I stomped the snow off my feet and slammed the car door shut. I wasn’t a damsel in distress. That wasn’t me. I was a capable woman who didn’t need a handsome next-door neighbor to rescue me every time I did something stupid. My eyes lighted on the tools in the garage that the owner had left behind, and I swore I heard the angels sing as I saw a big plastic shovel-shaped like a scoop, and what I assumed, based on what I had seen in movies, was a snow clearing machine sitting next to it.

  The ground shook beneath the frozen leather soles of my Frye boots and a blue flashing light pulsed into the garage as a snow plow lumbered by on the street. It was my first stroke of luck. If I could get out of the driveway, I could make it into work. The plow had cleared the side of the road that I would need to use to get into town. I wished for the warmth of Dean’s fuzzy lined work gloves as I clapped my hands together and dragged the snow scoop out of the garage. My feet slipped and slid as I leaned all my weight against the bar of the scoop. It was going to take longer than I anticipated, but it was working. “You haven’t beat me yet, Laketown,” I growled to myself as I made a second pass with the scoop. Already my heart was pumping and I pulled the scarf off my neck, I wasn’t going to need a gym workout after this.

  As I cleared the driveway, a pink glow appeared on the horizon, and the darkness of morning turned to a diffused gray. Headlights appeared and I waved as Dean Covington pulled into the driveway. He stopped and rolled down the window. “Do you need some help?”

  You’re not saving me again. I am a capable woman.

  “I’m good,” I shouted and the fringe on my gloves fanned as I waved enthusiastically.

  Dean waved back then drove into his garage. I was torn. Even though I didn’t want him to come and help me, part of me DID want him to help. The minutes ticked by and the other part of me was shocked that he hadn’t come back.

  I knew that I was being ridiculous and put a little extra oomph into my shoveling. With one more pass, the driveway would be completely cleared. The clouds parted and the beauty of the inconvenience in front of me took my breath away. I had heard that snow sparkled like diamonds, but didn’t believe it. It didn’t sparkle like diamonds, it sparkled BETTER than diamonds. I squinted and tilted my face up to my old friend, the sun. Even in what felt like the arctic, its rays warmed my skin. With the driveway shoveled and a sense of accomplishment blooming through my chest, I put the scoop back in the driveway, went inside and changed into dry pantyhose, and had no choice, but to slip my feet into my only other pair of boots – the stilettos.

  The rumbling earthquake sound returned as I opened the car door and my heart sank as the snow plow left a wall of snow at the end of the driveway. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” I slammed the car door and retrieved the scoop, carefully shuffling to the end of the driveway in tiny steps. The bank at the end of my driveway was impenetrable. I grunted as I shoved the scoop as hard as I could into the snowbank, the plastic bending and making cracking sounds as I thrust it harder and harder.

  I heard what sounded like a lawnmower and angrily wiped the tears from my face with the back of my glove. Dean was wearing a red flannel jacket and a wool hat with the Laketown Otters’ logo. A fountain of snow shot up into the air from his snow clearing machine. I gave him what I hoped looked like a confident wave and leaned on the scoop. As he waved back, the scoop slipped on the hard snow and clattered as it launched over the snowbank onto the street, and my world went into slow motion as I saw my heels in the sky above me, then back in regular time I couldn’t help but yelp as my body crashed to the ground.

  Hoping that Dean hadn’t seen my fall, I hopped to my feet, brushing the snow from my coat and wondering how I was going to scale the Mount Everest of snowbanks and retrieve that damn scoop.

  Hidden behind the fountain of snow, I couldn’t see Dean, but my heart leaped into my throat as I realized that the fountain was heading towards me.

  I shuffled out of the way as my knight in shining red plaid and his extremely loud snow clearing machine gobbled up the snowbank. The fountain of snow stopped briefly as Dean jogged into the street, retrieved the scoop, and handed it to me. He might have looked ten years older than the night before, with the stubble on his face covered in a haze of frost, but he looked ten times sexier.

  Averting my gaze from his ass as he wrangled his snow-clearing thingy back to his driveway was not an easy task. The hem of his plaid jacket had somehow gotten tucked into the waistband of his well-worn 501s, leaving a very round, very firm-looking ass pressing against the well-worn threads of his pants. As if he could read my very dirty mind, he reached and tugged the hem of his jacket back in place, the perfect ass now hidden beneath a quilted layer of buffalo plaid. I shook my head slightly as I turned away. I still hadn’t seen a sign of a Mrs… I racked my brain for hot neighbor’s last name, but either the blood that pumped through my veins with lascivious intentions had deleted that memory, or he’d just never told me. Either way, even though I hadn’t seen a sign of a Mrs. Dean Hot Neighbor, didn’t mean she didn’t exist.

  As I inched the car down the driveway, Dean shut off his machine and made the old school, roll down your window motion, but using his entire arm. I laughed and pushed the button, wondering how that gesture had survived the advent of electric windows.

  “Thank you for clearing away Mount Everest.”

  Dean approached the car and as he smiled I noticed the dimples in his cheeks. I don’t know how I could’ve missed those last night. I wasn’t drunk, and then I remembered the teeth, those perfect teeth must have blinded me.

  “That?” he laughed. “That was like Sugar Peak.”

  “Sugar Peak?”

  He chuckled. “Terrible reference, it’s the mountain from where I grew up. Much smaller than Everest. Wait until January when the snowbanks are taller than the roofline.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” There was no way the snow got that high.

  “I wish I was, Florida,” he laughed. “They leave that out of the tourist brochures.”

  No shit, I thought to myself. The real estate agent hadn’t mentioned a thing about moving into a real-life snow globe. “Well, thanks again. I’ll have to figure out how to work my own snow clearing machine.”

  The dimple again. He leaned on the window frame, “Round these parts, we call that a snowblower.”

  He was close enough to smell. And it was a weird, yet intoxicatingly sexy one, a combination of cedar, musk, and gasoline. Or, maybe I was just high on fumes. “Right, I’ll figure that out tonight.”

  “Oooookay.” He opened his mouth like he wanted to say something more. And then did. “Please let me help you.”

  It wasn’t the heated seats, the gentleman in him was making me melt a little. “I can run a lawnmower. I can figure out a snowblowie.”

  He hacked out a laugh and pursed his lips. “Blower.”

  My cheeks felt like they were about to burn up and fall off my face.

  “Florida.” He steeled his gaze on mine. “You have nice arms, I’d like for you to keep both of them. I’m not trying to insult you. I have the feeling you are a very capable woman.” His eyes dropped from mine, his thick lashes batting as he looked down to the ground.

  I wondered what he meant by capable. And I think he did too. He cleared his throat. “Let me show you the basics. Then you can repay me by snowblowie-ing my driveway in the next storm.”

  “Deal.” I thrust my frozen glove out the window and we shook on it.

  Until then, he had kept his gaze on my face, but I felt his eyes travel down my body and back up again, and the heat from my cheeks rushed to other parts of my body. “Florida, have you ever driven in the snow?”

  I thought about lying, but after this morning’s attempt, figured that lie would be easy to spot. “No.” I let my hands fall from the wheel to my lap.

  As if sensing my discomfort, he stood and gave a breezy wave with his hand. “It’s easy. Just drive like your grandma is sitting in the back seat holding a pot of venison stew.”

  Steam puffed out my nose as I snort laughed. “Got it.” I smiled and put the car into drive.

  Dean patted the window frame. “And your grandma is wearing white gloves.”

  The man knew how to make a woman smile. I shot him a coy one and gave him a quick salute as I rolled up the window. I glanced into the back seat and couldn’t conjure up an image of my grandmother, she was not the glove-wearing, stew holding type of lady, she was more of the gin toting, cigarette smoking, not eating kind of grandma, so instead, I pictured the Queen of England, white gloves and all, holding a teacup.

  “Hit it, sister.” The imaginary monarch sipped from her bone china mug and winked at me.

  I blinked hard and wondered if blizzards caused temporary insanity.

  Taking Dean’s advice, forty minutes later I pulled into the parking lot of my new ‘office.’ A tiny log home set back from the main road. A man was shoveling a narrow pathway that wound to a screened-in porch where I could see the twinkling lights of a Christmas tree. “Before Thanksgiving? A little tacky.” I thought to myself. But, maybe things were different up here in the country.

  Lipstick checked, hair, well, as good as it was going to get after my sweat show from shoveling, I grabbed my leather folio and Prada bag and strode as best as I could up the slippery pathway. The man had made it to the stairs, and I had taken advantage of the footprints left by his very big black boots, tip-toeing from one frozen tread print to the next, the cold from the ground seeping through my boots and into my soul.

  “Amber?” The man turned and that’s when I saw that it wasn’t a man at all. It was Melissa, my new boss. I recognized her from our online interview and the photo on her website.

  “Melissa,” I smiled and reached to shake her hand. She removed hers from what looked like leather oven mitts and shook mine. Our eyes met after each of us did a once-over of each other’s outfits. I wondered if Melissa was hiding something chic underneath her canvas snow pants and monster snow boots. Strands of blonde hair had escaped from beneath her wool hat and were encased in ice.

  “You made it in.” Melissa quickly shoveled the snow off the stairs and stamped her boots on a frozen jute rug. “I wasn’t sure if we’d see you today.”

  “I didn’t think that missing my first day was an option.” I mirrored her, stomping off my boots, and followed my new boss into our office.

  Melissa unzipped her giant jacket to reveal what looked to be a hand-knit fair isle sweater over a pair of leggings. Curious, I watched her step out of her boots with the felt liners still firmly on her feet.

  She followed my gaze and chuckled, “Best slippers ever.”

  That’s when I realized I hadn’t joined some chic designer firm. Melissa’s company looked like a mom-and-pop shop. I wondered where the samples of chicken border paper were kept.

  “They look comfy…” I didn’t know what else to say.

  “Follow me, I’ll show you to your office.”

  An office. That was new to me. At my Florida firm, I sat in a cubicle, albeit a cute one in the middle of a heavily air-conditioned glass and stucco building. Melissa flicked on the light to reveal an almost empty room. A small desk, which upon closer inspection was a kitchen table sitting in the middle of the room with piles of drapery swatches heaped on top of it.

  “I’ll get you a chair.” Melissa disappeared, leaving me to check out my new space. The room itself was quite large, with two huge paned glass windows that looked out onto a wall of pine trees, their boughs hanging heavily with snow. At first glance, it looked like a terrible oversight, but my designer mind took over and I quickly saw how my new office was going to look gorgeous if Melissa would let me make some changes.

  “Here, I brought you some slippers.” Melissa dropped a pair of pink and white handknit slippers complete with pompoms onto the floor beside my boots. “Oh.” I balanced on one foot and then the other, stepping out of my boots and onto the wide plank pine flooring – one of the best features of the entire room. “Thank you.”

  Suddenly, I was embarrassed to take off my jacket and reveal my city girl dress. Didn’t they say it was better to be over-dressed than under-dressed? Whoever said that hadn’t been standing in stiletto Pradas next to a woman wearing felt liners with dog fur caked to the bottom. As I took my coat off, my gaze turned upward. “That’s a beautiful chandelier.” I gasped. Now this, I could work with. A huge antler chandelier hung from the ceiling and my cabin chic ideas were coming at me hard and fast.

  “Thank you. That’s from my husband’s collection.”

  I slung my coat over the back of the wooden kitchen chair that Melissa had slid in behind my ‘desk’. “Your husband is a lighting designer?” My head was craned back, studying the piece.

  Melissa chuckled again and I returned my gaze to her warm brown eyes. I seemed to be amusing her. “He is a hunter. Was a hunter.” She glanced up to the chandelier and then blinked hard as if fighting back tears.

  “I’m sorry.” I felt awful for judging this woman based on her sweater and shabby, not chic design office.

  “That’s alright, dear.” She shook her head as if snapping out of a memory. “I just hope that his body is found soon.”

  Oh, God. Now I definitely didn’t know what to say.

  It seemed as though Melissa sensed my discomfort. “I’ll leave you to get settled. Did you need a computer or anything?”

  “I’ve got one.” I patted my leather bag.

  “The Wi-Fi is Mel Designs and the password is getyourowndamnwifi.” There was a glint in her teary eye. Already I could see that there were a few layers to my new boss, and I was looking forward to peeling them back. I suspected there was a fiery powerful woman at the core and I couldn’t wait to get to know her and show her that I was more than an outsider in the wrong outfit.

  “What do you want me to work on? Is there a project you need some help with?” I asked.

  Melissa had her hand on the doorknob and I hoped that she wasn’t planning to leave me alone in this disaster of a room without anything to do.

  “You can start with your office,” she smiled. “I’ve started a spreadsheet for you to enter your expenses. You will see the budget for your first project in the file.”

  “Okay.” It wasn’t what I was expecting, but it was something. Immersing myself in my work had gotten me through the darkest period of my life, and I would go stir crazy in this snow globe with nothing to do. I dragged the kitchen chair to the table and stacked the samples to one side and opened my laptop. The file for my first project was easy to find and my breath caught in my throat when I opened the file. I had already been trying to figure out how I was going to outfit this room with a rug and a proper chair without breaking the bank, and it turned out that my budget was much bigger than expected. The thirty-thousand-dollar figure at the top of the page seemed to glow in the light of the antler chandelier. That’s when I realized that the office wasn’t a project, it was a test. One that I was ready to ace.

  Darkness set in at four o’clock and I had just put the finishing touches on the mood board for my office project. I hadn’t moved all day, and my stomach growled as Melissa popped her head into my office.

  “It’s starting to snow again, Amber.”

  “I’m just about finished here,” I smiled.

  “You can pick it up tomorrow. The roads are already treacherous and if this keeps up, you’ll be stuck here making yourself quilt from those drapery samples.

  “It’s alright.” I turned my gaze back to my computer screen.

  “Amber. It’s an order. Get out of here.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder.

  I smiled. My mom and I weren’t close and here Melissa was, exuding the maternal protectiveness I had craved my entire life. Leaving in the middle of a good workflow wasn’t my style, but the tone of her voice told me that she was serious. I saved my work and closed the laptop.

  Pitch blackness made the drive home ten times scarier. Snow pelted the windshield of my car in Star Wars-like streams, the brighter my headlights, the faster and harder the white assault seemed to come. By the time I reached my driveway, my armpits were sweaty and I had been gripping the steering wheel so tightly it was painful to peel my death grip from it.

  Why had I moved here? I wondered how many times that thought was going to run through my mind until I gave up on my idyllic small-town dream.

  Six

  Amber

  I shivered as my frozen heels clicked on the cement floor of my garage. I examined the snowthrowie, no what was it called? Snowblower. I jiggled one of the red levers on the top and squinted at the instructions. I could figure it out – later. For now, I opted for the snow shovel. Clearing a pathway to the front door seemed like a manageable chunk to bite off before trying to start up that machine. I remembered my promise to Dean, that I would let him show me how to use it, but I wanted to show that I was independent and didn’t need him to help me.

  I threw the shovel over my shoulder and clambered through the door into the house, flicking on every light as I passed by. No wonder people here hibernate, I thought to myself, it felt like midnight at five p.m. I threw open the front door, ready to tackle a giant snowdrift, but instead of a wall of windswept snow, the only thing against my door was a big cardboard box. That’s when I realized that I had easily driven into the garage. My driveway was clear, much clearer than I had left it this morning. The pathway to my house was lined with thigh-high snowbanks. Relief that I didn’t have to battle the snow mixed with the guilt of someone taking pity on me. Leaning the shovel against the wall, I scooped up the cardboard box. I headed inside and set the box on the dining room table. It had a picture of a cougar on the front and I gingerly lifted the lid, not knowing what to expect.