Snow Crystal Trilogy: Sleigh Bells in the Snow / Suddenly Last Summer / Maybe This Christmas
to walk out.”
“As long as it’s not Élise. She’s a fabulous cook,” Elizabeth murmured to Kayla, “but hot-tempered. French. Cooks like an angel and swears like she’s in the military. Darren drives her crazy because he likes to do things the way they’ve always been done. I expect she told him his food is boring, only not as politely as that. Go and soothe her, Jackson. Don’t let her leave. I just love her duck confit. You should try it, Kayla.”
Kayla decided she’d better sign up to Weight Watchers before she left Snow Crystal. “Maybe I will.” Without looking at the tree or Jackson, she picked up her bag. “Thanks for the tea and the chat, Elizabeth. You’ve given me some ideas to work with.”
Jackson slid his phone into his pocket. “I’ll drive you.”
Which meant being trapped in an enclosed space with him. She didn’t trust herself not to spontaneously combust. “I’ll walk. You go and sort out your chefs before they chop each other into tiny pieces.”
“In that case I’ll pick you up at seven for dinner.”
He was asking her on a date? In front of his mother? “Dinner?” She looked at him stupidly, and he gave her that slow, sexy smile that told her he knew exactly why she wasn’t getting in the car with him.
“Dinner, Kayla.”
She licked her lips. “I—er—”
“I’m keen to spend more time discussing your initial ideas for Snow Crystal. I presume you have no objection to dinner meetings?”
A dinner meeting.
No candles.
No seduction.
Work.
Aware of how close she’d come to making a total fool of herself, Kayla gave a relieved smile. “Dinner meetings work for me. Great use of time.” She breathed again. “I’ll see you at seven.”
She left the house and closed her eyes for a moment, letting the freezing air cool her heated skin.
Snow Crystal might be in a whole heap of trouble, but it was nothing compared to the heap of trouble she was in.
JESS SAT CURLED up on the window seat in her bedroom, her arms around Luna as she stared at the snow falling in the darkness. Ash lay on the floor next to them, his head on his paws, watching her with those pale, beautiful eyes. The two Siberian huskies were her best friends, and Snow Crystal was her favorite place in the world.
Better than her home in Chicago, where there wasn’t a mountain in sight. When she was younger she’d had no interest in dolls or anything pink and glittery, and a few years on she had no interest in boys or shopping malls.
Other girls had posters of Justin Bieber on their walls. She’d had a poster of her dad skiing the Hahnenkamm in Austria, one of the most terrifying and dangerous downhill runs in the world. A run so steep that only the best made it down to the bottom in one piece. The top of that slope was a terrifying seventy-three degrees. Seventy-three degrees. Shit. That wasn’t skiing, it was flying. Or falling.
She angled her hand and tried to imagine it. Imagined the adrenaline and the death-defying speeds you’d reach shooting out of the start gate onto a slope so steep you couldn’t see where you were landing.
One day she wanted to ski that course, but it was an ambition she’d shared with no one.
She felt out of step with her friends and even her family. Most of the time she felt like a stranger, living a stranger’s life.
Only here did she feel as if she fit. Only here did life make sense.
This was the only place she’d lived that felt like home.
One hand buried in Luna’s fur, Jess rubbed the windowpane with the other and peered into the darkness.
Her mother hated Snow Crystal. She hadn’t been back since the day she’d walked out, taking Jess with her. She hated everything about the place. She hated the snow, the mountains and, most of all, she hated Tyler O’Neil.
She wouldn’t have his name mentioned in the house so Jess made scrapbooks and kept them hidden under her mattress. Ever since she’d been old enough to know what to do with a stick of glue, she’d kept pictures of her dad. Her grandmother and great-grandmother had cut out pictures for her, and at Christmas when she’d come to stay, they’d stick them in a new book together. She had photos of him skiing the most famous and prestigious downhill runs on the World Cup circuit. She knew their names and all the details. As well as the Hahnenkamm there was the Lauberhorn in Switzerland, the longest downhill of them all and a real test of stamina—the list went on, and the one thing those runs had in common was that her dad had skied them all. And if that hadn’t made her want to burst with pride, there were the two gold medals he’d won at the Olympics and the World Cup title.
She’d boasted about him in school once, but most of the kids hadn’t believed Tyler O’Neil was her father.
She knew her mom wished he wasn’t.
Her mom could have married him, but instead she’d chosen Steve Connor, because Steve had wanted to be a lawyer and could give them a better life than a guy whose only ambition in life was to get from the top of a mountain to the bottom faster than any person alive.
Once or twice, Jess had tried explaining how much skill that took, but her mother hadn’t wanted to hear it. Skiing wasn’t a “proper” job and Tyler O’Neil wasn’t a suitable father figure.
The past year had been hell, not that she’d shared that detail with anyone.
She might have told her grandmother, but she knew she was still hurting, and Jess figured if her dad could break a leg and then get up and ski to the bottom of the run on the one leg that still worked, she could cope with the shit her family had thrown at her without falling apart.
The truth was, she was never going to be the daughter her mother wanted her to be.
Janet Carpenter had done everything she could to knock the O’Neil out of Jess. She’d dragged her to piano lessons, extra French, debating, dancing—
All Jess wanted to do was ski as fast as humanly possible.
The final straw had been when she’d skateboarded down the stairs in the house and almost broken her stepfather’s leg.
“You’re just like your father,” her mother had screamed, and Jess had hugged the words tightly because they were the best words her mother had ever spoken to her.
She wanted to be just like her father.
She was her father’s daughter and always had been, and that drove her mother mad.
And now the baby had arrived, her half sister, a squalling tiny being with a wrinkled face and a shock of hair, and her mother was too absorbed by this second chance at parenthood to waste time molding a child who was all the wrong shape and always had been.
Jess had heard her on the phone that night, yelling at Tyler.
“She’s your daughter, so you can have her. I can’t cope with her anymore.”
And so Jess had been shipped off to Snow Crystal for Christmas, just as she always was, the only difference being that this time she wouldn’t be flying home at the end of the holidays.
She was here for good.
It had come to her in a cold moment of realization that no one wanted her. Not her mother, not her stepfather, not even Tyler. She’d been forced on him.