Suite Dreams Read online

I’d forgotten to look for any familiar markers, for the red flags. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  Wind was whipping up the loose snow around us and icy sleet began pelting us.

  I tried the radio and got the same thing I’d gotten the last six times I’d tried it: static. It made my teeth hurt, the sound as irritating as fingernails on a chalkboard.

  “I just don’t understand how this could have happened,” I said.

  “I do. I was spending more time watching you than keeping my eye on where we were going.”

  I suddenly grew so warm that I thought I was going to have to remove my jacket. I was surprised the snow around me didn’t just melt and create a puddle.

  “Because I’m so awesome on the board?” I asked.

  Reaching out, he touched his gloved fingers to my cheek. “You’re awesome, Lys. Absolutely.”

  I was certain that if we weren’t lost he would have leaned in to kiss me. But right now we had to concentrate on survival.

  He took a step back and glanced around quickly. “So what do we do now?” His voice held a seriousness that ratcheted up my worry level. If my fun-loving, life-is-to-be-lived-to-the-max Aussie wasn’t grinning, we were in big trouble.

  And when had I started to think of him as mine?

  “Under normal circumstances I’d put on my problem-solver outfit and—”

  He swung around. “What?”

  He was looking at me as though I’d shifted into crazy-girl mode. Maybe I had.

  “Bad joke.” I shook my head. God, did I really want to take time to explain this? “When I read Rick’s email to you, I had this vision of me in Superman tights with a big P for Problem-solver Girl on my chest.”

  He gave me his slow grin. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad joke.

  “So I’m about to discover that mild-mannered Lys is a superhero with a magic cape who can fly us out of here?”

  “I wish.”

  His smile dimmed as much as the daylight had.

  “You’re scared,” he said.

  Didn’t take a genius to figure that out.

  “I’m terrified,” I admitted.

  He hooked his finger in my jacket and pulled me toward him. “It’s gonna be all right.”

  He lowered his head and kissed me. In the frigid air, his mouth was so warm, and I thought if we could somehow harness that warmth we would be okay. The kiss was brief but it was enough to restore my confidence that we would survive.

  “Well, we’re certainly not going to make any progress by just standing here,” Jude said. He pointed toward some trees. “I think we need to go that way.”

  I didn’t have a better suggestion. “Agreed.”

  “So we’d best get going.”

  “Yeah. We should.” I was nodding my head so fast that I looked like a bobble-head. “I have a flashlight.”

  I removed my backpack, knelt in the snow, unzipped it, and dug around until I found the flashlight.

  “Don’t turn it on until we have no choice,” he advised. “Don’t want to waste the battery.”

  “I’ve heard of people getting lost in the wilderness for days and coming out alive,” I told him.

  “I don’t think it’s going to be as bad as all that.” He took my hand. “Let’s stay close.”

  I did my bobble-head imitation again, before falling into step beside him as he trudged toward the trees.

  The snow thickened and the wind started howling by the time we reached the trees. I had visions of us trying to build shelter.

  “You don’t happen to have a pocketknife with you, do you?” I asked.

  “Nope. Can’t get them through security at the airport, didn’t think to buy one when I arrived.”

  “Right.”

  “Why?”

  “I was just thinking about shelter.”

  “I think we can use the sleds as a form of shelter,” he offered. “Create a little tent with them.”

  “We’d have to scrunch up.”

  “I can scrunch.”

  “I guess if I have to get lost, getting lost with an optimistic Aussie is the way to go.”

  The radio crackled to life and I nearly peed in my pants right then and there. “Hello? Ten-four over.”

  I don’t know why I thought some code would strengthen the connection. It didn’t. Another crackle sounded. Then nothing.

  “Since we were able to pick up some sound do you think someone is near us?” I asked. “Are they trying to contact us?”

  “Haven’t a bloody clue.”

  “Do you think we should yell?”

  “I guess we could give it a go.”

  “What do we say? Hello out there or—”

  “How about help?”

  “Yeah, that’s the word we need.”

  We yelled in sync for a good five minutes, our hands cupped around our mouths, trying to increase the volume. We heard some twigs snapping, but decided it was just small animals scurrying away from the crazed sledders.

  “Okay, let’s move to plan B,” Jude said.

  He took my hand and we pushed forward—or at least I hoped it was forward. Who knew? We could be moving away from our group. How had this happened? Every time I heard some story on the news about people getting lost, I always wondered how they could be so stupid, so careless. And here I was. Stupid and careless and who knew what else?

  Possibly dead.

  Chapter 13

  The farther we walked, the more trees surrounded us and hemmed us in. I was suddenly claustrophobic when I’d never been before. The bare, rattling branches seemed ominous, reminding me of skeletal fingers. The wind was screeching. It was as if we were extras in a really bad horror movie—the characters without last names, the characters who never survive.

  Eventually the trees began to thin out and we found ourselves in another clearing as darkness was rapidly descending.

  I squinted in the distance. “Is that a barn?”

  “It’s some sort of building.”

  “If there’s a barn, there has to be a house.” But even as I said it, even as I looked around for smoke coming out of a chimney, I saw nothing except that one building, all the snow, the trees, and the mountain waiting to be climbed.

  “I say we go for it,” Jude said. “If nothing else, it’ll give us some protection against the wind until morning.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Good idea. Let’s go for it.”

  All I really wanted to do was lie down and go to sleep, but somehow I managed to reach deep inside and pull up the gumption to move toward the barn. I pretended I was a puppet and someone was yanking my strings—foot up, foot down. Foot up. Foot down.

  When I lost sight of the barn, I turned on the flashlight. There it was: a looming shadow in the encroaching darkness.

  I thought we were going as fast as we could, but somehow we managed to quicken our pace, in spite of the fact that our feet were sinking into the deep snow. The sled was bumping along behind me, hitting my calves and threatening to trip me up.

  We finally reached the barn. It didn’t look nearly as sturdy close up as it had from a distance. As a matter of fact, I was fairly certain that a good strong wind would cause it to crumble like a house of cards. And a ferocious gale was circling around us. Was this really our last hope for shelter, for survival?

  We took a slow walk around it. It had barely weathered the elements, and the boards were rotting, leaving gaping holes between some of them. I had a feeling we weren’t going to find a house nearby in the morning. It was a deserted building, maybe a hundred years old. Wonderful. I always wondered where old barns went to die.

  Jude pulled on the door. It creaked and groaned. When he had the door opened a crack, I picked up the sled and prepared to go through.

  “Wait,” Jude ordered. “Give me the flashlight. I want to take a quick look to make sure no dangerous animals are in there.”

  “I don’t think anything big could get through the holes we’ve spotted. And since we had trouble getting the door open, I don’