Wait, burnt means warm.
“Throw me your socks too.”
“What?”
“I’m going to warm them on top of the stove for a second.” She unfolded her pair and laid them on the blacktop. “Just for a few minutes, to take the cold off them.” If their feet were warm, maybe it would fool their bodies into thinking the rest of them were warm too. She snagged the second pair he tossed her way and laid them next to hers.
“Damn, Rosey-Posey. I’m sorr?—”
Rose whirled around and pointed a finger at him. “Don’t you dare apologize. You didn’t know this would happen.”
He pulled out one of the chairs from under the table and draped his wet clothes over it. “I should have double-checked.”
“You did. You asked Jack.” She turned the socks over to warm the other side. “If this had been the forecast, would he have forgotten to tell you?”
“He would have.”
She pulled the socks off the stove top and handed a set to him. “Then it’s not your fault.” She sank onto the edge of a bunk and pulled the toasty socks over her cold feet and sighed as the warmth wrapped around her skin. “That’s so much better.” She looked down at her feet and wriggled her toes. “It doesn’t matter that we put hot socks on cold feet, right?”
“Nope, baby girl,” he reassured her. “We weren’t out in it long enough to get frostbite. I think we’re good.”
“Awesome, because not gonna lie, even if it meant my toes were gonna fall off, I wouldn’t want to take these socks off.” She got to her feet and gathered her clothes. “How did you know there would be spare clothes here? Did Jack tell you?”
“Nope.” He scooted his wet clothes laden chair next to hers in front of the fire. “This place is laid out like one of the CHUs we have in our FOB in the Middle East. I hoped there’d be spares here like we have there.”
She blinked at him as she tried to figure out what he meant. Most of it, she did, but what the heck was a CHU or a FOB? She hadn’t done a very good job of hiding her confusion as he chuckled, and she wrinkled her nose at him.
“A CHU is a containerized housing unit,” Caleb explained. “Most military bases use them as housing overseas in warzones. Dalton bought a bunch of them from the military when they decommissioned a base.”
“Like a shipping container?”
“Pretty much.” He pulled tins and boxes from the top bunks. “FOBs are forward operating bases. Usually, it’s where we stage out from for missions.”
“It’s all a foreign language to me.” She took the boxes he handed her and peered inside. “Coffee and tea.”
“Yup.” He shook another tub. “This one has MREs, ready to eat meals, military style.”
“Are they good?”
He barked a laugh. “Hell no, but they’ll fill a hole in your belly and warm you up.”
Together, they figured out the camping coffee pot and put it on the stove along with a pan of water to warm. Caleb’s phone pinged just as the water began to bubble.
He glanced at the screen. “It’s Dalton.” He put the phone to his ear. “Boss, can you hear me? Dalton? Damn, the signal must be in and out.”
“Probably from the storm.”
“Yeah, I’ll send a text; it might go through at some point.” Caleb’s face was filled with concentration as he tapped the phone’s screen. “I sent one from the shed while we were taking care of the horses. If he could call, that must have gotten through, so he knows where we are.”
Rose pulled the two chairs without clothes hanging on the backs closer to the stove. “As long as they don’t come out in that.” She jerked her chin toward the door. “I’d be worried someone would get hurt.”
“Me too. I mean, they know what they’re doing. We’ve been here in Montana for years. It’s not the first time we’ve dealt with snow.”
She didn’t think he’d meant to admit his worry. “I know.” Guilt rode her hard. “If I hadn’t wanted to dance in it, we’d have been home.”
“Nope, don’t go there, because we’d have been halfway down the trail with no shelter.” Caleb turned the free chair around and straddled it backward. “We’d have been in deep shit if we’d left when I wanted to.” Caleb straightened in the chair as if he was annoyed with himself. “Shit, I forgot Jack said there was a generator in the shed.”
Rose followed him to the door. She peered under his arm at the swirling whiteness. “Umm. As long as we have enough wood and the lanterns work, I don’t think you should go out there.”
