Snowbound. Janice Kay Johnson

and Tabitha made a moue of displeasure.

      “Next question.” Fiona smiled at him. “What’s on the menu?”

      “Soup and sandwiches.”

      “That we can handle. Right, gang?”

      He accompanied them to the kitchen to show them where everything was. Fiona disappeared to the laundry room to move a load to the dryer and start another one while the girls opened cans of cream of mushroom soup and dumped them in pans.

      John loitered for a few more minutes, waiting for Fiona to come back. Despite his earlier discomfiture at imagining her naked, he couldn’t resist watching Fiona competently slice cheddar cheese and slather margarine on bread to make the grilled cheese sandwiches she’d decided on. 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.