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
