Free Snowbound Bride-to-Be by Cara Colter

the bedding, too.They should have made two separate trips. Because as they neared the middle of the stairway, the silk caught in the holly on the railing.
    She paused to untangle it before it pulled the whole garland down or tore the silk. She dropped the flashlight, and they were in darkness.
    It happened fast after that.
    “Wait a sec—” she cried as she felt the mattress pressing against her. But it was too late. The mattress squeezed by her, sweeping her along with it. Emma grabbed a fistful of something before being plunged downward into complete darkness.

CHAPTER FOUR

    “A RE you okay?” Ryder called.
    Emma couldn’t answer at first, the wind knocked temporarily out of her.
    “Are you hurt?” he asked again. She could hear him trying to get past the mattress that blocked the stairs.
    “Fine,” she managed to get out before he made a hole in the wall, bumping against it like that. The walls were admittedly flimsy in an “old wreck” of a house like this.
    She couldn’t help it. Emma began to giggle and then to laugh. But he mistook the muffled howls of her laughter for cries of pain and came hurtling down to her. Predictably, he got caught up where the mattress blocked the step, and he crashed down on it beside her.
    They lay there, side by side, on the mattress that blocked the staircase. Their legs and feet were up the stairs, their heads and backs on the floor of the foyer. They were only faintly illuminated by the shadows the firelight in the next room was throwing against the wall.
    The laughter died in her throat as Emma became aware of how solid he felt beside her, how his presence here in the house during the storm was somehow reassuring.
    Even if he was an ass who thought her house was a wreck and who was going to deprive Tess of Christmas.
    “Emma, are you okay?”
    “I’m fine,” she assured him again, though as she drank in the scent of him she wondered how true that was. “Are you?”
    She felt him get up on his elbow, stare through darkness made only a little less black by the slight light leaching in from the other room.
    He lay back down, sighed. “I guess I’m okay. Providing jest for the gods tonight. So, did one of your spirits push you down the stairs?”
    “Oh, no, just made sure the mattress was there when I hit the floor.”
    “Ah.”
    Was his cynicism slightly tempered? Ryder had altered his position slightly, and Emma could feel the solidness of his shoulder touching hers, make out the strong line of his nose, the sensuous curve of his mouth.
    “I want you to know I’m not the kind of girl who ends up on a mattress with a guy on such a short acquaintance,” she teased, trying to reduce with humor the tension she felt in her belly.
    “I already guessed,” he said softly.
    And her humor left her. What did that mean?
    “Remember when I said I didn’t think things could get any worse?” Ryder asked softly.
    “Yes?”
    “Around you they can. And they do.”
    “I know,” she agreed, “The White Christmas curse.”
    “Maybe it’s not a curse,” he said softly. “Maybe it’s magic, just like you said. And I’m not sure which I’m more afraid of.”
    And then he was laughing. It was a rusty sound, self-deprecating and reluctant, as if he had not laughed for a long, long time and did not particularly want to laugh now.
    For all that, it was a sound so lovely, so richly masculine and so genuine, that it made her want to stay in this place, on a mattress jammed half on the stairs and half off, with this man beside her for as long as she could, to rest a moment in this place that was as real as any place she had ever been before.
    Woman-scorned tsked disapprovingly.
     

    Well, why not laugh, Ryder thought? His situation was absurd. He was trapped at a place dedicated to Christmas corniness, the power was out, the storm raged on. He could hear it rattling the windows and hounding the eaves. He was lying in the pitch darkness on a crashed mattress, with Emma so close