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“She doesn’t have to stay on the couch.” He’s extending an olive branch to Josie by talking to Hunter. Interesting tactic for anybody, but the most surprising part for me is that he’s extending an olive branch at all. He goes on to shock me even more. “She can have my room.”

I glance at Beau. Beau avoids my gaze, Hunter’s questioning look, and Josie’s surprise, by staring at his feet. He shoves his hands in his pockets and glares at the hardwood floor.

“I’m sorry,” I interject, unable to help myself. “What did you say?”

“I said, she can have my room,” he mumbles. “She doesn’t have to stay on that damn couch.” His ears flush more dramatically and I cannot for the life of me figure out what’s motivating him. I can’t imagine that he likes her enough to invite her into his inner sanctum.

“Are you sure?” Josie asks. She’s blushing furiously. Did something happen between these two that I should know about? Not that I’m nosy. I like to keep on top of what’s happening in my own home, that’s all.

“I wouldn’t have said it if I wasn’t,” Beau snaps. So much for an olive branch. A cactus bud, maybe.

“Okay,” she says meekly. I don’t like it when she sounds like that. It’s almost as bad as her panicking. “I just don’t want to… I mean… are you sure?”

Say what you mean and mean what you say. It’s rule number one around here, and she seems utterly incapable of doing so. Like that story she told last night. Her fiancé was perfect. Her wedding was perfect. Everything was perfectly perfect, and yet here she is, snowed in with us instead of on a perfect island somewhere with her perfect husband.

Why doesn’t she just spit it out, already? Whatever it is. In this case, she could just say that she doesn’t want to invade his space, but no. She cuts herself off and defers to him. Why would she do that? She just met him!

Granted, it is his room. Still, though, she seems like the type to bend to the will of anyone and everyone who exercises it in front of her. I don’t like that. Turns out there’s plenty about her that I don’t like. So, what’s with this urge deep in my gut to make sure she’s happy and comfortable here?

Beau doesn’t bother to answer her. Instead, he grabs her bags and heads for the stairs. He grabs her wedding dress, too, tossing it over one shoulder. She doesn’t move. He stops at the base of the stairs and growls over his shoulder at her.

“Well? Are you coming? I have to show you which room it is.”

“Oh! Yeah. Um, I guess so. Sorry.”

Sorry. I think I’m going to hear that word from her more frequently than I’d like. I know as well as Hunter does that it’s going to be ages before we can get her out of here, and I don’t even want to think about how many more awkward moments I have to look forward to.

Especially now that she’s upstairs. What the hell was Beau thinking, anyway?

Hunter grins at me. “It’s a good thing we stocked up on food before the storm came, seeing as we have a guest and all.”

He’s damn near giddy about the whole thing. I grunt back at him, not nearly as amused. I don’t like how Beau’s acting around her. He looks like he’s damn near ready to shatter if she so much as breathes on him, and now he’s got her sleeping in his bed?

He better be taking the couch. Of course he’s taking the couch, he likes people even less than I do. But girls… I shake my head. We haven’t talked about women much since we’ve been up here. At least they haven’t talked women with me since we’ve been up here. Women are irrelevant out here in the wilderness, and I like it that way.

But does Beau like it that way? He was a wild man before he came out here. Always getting into trouble. Women are trouble. Chances are, he’s had his fair share and then some. Does he miss it?

Do I?

Growling under my breath, I head for the workshop to grab the snow shovel. Hunter is still grinning as he puts the blankets back in the closet under the stairs. At least one of us is having a good time.

I step through the door into the workshop and take a deep breath. Instantly, my shoulders relax. This is my sanctum. This is where my grandfather spent hours of too-hot summers and too-cold winters teaching me to carve, to build, to make things that will last. The smell of cut wood always soothes my mind.

I grab the shovel off its peg and reluctantly leave the workshop behind. I close the door reverently, promising myself that I’ll be back in there soon to work on something. Anything. I like wood. I like how predictable it is, even when it’s unpredictable. A knot is going to act like a knot, a split is going to act like a split.

People are going to act however the hell they please.

The boys are like wood. Hunter and Beau, they’re both predictable in their own ways. That’s why I like having them up here with me. My granddad was like that, too, although he was more like a tree to me. Shelter in the storm. Full of useful wisdom and good food.

I grab my coat and gloves off the hook, then crack the door open just enough to squeeze through and start shoveling. It’s a struggle for me, there’s no way Josie would ever have been able to do it, not with a thousand hours of little grunting pulls.

I frown at myself as the memory of those little grunts makes me twitch again. I channel that energy into moving massive shovelfuls of snow off the path.

I like feeling the cabin behind me as I work. The cabin my grandfather built, the one he left me when he died. The place skipped a generation for a damn good reason. I doubt my parents even remember how to get out here even if they wanted to.

And they’ve never wanted to.

I plow the emotions that rise with that thought into the snow, then throw them away, out of my path. My parents don’t deserve an ounce of my attention, not even as an idle thought in the middle of shoveling.