Snowbound - Harlequin.com

8 SNOWBOUND
Only, they hadn’t. They’d left Redmond, out in the
high desert country of eastern Oregon, hours ago,
right after the Knowledge Champs competition had
ended. They should have been close to home in Hawes
Ferry south of Portland by now, or at least descending
into the far tamer country in western Oregon. Instead
they were in the thick of the storm. Fiona was
struggling to maintain twenty miles an hour. It had
been at least two hours since she’d seen another
vehicle.
We should have turned back when we stopped to put
on chains, she thought. And when they realized they no
longer had cell phone reception.
The voices behind her had died out, Fiona realized.
“You okay, Ms. Mac?” one of the boys asked.
Despite the fact that her neck and shoulders ached
and her eyes watered from the strain, she called back,
“Yep. You hanging in there?”
Nobody had time to answer. A jolt shuddered
through the van as it hit something and came to a stop,
throwing Fiona against her seat belt.
“What happened?” Amy cried.
“We probably went off the road,” Dieter said.
Fiona made everyone but Dieter stay in the van. She
and he put on parkas and got out. With the engine turned
off, it was utterly silent outside, the headlights catching
the ghostly, slow fall of the snow and the white world
they found themselves in. Tree boughs were cloaked
with white, as were rocks and shrubs and ground.
“Awesome,” he said.
She opened her mouth to snap at him, then stopped