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“No. I’m full. Thank you.”
“It’s my pleasure. I really am grateful to you, Gabe. If you hadn’t let me stay here, I seriously think I would have met my death on this mountainside.”
His knuckles turned white as he gripped the stem of the wine glass, his face momentarily serious before he nodded once, a tight smile on his lips. “I wouldn’t want that.”
“Nonetheless, I’m grateful.”
“You shouldn’t have been driving in this weather.”
“I know. I didn’t realise it would get so bad.”
“Nobody warned you?”
“I think the woman at the road stop might have been trying to, but my Italian isn’t great. I thought she was just giving me directions.” She winced. “In hindsight, I was pretty stupid.”
“The weather can change on a dime around here.”
“Does it get this bad often?”
“Not this bad, no. We get blizzards most years. I’m snowed in from time to time. This is the first Christmas though.”
“Will your family be disappointed if you miss it?”
“They’d prefer that than for me to attempt to join them given the weather.”
“Of course.”
His smile was wry. “That’s only half true. They’re going to be furious.”
She winced. “Really?”
“Hell yes, really.” His brow furrowed and she had the sense he was speaking almost without wishing to.
“Yaya is old. She had a stroke in the summer. We’re all very aware of how special each Christmas is to her.”
“If that’s true, why come here at all so close to the date? Didn’t you realise the blizzard was expected?” She pushed. “Surely you could have got out ahead of it?”
His face bore a mask of rejection, and she knew she’d hit on an important point.
“But you wanted to be stranded here?”
“It would have been dangerous to drive, even more so to fly.”
“Liar,” she challenged, not sure where her certainty came from, but only that she knew she was right. “Ignore my questions, if you want, but don’t lie to me.”
“What makes you think I’m lying?”
“Because you’ve told me again and again how much you want to be alone. You’re glad you were snowed in, because it means you get to stay here and brood. Right?”
He stared at his wine and she waited, until it became clear he wasn’t going to answer. Time passed, each second growing thicker and thicker until finally the cloying intensity of it forced her to stand, intending to clear their plates. Only he surprised her by reaching out, curving his fingers around her wrist. Her eyes jolted to his and just like that, her tension shifted, morphing into a drugging sense of awareness. She gasped, her pulse in her throat, her heart hammering her ribs from the inside out.
His thumb moved across the delicate flesh of her inner-wrist, stirring her to a fever-pitch of awareness, so she let out a soft, delicate moan, that might have been a garbled version of his name.
“You seem to know a lot about me,” he said, the words like steel. She bit down on her lower lip, not sure how to respond.
“I don’t, I suppose.” But it was a lie. For some reason, she felt like she did know him, in a way that made very little sense.
“No?”
