Page 23 of Snowed In with Three Mountain Men

“You really feel that way?” I ask him as we start to walk again. “About it being another world, I mean?”

“Yep.”

“You didn’t say anything like that when we were together,” I blurt out, before I can stop myself. As soon as the words are past my lips, I wish I could reel them back in. The two of us have been doing a damn good job of pretending we don’t remember anything that went down between us all those years ago, but we both know it’s there.

He slows slightly, shaking his head. “I didn’t want to admit it, back then,” he confesses, finally. “Not when I was with you. I guess…”

He trails off. I reach out to touch his arm, just slightly—I need to know what the truth was. I’ve been wondering about it for years, what drove him away from me all those years ago.

“Was it something I did?” I ask him finally. That’s the part that’s been tormenting me the most, wondering if there’s more I could have done to make him feel at home. When I first met him, he was just a few months out of the serve he’d performed in Eastern Europe, and he barely spoke about it. I never pushed him for more information, figuring he would share it with me if he wanted to, but maybe it seemed to him like I just couldn’t handle hearing it from him.

“What?”

He rounds on me, stopping dead in his tracks. The way he’s looking at me, it’s as though he thinks I’m insane.

I blink, staring back at him. “I mean—I mean, the reason you left,” I continue. “Was that because of something I did?”

He shakes his head slowly. “No. Jesus, Charli, no, it never had anything to do with you,” he murmurs, and he takes a step toward me. There’s a look in his eyes that I can’t read—almost angry, but not aimed at me, aimed at himself. Like he’s furious to think that I might have thought that way about myself because of him.

“Then why?” I whisper, my voice cracking slightly. I didn’t realize how much emotion was tied up in all of this for me, not until this instant. I can’t believe I finally have the chance to get some answers—but he’s still staring at me as though he can’t give them to me.

He grits his teeth, draws his gaze away from me, and takes a deep breath. “Does it really matter?”

“Yes, it matters,” I shoot back. “Because you leaving me like that—it’s part of the reason I’m here right now.”

He frowns. “What?”

“Tell me,” I plead with him. “Please, just…just tell me what I did wrong?—”

“Charli,” he cuts me off, grabbing my hand and squeezing it tight. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Ever. You were perfect. It was me. I was the problem. I was always the problem.”

“How can you say that?” I demand. “I—we were happy together, Callum. At least, I thought we were, I don’t?—”

“I was happy with you, Charli,” he murmurs, tightening his grip on my hand, as though he’s reaching back all those years to keep hold of me. “Really happy. But that was…that was the only time I was truly happy.”

He pauses for a moment and looks away from me, gathering himself before he goes on. I can tell this is tough for him to talk about, but I need to hear it. I need to know what happened all those years ago.

“Because I never felt like myself again after I came back from service,” he murmurs. “After we lost our dad that year, I…I just couldn’t stop thinking about the shit he’d been through. The shit he had survived, and how it was too much for him. I never felt like I belonged with anyone my age, apart from you. Like they just looked right through me.”

Swallowing hard, he went on. “And when I took you to the cabin, the place where I’d always been happy as a kid,” he continues, “that was my last chance. The last chance I was going to give myself to feel normal. And if I didn’t, I wasn’t going to burden you with the weight of it, everything I’d been through, it just wasn’t fair. You were young, you were so free, you had yourwhole life ahead of you, and I wasn’t going to bring you down with me. So…so I left.”

I stare at him. All this time, I had wondered why he walked away from me like he did. I wondered, torturing myself with questions, about what I could have done to change things. And now he’s telling me that it was nothing to do with me? That it was all in his head? I want to scream. I want to hug him. I want to tell him that he’s the biggest fucking idiot on the planet…

But as I open my mouth to say something, a noise catches my attention—a slight whistling, followed by a bang and a crack.

Callum’s head whips around—my gaze follows his, and I see a small gash in the edge of a tree beside us, splinters still falling to the ground around us. I’m about to ask him what the hell is happening, when he grabs my shoulders and lets out a panicked roar.

“Charli, get down!”

He pulls me to the ground just before another bullet whistles through the air, slamming into the tree next to us and ricocheting onto the soft earth next to me. My eyes widen as it hits me—we’re being fired at!

“Shit, shit, shit,” Callum mutters, moving to block my body from the line of fire with his own.

“What the fuck is happening?” I hiss, and he shakes his head.

“We can work that part out later,” he replies. “Right now, we need to get out of here. Fast.” He catches my face in his hand and looks deep into my eyes, his gaze blazing with sincerity and concern. “You do exactly as I say, Charli. You understand?”

I nod. I can hear my heartbeat slamming against my ribs, the blood rushing through my veins. I know this is about me—this has to be. Out here, nobody would come looking for me if it wasn’t James. And I feel like a fucking idiot for being so naive. How could I think I would get away with everything so easily? Wandering around the forest, like I’m totally safe, like I don’t have a psycho on my tail willing to do whatever it takes to?—

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