Four Nights to Forever (12 page)

“You okay?” he called over his shoulder.

She stabbed her poles into the snow and pushed forward. “Yes.” She managed to say the word with more force than she felt. She didn’t like—and had never liked—jumps. But there was no going back now.

He had asked if she trusted him. And she had meant it when she’d said yes. It didn’t mean she was looking forward to the sensation of her skis leaving contact with the snow, though.

“It’s only a little farther.”

“Okay.” Not only did she trust him but she wanted to
keep
trusting him, so she dodged another branch and skied until she was beside him.

He stopped at the top of a break between trees that was several yards wide and seemed to continue all the way down the mountain. She followed suit. It didn’t look steep, but she wasn’t worried about the pitch of the mountain; she was worried about the small mounds of packed snow that she was supposed to work through. One was too tall for her to hope she’d keep contact between her skis and the snow. She would either have to jump or go around.

“Ready?” he asked. She couldn’t see his eyes, but his hopeful expectation was clear in the rise of his cheeks.

“Yes.”
I’m ready for you.

“You’ll go first and stop after that last jump. Depending on whether or not you like it, we’ll do more.” She nodded, and he must have noticed that her whole body was tight, because he put his hand on her shoulder and said, “You don’t have to do this. There’s a way out of here that’s not over the jumps.”

“No.” She shook her head. “I want to.”

Hotshot. I want to be a hotshot.

When he smiled, she believed she could do it. “Go get ’em, tiger.”

She growled to hear him laugh, then pushed off toward the jumps. The first few weren’t terrible. They were only slightly bigger than the bumps on the trail that had led them here. Both her knees and skis bent to accommodate the mounds and she stayed in contact with the earth enough that her stomach never sank. But the magic couldn’t last. The biggest jump was up ahead.

Being timid would only make it worse, so she gathered up speed and tried to relax when the ground fell out from under her.

Maybe she relaxed too much. When she hit the hard-packed snow, her knees bent as they were supposed to but her left leg slid too far out to the side and her ski caught on something. She spun around, skiing backward down the mountain for what felt like yards but was probably only a foot or two before her right leg also caught and she pitched forward into the snow.

“Cassie!” Snow over her ears muffled Doug’s voice.

Her body started to shake, and she had to kick a couple of times to get her skis into a position where she could roll onto her back. But when she scanned her body, nothing hurt. She opened her eyes and blinked. The worst of it seemed to be that snow had fallen down the back of her shell.

Doug pulled to a stop below her, so controlled that he didn’t knock up much snow, and tossed his poles to the ground. “Are you okay?” His jaw was clenched with concern as he leaned over her. “You’re crying. Are you hurt?”

Euphoria, joy, pleasure—emotions she didn’t have enough words for—welled up in her, blocking her ability to say anything, but she was able to shake her head no.

“Oh God, Cassie.” He put a hand on his chest. “You scared the hell out of me.”

Finally, the logjam in her broke apart and she burst out into a full-throated laugh. “It was marvelous!”

“Oh God,” he said again, smiling with relief and trembling slightly.

When she finally got control over her hysteria, she wiped her cheeks with cold, snowy gloves and lifted her arms up toward him. He bent back over, and she was able to grab his shoulders and pull him down on top of her.

“Let’s do it again,” she said, their goggles and helmets banging until she was able to find the right angle and kiss him.

“Anytime,” he said. “And always.” That last part warmed her enough that she barely felt the snow melting down her back.

*

When Doug returned to the plaza after getting his bag from his locker, Cassie was sitting at one of the tables, her legs out in front of her as she leaned back, looking out over the crowd. She’d set her helmet on the bench beside her and unbuckled her boots. After a day of skiing, locks of hair were pasted to her face and her skin was still flushed, but she smiled wide when she saw him. He’d never seen anyone look so beautiful.

He didn’t get a chance to sit next to her like he’d wanted to, though, because she stood when he got close and met him over by her skis. “Hey,” she said with a sassy half-smile, her helmet swinging in her hand.

“Hey, yourself.” He reached for her skis, dismissing her offer to take his bag, which he shouldered along with her skis. “So, I thought maybe we could head down to the valley for dinner.”

“I have food in the condo. I can cook for you again.”

“I know, but . . .” How to say what he was thinking and not sound like he was making more of this week and this relationship than was there. “I’d like to take you out,” he said finally. The words weren’t even close to what he wanted to say.
I would give up the world to hear you laugh like you did on the mountain, but all I have is the rest of the week and so all I can offer you is dinner.
“A date.”

She stopped to look at him, a lock of her hair falling in front of her eyes. “A date. Okay. I, uh . . .” She didn’t seem able to finish her sentences, either. “I like to be taken out. It’s, uh, it’s not what I expected out of . . . out of this.”

Was that a good or a bad thing? Her eyes were wide and her lips were parted just a little, so she looked pleased. He hoped she was. They hadn’t talked about going out in public together yet, but why would they have? She was only here for a week. It didn’t mean they couldn’t enjoy each other’s company in all kinds of ways.

“I even brought nice clothes,” he said, setting off with her for her condo before he thought too much about what he wanted this week to be versus what it
could
be. She’d said yes, and they both knew she was leaving at the end of the week. A dinner out was just a dinner out.

“Well, I didn’t,” she said.

“You don’t need them.”

She looked up at him, still swinging her helmet, and the self-satisfied smile on her face left him with no doubt that she was pleased now.

Doug showered first, then got his ancient Toyota 4Runner from the staff garage while Cassie showered. He’d made reservations, so he couldn’t climb into the shower with her, no matter how much he wanted to. Plus, seeing Cassie walk out of the bathroom was worth missing a chance to make out in the shower. She had on a deep-purple tunic with a scoop neck, showing off her hourglass figure, especially the hips and breasts that he’d lost himself in last night. Chinos and a sweater were about as dressed up as he got, and she looked too good to be on his arm. But she was going to be, and he was going to enjoy having her there. Even better, after dinner, he was going to see if he could lift her breasts out of the neck of her shirt so that the dark color framed her creamy skin. And then he was going to enjoy having her under him, over him, or otherwise using him any way she wanted.

The clerk at the desk winked at him as he went by, his hand on the small of Cassie’s back. Once they were out on the canyon road, Doug opened the moonroof, turned on some jazz—the only station that came in for him until they got out of Little Cottonwood Canyon—and snaked his way down the mountain.

On one of the straighter sections of road, Doug snuck a glance over at Cassie. She was looking through the moonroof up at the mountains and the stars. Her neck was slim, and the shadows danced on the soft curve to her jaw, which he knew got goose bumps when he kissed it. He would have to take his time with her jawline again tonight while remembering the look of awe on her face right now.

“Sometimes you can see bighorn sheep up on the edges of the cliffs. On my backcountry trips, I’ve seen several bobcats and one mountain lion, too. It’s pretty amazing.”

She lowered her head, and he felt her gaze shift from the view to his face. “I’d love to see it. All of it. I wish I could make it out here again, but this is once in a lifetime for me.”

“No more ski vacations?”

“Probably not.” She sighed. “Or at least not out here.” She was looking at him, and he had to remind himself to concentrate on the twisty canyon road rather than turn his head to look at her.

“Why did you stop skiing?” He kept his voice light, trying to offset the gloominess floating on the edge of her sigh. If she was going to be sad, he wanted to be able to pull her into his arms and hold her tight, not worry about hairpin turns and his brakes. “You enjoy it and you’re good at it, especially for not having been in twenty years.”

“I got pregnant, and then I got married. And my ex didn’t like skiing. His idea of a vacation was doing nothing on the beach for a week.” She must have realized that she sounded like she was complaining about many people’s idea of perfection, because she tapped her hand against the middle seat between them before saying, “The beach was nice. Doing nothing wasn’t.”

“And you didn’t ever put your foot down?” he asked. Cassie seemed to enjoy direction, on the slopes and in bed, but she wasn’t passive. Even when he’d been maneuvering her where
he
had wanted her in the shower, she’d been an active, engaged participant. Her clear involvement was much of what made that experience so damn memorable.

“Not until Sam, my daughter, got her driver’s license.” Her hand stopped tapping for a moment, before starting up again. “Then raising her was pretty much done and I had to think about what I wanted to do or I would go crazy. By that time, Tom was so used to me deferring to him that my sudden decision to have my own opinions was a shock to his system.”

Even in the dark, her eyes were sad. Doug risked letting go of the steering wheel long enough to grab her hand and squeeze it. “And that’s my fault. He’d grown dictatorial and accustomed to only sharing my attention with Sam. He wasn’t always like that, but I guess he didn’t want to go back to how we were before, sharing decisions and introducing each other to new experiences.”

Doug felt the mourning in her tone deep in his breastbone. He’d shared that sense of failure. Only he
had
failed. Spectacularly. “You know, you’re not responsible for him becoming dictatorial.”

“I know. Or that’s what my therapist said. ‘You’re only responsible for how you let it rule your decisions.’ But that’s enough for me to still feel bad about it sometimes. Less of an issue now.”

Doug and feeling bad were intimate, uncomfortable friends. He hadn’t been responsible for his ex-wife’s jealously, but he had been responsible for how he’d responded to it. And he was living the punishment for his decisions, especially in the winter, when he worked almost every day and his kids were with Madison and her new husband most of the time.

He considered telling Cassie about his kids, the words hovering at the tip of his tongue.

“You can’t go back and change it,” he said, instead of opening up that piece of himself. “What’s done is done, and there’s no going back.” A reminder for himself as much as for her.

“You know,” she said, smoothing the worn fabric of the bucket seat with her hand, “when other people have said that to me, it didn’t sound like such a death knell.”

He glanced over to her and was lucky enough to catch her eyes. They smiled at the same time, and he wondered if his smile was as full of old hurts as hers was. When he’d been younger, dating had been about having experiences, and now it seemed to be about navigating them, which was scarier but better. The damaged parts of a soul were just as beautiful as the whole ones, only more interesting.

“I’m sorry. It’s not supposed to be a death knell. I spend my days looking at other people’s mistakes and offering ways for them to fix the problems on their next run. I don’t actually want to live my life with that level of analysis, but sometimes a do-over would be nice.”

“Yeah?” she said, her voice lifting with curiosity. “What do you want to do over?”

“I fucked up my marriage.” The dark night would shelter him against his regret, so he stared ahead, deep into it. “We weren’t happy, and I’m not sure we ever had a chance for ’til-death-do-us-part happiness, but I could have ended it better.”

For his kids, especially, though he still couldn’t mention Tyson or Mia to Cassie. The woman in the passenger seat next to him was a date and a fling and couldn’t be anything more. So long as he kept the most important parts of his life private, he could believe that and not be disappointed when she climbed into the airport shuttle at the end of the week and disappeared from his life.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “I said and did some things I shouldn’t have, especially at the end when I was too angry to be reasonable.” Doug snuck another glance at Cassie. Her head was cocked as she looked at him, but her eyes were soft and understanding, the other benefit of dating as a fully formed adult. They had both made mistakes and knew better than to pass judgment too quickly.

He waited for her to elaborate on what she’d said or done, but she had her secrets, too. The lights of the city were getting brighter—brighter and, in Doug’s experience, harsher—as they got closer and closer to the end of the canyon. Sometimes you needed to be up in the mountains to share your secrets. The Rocky Mountains were a young range, but they were old enough to have seen the best and worst of humanity. There was nothing that could surprise them.