Snowbound. Janice Johnson Kay
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He doubted she or the girls were even conscious of his presence. This past year, he’d discovered he had a gift for invisibility.
Damn it, he could have spent most of the morning hiding out in his quarters, reading in front of the woodstove. But Fiona Mac-Pherson intrigued him.
What he couldn’t decide was whether it really was her in particular, or whether he’d been quietly healing without realizing it and she just happened to be the first attractive woman to come his way in a while.
Not true, he reminded himself; two weekends ago, a quartet of women in their twenties had spent two nights at the lodge. Apparently they’d been getting together a couple of times a year since they graduated from college. Each took a turn choosing what they did.
A couple of them were married, he’d gathered. One of the two single friends in particular had flirted like mad with him. He hadn’t felt even a flicker of interest, and she’d been more beautiful by conventional standards than this slender teacher with the river-gray eyes.
He’d thought rather impassively that the woman who kept making excuses to seek him out was attractive. He’d been bothered then by the fact that he’d felt not even a slight stirring of sexual desire. He hadn’t had had a woman since the night before he’d shipped out for Iraq. He’d missed sex the first months there. At some point, he’d quit thinking about it. That part of him had gone numb.
It wasn’t that he felt nothing. Grief was his constant companion, anger looking over its shoulder. He had unpredictable bursts of fear. Once in a while, he allowed himself to be grateful that he was alive and that he’d found sanctuary.
Fiona MacPherson’s pretty gray eyes and cloud of curly dark hair wouldn’t have been enough to draw him from his preferred solitude. Not if something else about her hadn’t sliced open the layer of insulation that had kept him distant from the rest of humanity.
So what was different about her? What had he sensed, from the moment their eyes first met?
He kept following her around in search of answers, not out of lust.
John gave a grunt that might have been a rusty laugh. Well, not entirely out of lust, he amended.
The sound he’d made brought her head around, although neither of the girls seemed to hear. When Fiona saw him leaning against the wall, she smiled. As if glad he was still here.
There, he thought in shock, might be his answer. She saw him. Really saw him. Not as a Heathcliff she was bent on seducing as part of a weekend’s adventure, but as if she were interested in him as a person. As if she might even like him.
In fact, she was the only person outside family and old friends who’d ever bothered to wonder if he suffered from PTSD—and he could tell she had been curious, even if she hadn’t meant to ask. He’d only admitted to having served in Iraq to a couple of other veterans who’d stayed at the lodge over the past year. They had recognized each other. If others had speculated after seeing his scar, they’d kept the speculation to themselves.
What he didn’t know was whether Fiona MacPherson looked at everyone the way she did at him. Why that mattered, he didn’t know. In a few days, she’d be gone.
But he still wanted to know.
CHAPTER FOUR
FIONA COULDN’T BELIEVE John Fallon had thought she would come right out and ask if he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. She didn’t know him anywhere near well enough to be that personal. The embarrassing part was that she had wondered, and he could probably tell.
In the privacy of the laundry room—where she was shifting loads again perhaps an hour later—she groaned aloud. He must think she had no better manners than Amy! She couldn’t even blame him.
Should she apologize once more? Or would it make things worse if she brought the subject up again?
Definitely worse, she decided.
Folding towels in the same style he did, lengthwise in thirds, she couldn’t help thinking about what he’d said. He needed to decompress, which must mean he was having trouble with… She didn’t know. People, noise, nightmares? Of course, there was his limp, too. She’d seen how much his leg hurt him on occasion. He’d go utterly still, his jaw muscles locking, and a sheen of sweat would break out on his face. Was he continuing to do physical therapy, or had he recovered as much as he was going to?
“Gee, why don’t I just ask him?” she said aloud, rolling her eyes.
His voice came from behind her, mild but impossible to ignore. “Ask him what?”
Fiona froze. Her fingers tightened on the towel in her hands and she said the first thing that came to her. “Oh, um, whether you have more laundry soap.”
“Why? Are we running low?” He came closer to her and peered into the tall plastic bucket. Which was half full.
Even more flustered by his nearness and the woodsy scent that clung to him, she babbled, “No, no, I’m just afraid we’ll use it up. I thought maybe we should start hanging the towels after baths instead of washing them incessantly.”
“We have plenty of soap.” He nodded past her, where half a dozen plastic buckets were stacked against the wall.
“Oh.” She gave a weak laugh. “I’m practically tripping over them. Well, now I feel dumb.”
“Don’t.”
Her laugh became slightly more genuine, if a touch hysterical. There he went again. Anybody else would have said, It’s okay, you were being considerate. Or, Anybody could have missed seeing them. But if John Fallon could compress twenty words into one, he did.
She grabbed almost at random for something to say. “You must get sick of laundry during your busy season.”
He reached for a towel from the basket and folded with quick efficiency compared to her more deliberate efforts. He was reaching for another by the time she was half done with one, even though his hands looked too large to be so deft.
“If you’re here for long, we’ll put the kids to work on laundry, too.”
Her embarrassment was fading, thank goodness. She chuckled. “The beauty of unpaid guests.”
“Maybe I should lower my rates in exchange for labor.”
“You could make the whole stay do-it-yourself,” Fiona suggested. “Kitchen privileges, bathroom privileges, but leave ’em clean.”
“You can’t imagine how appealing that is.” His tone was heartfelt, less guarded than usual.
“Oh, I don’t know. After a few days of cleaning up after them—” she nodded toward the kitchen “—I’m sure I’ll be in complete sympathy.”
“They’re done in the kitchen.”
A non sequitur? Or not?
She braced herself. “Is it clean?”
“I’ve seen worse.”
“But you’ve seen better.”
He shrugged. “They’re kids.”
She should have continued supervising. “I’ll finish up.”
“I already did.”
She winced. “I wish you wouldn’t do that.”
He raised his brows. “Do what?”
She forgot she held a towel in her hands. “Work nonstop. I feel guilty.”
“You’ve worked nonstop today, too,” he pointed out.
“But they’re my job. My responsibility.”
“And the lodge is mine.” While folding the last towel, he made it sound inarguable.
As, she supposed, it was. He couldn’t