AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Let me clean up.” She piled plates and bowls onto the tray.
“Let me help,” he said.
“You do the fire,” she said as she stood. “I’m not getting near that thing again.”
“Sounds good. But the next topic of conversation is how you grew up in the Pacific Northwest and never learned how to build a fire.”
She threw an almond at him.
~
Melinda melted snow on the stove for dishwashing and thought about what Grant had said. What she had said. Nothing like captive sexual tension to bring out your deepest truths. She hadn’t seen that conversation coming, though. Any of it.
She squeezed dishwashing fluid into the pan and swirled it to a bubbly lather, then tackled bowls, saucepan, spoons, and serving dishes. Was he right? Had she responded to her parents’ crumbled relationship by closing herself off to them? To her brother? To everyone and every relationship? Probably.
Bollocks.
That was an unfortunate revelation. Painful, even. Especially when it came to her brother. Melinda bowed her head over the sink and pressed her palm to her forehead, grimacing against the regret that barreled down on her like a train.
Was it time to be an adult about it all? She cursed her mother for the thought. What did being an adult about it even mean? First it meant surviving this experience. And after that...it probably meant calling Max and coming clean about her inadvertent repetition of their parents’ emotional shutdown.
Double bollocks.
Couldn’t she just do the dishes and stay alive, and worry about growing up later? Melinda’s mother stared at her in her mind’s eye, lips poised to comment on her lack of emotional dexterity. Ugh.
Melinda dried and shelved the dishes. Now what? A date on the deck, it would seem. She walked through the cabin, collecting warmer items—gloves, hat, boots, jacket—and moved to the living room to assemble herself. Fire tended, Grant sat on the edge of the chair across from her and laced his boots.
“Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.” She zipped up her jacket. Her puffed sleeves swished against her torso as she walked across the room behind him.
Grant pulled back a luxe-looking curtain to reveal a sliding glass door. He released the lock and shimmied the door open.
“Whoa!” Icy air shocked the breath from her lungs.
“Yeah, what you said.” Grant grinned. He followed her outside, then slid the door mostly closed after them. “I’d rather lose heat than have the door freeze shut on us,” he explained.
Melinda looked around. Whatever the deck’s material, it was inconsequential, as the whole thing was buried in snow. She trudged to the railing and looked over the snow-covered meadow they’d traversed the day before. Drifting snow erased the boundary between sky and earth.
“Looks harmless, doesn’t it?” Grant looked sideways at her from her elbow.
“Ha,” she said, straight-faced.
“So why can’t you build a fire?”
“Oh swell, you remembered.”
“Of course I did.” He grinned at her, then added, “Does this feel like a cross-examination?”
She laughed. “No, it’s fine. Better get it all out in the open. Yeah, I grew up north of Seattle, just south of Canada. I did go to Girl Scouts, and they taught us how to build a fire, but we never went camping so the skill faded.” Shoot, was she really thirty-two? That meant her last boyfriend was two years ago. Dammit. No wonder she was Mountain Man-crazy.
“So you guys had a gas fireplace?”
“We did. We loved it. Used it all the time. Sometimes we lost power, so that was inconvenient, but never for very long. We were on city water, so we didn’t have to melt snow to make hot chocolate.”
Grant laughed. “You guys were pampered. So your dad...He’s first generation?”
“No, he’s second. I’m third. He was born in Seattle but his parents were from New York, and their parents were from West Bengal. He retained a lot of customs and culture, but it’s impossible to keep it all. Plus I went to American public school, so...” She shrugged.
