Bedding Down, A Collection of Winter Erotica (8 page)

all over each other—

“Fletcher?”

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Janine’s voice brought him crashing back to the present. He

picked up his fork and took a bite of the potatoes. They were

much better than his, cooked with some of the spices in his cupboard that he never had any idea how to use.

“This is good,” he said.

“How do you manage when the snow comes in?” she asked.

“You’ve got all kinds of staples in the kitchen right now, but I can imagine you go through them before the snow lets up.”

Fletcher took a bite of the pork and closed his eyes. Maybe

it wasn’t much different than the way he cooked it, but the fact that it was cooked by someone else made it taste heavenly.

“I have a gun,” he answered.

“You shoot your own dinner?”

“There aren’t any other options.”

She nodded and picked at the food on her plate. For the first

time since he had walked through the door, he remembered the

fear of the night before. “Are you hurting? Inside?”

Janine seemed to know exactly what he meant. “I think I have

a bruised rib. But I don’t think there’s any bleeding going on in there. I don’t really know how to tell, but my breathing is okay, and I don’t feel any pain that I can’t explain.” She shook her

head slowly. “Does that make sense?”

“Yeah, it does.”

“I think I have a concussion.”

“I know you do,” he agreed. “You’re moving like you’re un-

derwater. Sometimes your words are slurred, but I know you

didn’t get into the moonshine. I checked,” he teased.

“Moonshine might be better than aspirin,” she said, grinning

back at him.

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“You scared me last night, when you fell asleep. I couldn’t

wake you up. I remember reading somewhere that a person with

a concussion shouldn’t be allowed to go to sleep.”

She took a bite of potatoes. “I think I’m going to be okay.”

“You were incredibly lucky,” he said, shaking his head. “It

could have been so much worse.”

“You were there,” she said, as if that explained everything.

“Nobody knows where you are, do they?” he asked.

“My editor has an idea, but no one knew my actual where-

abouts, no. I wasn’t sure what to tell them. I wasn’t sure where you were, but I knew you were up here somewhere.”

“How did you find me?”

Janine pushed the potatoes around on her plate. “Your hold-

ings were listed in the indictments. I got the records through

the Freedom of Information Act, and there was only one hold-

ing that hadn’t been explored, mostly because it was listed as

private hunting land. There was no structure listed on the

property. But then I got to thinking . . . prime hunting land on a mountain in the middle of Colorado? That’s big-time hunting. That’s the kind of hunting that can take a man away for

weeks on end. A man could backpack his way in, but he would

have to be a very skilled outdoorsman to manage living in a

tent for weeks. A cabin, however . . . something off the grid,

so that it isn’t registered with any agency anywhere . . . hid-

den away in a valley on the top of that mountain. Who would

notice?”

“A computer geek living in the wilderness,” Fletcher mused

with a smile. “What a concept.”

“It’s the perfect cover.”

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“A computer geek who had a banker for a father—a father

who couldn’t bait a hook, much less fire a shotgun.”

“But your great-uncle was a fisherman by trade, and you spent

childhood summers with him in the Keys.”

Fletcher raised an eyebrow. “You lied to me. You said you

were a photographer.”

“You lied to me, too. You said you knew nothing of the

indictments.”

They stared at each other over the pork chops and potatoes.

Fletcher took a drink of water and studied the young woman

across the table from him, one who had turned out to be more

of an adversary than he had first thought. She was dangerous, no matter how beautiful she was.

It was going to be a very long winter.

Another cold front came in a week later, and this one brought

an ice storm with it. All the animals on the mountain stayed in their hollows and dens, keeping warm as best they could. The

silence was almost as maddening as the cold.

Fletcher kept a fire roaring in the stove, but the chill of the snow crept in regardless. He ventured outside only to get fresh snow for water—the usual supply had frozen in the barrels, and

no amount of stoking the fire would thaw it out. There was a

thermometer on the outside wall of the cabin, but Fletcher was

afraid to look at it.

Janine stayed wrapped in layers of clothing. The bruises were

fading now, but somehow they looked even worse—instead of

black and purple, they were now all shades of green and yellow.

She joked that she looked like one of those alien life-forms on the late-night documentary channels.

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“I miss television,” she sighed.

“What’s television?”

She threw a rolled-up pair of socks at him and laughed.

In the few days she had been on his mountain, Fletcher had

learned quite a bit about Janine. Once the woman started talk-

ing, she didn’t want to stop, and that was just fine with him. It felt good to hear a voice other than his own. She brought stories of the outside world, and though Fletcher maintained that he

was perfectly happy on his mountain, it was nice to hear tales of the world that was spinning along just fine without him.

“Don’t you have friends who worry?” she asked one night, as

they sat before the crackling fire.

“I don’t think so. I didn’t have time for friends.”

“What did you do for fun?”

Fletcher shrugged. “I worked. That’s all I did.”

“There had to be more to your life than that. You were seen

everywhere with Amanda Whitmore. You don’t date a famous

actress if your whole life is spent behind a computer screen.”

“You asked what I did for
fun
, Janine.”

In the firelight her bruises looked like shadows, and he saw

what she would look like when they were gone. Her jaw was

sharp, almost too sharp, but the softness of her eyes made up

for it. When she smiled, her whole face was transformed, and

she went from pretty to beautiful.

“I don’t understand,” she said slowly.

“It was fun until we became such a spectacle. Do you know

what it’s like to be followed everywhere? To be constantly aware of what you’re doing and how you look, because you never know

where a camera is lurking?”

Janine tossed a thin stick of kindling on the fire. They both

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watched as it flared, turned to ash and disappeared. She picked up the poker and moved the logs around, sending up embers.

“I have no idea,” she admitted.

Fletcher stretched his legs out in front of the fire. “It de-

stroyed me and Amanda. It became more about what the public

thought about us than what we thought about each other.”

“You really loved her, didn’t you?”

Fletcher didn’t look at Janine. Instead he studied the fire,

watched as the flames changed colors, and thought about

Amanda. Where was she now? What was she doing? Who was

she with? A woman like her wouldn’t be alone for long.

“I did love her,” he said. “But love doesn’t conquer every-

thing.”

Janine stood up and walked to the kitchen. Fletcher was left

alone with the fire and his thoughts, like he had been so many

long nights before, and suddenly he wondered if it was what he

still wanted. What would it be like when the snow melted and

the ice disappeared? Janine would leave his mountain, and there might be a story or two about him, but eventually he would be

written off as an eccentric and mostly forgotten. That didn’t

bother him much. What bothered him was the return of the

silence. It had been comforting when it was all he had known on the mountain—when the cabin’s walls had never heard a voice

other than his own—but now that illusion had been shattered.

She came back with two mugs of thick, rich coffee. He sipped

it while he listened to her settle down beside him again. She had a quietness that took time getting used to, a way of moving that made him slow down and pay attention. He watched her delicate wrists as she took a sip from the mug.

“Is there anyone who misses you?” he asked.

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Janine shook her head. “Not really. My folks died a few years

back—cancer, both of them, within six months of each other.

No siblings, no kids. My work is my baby. My friends are used

to me going on assignment for weeks at a time, so they won’t be alarmed just yet.”

That wasn’t what Fletcher meant, but he couldn’t bring him-

self to ask the question he really wanted to ask: Was there a
man
who missed her? Was there someone special back home?

“Do you miss New York?”

“Manhattan. My offices are within shouting distance of my

apartment. Sometimes I think the two are interchangeable.”

“I know exactly what you mean.”

Janine nodded. “Do you ever miss your work?”

“I miss the fun of it. When I was in college, I would spend

days on end just figuring out code. Numbers are fun to me, like blocks to a baby. It holds my attention like little else can.”

“What else holds your attention?”

Despite his admonitions to himself to be the perfect gentle-

men, Fletcher glanced at Janine’s long legs. Her rakish grin said he was caught in the act. He leaned closer to the fire to hide the blush on his face, but now that he had been caught, it was easy to steal another glance.

“The wilderness holds my attention,” he said. “Trying to

fight Heisenberg.”

“Huh?”

“The Heisenberg uncertainty principle. It’s a little nugget of

quantum physics. It states that simply by observing the world,

you influence it. I like trying to influence the world as little as possible.”

Janine stared at him as if he had grown two heads.

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“What?”

“I’m starting to see the geek inside.”

Fletcher laughed. Logs dropped in the fire, sending up a hiss

and a shower of embers. They looked at each other in the fire-

light until one of them either had to look away, or do something they both might regret.

Fletcher was the one who looked away first.

“Hey,” she said.

“What?”

She reached over and took his hand. Her palm was smooth as

silk and warm, almost hot, with the steam from the mug of cof-

fee. He looked down at their joined hands. As he watched, she

laced her fingers between his, their palms pressing hard against each other. His thumb brushed her wrist, and he could feel the

heartbeat.

“I’m sorry about you and Amanda,” she said. “I don’t know

what it was like to go through the constant hounding you had

to endure, but I do know what it is like to lose someone you

love, over circumstances you can’t control. I know how it hurts, and I’m sorry it happened to you.”

Fletcher nodded, not daring to look up at her. He was afraid

of what kind of openness he would see in her eyes, and scared of what would happen if he did. He tried to remind himself that

she was a reporter, one of those who had been instrumental in

following him and Amanda to get the story for the front page,

but he found it difficult to put Janine in that category.

“Thank you,” he said, the simplest thing he could think of

to say, the only thing that wouldn’t spark more conversation.

He felt her gaze on him, as obvious as the flickering light from

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the fireplace. When she sensed nothing more would come, she

sighed and looked back at the fire.

But neither of them pulled their hands away.

In the light of day, things seemed a lot less complicated on the romance front, but maybe more complicated in other areas.

Fletcher realized this when Janine’s litany of frustrated sighs turned into curses. She was tired of being snowed in, angry at

the cookstove for something he couldn’t guess, and mad as hell

at the world.

“Shit!”

The wooden spoon flew across the room. It bounced against

the wall of the cabin and landed on the rug in front of the

hearth.

Fletcher looked up from the shirt in his hands. He was stitch-

ing with a needle and stout thread, mending a tear he had gotten while carrying in an armload of wood. He pulled the needle

through and watched as Janine stormed about the kitchen.

They had checked off days on the old, faded calendar. Yesterday marked two weeks of being snowed in.

It was the longest two weeks of Fletcher’s life, for so many

reasons.

“What’s wrong with you?”

She whirled to glare at him. In the time since she had fallen