"We aren't going to make the meeting," I radio back to Bee an hour later. "Can you call Damien's associate and reschedule?"

"Sure," Bee replies. "Want me to give you an extra hour?"

"What's the time?" I ask, not wanting to pull my watch out of my warm sleeve again.

"Just past noon."

It's still possible, but he's lagging. There's too many decisions to weigh.

"It seems really important that we arrive at this meeting on time," I say. "Maybe we should push it two hours just to make sure. I'm not confident an extra hour is enough."

"Consider it done, Amelia. I'm off in an hour, so Jasmine will be in to replace me. I'll make sure she knows what's going on."

"Thanks, Bee. I appreciate you."

"Any time. I'll let you know when it's done."

"Two hours?" Damien fumes, stomping back to the path after dealing with nature's call. The one place I really refused to tell him what to do, hoping he could figure it out on his own. Seems he managed that at least.

"Two hours what?" I ask, hoping he didn't hear everything.

"You pushed my meeting by two hours?"

"I—" How did he figure that out?

He holds up the radio. "You really shouldn't have taught me how to use this before you had that secret call with your friend."

Cringe.

"And especially since you two felt the need to gossip about me and my dealings with Mr. Pavlides."

"You heard that, too?" I'm just glad he can't see my blush creeping up my cheeks behind my scarf and hood.

"Why would you make that decision without me?" he practically roars, but I resist the urge to cower.

"Because it isn't a decision," I step into his space and press up on my toes so I'm a little taller. "I'm not deciding how long it's going to take us, I'm estimating our arrival time based on speed, distance, and known conditions. I could still be off, but it's not a decision. It's a calculation."

"It's more than that." He also steps in, probably trying to intimidate me. And I admit it's working just a little bit. "You decided he shouldn't wait for us. You decided to push it two hours instead of push us. You never asked if I could go faster than we are."

He's right about that. "Can you?" I challenge. "I know how important it is for you to make the meeting, so I estimated high. What's so wrong with that?"

"Because he's... Ugh you don't understand anything."

"I'm not supposed to, Sir." I emphasize the last word. "I'm supposed to be communicating as little as possible and being complicit in this little farce you have going to impress this guy. And I'll do it because you're paying us too well not to. But that is all I will do. And I will not be spoken to like that. I'm out here busting my ass and working extra hours so you can get where you need to go. Safely. I've already given up on receiving any thanks, but you could at least try not to degrade me."

"I didn't degrade you," he pulls back. "I'd just appreciate you running things by me before you change meetings with the client. He's very particular about time and—"

"Time is money," I interrupt. "I remember."

Is it possible Mr. Crabby Pants is smiling?

"I was going to say he won't appreciate me moving the meeting by two hours without an explanation."

"The explanation is the weather," I say, gesturing to the oncoming clouds whipping in on a strengthening wind. "It's pretty obvious to anyone who comes out here regularly. If he comes out here as often as I was led to believe, he won't need an explanation."

"I'd still like to speak to him directly."

"How?" I question. "I can't take my mittens off or I lose feeling in my fingers. We have no cell phone reception, and the radio only sends back to Cliffside Lodge. How exactly do you think I should let you talk to him."

'Well, can't we get him a radio?"

"Get him a radio? You want me to have someone deliver a radio to his house so you can communicate with him directly and you don't think that would be odd at all?"

"Of course it's odd. But what else are we but odd? Isn't that what you said? 'Rich people don't live in the real world' or something."

"How much eavesdropping have you been doing, exactly?"

"How do you think I got so rich?"

"In all my years," I joke. "Just trust me. He'll understand. Bee is very good. She'll have discussed everything with him in accordance with your outlandish story that you love hiking."

"Fine," he relents, probably realizing he will get absolutely nowhere in convincing me to waste people's time driving a radio to a man we're going to meet in the next couple of hours. "Let's go before the storm rolls in."

But it's too late for that. All too soon we're facing biting winds and blowing snow and the sky darkens with each breath it takes.

"We have to find shelter," I shout into the radio we've been using to talk for the last few miles. "I can't see well enough to guide us safely."

"What about my meeting?"

"I don't think you'll make it."

"I have to make it."

"I know you have to make it," I snap, trying to keep my bearings in the snow. "But you aren't going to. Either we find shelter now and live to see the morning or we keep going and freeze to death. I'm not letting you make that call. I'm finding shelter."

A gust of wind howls through the trees and my face grows dangerously cold. Damien shouts something I cannot hear.

When the gust quiets, he shouts again, "What makes you think I'm not capable of deciding my own fate?"

"Be my guest," I wait for a quiet moment and then dramatically bow to him. "Go decide your own fate. You signed a waiver, right?"

He stills.

"You want to decide your fate, I can't stop you. But there isn't a meeting in the world that means you should be out in these conditions. We have to find somewhere to wait out the storm and if my guess is correct we have about thirty minutes in which to do it before we're stuck out here. So I'm going. Because I can't slow down. Come with me or don't."

I can't turn around to see if it has worked, because I have a narrow window to find the cabin before I end up turned around or worse.

"There's a cabin just up here," I point and speak into the radio. When I turn around I see him holding his hand up, mitten parallel to the ground as though he's trying to give me a thumbs up sign but his thumb has slipped out of the mitten.

I move slowly and carefully, as quickly as I can down the narrow path between the trees until I reach the fork and take the left. Glancing behind me, it seems Damien is keeping up and joining us after all.

The clouds have now fully settled above us, stuck in the little weather vortex where all storms settle for a few hours before blowing through the other side. We're in for a long wait. If we can find somewhere safe.

If we can't...

Finally, a small clearing opens up in front, and I breathe out a sigh of relief. I found it.

I kick open the secret panel under the porch on the back of the little cabin and spin the combination to open the safe. It's hard with mittens on, but not impossible. Finally, I manage to yank the handle open to reveal the fob inside that will let us into the house. We used to have real keys until Harley ended up almost losing three fingers opening the door in the cold. Now, we have this.

Returning the safe door to the closed position and reattaching the hidden panel, I pull off a mitten briefly to drop the fob inside it, sliding my hand in immediately after, and still feeling the warm sting of an almost-frozen skin being slid into a warm mitten. It bites at me just enough to wake me up, but not enough to scare me.

"Come on," I say to Damien. Now that we're in the clearing between very densely packed trees, the snow and wind is quiet enough that he can hear me when I shout.

We trudge up the stairs and around to the front door where I wave my mitten near the lock sensor until it picks up the fob and squeals to life, spinning the deadbolt and flashing green. I push the handle down and stumble over a threshold just a little taller than I was expecting.

This isn't one of those movies, though, because he doesn't catch me. I catch myself seconds before landing on the ground, pulling my shoulder in ways shoulders should not go.

"Are you okay?" Damien asks once the door is closed to keep out the elements. He throws off his mitts, goggles, hat, and scarf, kneeling down beside me.

I use my functioning arm to pull off my own toque and scarf. "In that I will survive without medical intervention? Yes, I'm fine. In that I've clearly injured my shoulder? Then I'm less fine. I'll have to find the first aid kit for some pain medication."

He clicks open the clips to drop his pack off and leans it against the door, reaching around to help me undo mine.

"I can do that," I snap. "Why don't you help me sit up?" I offer him my good hand and he pulls me up.

It doesn't take me long to get my pack unhooked and slide the first aid kit out of its dedicated pocket. But rifling around to find the ibuprofen takes a little longer.

And Damien just stares at me the whole time, adjusting his glasses every now and then and rubbing his hands together.

"Do they have water in this place?" He asks once I've got the pills in my hands. "Or heat."

I shake my head. "There's probably water but we have to get wood for the stove. I just gotta get myself patched up first."

"You can't be serious." His eyes narrow. "You are not chopping wood with a sprained shoulder."

"I don't think it's sprained, Damien. And I won't be chopping wood. I'll be collecting it and then using it to make a fire in the wood stove. It's not that hard."

"Then let me do it," he says, packing the items back into the first aid kit exactly where I had taken them from. "Let me build the fire."

"How much of an embellishment would it be if you were to say 'I've made a fire before'?"

"A definite embellishment. But you're injured and cold. I'm very good at taking directions."

"I do like a man who's good at taking directions."

"What?"

It was the pain meds. They've made me loopy.

He clears his throat. "So where do I start? And please don't tell me we walked right past it."

"We did not walk right past it. There should be a little bit of wood and food in the crawl space downstairs. We'll have to go outside eventually, but let's get the place warmer first."

He looks out the window and shivers again. "How long do you think this will take to pass?"

I shrug, using my good arm to unzip my coat to survey the damage. "I'm not sure. Could be a couple hours. Could be a couple days. We won't know until it starts to clear."

"A couple days?" He spins around to face me and his smile turns into a glare. "How could you let this happen?"

"How could I let this happen?" I repeat. Surely I didn't hear him correctly.

"Well?"

"I can't control the weather, Damien. I didn't plan to be stuck out here with you."

"I think that's exactly what you planned," he whispers. The quiet is definitely more ominous than the roaring anger. "I think you wanted me to miss that meeting from the start."

"Oh, yes. The meeting I know nothing about because you won't tell me a damn thing? I am desperately trying to keep you away from it so I conjured up some injuries for you to complain about and also manifested the storm just so I could injure my own shoulder. You caught me. What kind of fucked up beliefs do you have if you think I'd do something like that?"

"Tomorrow's Christmas," he whispers again.

"Tomorrow's Christmas Eve," I correct. "And I couldn't care less about what day it is, but I definitely don't want to be stuck here with you. I got a whole day's pay as of an hour ago so everything I'm doing from now on is getting me nowhere."

I stand, rejecting his offer to help me up. "You know what? I think I'll go get the wood myself. You can just stay away from me, okay?"

Trying to get trapped? What on earth does this man think is going on? I can think of a few things worse than being stuck here with him for an undetermined period of time, but not many.

I'll just have to cross all my fingers and toes that the storm passes quickly.

When I get to the bottom of the stairs, it becomes obvious I've made a miscalculation. The crawl space really does require crawling. Which means one armed maidens are right out of the question if they want to carry anything back out.

"Shit," I mutter to myself. Would I rather be aggressively cold possibly for the next two days or would I rather admit I need the help of the man who continually accuses me of sabotaging his plans even though it is he who is sabotaging me?

Cold is starting to look pretty good right now.

"Let me get the wood," his deep voice says from behind me. He arrived so quietly I never had an inkling he was coming.

"I don't need your help," I murmur, though I definitely do. My shoulder is still throbbing despite the pain medication, and he might be right about my having sprained my shoulder. But I cannot think about that right now.

"Now who's stubborn?" He asks, pointing. "Which of these am I going into?"

"Third one on the left," I answer, sitting down on the ground and wishing away the pain.

"You got it," he says. "Just tell me what to do and I'll be your hands."

The way this man is giving me whiplash. But I don't have a choice. Survival first.