One Night in the Ice Storm by Noelle Adams

 
One
     
    Rachel Cole’s day was
getting worse by the minute.
    Her
boss had given the office the afternoon off, since no work was getting done on
the day before Christmas Eve anyway. The weather had been fine when she left
Richmond—overcast but dry—but then the sleet began and kept getting worse. By
the time she’d reached her mother’s house, the roads were barely passable.
She’d spun out once and was fortunate not to have ended up in a ditch.
    The
trip took an hour longer than normal, and she’d arrived to discover her mother
wasn’t even home.
    “Just
great,” she complained, frowning into the phone, although obviously her brother
couldn’t see her expression. “So I’m stranded out here alone in the middle of
an ice storm?”
     “Look,
I’m sorry,” Brad replied. “No one expected the storm to come up so quickly. But
mom and I are stuck in town. We’re at my place now, but we’ll try to get to the
house this evening when the ice slacks off.”
    Rachel
tried not to grumble, since it wasn’t Brad’s fault. It had been nice of him to
take their mother to do last-minute Christmas shopping.
    She’d
grown up in this house—ten miles outside of the nearest small town in a rural
mountain county of southwest Virginia—and they’d been trapped by winter weather
before.
    It
just didn’t put her in the holiday spirit.
    “Oh,
and I’m sorry to add to your annoyances, but…” Brad trailed off unexpectedly.
    “But
what?”
    “David’s
on his way to the house.”
    Rachel’s
spine stiffened almost painfully. “ What ?”
    “I
borrowed his circular saw to work on Mom’s deck and kept forgetting to return
it, so he’s stopping by to pick it up.”
    “Why
is he coming to get a saw in the middle of a storm?”
    “It
wasn’t so bad when he started out. He was working a job in Gilman, so the house
was on his way home. Anyway, he called a few minutes ago, and he’s not far
away.”
    “Damn
it, Brad. I don’t want to see him.”
    “I’m
sorry, but I’m afraid you don’t have a choice, unless you want to hide in your
room and pretend he’s not there.”
    Brad
didn’t sound remotely apologetic. In fact, he sounded like he might be mocking
her.
    “This
is serious to me,” she said, tightening one hand into a fist.
    “I
know he’s not your favorite person, but it can’t be that big a deal. We didn’t
expect you until the evening, so he should have been gone by the time you
arrived.”
    “Not
my favorite person?” she repeated. “I can’t stand him. I can’t stand to even be
around him.”
    Brad
was silent for longer than she’d expected. Finally, he said, “I didn’t realize you
were still so hung up on this. You see him around almost every time you visit.”
    “That’s
different. That’s not being stranded with him in a storm this way. You know
what he did to me.”
    “But
you’ve always acted like it was no big deal, and that was years and years ago.
Normal teenage drama. I always thought you’d gotten over it.”
    She
swallowed hard, a familiar ache tightening in her chest as she thought about
what she tried to never think about. “It wasn’t teenage drama. It just wasn’t .”
    David
Harris had been her brother’s best friend since elementary school. Two years
younger than them, Rachel had had a foolish crush on David for as far back as
she could remember. Finally, the summer she was seventeen, he had started
showing her attention.
    It
had been the best summer of her life—hanging out with David for hours every day,
sharing with him dreams and fears she’d never told anyone else. The summer had
climaxed—literally—on a blanket beneath the old willow tree on her family’s
property. She’d been a virgin, but she’d trusted him completely. He’d been so
sweet, gentle, and passionate, and it had been better than she could have
imagined.
    Until
a couple of days later, when he’d dropped her completely.
    He
hadn’t even broken up with her—just avoided her until