With a frustrated growl, I stared at my phone. I couldn’t imagine his plans for the evening, but he’d said I’d love it. A tiny grin tugged at my mouth. If the night ended in his bed, he’d be right.
Following his instructions, I tugged on a pair of insulated leggings and covered them with a pair of ski pants. A pair of wool socks covered a pair of silk socks on my feet. I layered my warmest sweater over a thermal long-sleeve T-shirt and hoped he wouldn’t make me wait, or I’d have to stand outside my apartment.
When he rang the doorbell, I was pulling my coat from the closet.
“Hey. I need to put on my boots, and I’ll be ready.”
“I’ll be out here.”
Over the past few weeks, he’d let his beard grow in a soft layer over his chiseled jaw. In the glow of the porch light, snowflakes like diamond shards clung to it, adding dazzle to his Hollywood smile. When I didn’t close the door because I didn’t want to be rude, he tugged it from my hand and closed it for me. Wasting zero time, I finished dressing in my outer layers, grabbed my backpack with the fleece blanket, extra socks, and a night shirt as he’d asked, and headed out the door.
“Now, are you going to clue me in on this mystery date?”
He leaned in and brushed his lips over mine. “It’s going to be epic—the most memorable Valentine’s Day of your life.” With a grin he took my hand and led me to his truck.
Flipping on the radio to a rock station, he hummed along with the latest Breaking Benjamin song and refused to talk to me. When we headed out of town toward the canyon, my knee started bouncing, and he took my hand and squeezed. “Epic. I promise,” was all he said to reassure me as we drove into the cold dark.
After a little while, he slowed and turned down a narrow road that suddenly opened up into a wide parking lot that was lit up like daylight.
“We’re here!” The glee in his voice drew a grin from me.
He hopped out of the truck and ran around the back. By the time I lowered myself onto the slick pavement, he was standing beside me with an oversized inner tube in his hand. Only then did I register the shouts and laughter coming from a hill above the parking lot.
“Wyatt. What is this place?”
“An old ski hill. People skied it in the seventies, I think. Anyway, there’s one good run left on it, and a couple of times a year the owners turn on the lights for night sledding. Valentine’s Day is one of those times.” He reached out a hand to me. “We have to walk up, but the ride down is worth it. Come on.”
As we made the trek up the side of the hill, I noticed multiple couples riding tubes together, their laughter ringing through the frigid night air. When we reached the midway point, I was gassed. While we rested for a minute, I saw Callahan and Piper whiz down the hill, her squeals a soprano counterpoint to his baritone laughter.
“If you wanted me on your lap, Wyatt, all you had to do was ask. You didn’t need to go to all this trouble.” Though I tried to sound put out, I wrecked it when I answered his grin with one of my own.
“Ready?”
I nodded, and we trudged the rest of the way to the top of the run. Once we were at the launch point, Wyatt carefully sat on the tube and motioned for me to climb on beside him. Once we were situated to his satisfaction, he dug his heels into the snow, bounced the tube a couple of times, and we were off.
At first we glided slowly over the gentle slope. Then the terrain abruptly changed, and suddenly we were rocketing downhill. I screamed and buried my face in Wyatt’s chest, his laughter rumbling beneath my cheek. We hit a hard slope or a jump that sent us flying. Though we landed some distance down the hill, miraculously we managed to stay on the tube until the slope evened out, and we coasted gently to the bottom near the parking lot.
Lying back on the tube, both of us laughed our asses off. Then our eyes met and the mood changed. Wyatt gazed at me with something deep and intense in his gorgeous greens, his expression setting me on fire. Without hesitation, I climbed up on his chest and leaned down to kiss him senseless because I couldn’t help myself. Wrapping me tight in his arms, he rolled us so he was on top as he took over the kiss. Caressing and tasting, nipping and licking, we devoured each other. The whole world telescoped down to this moment lying together on an inner tube on a snow-covered slope. I whimpered in frustration at the layers of clothes separating us. Wyatt groaned, taking the kiss even deeper as I lifted my knee and wrapped my leg over the back of his thigh.
“Hey, you two! Save that for later.” Callahan O’Reilly’s laughter interrupted us, dragging me from the fires of lust Wyatt’s kisses never failed to ignite.
Ever so slowly Wyatt pulled out of the kiss with tiny pecks and gentle tugs on my lips. Resting his forehead on mine, he sounded as out of breath as I felt. “Epic, yeah?”
I smiled. “Best Valentine’s Day ever.”
“You keep smiling at me like that, and it’s going to be the shortest epic date ever.”
I laughed as he hauled himself up, adjusting the front of his ski pants before he reached a hand down to help me stand.
We made four or five more trips up the slope, racing Callahan and Jamaica and Danny and his new girlfriend Taryn and some other football players who came without dates. Somewhere on one of our hikes to the top, Wyatt told me he crashed this party every year because he always missed the open night at Christmas. This year with me, though, was the best time ever. Something in his tone had my eyes darting to his where I saw that same intensity he’d shown me before he gifted me the hottest kiss of my life.
At last the whole gang had had enough. After we loaded our tubes, everyone headed to Stromboli’s for pizza and beer, something we’d earned after the workout of climbing a mountain over and over. Since Wyatt had to have a kiss to “tide us over” before we went into the bar, we were the last ones into the booth at the back where our friends were already seated with a couple of pitchers of beer.
We squished in beside Callahan and Jamaica, and Callahan wasted no time in razzing Wyatt about how long it had taken him to parallel park his monster rig. Wyatt shrugged good-naturedly and shot me a discreet wink. Or not so discreet when Callahan laughed again.
For a while after the debacle with my parents, I’d had the distinct impression Callahan didn’t like me much. But after I’d spent most of the past couple of weeks at their place, he’d seemed to warm to me. At some point, I needed to ask Jamaica what the deal was.
As we traded observations about the impressive sight of “Dally” sending “Taco” flying when they aimed for a jump—I swear, I was never going to learn all the names of the guys on the team—our pizzas arrived, and for a few minutes there was a lull in the conversation. In the quiet, I heard a voice I didn’t expect to hear in a bar for another month. When I glanced up, I locked eyes with my little sister, and my body went cold.
