Page 17 of A Mountain Man Christmas

“Oh.”

Silence passed between them for a minute. To his own surprise, Tristan began to find it uncomfortable.

“We’ve lived together in my cabin for the past fifteen years,” he went on. “He belonged to my brother, Jason.”

“Belonged?”

He nodded. “Jason was killed in an avalanche.”

The memory of a woman screaming,This isyourfault, Tristan! You shouldn’t have let him!slithered into his mind, but he dismissed it quickly.

“Oh,” she said again.

“I’ve been taking care of Lewis ever since. Raised him as my own. It was the least I could do. All Lewis had left were Ariadne and me, and Ariadne…” He trailed off.

More silence hung in the air between them, broken only by the occasional crunch of snow beneath their feet as they traveled through the woods.

“What about the curse you mentioned the other day?” she asked. “You said it was a family thing?”

You don’t need to tell her a thing, Tristan.

Tristan sighed and then told her about the curse, anyway; how the Harrison bloodline had been cursed, how he and his family had believed the curse to have ended a long time ago, until now.

If she said, “Oh,”one more time, he was going ahead with his plan to dislocate his fingers and break himself free.

He decided to change the subject. “You should tell me more about yourself.”

“I already told you the other day, didn’t I?” she responded. “I’m from the Bronx. I was on a plane before I got here. And I’m a hunter, like you are.”

He scoffed. “You and I are nothing alike.”

“It’s true. I hunt down people like you.”

Her words stung him harder than he cared to admit. “The only thing we have in common is that we are both bound to someone we cannot stand.”

It sounded less harsh than he’d intended it to. Lyla didn’t even seem the least bit fazed. Unable to come up with anything else to say, Tristan decided to drop the issue. They continued to travel in silence. He paused to scan their surroundings now and then in case anyone was lurking in the woods and watching them, or worse.

The sky had turned orange by the time they finally stepped out of the woods. The setting sun was a pleasant sight, but their gaze was riveted on the large mound of snow blocking their path, practically filling their line of sight.

“We’ll have to go around it,” he said. “It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.”

It took even less time to get around the mound of snow. By the time they returned to their path, they found themselves faced with another problem.

“Is that…a bridge?” Lyla wondered aloud.

Tristan simply stared. Ahead of them, nearly a hundred feet away, a small wooden bridge stretched from the snow over awide chasm toward another downhill slope. The bridge looked just as he’d remembered: old and narrow, worn away by foot traffic and the passage of time.

“It is,” he said. “We’re going to have to cross it.”

“Tell me you’re kidding.”

“I’m not. It’s the only way across that chasm. After that, we’ll travel for a few days more until we reach Alfanger. We could hide out there for a bit and recuperate.”

She blinked. “I don’t even know what that word means, but don’t you think you could have given me a heads-up about this, like,daysago?”

Tristan shrugged. “I’m telling you now. That is the only way across.”

“Well, it’s not exactly the Golden Gate Bridge,” she said, eyeing the bridge warily.

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