Page 9 of Snowed In with Three Mountain Men

“I’m not trying to hide anything! I just?—”

“Then tell us,” Dax demands. “Tell us what you’re doing here.”

“I can’t. It’s not that easy. Just let me go, I’ll?—”

“You can’t go anywhere in this weather,” Chuck reminds me again. I can feel tears pricking at the edges of my eyes—I feel trapped, my feet rooted to the ground. Fleeing the wedding, I had managed to actually get the road under my feet, to feel as though there was a way for me to get out of all of this, but now…

Now, I’m back to square one. Stuck, with no way out, these men refusing to let me so much as see the outside world. I want to scream. I want to tear this fucking wedding dress off my body, and I want to run back out into the snow—I don’t care how much danger it might put me in. It’s better than being trapped here in this place, knowing that, with every passing moment, James could be closing the distance between us.

And that, when he finds me…he’s going to rain down a hell I’ve never even imagined before.

“This girl’s going to be trouble,” Dax mutters. I don’t even want to look at him right now. Of course, I’m trouble—I’m always trouble. My life can never just be easy, no matter how hard I try, no matter?—

“Jesus, Dax, give her a break,” Chuck shoots back. At least I have someone on my side. Or do I? It doesn’t seem likely that these three could havenothingto do with James. Maybe he even thought that I would try and make a break for it on the day of the wedding, and hiring these guys was insurance to make sure I wouldn’t get far. Maybe they drove me off the road, maybe they had iced it up so I had no choice but to swerve off, maybe…

I realize I’m panting, gasping for breath, just trying to stay awake. If I pass out, I don’t know what will be waiting for mewhen I wake up, and I don’t want to know. I clench my jaw and squeeze my eyes shut, and stab my finger toward the door.

“Just…just get the fuck out!” I demand. “If you’re really not here to hurt me, then just leave me the fuck alone!”

As soon as I say those words, I feel something shift in the room—Dax is on his feet, striding toward me, though I can barely make him out through the blur in the corners of my vision.

“You don’t get to talk to us like that,” he snarls, and he slams his hand down on the bed before me, sending a loud creak through the room that makes me jump. “You don’t?—”

“Dax!” another one of the guys calls out to him, but it’s clear that whatever control they had over him, it’s gone. And now he’s staring me down like he wants to take a chunk out of me.

But if he thinks I’m going to make it that easy for him…he’s got another thing coming.

5

DAX

“What the fuckdo you think you’re doing?” Chuck snaps at me, grabbing my shoulder and trying to pull me away from the bed—but my eyes are fixed on her, and I’m not about to let her get away with speaking to us like that.

I don’t give a fuck what she’s been through. I don’t care how she knows this James. It doesn’t interest me how she found herself in the middle of the woods, driving in a snowstorm and running her car off the road. No, right now, she’s under our roof, which means she treats us with some fuckingrespect.End of story.

“You really think I’m going to play nice when I don’t even know who you are?” she fires back at me, voice laced with anger. “I—I woke up here, you didn’t give me any choice, I didn’t ask you to bring me here and now you won’t let me go!”

“Yeah, because if we’d left you in that car, you’d have frozen to death,” I snarl at her, pushing my face closer to hers. I can feel it, that red mist coming down, and even as I know I should stop it, I can’t. I don’t do well with anyone fucking up the good thing we have going here, especially not when they act as though we’ve kidnapped them to do it.

“Maybe you should have just left me, then!” she exclaims.

“Trust me, if I’d had my way, I would have,” I mutter. A shock of pain runs up my bad leg—on cold days like this, I swear I can still feel the impact of the bullet where it shocked into my hips, the fragments that were too small to remove still scattered through the muscle and bone.

“I didn’t ask for your help,” she protests. “And I’m not asking for it now.”

“We’re not letting you go back out there, and that’s final,” Callum intones. I turn to face him, eyebrows raised.

“I don’t know, man,” I reply with a theatrical shrug. “If she’s so certain she doesn’t want to be here, then I don’t see why we should force her.”

“Dax,” Chuck growls, clearly not up for my bullshit right now. I ignore him.

“She’s clearly got somewhere she wants to be,” I continue, tossing my hands in the air. “And it’s got nothing to do with us.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Callum snaps at me, but I stare down at her again. I can see something in her eyes, just for a moment—a flash of something I recognize, though I wish I didn’t. Vulnerability. Fear. Covered up with anger as best she can, though it takes everything she has to frame it as fury. Whatever she’s running from out there, whatever brought her to our doorstep, it’s bad—really fucking bad.

And that’s all the more reason for us to get her out of here before it catches up. Because this place we’ve built, this life—it’s the only way I can feel like a functioning member of society. And I’mnot going to sacrifice it for the sake of this woman who doesn’t want to be here any more than I want her to be.

“He’s right,” she counters, scrambling up to her knees on the bed again. She looks totally ridiculous, still wearing her wedding dress—still looking as though she’s just a few moments from walking down the aisle. And as much as I hate to admit it, the guy she would have been going to meet was one lucky bastard—she’s hot as hell, even after the mess she’s been through, and even more so with that fiery defiance in her eyes.

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