“Daniel, stop. No.” Ellie got to her feet, picked Daniel up, and pulled him away from the plant once more. “If you do that again, I’ll take the screwdriver away.”
Daisy, meanwhile, was playing with a little toy that made animal noises, moos and quacks and oinks holding her attention.
Claire got that sly look on her face that usually meant she was about to meddle in Ellie’s life. “Mom told me that Jesse babysat for you yesterday.”
Ellie sat again, unable to keep a smile off her face. “He did a great job. When I got home, he had Daisy’s tiara on his head. He’d forgotten it was there.”
“Oh! I like this guy.”
“He even made us dinner—spaghetti with homemade meat sauce.”
Claire gaped at her. “He cooked for you? Please tell me you slept with him.”
Ellie glared at her sister. “Could you maybe not talk about it quite so openly? Daisy repeats everything these days.”
“Oh, sorry. Did you F-U-C-K yet?”
“No! But I wanted to.” Ellie told her how she’d invited Jesse over for a glass of wine—and how that had led to other things. “He is the most amazing kisser. He really knows how to use his mouth.”
“How far did you go?”
“Just second base.”
“Awesome. Wait. Is second base…” Claire made a wanking motion.
“That’s not second base. That’s third base. Isn’t it?”
“I thought third base was, you know…” Claire stuck out her tongue and wiggled it—at which point the conversation seemed so absurd that they both burst into laughter.
“We sound … like we’re back … in high school,” Ellie managed to say.
When the giggles subsided, Ellie lowered her voice. “We kissed and got under each other’s shirts.”
“And?” Claire looked at her expectantly.
“And what?”
“How was it?”
“It was incredible. Truly. I didn’t sleep all night. I haven’t felt this alive since…”
The words “since Dan was killed” hung, unspoken, in the space between them.
“When are you going to see Jesse again?”
“I don’t know.” Ellie and Jesse hadn’t talked about it. “Soon, I hope.”
*
Jesse skied slowly down Ashes to Ashes, towing a toboggan and doing his best to avoid the bumps that made the snowboarder he was evacuating scream. Travis skied down behind him, making sure Jesse didn’t cut across the paths of other skiers.
“Traverse!” Jesse called out.
“Clear!”
Jesse snowplowed into the turn and cut back across the slope, using the edges of his skis to keep his speed under control, the weight of the toboggan pushing him down the fall line.
He hit a small bump.
“Goddamn it.” The kid had taken a nasty fall off the halfpipe in the terrain park, and Jesse was pretty sure his radius was fractured.
“Sorry, buddy,” he called back.
It had been a busy day so far, which was just as well. There’d been two calls for knee injuries, one for a fight in the lift line, and another about a couple fucking behind the ski patrol cabin at the top of Eagle Ridge. It had kept Jesse’s mind off things he didn’t want to think about—like Ellie, like the nightmare.
He’d had it again last night for the first time in maybe four months and had woken up covered in cold sweat, his pulse racing. He’d thought he was done with that shit. Hearing about the bus crash and that little boy’s death had probably triggered it.
Hell, he didn’t know.
But Esri would. She’d been the one who’d stopped the nightmares before. He couldn’t go back to the way he’d been this past August, when he’d had that same nightmare four and five times a night, so he’d made an appointment with her this evening. He was probably overreacting, but he’d rather take action sooner than later.
He got the victim down, helped him out of the toboggan and walked with him into the First Aid Center. “They’ll take good care of you.”
He glanced at his watch. It was after one.
Time for his lunch break.
He skied to the Ski Patrol chalet, stepped out of his bindings, and stowed his skis in the rack, then walked in and cleared his break with dispatch. He took advantage of his time off the slopes to call Nate West and set up a day to practice skijoring. They quickly settled on next Wednesday—his next day off.
“I’ll see if we can’t create a mini-skijoring course up here to give you a taste of what it’s really like,” Nate said.
Jesse would be impressed if they could pull that off. “Terrific.”
“Matt tells me you served with the Rangers.”
“That’s right.”
“So did my father. He did two tours with the Seventy-Fifth during Vietnam. I imagine you two could find a lot to talk about.”
“I bet we could.”
“Matt also says you’re a natural-born athlete, that you learned to climb and made the Team in a handful of months.”
“Matt has a big damned mouth.”
That made Nate chuckle. “We’ll see you up here next Wednesday. I’ll text directions to the ranch.”
“Thanks.” Jesse ended the call, feeling a little lighter.