One way or another, she was going to see Nia again before this storm was over.
5
NIA
Nia paced the length of her hotel room, the cordless phone pressed tight to her ear. The carpet muted her footsteps, but her frustration seemed to echo anyway, bouncing off the timber walls and the frosted windowpanes.
“I understand,” she said evenly, each syllable clipped with precision, “but there must be something. A shuttle, a private service—anything that can get me down the mountain.”
The voice on the other end was polite, practiced in sympathy.
“I’m sorry, Dr. South. The main road’s closed both ways, and the nearest airport reports zero departures until the weather breaks. We’re talking at least two days.”
Nia’s jaw tightened. “Two days.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Thank you,” she said, because civility was muscle memory, even when she wanted to throw the phone.
She hung up carefully, placed it back in its cradle, and then gripped the edge of the desk until her knuckles whitened. The room was too warm, the air thick with the scent of pine cleaner and wood smoke drifting in from downstairs. Outside, the world was smothered in white.
Trapped.
The word pulsed through her like a heartbeat.
Nia took a slow breath, straightened, and told herself she wasn’t angry—she waslogical.The storm was an inconvenience, nothing more. She had surgeries scheduled next week in Phoenix Ridge, department reports waiting, a life to return to. She couldn’t afford to be stranded in some snow globe of a town where the locals talked too much and the walls were too thin.
And she certainly couldn’t afford to be thinking about Soren Stevenson.
But she was. Every time she blinked, flashes of last night appeared behind her eyelids—Soren’s hands, her laugh, the way she’d looked at Nia like she could see every thought she’d tried to bury.
How it felt when she was fucking her.
Nia pressed her palms to her eyes, willing it away.It was a mistake.A lapse of reason brought on by stress, fatigue, whiskey, and the illusion of safety inside a snowstorm.
One night. That was all.
And then she’d woken alone.
That part, she refused to think about. The sting of it, the hollow disappointment she had no right to feel.
Her phone buzzed with another alert—flight cancellation confirmed. The message blinked like a taunt.
Nia grabbed her coat from the chair and slipped it on, buttoning it with brisk efficiency even though she had nowhere to go. She caught her reflection in the mirror: dark hair perfectly smoothed, lipstick flawless, posture a study in control. No one looking at her would guess her pulse was racing.
“Get a grip,” she whispered.
She picked up her mobile, scrolling through contacts—colleagues, travel agencies, anyone who might offer a solution—but the signal kept dropping. Each attempt ended in static or the soft, infuriating silence of no connection.
When she finally tossed the phone onto the bed, it bounced once and landed face-down, the screen dark.
She sat beside it, elbows on her knees, hands pressed to her temples.
This wasn’t how she operated. Nia South did not lose control of her environment—or her emotions. She didn’t let people like Soren under her skin.
Soren was chaos wrapped in a flannel shirt. She was warmth and ease, all the things Nia had spent her entire adult life avoiding because control was safer than feeling.
And yet, when she thought of Soren, her stomach tightened and her breath went uneven.
