Troping Through the Snow by Alexa Riley

“So that’s the blackmail, huh? One chocolate cake for your silence?”

I let that hang between us for a moment as she takes out the ingredients. “No,” I finally say, and her eyes snap to mine.

“Two chocolate cakes?” she offers nervously, and I shake my head. “Three?”

“I want you to come bake something for me every day.”

“What?” she snaps a little too quickly and then tries again. “You can’t be serious. I can’t drive out here every night and make you dessert.”

“Why not?”

“Well, I mean, you know.” She looks around like she’s thinking of an answer. “I don’t even know you.”

She doesn’t seem like she’s scared of me, so I don’t understand her reasoning. I can tell when people aren’t comfortable being close to me, but Frostie has never been one of those. She might not go out of her way to come up next to me, but she’s not scared.

“I’m a big guy,” I say, and the look she gives me says duh. “I like dessert.”

“Me too, but I also like to fit into my jeans, so I’ve got to practice self-control.”

My eyes move down her curvaceous body, and I scowl again. “Why?”

“Why?” She stops opening up packages, and for a second, she thinks about the question like she’s never really thought about it. “Jeans are expensive?”

She says it like a question, and my scowl deepens.

“Never mind about that. Are you really going to keep me here every night so that you don’t tell the whole town I bought boxed cake mix?”

“Yes,” I say simply. and the one word seems to aggravate her more than the act of being here.

“Nobody would believe you.”

“You willing to take that chance?” She opens her mouth to answer but then shuts it quickly.

“So just to be clear, I come out here and make you a dessert and you don’t tell Troping about my little secret?”

“And have dinner with me,” I blurt out, and she looks just as surprised as I am by the request.

“Dinner?”

“You can eat here and then we can have dessert. That’s the deal, take it or leave it.”

For a moment, she thinks it over, and then I see a flash of annoyance. “Fine.”

“And go with me to the craft fair.”

“The one in Westchester?” When I nod, she shakes her head. “No, I’ve already agreed to dinner and dessert. You can’t hold me hostage forever, Clause.”

“It’s not holding you hostage. There’s a cake thing. You should enter.”

“A cake thing?” She sounds intrigued as she stops stirring whatever is in the bowl.

“Yeah, like a contest.”

“Oh.” She’s quiet again as she thinks it over.

I’m just about to tell her to forget it when her soft sweet voice sounds through the kitchen. “How about I make you a counteroffer?”

I cross my arms over my chest, and I don’t miss the way she watches my shirt stretch tight. “I’m listening.”

“I will have dinner and dessert with you every night until the craft fair. After that, you let me off the hook. Deal?”

I’m thinking over the possibility of not having her here, but it’s a guarantee of two weeks together before the fair. It’s more than I would have otherwise, and I can always demand more afterwards with the threat of revealing her secret.

“Deal,” I say, and Frostie holds out her hand. I stare at it for a long moment and reach out to take it.

Her small hand fits in the palm of mine, and I wrap my worn wood-working fingers around hers. She’s soft, but there’s a strength there that surprises me, and I don’t want to let go. Forcing myself to release her, I sit back in my chair, and she goes back to making the chocolate cake.

At least for now, she’s mine.





CHAPTER 5





FROSTIE





Clause’s eyes stay glued on me the whole time I make his chocolate cake, and it makes it hard to concentrate on what I’m doing. I turn into a bumbling mess when he’s around. There has always been something in the way he stares at me.

I thought I irritated him because his face is always grumpy. Now I’m starting to think something completely different. Does he want me? What else could it be? He can’t outright demand sex because that would be taking it too far.

A rush of heat flows through my body at the idea of him demanding I service him. What is wrong with me? I really have to stop with the dirty books. Noel over at the library keeps us single ladies stocked up. She even knows which books to recommend to each of us knowing our specific tastes. Noel finds it funny that I enjoy some of the darker reads while our very own Wild-West-let’s-blow-shit-up Tinsel loves them as sweet as she can get them.

I have a taste for a rougher kind of man. Recently I’ve been picking up more lumberjack books, and I’d be lying to myself if I didn’t admit that it was because of Clause. Now that I’m in his home, I don’t think he’s a lumberjack at all. He might chop wood, but he has to do something that pays well.

“What do you do for a living?” I ask to make small talk.

“I’m retired.”