Suite Dreams Read online

  I put my hand on Jude’s arm, wanting to reassure him. “Just remember that we all took tumbles in the beginning.”

  I dropped my sled to the ground, grabbed the tether, and started walking up the steep incline, Jude trudging along beside me.

  “It’s eerily quiet out here, isn’t it?” he marveled.

  I understood completely what he was talking about when he referred to the quiet. It was as though even nature was holding its breath. We were in the wilderness, away from any true semblance of civilization. Extreme sledding truly offered the opportunity to get away from it all.

  “I love coming out here,” I said reverently.

  “You come often?”

  “Not often, because of school, but I come whenever I can.”

  “You must enjoy it.”

  “Trust me. You’re going to love it. I like it better than skiing.”

  Boomer and Mel, holding hands, hurried past us. “Come on, guys, let’s hoof it. We’ve probably only got a few hours before that snow storm hits. Let’s get this done.”

  A quick thrill shot through me when Jude’s hand tightened around mine. He grinned at me. I grinned back. He wasn’t the only one who was going to love being out here today. I was loving it already.

  Something had definitely changed between us the night of the party. Even though I knew he was leaving, I’d convinced myself that I wanted to make the most of the time we had while he was here. I’d even given him his own blocks on my time chart.

  We passed a scrap of red material tied to a bare branch.

  “Boomer’s leaving those rags, right?” Jude asked.

  “Yes. To make it easier for us to find our way back to the car.”

  “This is a pretty isolated thing we’re doing.”

  “We’ll be fine. We’ve done it before. Just don’t lose sight of me.”

  His grin broadened. “I’m not planning to do that.”

  And something in the way he said it made it sound like he wasn’t talking about only today. I shoved those thoughts back. Just take each moment as it comes.

  I peered over at him. His cheeks were ruddy and he hadn’t shaved this morning. Insanely, I wanted to take off my gloves and rub my palms over his jaw, let the bristles tickle my skin. Or better yet, lean in for a kiss and feel them tickle my chin.

  Suddenly Jude snaked his arm around me, tugged me up against his side, and spun us both in a circle until we landed behind a towering evergreen. My shriek mingled with laughter. The sound was cut off when he kissed me. Slowly. Thoroughly.

  When he drew back, he said, “Sorry. My hundred-things list. Kiss a girl on a mountain. Had to, you know? Might never get another chance.”

  Smiling broadly—I didn’t know if I’d ever smiled as much as I did when he was around—I teasingly slapped his shoulder. “You’re telling me that when you wrote your list, of all the things to do in your life, you put kiss a girl on a mountain?”

  “Well, no, not originally. Last night I scratched ride in the space shuttle off my list to make room for kissing a girl on a mountain. Seemed a greater probability of happening.”

  “You know, you probably could have gotten the kiss without putting it on your list.”

  “Ah, well then, I’ll put the space shuttle back in.”

  Then he lowered his head and kissed me again. I wrapped my arms around him and was tugging off a glove so I could thread my fingers through his hair when I heard, “Hey, guys!”

  With a groan, Jude broke off the kiss and leaned to the side slightly, calling up the mountain, “Coming!”

  He looked back at me. “I don’t suppose we could just stay here and do some extreme kissing.”

  He had no idea how much that idea appealed to me and the sacrifice I was making. “You need to give the extreme sledding a try. You can do extreme kissing anytime.”

  “Really?”

  Giving him nothing more than a sly grin, I grabbed his hand and started tugging him up the mountain.

  Really, I thought. Absolutely, positively, really.

  After an hour of hiking, we reached the top of our improvised trail. We were in the middle of nowhere. An expression I really never understood because obviously we were somewhere. On a mountain. High up on a mountain. With no cities, no buildings, nothing in sight except snow and trees and one another. The wind had picked up. Maybe because we were at a higher elevation. Thick, fat snowflakes had begun to fall. The sky had turned a dark gray, and the sun had gone into hiding, peering out from behind ominous-looking clouds every now and then as though it had suddenly become shy.

  “We need to carb up,” Boomer said.

  Leaning against a tree, I dug into my backpack, pulled out a peanut butter protein bar, and handed it to Jude, then grabbed one for myself. Jude took a thermos of hot apple cider out of his, removed the top, and offered it to me. I drank, letting the warmth spill through me from the inside out—a feeling very similar to what I experienced when he kissed me. I gave the thermos back to him.

  He put his arm around me. I smiled.

  Click!

  Mel was standing there with Jude’s camera. She handed it back to him. When had he handed it off to her?

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “No problem.”

  She walked off and Jude settled back in beside me.

  “I really wish you’d give me a second to pose.”

  “I told you. I don’t like poses. It’s not the real person then.”

  “I think my mouth was open, like a bass or something.”

  “I doubt it. And even if it was, it would have been cute.”

  I couldn’t win with this guy. Glancing around, I noticed something in the distant shrubbery. I turned back to Jude. He started to put his camera away and I grabbed his wrist. I rose up on my toes, leaned near, pointed toward the underbrush, and whispered low, “A snowshoe rabbit.”

  Jude moved in closer to me as though he needed to do that in order to get a clearer look.

  “Caw,” he said, seeming truly intrigued. “You’ve got good eyes.”

  “It must have moved its nose or something to catch my attention.”

  “Still, you’re amazing.”

  His face was right next to mine and as I studied him, I wasn’t certain he was even looking at the rabbit, wasn’t certain he’d ever looked at it. I felt a tightness in my throat that I didn’t understand. I wanted this moment to mean more than it should, more than it could. For all I knew maybe bagging an American chick was on his hundred-things list.

  Keep it cool, Alyssa, I warned myself. I should heed my own advice, even when part of me thought it was stupid advice.

  “Okay, guys,” Boomer announced in that booming voice he had, the one that had probably earned him his name. “The wind’s picking up so we probably need to start heading down. If you get too far behind, radio us.”

  While Jude was stowing away his thermos, I walked over to Mel. “Why is Boomer making such a big deal of the radios? We’re not going to lose sight of each other.”

  She looked a little sheepish. “We may go off trail. You know, so you and Jude…”

  She wiggled her eyebrows.

  I groaned. “You don’t have to make opportunities for us to be alone.”

  “Okay then. Maybe Boomer and I want to be alone. Besides, he takes this extreme sledding to new heights. He always heads for the more dangerous twists and turns. Honestly keeping up with us is probably not an option, so just enjoy a slow descent and don’t worry if you lose sight of us.”

  “Okay.” I glanced up at the sky. “Just don’t get too far off trail. It looks like that storm is moving in earlier than the weatherman predicted.”

  “We’ll be fine. Boomer is all about the outdoors.”

  “All right then.” I turned to go.

  “You like him, right? Jude?” she asked.

  I stopped, glanced back at her. “Oh yeah. Big-time.”

  Mel and I walked over to where Jude was kneeling on his board while Boomer adjusted the s