Snowed Under (Aspen Peaks #2)

6. Madeline

“ T he leading risk factors for heart disease and stroke are high blood pressure, high low-density lipoprotein—”

I hummed along to the Siri-esque voice in my headphones as I dropped my basket of cleaning supplies softly on the rug in a room a good distance from the main lobby. I wasn’t sure what the lodge technically labeled this room, but in my head, it was the fireplace room, since it was nothing more than a plain sitting room with a floor-to-ceiling fireplace that stood about twenty feet tall and a cathedral ceiling.

That was one of the nice things about my position. Mr. Graves, the OG one, had hired me for the bigger areas: locker rooms, lobby, office spaces, etc. Which was much nicer than going in and out of the same hotel rooms day after day. This at least gave me variety and allowed some flexibility in my schedule. It also allowed me to wear normal clothes and not an old maid’s costume. It was a good thing too. Otherwise, I would rather work at the local Starbucks scrubbing toilets.

I pulled my vacuum away from where I’d left it by one of the forest green accent chairs and set it against the nearest wall. Unwrapping the chord, I bent down on all fours and ducked under one of the side tables that sat so conveniently in front of the exact outlet I needed.

“Over 877,500 Americans die of heart disease, stroke, or other cardiovascular diseases every year.” The monotone robot lady in my ears kept on talking, clearly not caring a bit that I was on my hands and knees under a tiny table with my butt swaying in the air.

“And they say the mountains are Aspen’s best view,” a voice called out behind me. A non-monotone, non-Siri-sounding, very much male voice that rang a tad familiar.

My head shot up, and the back of my ponytail rammed into the wood above me with a loud thud. “Ow.” I winced and slowly backed myself out from beneath the table, sitting on my feet.

“Oof, that looked like it hurt.”

I looked up and saw Cooper Graves in his skiing uniform, minus the helmet. Messy brown hair all over the place, a wince on his all too handsome face. A scratch on the top of his right eyebrow that seemed fresh, and a set of keys in his hand. “Sorry, sorry. I was just trying to make my presence known so it wasn’t like I was back here, and you were unaware…” He trailed off, staring down at me with a curled brow. “You know, ’cause your butt was kind of in the air.”

I pulled out my headphones, disconnecting them from my Bluetooth. “Well, thanks for let—”

“Excess cholesterol can build up in the walls of arteries and limit blood flow to a person’s heart, brain, kidneys.” Siri’s voice loudly blared from my phone in the cleaning basket across the room.

“What the hell are you listening to?” Cooper turned to the phone, his face twisting in disgust.

“I’m tryi—”

“Making blood sticky and more likely to clot, which can block blood flow to the heart—” The robot that was determined to speak over my every word somehow got louder, sharing facts about congenital heart disease and blood flow to arteries. One of the not so sexy diseases. If any were sexy.

I quickly trekked to my phone and turned the volume all the way down until her traitorous voice left us. Turning to Cooper, I forced myself to look him in the eye, despite the warmth pushing behind my cheeks.

“I have a quiz coming up on heart diseases. I was studying.”

“A quiz?” His head tilted to the left.

I nodded. “For nursing school.” My blood was rushing to my head, and my pulse pounded so loudly that for a moment I wondered if I had heart disease myself.

“You’re in nursing school?” Cooper asked, and it was honestly embarrassing how little the man knew about me when I was aware of his entire bloodline’s history. I knew this man’s birthday, and he hadn’t even known I existed until yesterday.

The first time I saw Cooper, he was ordering food at the café in the lodge. I immediately took in how attractive he was—as did the entire restaurant, with that golden-boy smile and eyes that practically shouted Warning: This man is way too charming. But at the time I was fresh out of a breakup—understatement of the century—and my confidence was at an all-time low.

I also saw him wink at the server twice and quickly decided that even if I was up to standard that day, my heart was best left for people who wouldn’t have the potential to hurt it. People like my nine-year-old nephew, who I was pretty sure still thought babies came from moms’ butts, and my almost three-year-old niece, who had an addiction to Sham Jams.

The other times I saw him were in passing, in which I briskly walked around him to avoid the gaze of those gender-swapped Medusa eyes. He was charming at a distance, and even more so up close. And he was far, far too dangerous. The one and only time I put myself near him was when Mr. Graves passed. It was clear his death hit his entire family hard, but something about Cooper seemed like it died away too. Like a dimmer switched turned down too fast, resulting in the entire bulb being blown. I felt bad for him, and looking back, it probably would have been best to mind my own business.

“Uh, yes.” I set my silent phone back on the cart, placing my headphones directly next to it. When Cooper didn’t elaborate, just sat there staring down at me, I cleared my throat. “Can I help you?”

I tried to imagine a scenario in which Cooper would seek me out, and none of them felt good. Either the check I’d written for Charlie’s lessons had somehow bounced, despite how closely I kept track of my account, or I was getting fired—possibly for studying on the job—and the universe thought it would be hilarious to have Cooper do the letting go.

“Yes, actually, I need a favor from you.”

A favor? As in he…would need something from me?

My nose scrunched. “Okay?”

“I need to borrow you…for like an hour or two.” He swapped the set of keys back and forth between his fingers.

“Borrow…me?”

I swore if this man was going to ask me to clean his house, then I was officially done with life. This was going to be my new all-time low. No, this was lower than low. This was under dirt, under fossils, under those time capsules we buried in the third grade. Way down where the earth got hot. There I’d sit in my sad little bunker filled with empty oatmeal cream pie wrappers and half-melted iced coffees.

He nodded and gave me that terrifying smile that told me to watch myself or else. “Not for anything dirty. Well, not that kind of dirty.”

“I am really not sure how to take this conversation.”

“Look, I kind of screwed up something, and I need help fixing it.”

A silent pause fell between us.

“And you need my help, specifically?”

He nodded and replied in that soft, low tone that sent shivers up my spine and butterflies to my stomach. “Only yours, Madeline.”

Only mine? I raised my eyebrows at him. I wasn’t one to assume such things, especially when I’d just been caught on all fours underneath a table, but let’s say this man was hitting on me as good-looking and charming as he was, my only answer could be a strict no. If he was planning on having me clean up his house, my only answer would be a strict h-e-double hockey sticks no.

“Look,” he said, clearly picking up on the unease that rattled through me. “The new lodge in town just opened. I know you can see our numbers are dropping. I signed up for this…thing to help us out, and by the time I finished, I realized that I’d essentially told them I was…” He took a sharp breath in. “Well, more like I didn’t tell them I wasn’t—” He threw his head back with a groan.

I shook my head as I spoke. “Cooper, you’re not making any—”

“I need you to pretend to be my wife for like an hour.”

“Your wife?” I practically shouted it. Might as well have held a megaphone to my mouth and said the two words for the entire world to hear. The heat behind my cheeks lowered to my neck and deepened.

“Or fiancée.” He corrected himself with a shrug, as if that was any clearer. “Girlfriend may even work. I mean, this isn’t the 1600s. We can have kids out of wedlock without the town coming together to burn or stone us.”

“I—” Nope. No words were going to come across as remotely sane in this scenario. I just kept swinging my head from side to side like a pendulum that, instead of keeping things in rhythm, threw everything around it entirely out of rhythm and onto its butt. “I’m sorry. Let’s go back to the beginning.”

He shook his head too, groaning. “I don’t know what it is about you that brings out the worst in me.”

My chin pulled back at that. Any self-assurance I had was henceforth thrown out the window and forced to barrel roll into a cactus-filled ditch.

“I signed myself up for an interview with this family magazine. It’s for the lodge. I’m sure you’ve noticed that numbers, tourists, everything, have been lower lately. I figured doing this little column would pull in more people. Anyway, they assumed I was married with kids, and I…didn’t correct them.”

“Why?”

“Because all I could think about was their 2.8 million followers on Instagram and how, if they posted a single photo of the lodge, it could change everything.”

Well, that made a little more sense. More sense than him asking me to clean his house. But still…only yours, Madeline.

“Okay, so what do I have to do with this situation?”

“You have kids, and you know me.”

I squinted. “Those are the only requirements?”

He nodded. “Plus, your looks, obviously. That wasn’t, like, a real requirement, though. Just a bonus for my viewing benefit. Not that kind of viewing. You know what? I just need you to be my wife for a single lunch with these people. Or fiancée. Girlfriend. Whatever.”

He said it like he was asking for me to spot him a dollar for a vending machine, or to hold the elevator for him while he waited for a colleague.

A humorless laugh bubbled up in me, spilling out of my lips. “You’re joking.”

His eyes lowered. “I assure you, I’m not.” My laugh only grew further at how serious he’d turned. “I know I came across the wrong way the other day. I’m sorry. I really am not a creep, but to be fair, that lavender you had on really is your color and—”

“I know you aren’t a creep.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

I recalled how long I’d known of him. How long I’d thought he was far too handsome and avoided meeting his gaze. “I told you: I know exactly who you are, Cooper. I’ve worked here for over two years. We’ve met before. It’s not like—”

“I’m going to stop you right there.” He pointed a finger and waved it between us. “We have never met.”

I knew he didn’t remember me, and I couldn’t blame him for that. But that didn’t ease the sting. It wasn’t like I had a huge crush on the guy. I just would have liked to not be disregarded, like I was chopped liver.

“We have, Cooper.” My words were clear, matter-of-fact. The way his eyes darted to a far-off place and came back to me made me feel almost guilty.

“There’s no way. Not in a million years would I forget meeting you.”

I snorted, feeling my confidence building back up but still trying to keep myself in check for another blow. How often had he said that exact line to other women? And why did it even matter? Chosen guardian, model citizen. That was what I had to be.

So, I smiled and went on. “Well, you did.”

“When?” he asked, a smidge on the defensive side.

“I brought you food after your grandfather died.”

At that one sentence, any hint of that fun light in his eyes died, leaving this dull numbness instead. I recognized that kind of numb. It was the same kind I saw in the mirror each morning. At least he could turn his on and off.

His grandfather was the one who’d hired me officially. When I applied for a simple cleaning job, I never expected the owner himself to sit across from me at the interview table, a plate of cookies sitting between us. “Tell me, what’s your go-to karaoke song?” he asked, as if my job was to DJ rather than to mop tiled flooring and dust fireplaces. I left that interview crying laughing with him, giving the man a hug as he whispered “see you on Monday” in my ear. He never stopped being that man. For the year he was my boss, he never once made me feel like an employee. He even wrote Charlie and Piper handwritten birthday cards with ten-dollar bills stashed inside them. I would go as far as to say that Mr. Graves was a friend. A friend when I desperately needed it the most.

“Oh.” His shoulders slumped. “I didn’t know.”

I lightened my tone a little. “We’re neighbors. I live one block over. Your cousin gave me the news, along with your address, thinking I might want to bring something by.” She must have thought we were friends, because, foolishly, the first thing I asked when I heard was How is Cooper doing? “I didn’t have Charlie with me, but I brought hamburger casserole and a giant pan of brownies.”

“I remember the brownies.” His gaze didn’t lift from the far corner of the room. As if he was reliving the memory now. I knew that feeling so undeniably well, and it ate at me that I was the one who’d caused it. “I devoured them all in a single night.”

“At least there’s that.”

His lips turned up slightly, but his eyes stayed on that corner. “Yeah, at least there’s that.”

I wiped a hand on my leggings. “You were grieving. I’ve been there. You pay little attention to your surroundings those first couple of months after. I get it.”

At that, he lifted his eyes back to me. A vulnerable sweetness sat in there, and I smiled softly. Not in a pitying way, but in an I see myself right down that road even now, two years later.

“You do?” he asked.

I nodded. “I do.”

He smiled back at me. It wasn’t a 100 percent normal smile, but he was certainly getting there. He opened his mouth to speak, but I rushed to it before he could. “But I have to say no to the whole magazine thing.”

His shoulders slumped again, this time less like it was instinct and more like he was a puppy begging for a treat. “Please, Madeline—”

“I would say no to anyone about that. It’s not a you thing. I am a terrible liar, and I think it would make things uncomfortable for Charlie. You’re his coach, and he likes you a lot. You’ll find someone else, easily.”

“I really, really won’t.”

“Then tell them the truth and say it’s a family business so it still applies to their column. You’re enough on your own, Cooper. You don’t need a wife to get it done.”

He tosses his head back with a sigh. “Fine. Well, thanks for the brownies. Sorry if I was an ass.” He paused. “Again.”

I chuckled. “S’fine. I’ll see you around.” Probably not, but it came out of me automatically.

“Yeah, see you around.”

I watched him and his tight butt walk away before reaching for my headphones and going back to cleaning with the sound of Siri’s voice discussing heart complications all over again.