Chapter 16
Stephan was fast asleep when the truck gave an unhealthy hiss.
She heard it first, and then there was a sweet smell, and the truck went sluggish in her hands.
For a moment, she had a candy-cane-flavored flashback, but then steam erupted from under the hood, curling and uncurling its way into the night, looking much more like water vapor than peppermint.
It might not have been the same trouble, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t the curse. Was something scuttling around inside the engine causing trouble?
She jerked the truck toward an off-ramp at the last possible moment, the car behind her blaring its horn as she cut them off to make it in time.
“Uh, Stephan? Stephan?” She reached a hand over to shake him. “Wake up!”
His eyes fluttered open, and he sat up straight with a stretch and a yawn. “What’s going on?”
“Something’s wrong with the truck.”
“Oh yeah, it’s probably overheating—figured that might happen.” His voice was dreadfully calm. “There, pull over.”
“Excuse me, what?” she asked, blinking as she pulled the steaming car into the parking lot of a gas station strung with twinkle lights. Coeur d’Alene National Forest stretched into the hills beyond, dusted with snow. “You expected this?”
“Yeah, radiator’s got a hairline fracture. I’m planning to replace it after I get my holiday pay.”
Anxiety gave way to irritation as she hopped out of the car.
Wind blew against multiple inflatables arranged out alongside the mini mart, causing Frosty’s head to rebound off the Abominable Snowmonster’s midsection as a particularly strong gust howled its way by, kicking up snow into crystalline clouds that sparkled in the floodlights overhead.
“I’m struggling to understand why we drove across two states and into the mountains in a truck with a cracked radiator.”
“Because it’s what we had available.” He popped the hood, and they both took a step back as more steam escaped into the night in thick, foggy plumes. “That’s how most people do things.”
“It’s reckless!”
“It’s fine. I know what to do.” Rounding the back of the car, he dragged out a toolbox and began rooting through it. “Just give me a few minutes.”
His calm did nothing to comfort her. How could he shrug off something that could’ve stranded them in the middle of nowhere? She walked up, slapping her hand into the toolbox to get in the way of his search. “You should have at least warned me when I took over driving.”
He glanced up briefly. “Yeah, sorry, you’re right. It slipped my mind.”
She scoffed but removed her hand, allowing him to fish out a tube of epoxy. “That’s a pretty big slip…How’s your head doing, by the way?”
“Better. The nap was a lifesaver.”
Grabbing the epoxy, a jug of coolant, and a roll of duct tape, he returned to the engine. He’d popped a small flashlight into his mouth, and she reached up to pluck it free. “Let me hold that for you.”
Her fingertips brushed his lips, and she shook off a tingle while angling the light to where he’d set up to work. He leaned in, slathering epoxy all over the fracture.
“Do you get headaches a lot?”
“Not all that often,” he said, but she could tell he was brushing it off.
“You don’t have…spells to help with that?”
“That cream is some of my mom’s hearth magic. Works like a charm—literally—for the muscle pain. But not the headaches.” He finished sealing and topped off the coolant, patting the hood. “There, good as new.”
“Wonderful—tape and glue to get us over a mountain.”
“If it’s good enough for astronauts, it’s good enough for us.”
“You’re no Captain Lovell.”
As they settled back into the car, she was left feeling an echo of what she had been thinking about earlier—that Stephan Midwinter was a man who had, to his detriment, learned to live with whatever life happened to be willing to give him.
No matter how reasonable it might have been to ask for more.
They pulled into Eucharist long after the sun had fallen behind the horizon, greeted by a welcome sign that hung from an antique mine framing.
The downtown area was shut up for the night, with only a few strings of lights still blazing their way in winding paths around electrical poles.
Everything was covered in a dusting of snow, like the powdered sugar finish of a pastry.
She searched downtown for signs that Eucharist was flourishing, that their development had done what they’d set out to do and bolstered the town’s prospects, but it was difficult to say this late at night.
There was a mix of familiar storefronts and new, but also empty real estate littered throughout.
She wouldn’t call downtown desolate, but it wasn’t bustling either.
The Goshen-owned development at Shepherd’s Summit, on the other hand, was much more active.
It was a resort village with a modern twist on mountain chalets surrounded by four high-rise hotel towers.
People were still filtering between restaurants and accommodations, and overhead wires carried a bright green gondola up and down the mountain, carrying night skiers back to their hotels.
A nativity scene dominated the central plaza of the village, and a brilliant gold star beamed overhead.
Maybe it hadn’t been an electric shock for downtown, but it was bringing tourists in, and tourists meant jobs. No one could argue that they had done nothing good for Eucharist, Idaho.
“Is this where we’re staying tonight?” She gazed at one of the resort towers hopefully, dreaming of its high-thread-count sheets and terrycloth robes.
He chuckled. “Oh no. That place is both expensive and full. We’re lucky I could find anything at all.”
She flipped through a mental catalog of the hotels in the area. None of them were anything to write home about, mostly on par with the Icicle Point. The Goshen team had stayed a couple of towns over in the resort they’d considered their future competition.
“Where, then?” she asked.
“Well, there were two things left…”
“A train?”
They’d pulled up in front of a fire-engine-red train car that stood on an empty patch of land off the highway.
There was a field stretching off in one direction, closed off by a wooden fence.
She spotted telltale hoofprints and knots of hair gathered in the joints and grinned—there were horses somewhere in that field.
The property was surrounded by woodlands dotted with familiar firs and cedars but also less familiar larches and lodgepole pines, which gave off a resinous scent reminiscent of turpentine.
“We’re actually pretty lucky this was available,” said Stephan. “They had someone cancel last minute.” He slung a purple-and-gray duffel over his shoulder emblazoned with a grinning husky dog and University of Washington Athletics.
Had he been a college athlete? That surprised her—he had the size for it, but otherwise it didn’t seem to fit the mental image she had of him.
“But it’s a train.” She could not make sense of this as a place one would choose to sleep.
“Was a train. Now it’s got four point seven stars as a vacation rental. Be grateful it’s not a yurt, because the alternative was a yurt.”
Hayleigh tutted. “A yurt’s at least meant to be slept in.”
“Not in the dead-ass of winter.”
“Well, what are the missing point three from? Please don’t say vermin.”
He was definitely going to say vermin.
“Oh, you know, the usual.” He mounted the stairs up to the wraparound porch that had been trimmed with candy cane runners for the season.
“No, I don’t know,” she said, reluctantly trailing after. “I stay in hotels, because I do not go on vacation to make my own bed. What’s the usual?” He didn’t answer the question, focused on hunting down the lockbox. “What’s the usual, Stephan?”
He opened the door to reveal the interior, and a gasp escaped her lips. It looked as though someone had rolled through and vomited Christmas all over it.
“Incredible,” murmured Stephan, laughing to himself with a shake of the head.
Every wall had been covered in either Christmasy decals or lengths of the same red-and-black buffalo print flannel they’d used to make all the curtains. The sofa was backed by a decal of a full snowy London street scene, framed with Victorian lamps decked out with bunches of holly and ribbon.
More buffalo print ribbon had been tacked onto the cabinet doors to make them look like wrapped gifts.
A massive nutcracker was wedged in one corner, and a Jack Frost standee guarded the bathroom door.
Even the trash can was seasonal, a red-nosed reindeer with its mouth open wide to gobble up refuse.
“Look at this.” Stephan gestured toward the bathroom. The first thing she noticed was a lingering mark of the train’s original purpose—a heavy metal door printed with red lettering that read Stay Off Roof. No Running Guard.
Then her eyes landed on the bathtub. It was boxed in on all sides by wooden counters that were completely covered with porcelain angels, all positioned to stare directly into the tub, and a false front had been added that gave it the appearance of a running sleigh.
“Can we still get the yurt?”
“Oh, come on, it’s not that bad,” he said, trailing back out to the main room. There was a kitchenette in one corner, which he paused at, removing a loaf of homemade bread wrapped in parchment from his duffel.
“You want some?” he asked, sawing through the golden crust with a heavy knife. She nodded, but as she reached for a gleaming red plate he’d set on one end of the counter, he shook his head. “Not that one. It’s an offering.”
“An offering?” She arched an eyebrow as he sawed off more slices.
“To the house spirits.”
Her eyes scanned the walls up and down. “You think this place is haunted?”
“Not ghosts. Other folk. Faerie. All houses have ’em. They’re basically everywhere.”
A strange sensation swept through her. Her grandfather had said the same thing, and there had been a plate much like the one Stephan had set out in her grandparents’ house where they left the same kinds of offerings.
She’d done it as well, until her mother had caught her doing it and forced her to stop, because her father didn’t suffer “Pagan nonsense” in his house.
As they moved out of the kitchenette to find a place to settle, she realized something.
“There’s just one bed.”
“Yeah, that seems to be the case.” They did their best not to make eye contact, and a molasses-in-the-air feeling left her limbs heavy. Stephan cleared his throat and said, “I’ll do the couch.”
She glanced over at the small gray sofa, which could really only be called a loveseat.
“You’re at least a foot longer than that thing.
I’ll do it.” When he opened his mouth to protest, she pushed her way past him and flopped down, pulling a woolly blanket up to her chin and burrowing in as she gazed at the street scene decal overhead.
“I’ll just lie here and take a stroll through merry old England. ”
The fake British accent she attempted to say it in was truly awful, and a laugh rumbled all the way through Stephan as he flopped onto the bed. She caught it like it was contagious, giggling along even though it wasn’t really that funny.
“Where did they even find that?” he asked. “Or any of this?”
“I don’t know. Did you see the garbage can, though?”
“Mmm-hmm. Nothing gets you in the holiday spirit like watching Rudolph choke on last night’s pizza box.”
“And the bathtub!” A fresh giggle escaped her lips. “The sleigh thing is almost cute, but the angels?”
“Seriously, serial killer stuff. How are you supposed to relax with all of them staring at you?”
“Oh, they’re definitely there to make sure you don’t sin in the tub.”
He rolled onto his stomach, and her breath caught in her throat as his shirt bunched up in the motion, revealing the lower half of his back and the V-shaped Apollo dimples that disappeared into his waistband.
He didn’t seem to notice, only looked her way, wagged a finger, and in a surprisingly good “old woman voice”—much better than her old-timey British—said, “No hanky-panky in the bathtub!”
She stuck out her lower lip. “Not even a little?”
“Okay, maybe just a little, but…” His eyes twinkled as he tipped his head back toward the bathroom. “They’ll want to watch.”
“Oh God, why did you put that in my head?” She snatched up a gumdrop-shaped pillow and hurled it at him.
He easily snatched it from the air and tossed it right back, forcing her to dodge to avoid getting hit in the face.
She tumbled straight to the floor. Despite the initial shock, her laughter redoubled, leaving her breathless.
Finally, she mellowed, and so did he, leaving only the chugging of the train’s laboring heaters to fill the silence.
Her eyes slid his way, and she found him still on his stomach, watching her with the unguarded half smile he got when he thought she wasn’t paying attention.
The room grew smaller, soft light pooling in the space between their beds.
“What?” she asked, sitting up from the floor.
“Nothing,” he said, rolling back over and adjusting his position so that his head fell onto the pillow.
Part of her wanted to stand up and shake him and ask, What are you seeing when you look at me like that?
But the rest of her knew it was safer not to ask.
With a noisy exhale, she pulled herself back onto the couch and slipped the blanket over her body, shifting positions again and again in an effort to get comfortable. Her restlessness must have been keeping Stephan awake, because he said, “You know, there’s really room for two on here.”
Her eyes flew open, darting to the bed. It was king-sized, with plenty of room for them to spread out—even given his size. He was looking at her with a carefully neutral expression, clearly trying to make certain the offer suggested nothing but a practical sleeping arrangement.
“Yeah, there is,” she said, but made no immediate effort to move.
“We could pull over the couch cushions,” he said, “make a little border wall if it’d make you more comfortable.”
“I…” she began, and then shook her head. “No, I don’t think we need to do that.”
She slipped from the couch, padding across the room to settle opposite him on the bed.
He turned away, rolling onto his side, creating maximum distance between them.
The bed groaned beneath his weight, and she was left aware of every shift and shimmy of fabric as he settled at a gentlemanly distance.
It was just what she’d asked for, but not at all what she wanted.