Page 68 of Avalanche
“And Lily Dean?” the clerk asks, pulling out a pair of reading glasses from his pocket and pushing them up his nose.
“That’s me.” Lily offers him a smile, but there’s no mistaking the flush painting her cheeks, or the faint warbling of nerves in her voice.
I reach across, take her hand in my own. She turns to give me a smile, this one fuller than the one she gave the clerk, and more real.
“We’re here to get married,” she says, a little breathy. “We’re ready.”
And she’s right, I realize, giving her a slow, slightly bewildered smile back in return.
As crazy as this is, as rushed as this is, we are ready. I am ready. Even if I don’t get my inheritance, even if my dad wins the legal battle he’s fighting back in France, there’s no way I’m going to regret today.
Whatever happens, wherever life takes the six of us, I don’t think I could ever regret marrying Lily.
Chapter 21
Lily
“I can’t believe you’re finally letting me ride with you,” Liam remarks as we get off the lift. “Was Tessa busy or something?”
I tuck my face into the shoulder of my instructor’s uniform to hide my smile, my free foot kicking to propel me across the flat after Liam.
It was actually Tessa who suggested that I do a training session with Liam, since he’s an examiner for the New Zealand instructor’s exam. He can tell you where you’re at, she’d explained. Whether you’re in a good position to take the exam at the start of the southern hemisphere season.
But if I tell Liam that, I’ll never hear the end of it.
“How was your lesson?” I ask, in a paltry attempt to change the subject. “It was that woman from Arizona, right?”
“Unimportant.” Liam waves one gloved hand dismissively as he skates to the edge of the run, away from where groups of skiers and boarders tend to mingle as they work out where to go. “What has Tessa been working on with you? Teaching demos? Rider assessment?”
“Yeah, all of that,” I agree, skidding to a stop beside him, then bending to clip on my board. “Plus generally pushing me on my riding. You know, improving my switch riding, getting me to be more aggressive in my carving, that sort of thing.”
Liam nods, his lips pressed together in thought. I can’t help but smile at him when he’s like this—serious and focused, his grey eyes bright. I wonder what he’s seeing when he’s like that, if his brain is pulling clips of my snowboarding, remembering what my riding was like before, cataloging all the little faults, considering how to reshape me.
“Let’s do a run,” he suggests. “I want you to go through all the demos. I’m talking falling leaf to dynamic carve, the whole range. Talk me through all of them like you would a student. Then watch my riding, and tell me what I need to do to improve.”
“Okay.”
The thought of running through everything I’ve learned, of pretending to teach Liam, it has my stomach going suddenly tight with nerves. I let out a strained exhale, my breath clouding in front of my lips.
“You got it, love.” Liam gives me a teasing smile. “Just pretend I’m Tessa. Or one of your students. You do this stuff every day.”
I give him a tight nod. He’s right. I know he’s right. It’s just, I don’t normally do this in front of him.
Liam’s eyes track my movement from behind his goggles. I feel them on me, feel his attention like a brand on my skin, know he’s seeing each micro movement, breaking it apart in his head. I do my best to ignore it, to ride like it’s just me and Tessa.
I bend my knees, line my body up over the edge, let my weight pull me into the turn, then drive my front knee around and carve onto my heel edge. I can feel the board arch beneath me, the minuscule popping of the camber in the core, the singing movement of the snow beneath me, the warmth burning through my quads, my hips, my calves.
“Nice.”
Liam’s praise whispers across the snow, barely audible over the sound of my board, over the sound of my heart. It feels good, his praise, but not as good as knowing I’m doing it right. Of locking into the turns. I move into the next turn, and the next, and the next, finding my rhythm.
The first time Tessa showed me how to carve like this, I was conscious of every part of my body, fighting against my own instinct to move in a way that seemed wholly unnatural. I was constantly terrified of falling too, of catching an edge and hurtling down the steep face of the mountain.
It was not an unfounded fear, it turned out, because I did fall. A lot.
And then I got it.
I hadn’t even been trying, not really. I’d been following Tessa through a a tree-run, laughing, drinking in fresh snow and sunshine. We’d popped out of the trees and onto newly groomed cord, a miraculous patch of trail that hadn’t been skied out yet. I’d sunk into my edge, my knees bending with laughter, my body floating.
