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

Chapter 7

7

Cash

Every time I think I’m bored, I remind myself it could be worse.

The power has held for hours even if the internet is completely dead.

The snow’s probably two feet thick already. Other than seeing Aspen for a few brief minutes when she came out to get a mandarin and a hunk of cheese for lunch, I’ve been left to entertain myself.

I find a book on a shelf under the television, but it doesn’t hold my interest.

I shuffle through the cabinets and find a weird mix of dry goods and spices.

TV gets a few channels that seem to be coming from a satellite dish, but even that is cutting in and out. Every time a show stalls, I give it a few minutes while I lapse into the dozing kind of sleep and try again.

All. Day. Long.

While Aspen’s in the next room.

Sometimes I hear her humming. Then there’s strumming on her guitar, often with the same chords repeated while she works something out.

When she’s not playing, she mutters to herself every once in a while too.

Usually the same time the television loses signal.

She probably has a television in the bedroom too.

Once my pants are dry, which takes most of the day, I use the shovel to clear a path to our cars just to have something to do. When I step back inside, Aspen’s in the kitchen, poking around in the cabinets.

I shut the door behind me and shrug out of my coat. “There’s pancake mix in the cabinet.”

She looks down at my crotch. “Did you get your pants wet again?”

Dammit. They’re soaked. And also, there’s a little more dammit that she’s not eyeballing the goods.

Don’t be an inappropriate creeper, asshole .

I toe my first boot off. “Nah. Maybe a little. I’ll rotisserie myself in front of the fire and be fine. Good day?”

“Yep.”

This is not normal. I feel like such an intruder right now. “You feel like pancakes?”

She pushes up on her tiptoes, shoves some things around in the open cabinet, and goes flat-footed again as she pulls out a jar of sprinkles. “Only if they’re fun pancakes.”

I kick off my other boot and pad into the kitchen to join her.

“You cook?” she asks me.

“My mom taught us all how to cook as soon we turned ten, and she’d raise holy hell any time any of us boys tried to get June to cook for us.”

“But do you still know how to cook?”

“Pretty sure I can handle pancakes.”

Her eyes sparkle as she grins at me. “Guess we’ll see then, won’t we?”

While I take over in the kitchen, gathering ingredients and setting a pan on the stove to heat up, she pulls out a bottle of wine from a box under the table.

“Where’d that come from?”

“Waverly and Cooper’s collection.”

Huh. Didn’t know Cooper was a wine guy.

“He’s not,” Aspen says as if she’s reading my mind. “I mean, he’s not anti-wine. But Waverly’s driving their collection. She started visiting wineries around all of the baseball cities when she was traveling with him last summer.”

That’s the part of being on the road I miss.

Seeing new things.

Exploring what makes each city unique.

The rest of the guys would sleep in on the bus or at the hotel, and I’d be up heading off to see a brewery or an art gallery or the world’s biggest pencil, getting back in time for sound check or appearances at pet shelters or children’s hospitals or whatever else our manager had lined up for us when we were on tour.

“I didn’t steal the wine,” Aspen says dryly.

I shake my head, realizing I’m frowning. “Didn’t think you did.”

“So what’s with Mr. Grumpy Face?”

I rip open the bag of pancake mix and scoop a cup of it into a large bowl. “I miss it.”

“Wine?”

“Being on the road.”

She pauses with the cork halfway out of the bottle. “Are you serious?”

“I like new things. Checking out wineries at every stop sounds like fun.”

“She had a blast. And I have a blast every time I see her get tipsy on wine now.”

“You ever get to explore while you’re on the road?”

She finishes uncorking the bottle and sets it aside before joining me briefly in the kitchen to grab a mug. “Not when I’m doing shows five nights a week. Maybe once I’m big enough to just do weekend shows, but not right now.”

“Yeah, the early days are rough.”

She dangles a second mug at me. “You want some?”

“No wine glasses?” I measure out the water and dump it into the mix, then go digging for something to stir it with.

“Even if there were, I’d rather drink my wine out of a mug that recognizes my awesomeness.”

Ah. She’s found the classy as fuck mug.

“Red or white?” I ask.

“Red.”

“Like a bold red or a wussy red?”

She crosses the kitchen back to the table and the waiting wine bottle. “Like the only kind of red I have here.”

“Aren’t you supposed to have white with pancakes? Match the colors or something?”

“The sprinkles have red in them.”

“That’s like saying you have to have white wine with steak if it has a butter sauce on it.”

“One, I take my steak plain and as close to raw as possible while not being refrigerator temperature on the very rare—heh—occasion that I can afford steak, and two, no wine for you if you’re going to be picky about it.”

Mental note: get her a steak dinner when we’re out of this.

Other mental note: don’t be a fucking creeper . “I’m not being picky. I’m being informed.”

“Bottle’s right here, bud. You can read the label yourself. I’m simply going to enjoy it for what it is, which is a wine that my friend thought I’d like.”

Normal .

We have achieved normal.

Complete with me having fantasies about playing footsie beneath a black-clothed table at a fancy steak restaurant where her hair is swooped up and her eyes are sparkling and she’s laughing at all of my jokes and reaching across the table to touch my hand with a promise of more touching to come?—

Fuck me .

I turn my attention back to the task at hand and hit the pan with a sprinkling of water. It sizzles.

Pancake time. “Do you get tipsy on wine?” I ask her.

“Only when I want to.”

I’m grinning, but it’s short-lived.

I have pancake batter.

I remembered to put the sprinkles in.

I have a skillet.

I do not have butter.

And this skillet looks like it hasn’t been nonstick since the 1980s.

Aspen takes her first sip from the mug, and a smile blossoms on her face.

She’s so fucking pretty.

So pretty.

If she were ten years older, I’d be saying to hell with the pancakes and kissing her.

But she’s not.

And I need to get my head on straight.

“This might not last, but I’m enjoying the hell out of it today,” she murmurs as she swirls the mug and watches the wine inside.

I frown at her. “What might not last?”

“Try the cabinet next to the fridge,” she says instead of answering me. She settles into a chair at the small table, crossing one leg over the other, and points with her wine mug. “I think I saw some olive oil in there. Not ideal, but it’s better than crusty pancakes.”

I go digging, and yes .

Even better than olive oil, there’s nonstick spray.

Looks expired, but it’s butter flavor. “Did you bring all of this?” I ask her as I get the first pancakes on.

She pauses with the mug halfway to her mouth. “You’ve never stayed in a vacation rental house, have you?”

“I might’ve once a decade or so ago.”

Her smile explodes again. “You want to live, book yourself a vacation rental once a month and see what weird things happen. Usually they’re nothing out of the ordinary, and if they’ve been around a long time on the rental sites, you’ll have stuff like the pancake mix that someone else left here. But sometimes you get in a situation with people who aren’t authorized renting out a house, or with previous people leaving their edibles or mega boxes of condoms.”

She takes another sip of wine, then continues. “And sometimes the houses are just strange. I stayed in this one just outside of Cleveland that had pink toilets and a massive marble statue of a vagina in the courtyard out back. But the house itself was built in like the early nineteen hundreds. There was zero water pressure and the beds were so soft that I couldn’t sleep. Except for the bed in the attic room. That one was so hard you might as well have slept on the floor. And it smelled very weird.”

“You always stay in vacation rental houses when you’re on the road?”

“Depends on how long I’m in any given city.”

“You have a favorite city?”

She opens her mouth to answer as I reach to flip the pancakes, and there’s a massive pop that plunges us into darkness.

Fuck.

Aspen makes a noise as my eyes adjust to the low light coming off of the fire in the living room.

“You good?” I ask her.

“Did the power just go out?”

“Yep.”

I pull out my phone and flip on the flashlight, taking care not to aim it at her.

“I mean, duh. Yes. Of course the power went out. Like you thought it would.” Her voice is a little higher than normal.

“Happens in heavy snowstorms.” Cook, pancakes. Keep cooking. Wonder if I can finish the rest of the batter over the fire? Also, is she panicking about the power being out? “We’re as prepped as we can be. Nothing to worry about.”

But don’t flush the toilet. Or plan on taking a shower.

Also— shit again.

I head around to the window over the table, drop the blinds, and pull the curtains shut, then do the same in the living room and the bedroom.

When I leave the bedroom, I shut the door.

Aspen’s still at the table when I get back to the kitchen and peek at the pancakes with the light from my phone.

Not quite cooked all the way through, and with the heat off, the pan’s cooling rapidly.

“Aspen?” I say as I will the pancakes to keep cooking.

She shakes her head. “I’m good.”

No, she’s not.

Not with that tremble in her voice and her stiff posture and the way she’s staring at her mug.

“We’re gonna be okay.” I abandon the pancakes to go squat in front of her, wanting to touch her and absolutely not daring to. “Lucky you, you’re with a guy who’s survived three apocalypses, two famines, and a few dozen alien invasions.”

“You were acting .”

“It felt real when you watched the movie though, didn’t it? Plus, one night at poker with the guys, I was being an ass about wiping the table with them, so they started reading all of the criticisms of When Comes the End , and I have been corrected on every basic survival skill that movie taught me. I’ve got this. We’ve got this.”

She eyes me.

And it’s not one of those you have something on your face looks.

It’s I don’t know if I believe you in her wary expression.

“We do. We’ve got this,” I repeat.

She glances at her wine, then at me again. The shadows from the fire and my flashlight are making her look even more unsure, and that has my heart pounding.

I want her to believe in me.

It matters.

Even though I know it shouldn’t, it does.

It’s so damn hard to not touch her. “You said it yourself earlier. You would’ve made do on your own. You’re fine.”

“You’ve never yelled when I break stuff in your house,” she says quietly, “so I don’t expect you to yell now, but I’m not used to emergency situations where no one’s yelling.”

“Do you…want me…to yell?”

“No! No. I just—I expect it, and I don’t like it, and it’s not—it’s not you, okay?” She huffs out a laugh that’s not funny at all. “This is why I should’ve handled this alone.”

Fuck it.

Just fuck it .

I lean forward and wrap her in a hug. “No yelling, I promise.”

Her body shudders against mine. She drops her head to my shoulder. “Thank you.”

Anything for you, Aspen. Fucking anything .

Her hair smells amazing, and I don’t care that it’s tickling my nose. I could hold her like this for eons.

But she tenses like she again knows what I’m thinking, and I drop my arms. “You want an almost-cooked pancake or three? Nothing like that hot runny batter surprise.”

Another small, forced laugh slips out of her lips. “Sure. Thank you. Do I—can I do anything else to be prepared here?”

“Got water, got fire, got food that you can no longer see is holiday-themed. We’re as good as we can be.”

Except for the last part that I’m not telling her.

Can’t hurt to hope for a miracle that gets the power back on in a matter of minutes or hours instead of potentially a couple days, can it?