Two groups came from Portland and one from Lincoln City over on the coast. What if…?” She pressed a hand to her throat.

“Nothing you can do about it.” Okay, that didn’t help, John saw immediately. He tried again. “Eight kids is enough for you to take responsibility for.”

“I can’t help worrying. Oh, I wish we could get some news coverage!”

“You can’t do anything.”

She tried to smile. “I can worry, can’t I?”

They’d been standing here in the hall too long. He was becoming uncomfortably aware of her. Of little things: the palest of freckles on the bridge of her nose, the fullness of her lower lip, the single strand of dark hair that curved down over her brow. He resisted the urge to lift his hand and smooth it back.

The effort made his voice curt. “Worrying won’t help.”

Her pointy chin rose. “No. It won’t. Hadn’t we better get started? I figure they’ve already been out there five minutes. By your estimate, Amy will be coming in the door in another five minutes.”

“I didn’t mean…”

“It’s okay. You’re trying to help. I know.” She smiled, a benediction.

His fingers curled into fists at his sides. She wouldn’t be so forgiving if she knew about the death he’d rained on the innocent.

The road to hell was paved with good intentions.

She took the girls’ bathroom, he took the boys’. From long habit, he cleaned fast, and then carried a pile of towels and washcloths to her. She was wiping the countertop, which took longer than in the other bathroom because of the amazing array of toiletries and cosmetics scattered there. All of which had presumably come out of their purses and bookbags.

“Oh, thank you,” Fiona said, seeing the pile in his arms. “More loads of laundry in the making.”

His laugh felt rusty. “You don’t look like the half-empty kind.”

She smiled impishly. “In this case, the washing machine is going to be a lot more than half full.”

Still smiling, although it felt unnatural, John said, “And I seem to remember you promised to load it.”

“Yes, I did.” Fiona began hanging towels on racks, leaving part of the stack on the counter between the pair of sinks. “What you said earlier, about Iraq… Was it awful? I know a lot of the returning veterans are suffering from posttraumatic stress, just like after Vietnam.”

PTSD—Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—was a fancy way of saying that you’d seen things you shouldn’t have, in John’s opinion. It was ridiculous to talk about it as a disease, as if the right pills would cure it.

He cocked a brow at her. “Are you asking if I’m one of them? Maybe. Most soldiers do have some symptoms.”

She flushed. “I’m so sorry if you thought… I really wasn’t asking, even obliquely. You haven’t given me any reason… Oh, dear.”

Great. He’d been a jackass again.

“That’s all right. I…hinted.”

“If you need help you can get it from the Veterans Administration, can’t you?”

“I don’t need it.” The gravel in his voice startled even him. He cleared his throat. “What I need is to…decompress. This is my way of doing that. Be around people in limited doses. Get over being jumpy without a barrage of noise around me all the time.”

She looked doubtful even though he could tell she was still embarrassed. “Is it working?”

Some days he thought so. On others, when he awakened from a nightmare with his heart pounding and a bellow raw in his throat, he wasn’t so sure.

“I feel better than I did when I tried to go back to work at Robotronics.” Which was truth, so far as it went.

“It is peaceful up here.” Shouts from outside drifted up, and her mouth curved. “Or was, until we darkened your door.”

“You’ve been good guests,” he forced himself to say.

“Why, thank you.” She sighed. “I suppose I’d better go check on the kids.”

He stepped aside and let her pass him, a flowery scent lingering for a moment even after she’d disappeared into the hall. Had she brought perfume…? No, he realized; she’d used one of those fragrant bath beads.

John glanced toward the old-fashioned tub, picturing her letting her bra drop to the floor, then slipping off her panties before stepping in. He’d seen her long legs when she changed yesterday in front of the fire. Imagining the rest of her naked body came easily. Had her hair been loose, to float on the water when she sank down into the tub? Or had she bundled it up?

Loose. Definitely loose. Her hair had still been wet when she came down for breakfast.

A groan tore its way from his throat. Damn it, what did he think he was doing? He had a shaky enough hold on reality.

He forced himself to scan the bathroom with a practiced, innkeeper’s eye before following her downstairs.

As predicted, Amy was the one to have come in and was shedding her outerwear in front of the fire. Water pooled on the plank floor around her boots.

“It’s freakin’ cold out there.” She shivered and hugged herself.

“It was nice of you to go even though you didn’t want to, for the sake of everyone else,” Fiona said.

Reaching the foot of the stairs, John paused to hear the girl’s answer to the teacher’s kindly retooling of motives he was pretty damn sure hadn’t been that altruistic.

“Even though I went out to be nice, Troy,” she said the name with loathing, “made this big snowball and smashed it against my face. He’s a…a creep.”

“Well, you did go out to have a snowball fight.”

“But he walked right up and did it! He’s such a jerk. Him and Hopper, too.”

How sad romance was when it died. A grin tugging at his mouth, John crossed the huge great room, opened the heavy front door and went out on the porch.

Snow still floated from the sky, obscuring the landscape. The steps he’d shoveled last night had disappeared again.

There seemed to be a free-for-all going on, snowballs flying, accompanied by shrieks and yells. With the snow still falling, the teenagers were indistinguishable from each other, all blurred in white. They were thigh deep and higher in the white blanket that enveloped the landscape, the shed and the cabins he could usually see from here.

John raised his voice. “Time out!”

The action stopped and heads turned his way.

“When you get cold and decide to come in, everyone go get an armful of wood and bring it. Pile’s just around the side of the lodge.” He jerked his thumb toward the north corner.

“Girls, too?” a voice squeaked.

“Girls, too.”

He went back inside, where Amy was elaborating on what pigs all boys were, while Fiona soothed with common sense. As far as he could see, the girl was a spoiled brat, but what did he know?

Not that much later, the kids did all carry in wood, and all three boys and one of the girls willingly went back for another load.

John nodded his approval as they dumped split lengths in the wrought-iron racks. “That should keep us going for a bit.”

“It’s a really big fireplace,” the girl said. “Have you ever had to cook in it?”

“No. The generator hasn’t failed me yet.”

“God forbid,” Fiona murmured.

He silently seconded her prayer, if that’s what it was. He’d be okay on his own with just the fire. But trying to feed ten of them? No ability to do laundry for who knew how long? He remembered all too well what it felt like to go for days without a chance to do more than sponge your underarms and genitals with lukewarm water, to get so you couldn’t stand your own stink, to have sand in every fold of skin and gritty between your teeth.

Somehow, he didn’t think the spoiled girl would take even three days of sponge baths and half-cooked food stoically.

“I get the first bath,” Amy declared, staring a challenge at the others.

Dieter pulled off his wool hat and shook his head like a wet dog. “We just had baths. Why do you want to take another one?”

“Because I’m cold,” she snapped, and stomped off.

“Why’s she so upset?” Hopper asked in apparently genuine puzzlement.

Nobody leaped to explain. The teacher was too tactful to say, Because she didn’t get her way. The others were either indifferent or perplexed as well.

“Maybe she’s just having a delayed reaction to the fact that yesterday was pretty scary,” Fiona said.

“But we’re okay,” one of the other girls protested.

“Some people are more resilient than others. It’s also possible that getting stranded this way reminds Amy of something that happened to her in the past. We all have different fears.”

John shook his head. Damn, she was good. He wondered if she believed a word she was saying.

“Now,” she said, more briskly, “let’s get everything that’s wet laid out in front of the fire to dry. Neatly,” she added, when one of the boys dumped socks and gloves in a heap. “Then the lunch crew can get started. Ah… who did I assign?”

“You!” they all chorused in glee.

She laughed with them. “Okay, okay! And, uh, Tabitha and Erin, right?”

Erin nodded with composure John suspected was typical, and Tabitha made a moue of displeasure.

“Next question.” Fiona smiled at him. “What’s on the menu?”

“Soup and sandwiches.”

“That we can handle. Right, gang?”

He accompanied them to the kitchen to show them where everything was. Fiona disappeared to the laundry room to move a load to the dryer and start another one while the girls opened cans of cream of mushroom soup and dumped them in pans.

John loitered for a few more minutes, waiting for Fiona to come back. Despite his earlier discomfiture at imagining her naked, he couldn’t resist watching Fiona competently slice cheddar cheese and slather margarine on bread to make the grilled cheese sandwiches she’d decided on. He doubted she or the girls were even conscious of his presence. This past year, he’d discovered he had a gift for invisibility.

Damn it, he could have spent most of the morning hiding out in his quarters, reading in front of the woodstove. But Fiona Mac-Pherson intrigued him.

What he couldn’t decide was whether it really was her in particular, or whether he’d been quietly healing without realizing it and she just happened to be the first attractive woman to come his way in a while.

Not true, he reminded himself; two weekends ago, a quartet of women in their twenties had spent two nights at the lodge. Apparently they’d been getting together a couple of times a year since they graduated from college. Each took a turn choosing what they did.

A couple of them were married, he’d gathered. One of the two single friends in particular had flirted like mad with him. He hadn’t felt even a flicker of interest, and she’d been more beautiful by conventional standards than this slender teacher with the river-gray eyes.

He’d thought rather impassively that the woman who kept making excuses to seek him out was attractive. He’d been bothered then by the fact that he’d felt not even a slight stirring of sexual desire. He hadn’t had had a woman since the night before he’d shipped out for Iraq. He’d missed sex the first months there. At some point, he’d quit thinking about it. That part of him had gone numb.

It wasn’t that he felt nothing. Grief was his constant companion, anger looking over its shoulder. He had unpredictable bursts of fear. Once in a while, he allowed himself to be grateful that he was alive and that he’d found sanctuary.

Fiona MacPherson’s pretty gray eyes and cloud of curly dark hair wouldn’t have been enough to draw him from his preferred solitude. Not if something else about her hadn’t sliced open the layer of insulation that had kept him distant from the rest of humanity.

So what was different about her? What had he sensed, from the moment their eyes first met?

He kept following her around in search of answers, not out of lust.

John gave a grunt that might have been a rusty laugh. Well, not entirely out of lust, he amended.

The sound he’d made brought her head around, although neither of the girls seemed to hear. When Fiona saw him leaning against the wall, she smiled. As if glad he was still here.

There, he thought in shock, might be his answer. She saw him. Really saw him. Not as a Heathcliff she was bent on seducing as part of a weekend’s adventure, but as if she were interested in him as a person. As if she might even like him.

In fact, she was the only person outside family and old friends who’d ever bothered to wonder if he suffered from PTSD—and he could tell she had been curious, even if she hadn’t meant to ask. He’d only admitted to having served in Iraq to a couple of other veterans who’d stayed at the lodge over the past year. They had recognized each other. If others had speculated after seeing his scar, they’d kept the speculation to themselves.

What he didn’t know was whether Fiona MacPherson looked at everyone the way she did at him. Why that mattered, he didn’t know. In a few days, she’d be gone.

But he still wanted to know.

CHAPTER FOUR

FIONA COULDN’T BELIEVE John Fallon had thought she would come right out and ask if he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. She didn’t know him anywhere near well enough to be that personal. The embarrassing part was that she had wondered, and he could probably tell.

In the privacy of the laundry room—where she was shifting loads again perhaps an hour later—she groaned aloud. He must think she had no better manners than Amy! She couldn’t even blame him.

Should she apologize once more? Or would it make things worse if she brought the subject up again?

Definitely worse, she decided.

Folding towels in the same style he did, lengthwise in thirds, she couldn’t help thinking about what he’d said. He needed to decompress, which must mean he was having trouble with… She didn’t know. People, noise, nightmares? Of course, there was his limp, too. She’d seen how much his leg hurt him on occasion. He’d go utterly still, his jaw muscles locking, and a sheen of sweat would break out on his face. Was he continuing to do physical therapy, or had he recovered as much as he was going to?

“Gee, why don’t I just ask him?” she said aloud, rolling her eyes.

His voice came from behind her, mild but impossible to ignore. “Ask him what?”

Fiona froze. Her fingers tightened on the towel in her hands and she said the first thing that came to her. “Oh, um, whether you have more laundry soap.”

“Why? Are we running low?” He came closer to her and peered into the tall plastic bucket. Which was half full.

Even more flustered by his nearness and the woodsy scent that clung to him, she babbled, “No, no, I’m just afraid we’ll use it up. I thought maybe we should start hanging the towels after baths instead of washing them incessantly.”

“We have plenty of soap.” He nodded past her, where half a dozen plastic buckets were stacked against the wall.

“Oh.” She gave a weak laugh. “I’m practically tripping over them. Well, now I feel dumb.”

“Don’t.”

Her laugh became slightly more genuine, if a touch hysterical. There he went again. Anybody else would have said, It’s okay, you were being considerate. Or, Anybody could have missed seeing them. But if John Fallon could compress twenty words into one, he did.

She grabbed almost at random for something to say. “You must get sick of laundry during your busy season.”

He reached for a towel from the basket and folded with quick efficiency compared to her more deliberate efforts. He was reaching for another by the time she was half done with one, even though his hands looked too large to be so deft.

“If you’re here for long, we’ll put the kids to work on laundry, too.”

Her embarrassment was fading, thank goodness. She chuckled. “The beauty of unpaid guests.”

“Maybe I should lower my rates in exchange for labor.”

“You could make the whole stay do-it-yourself,” Fiona suggested. “Kitchen privileges, bathroom privileges, but leave ’em clean.”

“You can’t imagine how appealing that is.” His tone was heartfelt, less guarded than usual.

“Oh, I don’t know. After a few days of cleaning up after them—” she nodded toward the kitchen “—I’m sure I’ll be in complete sympathy.”

“They’re done in the kitchen.”

A non sequitur? Or not?

She braced herself. “Is it clean?”

“I’ve seen worse.”

“But you’ve seen better.”

He shrugged. “They’re kids.”

She should have continued supervising. “I’ll finish up.”

“I already did.”

She winced. “I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

He raised his brows. “Do what?”

She forgot she held a towel in her hands. “Work nonstop. I feel guilty.”

“You’ve worked nonstop today, too,” he pointed out.

“But they’re my job. My responsibility.”

“And the lodge is mine.” While folding the last towel, he made it sound inarguable.

As, she supposed, it was. He couldn’t want a crowd of teenagers trashing Thunder Mountain Lodge, even though he seemed less than enthusiastic as an innkeeper.

“What are they up to now?” she asked.

“I offered some games. Most of them are in front of the fireplace playing them. I think a few are upstairs.”

Not one boy and one girl, she hoped.

“Amy?”

“Last I looked, sulking because someone else already took Boardwalk.”

“Oh, dear.”

He frowned. “Quit worrying about them.”

“But they’re…”

“Your responsibility. I know. But they’re not toddlers.”

“No, they’re teenagers, which is almost worse.”

Why did he look irritated? Was he tired of her fussing?

He picked up the piled towels before she could. “I’ll put these away.”

“I can…”

He ignored her, of course. Frustrated, she watched him limp out of the laundry room, leaving her to the sound of running water in the washer and the spinning dryer. Why did the wretched man have to be so hard to read? And why couldn’t he be, oh, fifty years old, balding and potbellied? Or the wizened old man Dieter had said used to own the lodge?

Fiona sighed and went to see what the kids were up to.

She found them sprawled in chairs and on the floor around a couple of different gameboards. Dieter, Hopper, Tabitha and Amy played Monopoly, Kelli and Troy Chinese checkers. Erin was curled like a cat in an upholstered chair reading. Only Willow was missing.

“Anybody seen Willow?”

They hardly glanced up.

“Nope.”

“Not in a while.”

“Uh-uh.”

Fiona hesitated, hating to look as if she was following John, but finally started up the stairs. He was just closing the door to the linen closet when she reached the top.

“Missing a kid,” she said. “Seen one?”

He shook his head. “Let me know if you need help.”

Fiona glanced in the first bedroom on the girls’ side—beds still unmade, she saw—then knocked on the door to Erin and Willow’s room. “Willow, you in there?”

“Yes.” The voice sounded small.

“I’d better feed the fire.” John passed her, his shoulder brushing hers.

Even that minor, incidental physical contact made her heart jump. Darn it, he was the sexiest man she’d ever met, even with a scar and limp. And she must be feeling a little more vulnerable than usual.

The kids. Think about the kids.

She took a deep breath. “Can I come in?”

“If you want,” Willow agreed.

Fiona pushed open the door. Willow lay on the bed, curled on her side around a pillow she clutched to her middle. Fiona sat on the edge of the bed.

“You okay, kiddo?”

Face wan, she nodded. “I have cramps.”

“Period starting?” Thank heavens for the tampons John had produced yesterday.

“Not yet. But it must be.”

“Have you taken anything?”

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