Page 42 of Snowed In with Three Mountain Men

“Hello?” I call out into the house, but there’s no response. My heart drops. Where are they? Has something happened? Are they hurt? Worse…?

I’m just about to emerge from the bedroom to start looking for them, but all at once, a sound catches my attention—conversation, overlapping voices, agitation. I freeze, and press my ear to the door to get an idea of what’s going on.

“You heard what he said!” Dax exclaims. “We can’t sit around and wait for?—”

“Yeah, I heard how many people he said were waiting for us,” Callum counters. “We can’t take them all on. There’s just three of us.”

“But with the right planning?—”

“We don’t have time to put together some master scheme,” Chuck argues. “We have to move fast. The more time we spend discussing it, the?—”

But before he can continue, I shift my weight to try and get a better ear on the conversation, and the door swings open. I stumble out, right in front of all three guys—and when I get a look at them, my stomach drops.

It’s clear they’ve been out for hours. Their clothes are caked with dirt, and Dax looks hurt—there’s blood on his hands, spattered over his fists and along his wrists. I rush over to him, my eyes widening.

“Jesus, what happened?” I gasp, staring down at the blood.

He pulls his hands from my grip and shakes his head. “Nothing. It’s not my blood.”

“Nothing?” I exclaim. “What the fuck are you talking about? I wake up and you’re not here, and you come back talking about a plan?—”

“Charli, you should get some rest,” Callum tells me gently, but I shake my head.

“No, I’m not going to be left out of this,” I protest. “I deserve to know what’s going on. Don’t try and keep me away from it!”

The words come out of my mouth in a tone far sharper than I intended, and the three guys fall silent. They look between eachother, and I try to catch my breath, the shock of seeing them like this almost getting the better of me.

“What were you doing last night?” I ask, my voice dropping slightly. “What were—did something happen?”

Chuck sighs and pushes a hand through his hair, clearly giving up on trying to hide the truth from me.

“We…we set a trap,” he explains. “For some of James’s men. Catch them in the act and pull them in to ask them some questions, that was the idea.”

My eyes nearly bug out of my head. “A trap?” I gasp. “And you didn’t say anything to me about it…?”

“Because you didn’t need to know,” Callum replies. “Not until we had something to actually report to you. No point in worrying you if nothing happened.”

“So, what, you were just going to tell me when you decided it was time?”

“When we had something to go on.”

“And do you?” I demand, taking a step toward him. They glance between each other, not saying a word for a moment, and I clench my fists at my sides.

“Guys, this isn’t fair!” I protest. “You can’t leave me out of this stuff. I—I’m the one in the middle of this. I don’t want you doing shit that I have no say in, it’s—it’s not…”

I trail off, and to my surprise, I feel tears rising in my throat. I don’t know why this has gotten to me so much. But seeing them like this, knowing they were out there last night, putting themselves in the midst of this danger, it…it gets to me. It reallygets to me. Something could have happened to them, and I would have known nothing about it…

And then it hits me.

This feeling. It’s familiar.

Not just because of how scared I feel, but because of how helpless—it’s that sensation that I so often got when I was with James, when I felt like there was nothing in the world I could have done to control anything in my life. That sensation of being left out of all the big choices, having no grasp on the way anything was set to go—like I was being engulfed by a huge wave and swallowed, fighting my way to the surface, with no way to get there.

“Please,” I whisper, looking between them. “Please, don’t push me out of this…”

“Hey, hey,” Callum murmurs, and he reaches over and pulls me into his arms. “It’s fine. We’re fine. You’re fine. Okay…?”

But before I can get out a response, I feel the tears starting to course down my cheeks. I know it’s stupid to cry about this, but I can’t help it. All my emotions are still so close to the surface, and holding them back feels like too big a task in the face of everything else that’s going on.

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