Free 2 Dancing With Death by Liz Marvin

aren’t even officially dating yet, and I’d just as soon not share a bed with him quite yet, thank you very much!”
         Clarise chuckled. “I wouldn’t mind sharing a bed with Wes. But,” she said, holding up her hand as Betty started to speak, “I’d be fine sharing with you instead. I think it’s good to play a little hard to get anyhow.”
         Betty rolled her eyes. “You have “hard to get” down to an art. How long did it take you and Wes to get together again?”
         “And now that I have him I’d like very much to keep him, thank you very much!” Clarise stated. “So, I’m not going to rush anything.”
         “Makes sense,” Betty said, though personally she thought Clarise and Wes would get overrun by glaciers if they moved any slower. “Now shove over. It’s sleep time.”

    ~

         Betty slept deep enough that she didn’t hear Bill and Wes come in, but when she awoke in the morning there they were in the bed closest to the door. Betty stared at Bill’s face for a moment. His eyelids flickered, and she realized that he must be dreaming. About what? She only let herself wonder for a moment before shaking herself out of her stupor.
         So she liked the man. That didn’t mean she had to act like a lovesick teenager. Clarise was still asleep beside her, her breath coming soft and steady. Betty eased out of bed, trying not to move the mattress and covers so much that Clarise woke. She could use this time to check her e-mail and make sure that everything was going fine with her clients.
         Running her own business was a mixture of blessings and curses. In this case, while she could set her own schedule and arrange to come on this trip with no worries, she still had to work on her mini-vacation. If something was going wrong, she was quite literally the only employee capable of putting out fires. She was the only employee period!
         Betty pulled her laptop out of its well-worn travel case and plugged in a set of headphones to hide the sound of the system starting up. She plopped down in the chair in front of the screen and tapped her foot impatiently. Why did it take her computer so long to boot up? Could she have chosen a faster model, a better start-up program, a better anything?
         One of the boys shifted in their bed. Betty stopped tapping. The last thing she wanted was for one of them to wake up because she was loud. Who knew how long they’d been awake last night?
         When her computer was fully awake, Betty opened the wireless network part of her control panel. This was the part of the computer that listed every wireless network in the area. Betty waited for the hotel’s network to pop up.
         And waited.
         And waited.
         It took her a few minutes to realize that there wasn’t a hotel network to find. No free wifi, no wireless connections with blocked passwords… in fact, her computer wasn’t listing a single wireless network in the whole area.
         Betty walked over to the window and peeked through the blackout curtains, careful to not let any light fall on the sleepers. For a moment, the brightness outside shocked her vision. She winced, holding her hands up to her eyes to ward out the sun, before realizing that it wasn’t the sun that her eyes needed warding from. It was the whole whitewashed world.
         Betty might not have been able to see very far without her glasses, but that didn’t make any difference in this case. Even if her vision had been top-notch, she wouldn’t’ve been able to see more than ten feet from the window. The air was swarming with snowflakes. And they weren’t the pretty, fluffy kind. These snowflakes were small, frozen bits of ice whipping around at who knew how many miles per hour. They clicked and hissed against the glass of the window. This was the type of storm that downed power lines and turned satellite signals into white noise. And apparently, the hotel’s