Snowed In With My Stepbrother novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: One Stove
A blizzard closes the pass and Finlay drags Ailsa into the estate's one-room hunting shack, where he stops pretending he hasn't watched her for two years and tells her why he tried to stop their parents' wedding.
Finlay kicked the shack door open with snow up to his knees and said a single word:
"In."
I didn't move.
He took me by the back of my coat and put me through the doorway.
The door banged shut behind us and the wind stopped screaming.
It was nearly dark inside.
I could make out a stove, a log basket, a shelf of tins and one narrow iron bed.
One.
"You've got to be joking," I said.
"There's a road over the pass, Ailsa. It's under four feet of snow. Laugh if you like."
My car was in the ditch below the pass road with its hazards still blinking.
His Land Rover was two hundred yards behind it, buried to the doors in a drift.
My mother had texted me an hour before the signal died.
"Finlay's fetching you. Try not to make him regret it."
He had fetched me.
He had also told me I drove like a tourist, and carried my bag half a mile through a blizzard without asking if I wanted him to.
He crouched at the stove with his back to me and struck a match.
Kindling caught.
Orange light climbed the walls and showed me the rest of it.
A paraffin lamp. A kettle. A bottle of whisky with dust on the shoulders.
One grey wool blanket folded at the foot of the bed.
"There's one blanket," I said.
"I can count."
"Where are you sleeping?"
"Haven't decided."
He fed a log into the stove and stood, and the shack got smaller.
He had to stoop under the beam.
Snow was melting in his beard.
For two and a half years Finlay MacPherson had looked at me across his father's dinner table.
Two Christmases. Two Easters. Two birthdays for his father.
He passed me the potatoes and never once said my name if he could avoid it.
Now he looked straight at me and didn't stop.
"Your jeans are soaked through," he said.
"I'm aware."
"Get them off."
I laughed, because it was that or hit him.
"Not happening."
"You'll be hypothermic in an hour. Get them off and get under the blanket. I'll turn round."
"How gallant."
"Ailsa."
He said my name.
My hands were shaking too hard to work the button.
He watched me fail at it twice.
Then he crossed the floor in two steps and did it for me.
His knuckles were cold against my stomach.
Neither of us breathed.
He peeled the wet denim down to my knees and stepped back.
"Sit," he said, and turned to the wall.
I kicked the jeans off and sat on the bed and pulled the blanket over my legs.
It smelled of woodsmoke and him.
"You can turn round."
He didn't.
He stood with one hand flat on the wall, his head down.
"What's wrong with you?" I said. "You've barely said ten words to me since your dad's wedding. Now you're undressing me."
"I've said plenty to you."
"You've said 'pass the salt.'"
"In my head I've said plenty."
I stared at his back.
"What does that mean?"
He turned round.
"It means I've sat across that table from you twenty times and looked at the salt so I wouldn't look at you."
The stove ticked.
The wind threw snow at the one small window.
"You hate me," I said. "You hate both of us. Everyone knows it."
"I've never hated you for one minute."
"You walked out of your own father's wedding before the speeches."
"Because you were wearing green," he said. "And you were laughing at something the minister said. And I couldn't stand there and watch it as your brother."
My mouth went dry.
"You're not my brother."
"No," he said. "I'm not. And I'm done pretending I am."
He picked up his wet jacket from the floor.
"Where are you going?"
"Back to the Land Rover. I'll run the engine for heat."
"It's buried to the windows. You'll gas yourself."
"I'll crack a window."
"Finlay."
"I can't sleep in here with you, Ailsa. Not tonight. Not after saying that."
He had his hand on the latch.
Outside it was black and white and howling.
I knew what he was offering me.
A locked door and a clean conscience and a man freezing in a drift.
"Sit down," I said.
He didn't move.
"If you walk out that door I'll follow you, and I've no trousers on, so you'll have that on your conscience too."
His shoulders moved.
It might have been a laugh.
He let go of the latch.
He came back and sat on the log basket by the stove, as far from the bed as the room allowed, which wasn't far.
The fire lit one side of his face.
"Say the rest of it," I said. "You've started."
He looked at his hands.
"I asked my father not to marry your mother."
I knew that.
Everyone at Glenmorran knew that.
"Because you think we're gold-diggers."
"No."
He lifted his head and looked at me.
"Because I'd already met you."
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