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Granted, the whole part about wanting to cuddle up to him was a bit strange, but I was steadfastly pretending that wasn’t happening and that was the end of that.
And no, it wasn’t up for discussion. At least right now. I was feeling better than I had all morning, and I wasn’t going to get lost back inside my head.
“What are you doing?” William asked, causing a shadow as he towered over me.
“Trying,” I grunted. “To move… this.”
“You’re failing.”
“Yes, thank you, Sherlock.” I stood up straight with a huff. “Funnily enough, I’d realised that.”
His eyes twinkled. “Would you like some help?”
“No, but I’m going to have to accept the offer anyway.”
With a laugh, he nudged me over and put his hands on the snowball. “Come on. Yours is bigger than mine, so this can be the bottom part of the body.”
“Ugh. No wonder I couldn’t move it. It’s twice the size of yours!”
“It’s hardly my fault that you’ve overachieved. Come on before my hands freeze off.”
“We’re wearing ski gloves,” I pointed out, bending over to push the snowball. “One, two, three.”
On my count, we pushed off, heaving the ball over. It took us several more shoves and more than one colourful string of words from William to get it to the spot he wanted to build it on, but we finally did it.
He stepped back and looked at it. “Not bad. Now let’s lift my ball on top of it.”
“Oh no. I have the upper body strength of a mouldy potato,” I muttered.
“I noticed.”
“Hey!”
He laughed and beckoned me over to the ball. Begrudgingly, I joined him, and together we hefted it up onto the bigger body, only just stopping it from rolling right back off and presumably smashing into smaller bits.
I packed some snow into the gap between the body parts to steady it, and William slowly backed off.
“Okay, it’s good.”
“Now the head,” I pointed out.
“I’ll do the head. You find some eyes.”
“How am I going to find eyes? There’s nothing but white here!” I looked around, throwing my arm out to emphasise my point.
“Stones on the path,” he replied. “Bruce will find sticks. He’s good at that.”
“Where is Bruce?”
William pointed to a space under a huge pine tree where he was happily curled up, napping. “He’s found the only spot in the area with no snow, it seems.”
It was true—the tree’s branches were so dense that no snow could get through.
“All right, fine. I’ll see what I can find, but don’t be mad if pine needles are all there is,” I warned him.
“We’ll figure something out.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR – GRACE
