Snowed in with Mr. Heartbreaker (Copper Valley Bro Code #5)

Chapter 4

4

Aspen

I retreat to the bedroom shortly after nine and spend a couple hours attempting to binge a television series I want to catch up on. The cabin’s WiFi works so-so with my phone, so it’s a glitchy binge-watch, but I manage to mostly enjoy it.

No messages from the owners.

And it’s getting later and later.

But I can’t fall asleep.

Drifting off is absolutely impossible.

It’s not the wind. It’s not the sound of the heavy, icy rain pounding on the roof. I’m not too cold. Not too hot. The mattress is surprisingly plush and comfortable. The scent of cedar throughout the house is pleasant and soothing.

This should be the perfect place to sleep.

But when Cash so much as thinks of moving out in the living room, I hear it.

Swear I do.

Every time I tense, thinking he’s moving, I hear confirmation moments later. A deeper inhale, a shuffle of fabric against the fake leather on the sectional, a glass clinking as it’s set down on a solid surface like he needed a drink in the middle of the night.

Morning takes forever to arrive.

And when it does, the first rays of sunlight show that we have bigger problems.

I have bigger problems.

The entire world is a fuzzy sheet of white.

Cash is right. I’m a California girl, and a warm-weather SoCal girl at that.

But even I’ve seen enough of the world to recognize that neither of us is going anywhere when I can barely see the trees around the cabin through the swirling wall of snow. I can only tell where the tree that fell yesterday is sitting because the snow pile on top of it is uneven and lumpy, whereas it’s a pristine white sheet everywhere else.

And it means one thing.

He’s stuck here with me.

I don’t get my alone time.

I whimper in utter frustration, and almost immediately my spidey senses tingle. A moment later, he calls, “Aspen? You okay?” in a deep, raspy morning voice that makes my nipples tingle.

“Stop it,” I whisper to them.

There’s a shuffle outside my door, and the primitive part of my brain wonders if he’ll have bedhead and be in a wrinkled T-shirt, or if he slept without his shirt.

Great time for my libido to betray me.

“I’m fine,” I say.

The shuffling outside the bedroom stops. “You need anything?”

Just to shove the inappropriate attraction to my landlord back into the box where it belongs. “I thought I packed my favorite yoga pants and I didn’t. I’m fine. I’ll find some way to survive this tragedy.”

“You want to borrow mine?”

I suck in a surprised breath and choke on a dust particle, which sends me into a fit of choking laughter.

“Men can wear yoga pants too,” he says through the doorway, which makes me laugh and cough harder.

His voice gets closer. “The only reason I’m not breaking this door down to make sure you’re alive is because I can hear you breathing.”

“ Breathing ?” I wheeze out.

I’m not breathing .

I’m choking and laughing so loudly, they can probably hear me at the next cabin, which is at the bottom of the long, windy road up this mountain.

“Making noise,” Cash says. “Breathing. Same thing where I grew up.”

“Short of weird smells or a serial killer vibe, there’s no reason for you to assume something horrible happened while I was sleeping.” I pull myself together, grab a pair of sweatpants and a baggy hoodie, slip them on, and then open the bedroom door.

Cash is leaning against the opposite wall, just outside the door to the lone bathroom. His eyes go alert and wary at the same time as he sweeps a quick glance up and down, like he’s making sure I survived the night.

He’s still in his jeans from yesterday, naturally. Not like he planned on staying or needing a change of clothes. His gray T-shirt is wrinkled but still clinging to his broad chest and solid biceps, and his brown hair is all kinds of messy.

Why is he so hot?

Sincerely. Why?

Why does he have those thick veins wrapped around his forearms?

Why are his nipples poking his shirt and highlighting how solid his movie-star physique is?

Why does looking at him make my lungs tingle?

We don’t kiss our landlords. Bad things happen when we kiss our landlords. Ask me how I know.

But I’ve never had a landlord who would’ve driven an hour in the wrong direction for his holiday plans to apologize for anything. And especially to apologize for something that didn’t even happen.

“Sleep okay?” he says.

“Absolutely,” I lie. “You?”

“Like a baby,” he lies right back.

It’s not just that I spent the night listening to him moving here and there. It’s the dark smudges under his eyes, the dip of his lips, the sag of his shoulders.

Either he’s one of those people who wake up slowly, or he slept like crap.

“So, I was on the WiFi.” He doesn’t just look tired as he says it.

No, he looks guilty.

“Were you streaming porn?”

“ No .”

“Then why do you look like you using the WiFi is the worst thing you could’ve done?”

He cringes and looks at the floor. “I pulled up the weather.”

My heart thuds against my ribs. “And?” I ask, like I don’t know on some level what he’s about to say.

“Blizzard developed unexpectedly and isn’t over until late tonight,” he mutters.

“Blizzard?”

“Couple feet of snow should fall before it’s over.”

I stare at him.

He scuffs one socked foot against the knotted wood floor. “Good news is, I have more food out in my car. I’ll head out and grab it before the snow gets any thicker.”

“And the bad news is, you’re not leaving.”

“Yeah.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean that to sound?—”

“No, you wanted to be alone. I’m intruding. I get it. It’s hard enough to find alone time with the way we— you live, and I shouldn’t be here.”

But he is here.

There’s a part of me that doesn’t mind. When Waverly found out that my latest apartment wasn’t working out well, she insisted on helping me find a place she knew I’d be comfortable, and the next thing I knew, Cash fucking Rivers was texting me about renting his pool house.

There was definitely some freaking out going on. I’d once joked to her that I should date Davis Remington to increase my visibility in the world by bringing him out of hiding and making a big splash, but I never imagined she’d hook me up with another former Bro Code member to live with.

It was definitely an I’m out of my league moment.

But our conversations quickly turned easy and friendly, like we’d known each other forever.

On one level, he’s my friend.

And then we met in person, months after I moved into his pool house, and everything changed.

At least for me.

I started having dreams about him. Weird dreams, but good dreams. Dreams where he was kissing me. Talking dirty to me. Telling me I was his designated sex partner for alien explorations. Sometimes he’d strip me out of my trench coat in the middle of a mall that was actually a nursing home, and then we’d have sex in the food court while the elderly pet store employees rated our performance, which squicked me out because ew , but also, in my dreams, Cash Rivers is exceptionally good at giving me orgasms.

And then I wrote “Forget Christmas.”

My anthem about hating everything about the holidays…until he arrives.

About him showing me the magic of the season.

I’ve told absolutely no one that Cash was my muse. Not only am I a hot mess of a rising pop star who breaks things in every house, condo, apartment, or spare room that I move into, but I’m also too busy for relationships.

Besides, he sees me as a little girl who needs guidance, and he’s promised his friends he’d watch over me.

If life has taught me anything, it’s that you put your energy toward the practical and possible.

It’s still astonishing to me that having a career as a singer-songwriter is possible, but it is.

The other thing life has taught me is to accept kindnesses when they come your way.

Waverly is that kindness.

And if all of this—the songs, the albums, the viral sensation , the tours and performances—if it all goes away, I will be okay .

But if I let myself love someone and they don’t love me back, I won’t.

I left that behind the minute I turned eighteen and moved out of my parents’ house.

No one will ever break me like that again.

No matter how handsome and charming and sexy he is.

And that’s probably why I’ve broken up with every man I’ve ever dated. I don’t have it in me to be the level of vulnerable you have to be in order to have a relationship.

I straighten my spine and look him dead in the eye. “We should probably get that food out of your car before it gets harder to get to your car.”

The number of times he’s winced or cringed in the four minutes that we’ve been talking is a bad sign.

“What?” I say.

“You…aren’t a fan of the holidays.”

“So?”

“In my defense, I was working with what I had and historical knowledge of other women in my life, and I didn’t know you didn’t like the holidays. Also, you were at a holiday party, and you looked like you were having fun.”

How can I not appreciate this man? He seriously needs to go before I do something stupid. Because he’s freaking adorable right now. “Is it food?” I ask.

“It’ll give us calories when your food runs out.”

When your food runs out .

Oh, no.

Oh, no no no. We’re not doing food running out at the holidays.

Been there, done that, and I am not signing up for it again. Even if there are no decorations, no music, no A Christmas Story on repeat on the television for days, no yelling about how someone needs to turn off that goddamn annoying movie, no pity cookies dropped off from the neighbors, I’ll still know it’s the holidays.

“Cash?”

The man refuses to look me in the eye while his face does a thing that I loosely translate to mean I don’t want to tell you more bad news .

“How long will we be stuck here?”

He mumbles something.

“ Cash .”

He answers the ceiling instead of me. “Given how remote it is here, it could be a week before we can get plowed out. Partially depends on whatever arrangements the cabin owners have for the driveway.”

“I’ll email them again.”

He gives me another look.

“What?”

“It was a couple hours ago that I had enough WiFi to get the weather. Haven’t been able to get it to work since. Cell signal is nonexistent. I’ve been trying to get a message out to my assistant to get help up here sooner since I checked the weather, and it won’t go. I’ll go get the extra food.”

I grab my phone and pull up my email, which takes forever to connect, then sputters out immediately. I trail him out to the living room. “I’ll help get the food.”

He puts a foot into one boot. “You have a warm coat?”

“It’s just ten feet.”

“Snow boots?”

I open my mouth, then shut it again as I eyeball the boots he’s also eyeballing next to his.

Mine are ankle-high purple suede with a heel.

While his boots are also ankle-high, they look like hiking boots. Not like something that would bring all of the fashionable squirrels to the yard.

“Might take me a couple trips,” he says. “Stay at the door. You can take everything inside while I go back out for more.”

It would be quicker and more efficient if both of us went out to the cars, but my version of being prepared for a snowy mountain Christmas was to not have to go anywhere, and I packed accordingly. Plus, it’s not like I have a full winter wardrobe.

“Can you grab a thing or two out of my car too?”

“Yep. Keys?”

I fish them out of my bag and hand them to him. “There’s a gallon of water and a backpack with some books. Be careful.”

“ It’s not war, Mabel. It’s the future of the entire planet ,” he replies.

And I laugh.

I actually laugh. “That was the absolute worst movie you ever did.”

He winks. “Yet you still watched it and recognize the line.”

My god, he’s handsome.

Does he know it?

Does he know exactly how attractive he is?

I tell myself he probably does. The idea that he’s full of himself makes it easier to remember that relationships are trouble, and crushing on your landlord is always a bad idea.

He slips out the door.

I close it behind him, and then I dash to the window to peek out and watch him.

Merely because it’s so thick with falling snow that I can barely see the cars.

This is me watching for his safety.

Not me watching his ass as he braves the weather to bring in a few more supplies.

Yep.

Just watching for his safety.

And I need to get a lot better at lying to myself.