âStay.â
He sounded rusty, as if he didnât know how to ask for what he wanted. He tried again. âTalk to me. Tell me aboutâ¦â What? Her life? What she expected the ârightâ man to be like? âA movie. I havenât been to one in a long time. Whatâs the last one you went to?â
Fiona relaxed, as heâd hoped she would. While he measured sugar, she told him about a thriller with a huge budget, big stars and an unlikely plot.
They hadnât even been there twenty-four hours.
How, in such a short time, had he got to the point where he had a thought like I need her? He hadnât kissed her, hadnât touched her beyond a hand on the shoulder, didnât know that she felt anything at all for him.
He didnât need her. That had been a ridiculous thought. But he wouldnât mind if snow kept falling for another day or two.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Janice Kay Johnson is the author of nearly sixty books for adults and children. She has been a finalist for the Romance Writers of America RITA>® Award for four of her novels. A former librarian, she lives north of Seattle, Washington, and is an active volunteer at, and board member of, Purrfect Pals, a no-kill cat shelter. When not fostering kittens or writing, she gardens, quilts, reads and e-mails her two daughters, who are both in Southern California.
Dear Reader,
I confess to thinking itâs great fun to tweak classic romance plots â you know, secret baby, marriage of convenience, snowbound hero and heroine⦠And I admit to having a special fondness for the snowbound plotline. There are so few ways, in the modern world, we can isolate two people, trapping them together for days and days as the sexual tension rises to an unbearable levelâ¦
But letâs face it, the odds arenât great, are they? Every time I read one of those books, Iâd think about how, with my luck, Iâd be more likely to end up snowbound with a sexy guy and his wife and kids. Since I write (and love) romance, thatâs not a workable scenario. So what can I throw into the stew to give it an unexpected taste? Not a baby â newborn babies are a common element in the classic take. They nap so conveniently, you know. I didnât want convenient for this book, I wanted inconvenient. No, what if our heroine were to have a teenager with her? Ooh, better yet: what about eight teenagers?
Yes, the plucky heroine is chaperoning a high school trip when in the midst of a blizzard she finds herself snowbound at a Cascade Mountain lodge with eight feuding, funny, sometimes depressed teenagers for whom sheâs responsible â and their reluctant host is a brooding man hiding out from the world after returning from being wounded in Iraq. Now, thereâs a mix!
I hope you have as much fun reading Snowbound as I did writing it.
Best,
Janice Kay Johnson
CHAPTER ONE
FIONA MACPHERSON was starting to get scared.
The rhythmic thwap, thwap, thwap of the tire chains helped her shut out the chatter of the eight teenagers behind her. With the snow falling so hard, she felt as if she and the kids were in a bubble, darkness all around, the headlights only reaching a few feet ahead. Snow rushed at the windshield, a white, ever-moving veil.
She shouldnât have taken this routeâa thin line on the map that promised to cut north of the projected path of the storm.
âThis wayâs good,â Dieter Schoenecker had said, when she told her vanload of students what she intended to do. âWe cross-country ski at a place up near High Rock Springs.â
Hadnât she been a high school teacher long enough to know better than to take a sixteen-year-oldâs word for anything?
Not fair. She was responsible, not Dieter, and she had had some doubts about whether the line on the map was too skinny. But it was a highway, it headed westbound, and they should have been able to make it across the Cascade Mountains before the blizzard arrived.
Only, they hadnât. Theyâd left Redmond, out in the high desert country of eastern Oregon, hours ago, right after the Knowledge Champs competition had ended. They should have been close to home in Hawes Ferry south of Portland by now, or at least descending into the far tamer country in western Oregon. Instead they were in the thick of the storm. Fiona was struggling to maintain twenty miles an hour. It had been at least two hours since sheâd seen another vehicle.
We should have turned back when we stopped to put on chains, she thought. And when they realized they no longer had cell phone reception.
The voices behind her had died out, Fiona realized.
âYou okay, Ms. Mac?â one of the boys asked.
Despite the fact that her neck and shoulders ached and her eyes watered from the strain, she called back, âYep. You hanging in there?â
Nobody had time to answer. A jolt shuddered through the van as it hit something and came to a stop, throwing Fiona against her seat belt.
âWhat happened?â Amy cried.
âWe probably went off the road,â Dieter said.
Fiona made everyone but Dieter stay in the van. She and he put on parkas and got out. With the engine turned off, it was utterly silent outside, the headlights catching the ghostly, slow fall of the snow and the white world they found themselves in. Tree boughs were cloaked with white, as were rocks and shrubs and ground.