A Winter's Romance by BHC Press

Cover, interior book design, and eBook design by Blue Harvest Creative www.blueharvestcreative.com

All individual stories within this collection are copyright © 2015 by their respective authors. All authors retain the rights to their own work. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher. This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from each authors’ imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Published by BHC Press

A division of Blue Harvest Creative

ISBN-13: 978-0692591666 ISBN-10: 0692591664

Visit the publisher at: www.blueharvestcreative.com & www.bhcauthors.com Visit www.blueharvestcreative.com by scanning the QR code.

table of contents 11 PATRICIA PARIS

ESCAPING THE GREYS 33 BIBI HAMBLIN

A SECOND CHANCE 45 A.D. TROSPER

MID-WINTER CELEBRATION 58 KATIE JENNINGS

WHERE THE HEART HIDES 77 TOM MOHAN

DARKNESS FOLLOWS 85 LADONNA COLE

A FROSTED BLUSH

93 ELISE MANION

CHLOEâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S FROST 117 EMMIE MEARS

THE SHADES OF SNOW 129 LISA SHAMBROOK

BETWEEN ICE AND FIRE 139 J.S. BAILEY

THE OUTING 147 HANNAH STEENBOCK

BORDERLINE 172 SARA DANIELL

THE DEATH OF ME 190 C.R. HIATT

COVERT CAREERS 213 ALICE LAKEWOOD

HEARTS ON ICE

218 MELISSA HLADIK MEYER

RAY OF SUNSHINE 237 NATALIE GIBSON

HUNGRY EYES

257 DREA DAMARA

LIGHTING THE DARKNESS 279 D.M. KILGORE

THE ICE QUEEN 300 S.R. KARFELT

TOUCHING TESLA 317

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

It is the life of the crystal, the architect of the flake, the fire of the frost, the soul of the sunbeam. This crisp winter air is full of it. ~ John Burroughs ~

patricia paris

escaping the greys The Naked Truth

ae West once said: “Love is like a booger, you pick and pick at it. Then when you get it you wonder how to get rid of it.” I wouldn’t know. I’ve never really been in love. I’ve been in like and in lust, but in most of those relationships I turned out to be the booger someone wanted to get rid of. Max and Cora, my parents, are prime examples. They insisted my siblings and I call them Max and Cora from the time we babbled our first words. I couldn’t have known at that infantile stage that this wasn’t the norm. I didn’t discover until I entered the real world of primary school that my family marched to the beat of a different drummer, or that everyone referred to us as those weird Greys. I grew up in Maryland, where I lived with my parents up until five months ago when I moved to Pillster, New Jersey. It was a Saturday, August 15th, my birthday, the day I turned 29. Prior to moving, I’d been working as an associate brand manager for a small marketing company. My parents had been trying to

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nudge me out of the nest for several years. They encouraged, suggested, cajoled, and when I remained burrowed in, they dropped the bomb that convinced me to look for a new place to live. “You know we love you,” Cora began one blue-skied morning in early June as I sat in the kitchen eating my usual breakfast of Trix in fat-free almond milk, “but you need to find a place of your own.” I’d come to expect a don’t you want to spread your wings discussion every few months, but this sounded more like a pack your bags kid, you’re being evicted. She leaned in and kissed me on the cheek to dull the punch. “At this stage of our lives,” she continued, “Max and I want to live a certain lifestyle, and with you still here we’re not able to do that.” Given quinoa and alfalfa sprouts have more in common with my family than I do, you’d think I’d have moved out years ago. New situations make me uncomfortable. I prefer the familiar. Max and Cora were familiar. They’re also my parents, and I love them despite them being…well, weird. So I stayed, comfortably ensconced in the crib I knew, content to tread down the same predictable rut. My mother took my hands and gave them a light squeeze. “The truth is, and please don’t take this the wrong way, Clematis, you’re cramping our style.” Yes, my real name is Clematis. I never understood why, if my parents wanted to name me after a flowering vine, they didn’t have the foresight to pick Jasmine, Wisteria, or anything else that didn’t sound like an STD. They aren’t stupid people. Odd, yes, but not stupid. You’d think they would have realized what they were setting their youngest child up for. I didn’t understand a lot about my parents though, including my mother’s comment. I got that they might want to encourage me to embrace my independence, but how could I be cramping their style? They came and went as they pleased. I cooked and

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cleaned after myself, and it wasn’t like I was freeloading. I paid them rent, which I had suggested because I had a decent paying job and it was only fair. I wondered if they wanted to repurpose my bedroom, turn it into a meditation room or gym or something. It was their house, but— “We’re nudists,” Max cut to the chase. “We were going to wait until you moved to live the lifestyle, but the way things are going we’ll be dead before you get a place of your own. We love you, but you’re pushing thirty. We don’t want to wait any longer.” My mouth dropped open, and I stared at them. They stood in front of me in matching white robes, probably organic bamboo, and I suspected they must be naked underneath. It was awkward, at least for me. Max and Cora have always been free spirits, but I think I’d have been less stunned if they’d told me they were cloning Bob Marley in our basement. I wasn’t a prude, but I was the conservative one in the family, and they were my parents—the nudists—so yuck! I started searching job boards that afternoon. I found a new job and settled on a place of my own in just under two months. The day I moved out of their house and into my own, Max drove the rental truck from Maryland to New Jersey, and smiled the entire way.

Through Rose-Colored Glasses

’d been on my own for almost five months when I woke unusually early one Saturday morning in January. The numbers on my bedside clock glowed blue in the soft gray, pre-dawn light still cloaking my room. 5:15. Normally, I would have pulled the covers up over my head and drifted back off to sleep, a luxury I could only indulge on weekends. Something tugged at me to get up, though. An eerie quiet that went beyond the earliness of the hour seemed to hold the world

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in its grip. I slipped out of bed, shivering when the cooler air of the room greeted my bare legs. Dragging the thick, white down comforter across the mattress, I pulled it off then wrapped myself in its warmth and padded out of the bedroom to my large—but to remain outdated until I could afford to remodel—kitchen. I started a pot of coffee then went out to the living room and opened the front door. Everywhere I looked, the world appeared to have been transformed into a glass menagerie. My front porch steps, the sidewalks, trees, my car, the rooftops on all of the houses across the street, everything wore a coat of thick, glistening ice. The air was redolent with a soft symphony, hundreds upon hundreds of thin tree branches clinking together in a toast to Mother Nature’s mastery. All else was silent, sealed in a crystalline case of ice commanding the world to be still, to be hushed, to slow down and take pause. I stood there, awed by the shimmering beauty like a scene out of Frozen. Within minutes, the grating of heavy shovels chipping and scrapping against concrete sidewalks whisked me from comparisons of Elsa’s North Mountain back to the reality of my Jersey suburb. The Joes, as I’d dubbed them shortly after moving in, had appeared in front of their homes and armed with shovels, and probably hydraulic ice picks and blow torches, had begun attacking their respective walkways. The Joes—Joe Lucas, Joe Barnes, and Joe Marcos—are three different neighbors I’m convinced spend every minute of their spare time trying to outdo one another. Their yards had the greenest grass all summer, which they cut at diagonals or in overlapping checker-board patterns. Of course they would be the first ones out to shovel, salt, and put pressure on everyone else in the hood to do the same. I didn’t have a shovel, snow or otherwise, so before I’d even had my first cup of coffee I began worrying how I’d clear my sidewalk. I had a 600-watt hair dryer, but wasn’t keen on risking electrocution by

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running the number of extension cords I’d need to reach outside to try to melt the ice with it. I also didn’t want to give my neighbors any reason to think I was weird, which blow drying my sidewalk had the potential to do. After eating some breakfast I got dressed and picked my way across the ice to my elderly neighbor, Mrs. Worthy’s house. “Good morning, Mrs. Worthy,” I said when she opened her front door. “I was going to clear the ice from my sidewalks and stopped over to see if you’d like me to do yours, too?” “Oh, you’re such a dear! Can I pay you something?” “No, I’m happy to do it, but I don’t have a shovel. I was hoping you had one I could borrow to do both of our walks.” “I do, it’s in the shed out back. There should be some rock salt in there, too. Help yourself to both, and when you finish come join me for tea and blueberry muffins. The muffins are in the oven and should be done by the time you are.” I had been trying to chip the ice for almost forty-five minutes, making little to no progress, when Joe Lucas, who is the neighbor on the other side of me, came over and leaned against the handle of his shovel. It had an aerodynamic stem thingy, and the shovel thingy part I’ll refer to as, the bottom, was three times as thick as the one I was using. I think it also had teeth. “You’re not going to get too far with that, little girl,” he said. I gave him a limp smile, and in my usual fashion, avoided possible conflict by not telling him I found his use of the term “little girl” sexist and insulting. Instead, I looked down at my shovel. Compared to his it looked like a sheet of aluminum foil on the end of a stick. “You need to get yourself one of these babies.” He hefted his super spade a few inches in the air and then whacked at my walk. The ice splintered. A convincing demonstration if I were in the market for a death shovel. I wasn’t, but his macho display did give me an idea.

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“You must work out, Joe. I mean that certainly is an awesome shovel. I’ve noticed you’ve got a lot of very cool tools, but it takes more than a good tool to do the kind of job you did on your sidewalk.” I’m not a flirt, not by a long shot, but I’ve observed plenty of women prime a man to get something she wanted, and in most cases it involved some ego sugar. Joe puffed up his chest. “Well, I do have a workout room in the basement.” Ten minutes later I helped myself to one of Mrs. Worthy’s warm, plump blueberry muffins and a cup of tea. The muffled sound of metal against cement as Joe Lucas attacked our sidewalks making me smile. I don’t like passive-aggressive behavior, I’m working to curb it in myself, but in this case I definitely believe it was a win-win.

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