Snowbound

Page 1

“Stay.”
He sounded rusty, as if he didn’t know how to
ask for what he wanted. He tried again. “Talk
to me. Tell me about...” What? Her life? What
she expected the “right” man to be like? “A
movie. I haven’t been to one in a long time.
What’s the last one you went to?”
Fiona relaxed, as he’d hoped she would.
While he measured sugar, she told him about
a thriller with a huge budget, big stars and an
unlikely plot.
They hadn’t even been there twenty-four hours.
How, in such a short time, had he gotten to
the point where he had a thought like I need
her? He hadn’t kissed her, hadn’t touched her
beyond a hand on the shoulder, didn’t know
that she felt anything at all for him.
He didn’t need her. That had been a ridiculous
thought. But he wouldn’t mind if snow kept
falling for another day or two.
Dear Reader,
In 2009 Harlequin will celebrate sixty years of
providing women with pure reading pleasure. To mark
this special anniversary, we are pleased to offer you
this book written by popular Superromance author
Janice Kay Johnson.
With the focus on a complex and satisfying romance,
Harlequin Superromance has been entertaining readers
for almost thirty years. Each month you’ll find six new
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If you want to read about real people and their journey
to happily-ever-after, then Harlequin Superromance is
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Happy anniversary,
The Harlequin Superromance Editors
CHAPTER ONE
FIONA MACPHERSON was starting to get scared.
The rhythmic thwap, thwap, thwap of the tire chains
helped her shut out the chatter of the eight teenagers
behind her. With the snow falling so hard, she felt as if
she and the kids were in a bubble, darkness all around,
the headlights only reaching a few feet ahead. Snow
rushed at the windshield, a white, ever-moving veil.
She shouldn’t have taken this route—a thin line on
the map that promised to cut north of the projected path
of the storm.
“This way’s good,” Dieter Schoenecker had said,
when she told her vanload of students what she intended
to do. “We cross-country ski at a place up near High
Rock Springs.”
Hadn’t she been a high school teacher long enough
to know better than to take a sixteen-year-old’s word
for anything?
Not fair. She was responsible, not Dieter, and she had
had some doubts about whether the line on the map was
too skinny. But it was a highway, it headed westbound,
and they should have been able to make it across the
Cascade Mountains before the blizzard arrived.
Only, they hadn’t. They’d left Redmond, out in the
high desert country of eastern Oregon, hours ago,
right after the Knowledge Champs competition had
ended. They should have been close to home in Hawes
Ferry south of Portland by now, or at least descending into the far tamer country in western Oregon. Instead they were in the thick of the storm. Fiona was struggling to maintain twenty miles an hour. It had
been at least two hours since she’d seen another
vehicle.
We should have turned back when we stopped to put
on chains, she thought. And when they realized they no
longer had cell phone reception.
The voices behind her had died out, Fiona realized.
“You okay, Ms. Mac?” one of the boys asked.
Despite the fact that her neck and shoulders ached
and her eyes watered from the strain, she called back,
“Yep. You hanging in there?”
Nobody had time to answer. A jolt shuddered
through the van as it hit something and came to a stop,
throwing Fiona against her seat belt.
“What happened?” Amy cried.
“We probably went off the road,” Dieter said.
Fiona made everyone but Dieter stay in the van. She
and he put on parkas and got out. With the engine turned
off, it was utterly silent outside, the headlights catching
the ghostly, slow fall of the snow and the white world
they found themselves in. Tree boughs were cloaked
with white, as were rocks and shrubs and ground.
“Awesome,” he said.
She opened her mouth to snap at him, then stopped
herself. He was young. She should be grateful he didn’t