Free Snowbound by Kristianna Sawyer Page B

was lying in bed waiting
for him.
    So here she was, ready to tackle the great
outdoors, post-whiteout. The chime of her phone distracted her from
her own face in the mirror, and she reached for it, pleasantly
surprised to find service restored. The text was from her mom,
decrying how an early period had ruined her spa trip.
    Beth giggled as she sent her sympathies,
wondering if it had interfered with her mother’s planned
treatments, or something more sensual with one of guests. Or an
employee. Her mother wasn’t hung up on social status and remained
unbothered by little details, such as fidelity to a dead
marriage.
    Feeling a twinge of sadness that her mother
had settled for such a sad union, she put down the phone, her gaze
falling on the calendar as she did. Something niggled in the back
of her brain, and she scooped up the phone again. Opening the app,
she looked at her calendar, certain she had forgotten something.
Seeing no urgent appointments for the remainder of February, she
swiped to go to March. What was bothering her hit her when she saw
the tiny flower.
    Going back to the previous screen, Beth found
the flower in February, releasing a ragged exhalation when the date
didn’t match what she’d calculated. How could she have made such a
mistake? From the time she was twelve and got her first cycle,
she’d had a period every twenty-nine days. Her last cycle had been
as consistent as usual, but she’d somehow added a week to the date
she’d started in her mental calculations the other night.
    Feeling a bit weak, Beth collapsed on the bed
in the guestroom, where all her things remained, though she had
spent most of the last three days with Reed in his room. Three of
her most fertile days. “Holy hell.” How had she messed up so badly?
Had her brain been too fogged with passion to remember the right
date, or had she deliberately let herself “forget” so she wouldn’t
have to tell Reed it wasn’t safe to proceed?
    She squirmed, remembering how she had told
him she never lied. Would he believe it had been an honest mistake,
or would he assume she’d lied deliberately? Her stomach twisted as
she imagined the ugly things he might say if he thought she’d been
trying to trap him into something.
    Maybe she was overreacting. Even though she
was young, and probably fertile, that didn’t mean she was
absolutely going to get pregnant from the sex they’d had the past
three days. It was stupid to freak out about it right now, when she
couldn’t do anything to change the outcome anyway. Emergency
contraception was about as reachable as the moon in the current
environment, and they were already past her most fertile window.
There was no reason to stop their intimacies now. What was that
saying? It’d be like closing the stall after the horse ran away?
Something like that.
    She just wouldn’t say anything for now, until
she knew there was a reason to have to. Abruptly, she remembered
her half-sister, Megan, had struggled with infertility. She was a
decade older than Beth, but she’d still been just twenty-five when
she’d started trying with her husband. It had taken almost two
years and three IVF cycles for them to conceive their twins. It
boded well for her odds of not getting pregnant the first time if
her half-sister had trouble conceiving. Didn’t it? She clung to
that hope as she put away the phone.
    Struggling to compose herself, she took a
deep breath, unable to suppress the wave of guilt. She hadn’t
deliberately misled Reed, but it still felt dishonest, especially
since she wasn’t sharing her concerns. As much as she wanted to
pretend it was solely to spare him worrying for two weeks before
they could discover if they were going to be parents, she knew she
was afraid to confess. He didn’t seem like he would be happy with
the idea, and he was probably going to assume the worst of her. Was
it wrong to cost herself another few days in his arms? Should she
waste the opportunity to get better