Chapter 12 Sam
SAM
Sam was more than ready to get into the promised sauna, with the freezing air nipping at his legs and shriveling his .... everything.
What he was not prepared for was Maggie opening the door, wearing nothing but a towel.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” was all he could say.
Maggie stared at him, lips half parted. Her dark hair was piled in a messy bun on top of her head, tendrils straggling around her face, damp with sweat and steam. She looked deliciously kissable.
His stallion, of course, was delighted.
“Coming out or going in?” Maggie said blankly, then squeezed her eyes shut. “I mean. I’ll leave.”
“No,” he said quickly as she reached for the coat hanging inside the door. “Look, I gotta get out of the cold.” He came in and hastily shut the door behind him. “There’s no need for you to go. We’re adults. We can share a sauna as long as we keep our towels on, right?”
Maggie hesitated, then gave a small nod and put her coat back.
It was clear to Sam after a couple of minutes that they absolutely could not share a sauna, towels or not.
They had taken opposite benches, but this didn’t help.
The towels were not hiding nearly as much as Sam wished they did.
He hadn’t realized that clinging to curves was something that a towel could do to the extent that Maggie’s was doing.
He folded his hands on top of his own towel to hopefully disguise the problem that was, so to speak, growing.
Maggie shifted uncomfortably on her bench. “You know, I think I’ve had enough sauna for one night.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” she said, rising swiftly, with a firm hand on her towel to keep it from slipping. She looked around as if to gather items, then seemed to realize she had no items to gather. “Have a, uh, a good night, Sam.”
She went swiftly past him in a flash of bare legs. Sam took a moment to collect himself, and then rose as well.
“Maggie, wait.”
She had vanished behind the barrier between the door and the coat area. He heard a thump and cursing.
“Are you okay?”
“I can’t get the door open,” Maggie snapped.
Sam went around the half-wall. She had her boots on, coat over her arm, and was wrestling one-handed with the door. She tried pushing against the bottom with her foot.
“They said it can stick. Let me.” Sam jiggled the door, then put his weight against it. “It’s wedged or something.”
“Come on, use your strength,” Maggie said impatiently. “We’re shifters. We can open a stupid door.”
She put her coat down and planted her hands on the door, pushed, pulled, and finally had to stagger back to catch her towel before it slipped down her sweat-slick arm. Sam grabbed her to stop her from potentially crashing into the wall
Now he was holding a wet, sweat-slippery, mostly naked Maggie.
“This is fine,” Maggie said, mostly to herself. She got her feet under her. “Someone will get us out eventually.”
“With what, a chainsaw?” Sam put his shoulder against the door. Then he felt his towel start to slip and had to grab it.
He met Maggie’s eyes for a minute.
“This is going to sound like an excuse,” he said. “But if I take off my towel and use it as padding, I can apply more force to the door.”
The flush on Maggie’s cheeks was probably just the heat in the sauna. “Yes. That makes sense. I’ll—I’ll go open some vents in case we start getting too hot.”
Sam was already too hot, but not physically. Having Maggie out of sight was a little help, anyway. He unwrapped his towel, pressed it against the door, and threw his shoulder against it.
No luck. He didn’t want to break the hinges. Something was really holding the door in place. He was afraid it might’ve frozen shut. All this water and steam, with the temperature dropping steeply at night, seemed like a good way to make that happen.
There was a small throat-clearing noise. Looking around, he saw Maggie. She was trying to look anywhere but at him.
“Sorry about this,” Sam said. He was definitely flushed with more than the heat. He slung the towel around his hips again.
“It’s not your fault.”
“Well, I was the one who shut the door.”
Maggie gave a nervous laugh. “Why don’t we just enjoy it? Apparently Mauro will come around to close it down eventually, so we just have to wait. And we have total privacy, since no one else can get in, either.”
“Total privacy,” Sam repeated.
He took a few steps forward. Maggie didn’t give ground, and now he was nearly brushing against her. She was tall enough to look him in the eyes, with just a slight tilt back of her neck when he approached.
“You know,” Maggie said, her voice breathless. “I thought you were going to kiss me on the snowmobiles today.”
“If Doreen hadn’t come along, I might have.”
He gently placed a hand on her towel-clad waist, feeling the flex of her muscles and ribs as she breathed.
She leaned forward.
He met her lips with his, mouth parting in a long-awaited coming together.
They got a few seconds into the hottest and steamiest—literally—kiss of Sam’s life before there was a sudden pounding on the door and then the worst possible voice said, “Dad? Are you in there?”
Sam hastily broke away from Maggie, stopping himself before he reflexively shoved her into the wall. Maggie had leaped back as well. “Charlie! Great timing!”
“The greatest,” Maggie murmured.
“Oh good, you are in there. I need the room key.”
“It’s—uh—” In his coat pocket. With him. “... in here with me, but there’s a problem. Charlie, can you get the door open from out there?”
“What? Why? You better not be naked in there!”
“The door’s stuck!” Maggie called.
She clapped her mouth shut immediately, but Charlie said in tones of betrayed horror, “Are you both in there?”
“Charlie, please just go get Hester or Mauro, the owners,” Sam said. “If you can’t find them, ask anybody you can find who looks official.”
“Ugh!” Charlie said indistinctly, but Sam heard her take off at a run.
“Sorry,” Maggie said softly, coming up beside him.
“Don’t apologize. She’s a teenager, not a little kid.
And she’ll know we’re both in here when the door opens, anyway.
” Still, guilt reared its head. He had spent so much time in his life thinking about Charlie, and Charlie’s welfare, that he wasn’t really sure where to go from here.
There was one thing he did know, though.
“We have a few minutes before she can bring Mauro back. Want to pick up where we left off?”
“In for a penny, in for a pound, huh?” Maggie murmured in her husky voice.
Sam put his hand on the side of her face, and drew her in for another kiss.
This time they weren’t interrupted, at least for a little while. He nearly lost himself in the softness of her lips.
Just as the situation under his towel was becoming critical, boots crunched outside. Sam took a quick step away and reached for his coat. Maggie did likewise.
“You folks okay in there?” Mauro’s voice asked.
“Yeah,” Sam said. “We just need out.”
“Hang on. There’s a pretty bad ice-up situation here. I’ve got a crowbar and I’ll have you out in a minute.”
Some ominous cracking sounds followed, and a moment later the door opened and cold air flooded inside. Maggie gasped “Brrr!” and clutched her coat around herself.
From the other side of the door, Mauro looked ruefully at them as he stood there holding a crowbar.
“I guess we better shut the sauna down until the weather warms up a little, or we figure out a solution to this. Meanwhile I’ll get some deicer out here.
Really sorry about that. You all aren’t having much of a vacation, are you? ”
“It’s okay,” Sam said. He looked down at Maggie with a grin playing around his lips. “It didn’t turn out so bad.”
He wasn’t aware of having put an arm around her waist. Perhaps it was still there from when they had been kissing earlier; he’d nearly lost his awareness of his surroundings in the heat of Maggie’s mouth.
But he was all too aware of it when he looked up, past Mauro, and saw his daughter looking at both of them with a betrayed expression.
“So this is me getting a say in it, huh?” Charlie snapped, just before she stormed off.