Читать книгу Snowbound - Janice Kay Johnson - Страница 8

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.