Snowbound Games Read online

  Snowbound Games

  Snowbound Series

  Book Ten

  By

  Veronica Tower

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Snowbound Games By Veronica Tower

  Red Rose™ Publishing

  Publishing with a touch of Class! ™

  The symbol of the Red Rose and Red Rose is a trademark of Red Rose™ Publishing

  Red Rose™ Publishing

  Copyright© 2012 Veronica Tower

  ISBN: 978-1-4543-0170-7

  Cover Artist: Shirley Burnett

  Editor: Zena Gainer

  Line Editor: Pam

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews. Due to copyright laws you cannot trade, sell or give any ebooks away.

  This is a work of fiction. All references to real places, people, or events are coincidental, and if not coincidental, are used fictitiously. All trademarks, service marks, registered trademarks, and registered service marks are the property of their respective owners and are used herein for identification purposes only.

  Red Rose™ Publishing

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  Thank you for purchasing a book from Red Rose™ Publishing where publishing comes with a touch of Class!

  Snowbound Games

  By

  Veronica Tower

  Chapter One

  A Difference of Opinion

  “I thought I raised you better than this!”

  Thea paused in her packing and started silently counting to ten: one, two, three, four…

  “Well, didn’t I?” her mother screamed. She stood in the doorway to Thea’s bedroom observing her daughter pack for her overnight date. “How can you even think of doing this?”

  Thea clenched both her hands around the nightgown she’d just placed in the suitcase. Her black cat, Hendrix, tried to step into the suitcase on top of her clothes. She forced herself to be gentle as she nudged him away and then carefully smoothed the fabric of the nightgown so it wouldn’t wrinkle. Fighting with her mother didn’t help—it never helped. And this time would be worse because she wasn’t certain in her heart that her mother was wrong.

  “I’m not a fool!” her mother told her. “I know what you’re planning to do. I found the birth control pills in your nightstand.”

  “Oh, for goodness sake!” Thea snapped, abandoning her determination not to argue in a sudden flair of temper. She spun about to face her mother’s five-foot-two inches of fire and brimstone. “You’re searching through my things now? What’s wrong with you? If you’d wanted to know about the birth control pills, you could have asked.”

  As usual, her mother did not accept any notion that there were restraints—legal or ethical—on her boundless curiosity. “And you’d have just told me it was none of my business!” she shouted.

  “It is none of your business!” Thea screamed.

  Her mother wasn’t ever going to accept a statement like that. “You’re sleeping with this white man!” she accused. “It’s my business who my girls sleep with.”

  “Mom,” Thea said in total exasperation. “I’m thirty-eight years old! Don’t you really think it’s about damn time I started sleeping with someone? You had Daddy! Becka had Wilson! Isn’t it my turn to have somebody in my life?”

  “You can have someone in your life without having sexual relations with him!” her mother insisted. “You’ve only known this man a few weeks.”

  “Oh grow up!” Thea told her. “It’s the twenty-first century! I was worse than that guy in the movie The Forty Year Old Virgin.”

  “That movie was about a man—not a woman!” her mother reminded her. “And we’re talking about real life! Not something those perverts in Hollywood came up with!”

  Thea closed the lid on her suitcase even though she wasn’t certain she’d remembered to pack everything. Then she made a supreme effort to lower her voice and sound reasonable. “Mom, Nick is my boyfriend and yes, I’m sleeping with him. This is America. Everybody does it. You don’t have to be—”

  “I never did!” her mother interrupted. “I was raised better than that by my parents!”

  “So you keep saying,” Thea told her, showing her own nasty streak. “But all we know for certain is Aunt Margaret slept with her boyfriend and got pregnant—and she was still a kid, I might add. So just how good Gram and Gramps raised you is up for debate!”

  Her mother finally stormed into the bedroom to stick a quivering finger in Thea’s face. “Don’t you dare speak of your grandparents that way!”

  “Mom,” Thea said. A terrible calm sank over her that she suspected had more to do with depression than any rational sense. “I’m thirty-eight years old and before Nick, I hadn’t even had a date in over a decade. I’m lonely. I live with my mother so I can pay your bills since Daddy died.”

  “You lived with us before,” her mother interrupted.

  “Yes, because Daddy was sick and you needed help taking care of him.”

  “I did not—”

  “I’m thirty-eight years old,” Thea told her. She would not let her mother twist this conversation into being about her. “And I’ve given up my whole life to help my parents.”

  “You are not blaming—”

  “Mom!” Thea interrupted her. “Stop talking and listen to me!”

  Her mother actually silenced herself. Thea could see the strain of doing so in the older woman’s face, but she actually silenced herself. She needed to take advantage of this opportunity to try and make her understand.

  “Mom, I’m thirty-eight years old and I’m lonely. All of my girlfriends have been married. Some are on their second or third try. I’d given up hoping I’d ever find a good man. I want my chance to try.”

  Disapproval still covered her mother’s face, but her voice dropped down to a more reasonable level. “He’s not that good a man, Thea. He runs a bar—a tavern. He’s a purveyor of alcoholic beverages.”

  Thea knew this was a critical issue for her mother and that she was never going to change her mind about it, but she couldn’t let the implication that Nick was doing something wrong go unchallenged. “He runs a legitimate business—a legal business.”

  “Leave your brother out of this!” her mother snapped.

  “Then you back off Nick’s bar!”

  “But he’s got you working in it,” her mother protested.

  “I waitress two nights a week,” Thea defended herself. “I did it in part to see Nick on Friday and Saturday nights, and in part because I’m bringing home more than two hundred tax-free dollars each evening and you and I really need the money.”

  “I also found your pamphlet on the bartender’s exam,” her mother accused.

  “All right, Mom, you win!” Thea told her.

  Her mother smiled, looking disgustingly pleased with herself.

  “I didn’t want to have to do this, but I’m going to install a deadbolt lock on my bedroom door.”

  Her mother lost her smile. “You will not! This is still my house!”

  “Yes, it is, Mom,” Thea agreed, “but I’m the one who pays the mortgage and the cable bill and half the utilities.”

  “You are not putting a lock on a door in my house!” her mother insisted.

  Thea lost it. “THEN I’M MOVING OUT! You can lose the house for all I care! I’m tired of taking care of everything and having you scream a
t me whenever I want to do anything on my own!”

  Her mother got back in her face. “This is not about you doing something on your own! It’s about you going to spend the night with your boyfriend in a snowstorm!”

  “I already hired the boy down the street to shovel your driveway!” Thea yelled back her.

  “It’s not about the driveway!” her mother screamed.

  “I know!” Thea shouted. “It’s about you being afraid I might actually find some happiness and go away!”

  Crack!

  Thea’s face burned from the slap her mother had just landed on her cheek. The urge to hit her back was incredibly intense, but hitting her mother was something she was never going to do. “That’s it!” she said. She could hear her voice trembling with her own rage. “I’m through with you! I don’t know if I’m going to spend the rest of my life with Nick but I sure as hell won’t be spending it with you!”

  When her mother didn’t move, Thea grabbed her by the shoulders and propelled her back into the hallway outside of her bedroom.

  “Don’t you put your hands on me!” her mother shouted at her.

  Thea left her in the hallway, slammed the door and leaned her back into it. Sure enough it only took a second or two for her mother to try the handle. “I’m not through talking to you, young lady!”

  “I’m not young anymore, Mom,” Thea said. She wanted to cry but she was afraid of what that might do to her face when she was going to see Nick. “That’s most of the problem. I’m not young anymore and I’m tired of being alone.”

  Her mother wasn’t listening. She pushed on the door, forcing it half an inch open before Thea used her leg muscles to force it back closed.

  “You open this door!” her mother ordered.

  Thea sank down to the floor, her back still against the door. “Just please leave me alone…”

  Chapter Two

  Nick

  “Thea?” Nick asked into the phone.

  “I’m here,” she told him. She was sitting in her little secondhand Ford Escort in the parking lot of his building, thinking about the fight with her mother and whether or not she should go up to spend the night with her boyfriend.

  It was Sunday afternoon and the cloudy sky was already heavy with the coming storm. Forecasts were calling for at least eighteen inches of snow. Schools had already cancelled Monday classes throughout the region. The dentist she worked for had decided to cancel all of his Monday appointments. And miracle of miracles, Nick Morrow, Thea’s workaholic boyfriend, had decided to close his bar in anticipation of the coming blizzard.

  “Is everything all right?” he asked. “You don’t sound very happy about coming over.”

  In truth, she’d sat in the parking lot for five minutes before deciding to go ahead and make this call. She didn’t like what had happened at home, and the sick dread in her stomach told her she really was going to have to move out. What would her mother do then?

  The woman acted like a general, but she’d really never been able to take care of herself. Daddy had done that for years and he’d asked Thea to look after her when he was gone. Which really wasn’t fair now, was it Daddy? Why didn’t anyone think she deserved a life of her own?

  “Thea?” Nick asked, probably checking that she was still on the phone.

  “I’m still here.” She sighed. “It’s just…I had a big fight with my mother about coming over here and I…I’m in a really bad place right now. I don’t know if it’s a good idea for me to come up.”

  “Don’t say that,” Nick said. “Tonight is a great idea. How many times are we going to have a night when I have to close the bar? Think about it—a date when Jim can’t call in a panic because the weather looks bad.”

  Thea almost smiled—almost. One of the reasons her mother found Nick dangerous was that he got under Thea’s skin in all the right ways.

  “I, um, I don’t think I’m going to be able to go through with this,” she said. “I promised my Dad I’d take care of my mother and…”

  “Don’t go,” Nick pleaded. “Why don’t you at least come up so we can talk about it?”

  He really was dangerous. “I can’t do that,” Thea told him. “We both know if I see your face I’m not going to be able to tell you no.”

  “Then I guess it’s a very good thing that I started down to meet you the moment I saw your name on the caller ID,” Nick told her.

  “What?” Thea asked.

  “I’m here outside your car,” Nick told her. To emphasize the point, he knocked on her side window.

  Thea nearly jumped out of her seat at the sound—not an easy thing to do with a seatbelt on and a steering wheel over your lap.

  She reached for the door handle, her heart racing, and opened the door. “You just scared me nearly half to death!”

  Nick grinned, his breath showing clearly in the cold air. He had long blond hair and beautiful blue eyes atop a lean track-star style frame. He wore a plain gray wool sweater over blue jeans and construction-style workbooks and looked damned handsome. He was also a dozen years younger than Thea—another problem her mother had with Nick although she hadn’t mentioned it today. At least she hadn’t mentioned it yet.

  He leaned down though the open door and kissed her lightly on the lips. “I’m glad you came. Please don’t turn around now and go home.”

  “I just don’t know what to do,” Thea confessed. “I want to spend the night with you, but my mother has me feeling so guilty about our relationship and about me not being home to take care of her—which of course she insists she doesn’t need.”

  “Well, why don’t we go upstairs and talk it out,” Nick suggested. “We have time. It’s not even snowing yet.”

  As he spoke, the first fluffy white flakes began to fall from the sky.

  Thea looked first at the flakes and then pointedly at Nick.

  He grinned and shook his fist good-naturedly at the sky. “You’re not helping, God!” he called out. “Five more minutes and I’d have had her inside.”

  He turned back to Thea. “What do you say? You’ve already driven out here.”

  She picked up her purse. “I guess we can go up for a while.”

  Nick set Thea’s suitcase on the floor in the corridor while he dug the key out of the pocket of his jeans. Then he opened the door, picked the suitcase up and walked inside, holding the door open for her to follow him.

  Nick’s apartment was a lot like his bar, Thea noted—functional but not fine. It needed paint on the walls and a good area rug on the floor of the main room. By way of furnishings, it could only be described as Spartan.

  Nick’s main room was a combination television room and kitchenette. At the one end was a refrigerator, a sink, and stove with a couple of sparsely populated cabinets. At the other end was a couch that pulled out into a not-very-comfortable sofa bed, a television, and a couple of TV trays. He had three old maps on the wall, a poster of a painted Samurai by someone named Frank Miller, and a pen and ink sketch that someone had done of his bar. Throw in a couple of lamps and an overhead light in the kitchenette and she had basically described the whole apartment.

  There was a bathroom, of course, and what was doubtless supposed to be a very tiny bedroom where Nick’s dresser sat together with a worktable, but there was no bed in it. Nick slept on the pull out, which she was willing to bet he had gotten from his parents’ house.

  He dropped her bag to the floor the moment she was fully in the apartment and let the door swing closed behind him. Then he wrapped Thea in his arms and let his lips and tongue do his talking. At least he tried but Thea pushed him away before he could do much with his tongue.

  “I thought we were coming up to talk,” she said.

  “Actually,” Nick reminded her, “the plan was to have hot sex all night and tomorrow morning.”

  She rolled her eyes at him. “I’m serious, Nick. I don’t know what to do. She was impossible before, but now that I’m dating you she’s gone completely over the edge.”

/>   Nick turned away from Thea and strode into his tiny kitchenette. “You want something to drink?” he asked.

  “Now?” she asked him. Thea had never been a big drinker. She could have the occasional beer with her girlfriends and maybe a glass of wine over dinner if her mother wasn’t around, but in general she had never found alcohol all that attractive.

  Nick opened the refrigerator and took out a can of coke. “Water, soda, tea?” he asked. “I’ve got a couple of beers too, of course, if you’d rather.”

  “Diet coke?” Thea asked. She wondered why she always expected him to offer her booze. Maybe it was because he owned a bar. It felt weird to her that he didn’t drink much.

  Nick snagged one out of the refrigerator, went to the cabinets and took out two glasses, which he filled with the sodas. As he carried them back in to Thea he said, “If you’re going to stay long enough to drink a soda, you can surely take off your coat.”

  Thea smiled and set her purse on the floor near the couch. Then she unbuttoned her coat. “You seem very determined to convince me to stay,” she observed.

  Nick handed her one of the glasses and took the coat from her. “Let me go hide this in the closet,” he said. “It will make it that much harder for you to leave if you have to wait for me to fetch it for you.”

  Thea followed him to the bedless bedroom and watched while he opened the closet up and hung her coat on an empty hanger. She had expected the closet to be packed with clothes, but not only were there almost no garments in there, most of the space was taken up with shelves housing tiny little figures in neat little rows. “What are those?” Thea asked, moving up behind him.

  “What?” Nick asked. He had her coat half on the hanger and seemed surprised by Thea’s question. He twisted about to look to see what she was talking about and only belatedly realized what had captured her interest. “Oh, those,” he said. His face colored slightly with embarrassment. “Those are my Dungeons and Dragons miniatures.”