Page 13 of Can She Get Home for Christmas?

“Sounds good,” he answered, relieved that the atmosphere in the cabin had lightened a little.

She took a sip of the hot chocolate. “You might as well eat another cookie.”

“Dessert first?”

“Well, nothing about today is normal.”

“Right.” Too bad that included their relationship. What was he going to tell her? That he’d fallen in love with her while he was spying on her?

Fallen in love?

The realization hit him like a punch in the gut. He hadn’t admitted that to himself. But the reality had been staring him in the face for a long time.

He must have caught his breath, because she looked up at him. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“You look—weird.”

“I’m just worried,” he managed to say, then kicked himself for grabbing at that excuse.

“About what?”

“That we’ll get snowed in,” he answered lamely.

She kept her gaze on him like she doubted his explanation, but she didn’t press him, thank the Lord.

To cover his stunned reaction to his own state of mind, he got up from the table and began poking in the carry bags on the counter.

“We both had a rough day. Maybe we should eat and try to get some rest.”

“Yes, right. “I’m sorry I don’t have the main part of the meal. But I’ve got twice-baked potatoes.”

“I haven’t had those in years,” he answered, trying to focus on the food and not his roiling emotions.

“And two cold dishes. Ham and broccoli salad and a green Jell-O mold with apples and pecans.”

“My lucky Christmas Eve. I was going to be lucky to get a can of tuna fish.”

She nodded, then walked to one of the windows and pulled the blackout shade aside, revealing the still-swirling snow.

As she let the shade fall back into place, she asked, “Could we walk to a place where you can get phone reception?”

“Maybe, but it could be a long walk through the snow, and I’m not going to take the chance of leaving you alone. We can hope that when I don’t check in, some of my Decorah buddies will come looking for me.”

She tipped her head to the side, considering the implications of what he’d said. “Isn’t this cabin safe?”

“I thought it was. But after you tripped over that stick, I’m reevaluating the situation.”

“Sometimes a stick is just a stick.”

“Sometimes it’s part of an alarm system. Let me show you something in case we need to make a quick getaway.” He got up, walked across the room and moved the bed aside. Below it was a place where she saw a rectangle outlined in the floorboards. It was a trapdoor, which he pulled up with a metal ring. The door exposed a narrow passageway below the floor. Leaning against the interior was a ladder going down.

“This leads to a tunnel that comes out twenty yards from the cabin, in a clump of brambles. If we’re under attack, we might have to get out that way.”

She stared down into the secret passage, then back at him. “You went to the trouble of digging a passageway under the floor?”

“No. It was already here when Decorah rented the property. We just cleaned it out and shored it up with timbers. We think it was a stop on the Underground Railroad.”

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