Page 98 of Famous for a Living

I reach for my boots, feeling the growing need to do something. Say something. “Your arms must be killing you.”

“That was incredible,” he says. “You were incredible.”

Our words emerge simultaneously, and I smile as I register his.

“I discovered skiing when I was twenty. I’m a sucker for a good ski trip.”

“Colorado?”

“Sometimes.” I hesitate, uncertain how he would take it. Should I say the full truth? “Mostly Switzerland.”

The finest crease forms between his brows, but there’s no “Are you serious?” escaping his lips. No need for me to ball up like a hedgehog to defend myself. “I’ve heard Switzerland is beautiful. I’ve always wanted to go.”

No criticism. Just honesty.

I exhale just a tiny bit, and the tension in my shoulders eases. “It is. It’s breathtaking.”

He pauses. Nods. “I’m not a big traveler. Not intentionally. Just I never have found a place I’d rather go than right here.”

“What a surprise. You?” I say with a smile. “Let me guess. Once you got out here, you’ve had a hard time leaving. Saw these big, beautiful mountains and just couldn’t let go.”

“More like, I weigh the cost of a few days away, and it never quite seems worth it when I have this here.” He smiles. “So yes, in a way, I suppose I got here and couldn’t let go.”

I laugh. As I finish lacing up my boots, I feel something funny in my coat. What is that?

Oh yes. It’s the wind, a twenty-degree wind getting through the barrier.

I reach inside the pocket as I stand. My thumb and forefinger find the button and press.

“You seem more related to Uncle Terry than I am. What about family, though? Your mom? Do you keep up with her?”

He raises a brow. “Yes.”

But there’s something in the way he looks at me, amused about something I clearly don’t know.

“There’s my girl!” Uncle Terry departs from the group of men huddled around the bonfire and walks over the snow my way.

He gives me the hardiest pat on the back I’ve ever felt. The kind of slap that would dislodge a chicken bone from one’s throat. “That’s the Cranwell spirit. Now how about the champion’s dinner?”

And as it turned out, Zaiah did not skip the moment of asking me to dinner and all but throw me over his shoulder like a caveman declaring his girl. Apparently what was known to every person at the skijoring event, except myself, was that after the Tenth Annual Skijoring National Race was the Tenth Annual Champions Potluck, and of course that’s what my skijoring partner was referring to.

A good ol’-fashioned chili potluck in a barn.

Uncle Terry proceeded to spend the next two hours touring me around to every single person he knew—which turned out to be everybody in the entire town. Around and around we went, like little dolls twirling in an open music box, him rehashing the same play-by-play we had all seen and experienced a couple of hours prior. He laughed often, a boisterous growl of a laugh that roared up to the rafters where cats with curlicue tails walked along them like balance beams.

As the line at the long string of food tables died down, he only seemed to grow more and more excited with each retelling.

I didn’t mind it, despite the way the heavy scent of chili and cumin and roasted tomatoes was doing strange things to my stomach. Actually, I found it all more exhilarating as the evening wore on, with the way Uncle Terry put his hand on the back of my shoulder, guiding me to another person he noticed in the crowd, saying, “Oh, John! John! Have you met my niece?”

The way he embellished a little bit more every time he told the story.

The way whomever he was speaking with didn’t question the details of his embellishments, despite the fact they saw everything with their own eyes.

He was proud of me, not in the way a few ill-fated boyfriends had been in the past.

No, like a dad would be. A good dad.

Like Serena’s father after she sailed to the bottom of the black diamond last year in Zermatt.