Free Snowbound by MG Braden Page B

“Are you ok? Are you hurt?”
    Picking himself up, he shivered, and walked as quickly and as carefully as he could to jump back into the heated water. He went right under. Coming up with a splash he answered, “Nothing hurt except my manly pride. The cold was rather refreshing actually.” With that he reached over the side, scooped some of the snow off the railing and dropped it down her back.
    “Hey!” She squealed and turned to grab her own batch of snow from the side.
    Laughing the two of them playfully threw mini snowballs back and forth at each other until he held up his hand. “Truce.”
    “Truce,” she said. “Wow, we spilled water everywhere.”
    He glanced around. “Yeah. I’ll make sure to get some salt sprinkled down here, or it will cause an icy mess come morning.” He looked at her sitting across from him, where she had ended up during the course of their snow fight. Suddenly he felt that she was too far away. He reached over and tugged on her hand, pulling her over to him. “Come sit over here. The view is better.”
     
    * * *
     
    Cassidy settled in beside Daniel once again and was content; even though she was sure she was a wrinkled prune from being in the water so long. A hush had fallen on their conversation and they both seemed lost in their own thoughts. She was thinking about something he’d said earlier and decided to ask him about it.
    “Daniel? At dinner you mentioned something about taking a ghost from your past out on me, or something like that. What was that all about?”
    He was silent for a few minutes and she noticed his brows were furrowed like he was thinking really hard about something. Rather than push him to speak she just waited. Normally patience wasn’t one of her virtues, but she had a feeling this was something she had to wait out.
    Finally, when she thought he wasn’t going to answer at all, she heard him clear his throat. “About eighteen months ago I lost my fiancé, Natasha, in a hiking accident.”
    He spoke so quietly she wasn’t sure if she heard him correctly but, in case she did, she wasn’t sure what to say anyway so she said nothing.
    “She wanted to take a trail that was too narrow. The rest of us didn’t want to go. I had a bad feeling about it and asked her to stay with the rest of us. She chose to go anyway. There was a rock slide. She didn’t make it.”
    “I’m so sorry. That must have been horrific.”
    “Yeah. Well, anyway, that’s why I was so mad earlier.”
    Cassidy felt him slightly shift away from her. “But, I don’t understand. You didn’t even know I was going on that run, we never discussed it, so I’m not sure how you could be mad.”
    “I thought you blatantly ignored the sign saying the run was closed. Like Natasha, I thought you just did what you wanted regardless of the circumstances. It was like déjà vu.”
    “Maybe it appeared that way, but you know now that I didn’t even see the sign. And it’s not like I expected you to come rescue me anyway.” While she felt bad for him and his loss she was annoyed that she was being pegged as a troublemaker. At least, that’s what it sounded like he was saying.
    “Well I don’t think Natasha expected it either, but when you ignore things around you that’s what happens. If you would only pay attention then I wouldn’t need to rescue anybody!” He was almost shouting at her now.
    Shrinking back in the hot tub, she tried to pull her body far away from his. Slowly moving to the opposite side. Why was he yelling at her, again? She realized that he was talking very softly now. While he was looking at her it didn’t seem like he even saw her. In fact, she was pretty sure he didn’t. “If she’d have listened she’d be alive today. She’d be alive...” were the words that she finally caught as he spoke them.
    Compassion flooded through her. This poor guy. He was still miserable over losing his fiancé and here she was getting mad at him. Obviously the incident today had