Snow Angel
Authors: Chantilly White
SNOW ANGEL
Chantilly White
A SnapDragon Press Novel
Chantilly White
SnapDragon Press
Copyright © 2014 Chantilly White
Edited by Laurie Temple
Cover Design Copyright © 2014 Chantilly White
Cover Image Copyright © T.Tulik, via fotolia. Used with licensed permission.
Digital Edition 1.0
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales, is purely coincidental.
SNOW ANGEL
Chantilly White
Fall in love with the Honeywell-Carlisle clan and their friends in
Snow Angel
, book one in the
High Desert Hearts
series of New-Adult Contemporary Romances from Chantilly White! Set in California’s hot-hot-hot high desert, where the landscape is stark and the passion is sizzling…
“If you are looking for a great story that sizzles and truly likable characters, read Chantilly White.”
–Lucy Monroe, USA Today bestselling author
Jacob is flipping out ~
His heart, body, and mind have gone emotionally, lustfully, entirely haywire for the one woman who is totally off-limits to him—his best friend since birth, Melinda.
Melinda is flipping confused ~
She thought she loved Mitch, her rat-bastard ex-boyfriend, who dumped her flat on Christmas Day. But now her heart—and other unmentionable places—is howling for Jacob. But as much as she loves him, she knows he’s not the right guy for her—they want such different lives.
Together, they’re flipping screwed ~
They agree on one thing—a romance between them would be a huge mistake. But when passion shoots their emotions from sweet to scorching during their annual multi-family ski vacation, all of their rationalizations come crashing down.
They’ll have to choose—rebuild the safe, secure friendship-wall between their throbbing bodies and yearning hearts, or blow it apart and risk everything they’ve ever known… for the chance at a love like they’ve never imagined…
Snow Angel
is a friends-to-lovers small-town romance in the HDH series—stories with a heat rating from sweetly sexy to downright scorching! Stay tuned for
Desert Damsel
, book two in the HDH series, coming Spring ~ 2015!
To friends—
Young and old, new and established,
Male and female, human and furry.
Cherish them all.
To my friends—you are loved.
It was not in the Winter
Our loving lot was cast;
It was the Time of Roses…
~ Thomas Hood,
Ballad
SNOW ANGEL
Chantilly White
“Melinda Anne Honeywell, are you packed?” Her mother’s voice rang along the upstairs hallway, moving closer.
Grimacing, Melinda switched her teary gaze from the handsome photo filling her cell phone’s screen to the empty suitcase on her bedroom floor.
“Um...” Crap.
“Melinda?” Her mom’s voice, closer now, rose in volume, drawing her name out in an I’m-coming-to-check-on-you-and-you’d-better-be-busy warning tone.
Melinda hunched her shoulders against the imminent intrusion, feeling four-years-old again instead of twenty-one. She clicked her phone off and swung her legs over the side of her unmade bed to stand up.
Too late.
Her mom, Karen, thrust open Melinda’s bedroom door and stood in the opening, her arms cocked and exasperation covering her pixie-esque face. Her big blue eyes narrowed as her gaze swept from Melinda’s guilty expression to the open suitcase.
“Just as I suspected,” she said, shaking her head and making her glossy sweep of dark brown hair swing. “Come on, Mel, chop chop. The Tanners are here, dinner’s almost ready, and I want everyone packed before bed. Five o’clock comes early.”
“I know, Mom, I—”
“No, now listen. You earned your couple days of hibernation after busting your butt helping me get ready for Christmas, which I really appreciated—”
Melinda sighed, but Karen simply held up a hand and kept talking, “—so I haven’t wanted to push too much the past few days.”
It was a challenge not to roll her eyes. Her mom, in fact her entire family, had a great talent for pushing and poking and nosing.
Out of love, of course, but still.
While it was true no one had prodded her overtly since The Christmas Day Disaster, Melinda would hardly call it hibernation when her mom, dad, three cousins, aunt, uncle, two dogs, and various family friends had been in and out of her room in a steady stream on one pretext or another.
Checking on her.
Keeping her company.
Cheering her up.
Love, in her family, was not exactly subtle.
Her cousin Rick had even performed a complete scene from Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
, playing every part himself, and had made her laugh ‘til she cried with his over-the-top versions of each role. So hibernating she had not been, even if she might have preferred a little more privacy to lick her wounds.
Still, she didn’t argue the point.
“I know you’re upset right now, and you have every reason to be.” Genuine sympathy shone in her mom’s eyes, and a healthy dose of anger on Melinda’s behalf, though it couldn’t quite overcome the hurry-hurry vibe humming beneath the surface of her words. “But we’re on a deadline here.”
Echoing down the hallway outside Melinda’s room came the sounds of a small horde of people rushing frantically around the house. Melinda’s dad, Stanton Honeywell, called orders from downstairs in his best war-general imitation, rallying the troops—now including her best friend, Jacob Tanner, and his parents—who seemed hell-bent on making enough noise to raise the dead in Australia, let alone in Pasodoro, their small Mojave Desert town in southern California.
“Don’t forget your thermals,” Karen added, pointing at the suitcase and raising her voice over the din, “and—”
She broke off as the sound of a loud cheer, followed by maniacal laughter and the ecstatic barking of their two-year-old black labs, Buddy and Baxter, rolled into the room.
Stepping into the hall, Karen put her hands on either side of her mouth like a megaphone and hollered, “Get to work, you hooligans!”
A chorus of male voices answered her with the equivalent of a “yeah, yeah, yeah,” and more laughter. Somewhere, a door slammed shut, and the dogs’ barking faded slightly as they raced outside.
Her dad’s voice boomed its way to her room next. “Hon, where’re the bungee cords?” he yelled.
Melinda imagined her handsome father—just short of six-feet tall and starting to go a bit pudgy around the middle—standing at the base of the stairs, arms akimbo and his head thrown back as he called up to her mom. His hair, a lighter shade of brown than hers and her mother’s, and sun-streaked from decades of working outdoors, would be raked into spikes after running his fingers absently through it all day long.
Staying on top of the packing and organizing for their winter trip was a huge job. One her dad took seriously—at least to a point. While he might sound like a military master, his moss-green eyes would still be twinkling with good humor, and if the opportunity presented itself for a bit of mischief, he’d be first in line.
“Honestly,” her mom muttered beneath her breath. She stepped farther into the hallway to yell back to her husband over the noise of way too many people and the reentrance of the barking dogs. “Third drawer down in your tool chest!”
“Thanks, hon!”
Raising her hands heavenward as if begging for patience, Karen turned back into the room. “My word, they get louder every year.”
Melinda assumed her mother meant the people, not the dogs, but she only nodded.
Five women, counting herself and her mom, and—holy hell—eleven men, aged eighteen to forty-seven, filled the house to the rafters, all preparing to depart on their annual post-Christmas, multi-family, week-long skiing trip. The racket seemed to underscore her mother’s agitation. The slightly manic gleam in her usually calm gaze warned she was near the end of her travel-planning tether.
No matter how many years they’d been making this trip, the night before departure always devolved into a three-ring circus.
“I don’t know why I believed any of this would get easier once you kids were all grown up,” Karen added. “When you were little, we could park you in front of cartoons, out of the way. Now there are people everywhere.”
Yeah.
Everywhere.
Melinda wished they’d all go home. Aside from their forays into her room, she’d managed to mostly avoid her extended family members and their friends over the past two days, but once on the trip, avoidance would be impossible. The last thing she wanted was to be surrounded by a bunch of people having a good time.
And didn’t that sound whiny and self-pitying.
Flopping back on the bed, Melinda drew her knees to her chest and hugged her arms around them with a groan, her face buried against her legs.
“I don’t even want to go,” she mumbled, knowing she sounded childish. This was not the way her Christmas break was supposed to go.
“Oh, honey,” Karen said, huffing out a breath. “I know.”
Her mom sat beside her on the bed and draped a comforting arm around her shoulders. Though Melinda topped her mother’s compact five-foot-two by a good four inches, they had the same delicate features and curvy build, the same coloring—the dark hair, pale skin, and deeply blue eyes inherited from their Black Irish ancestors.
Karen smelled faintly of her signature floral perfume, leftover Christmas cookies, and the zesty spaghetti sauce she was making for dinner. Melinda inhaled deeply, but even the promise of a favorite meal didn’t sound all that appetizing.
Her mother stroked gentle fingers over Melinda’s hair, scooping the dark-chocolate strands into a long ponytail down her back. Melinda sniffled.
“He’s not worth it, you know,” Karen said.
Melinda swiped a hand beneath her nose. “It still hurts.”
Blowing out another breath, Karen pressed her head to Melinda’s and squeezed her shoulder in a one-armed hug. “I know it does, sweetie. The first real heartbreak is always the worst.”
“What about Kenny?”
“You didn’t love Kenny, honey. You just thought he was hot.”
Melinda acknowledged that silently, knowing her mother was right. Hating that it made her seem so shallow. Kenny had been the first guy to ask her out, back when she’d been sure no one ever would, and he
was
hot. Very. He’d appealed to her vanity. When he’d broken up with her, it had hurt, but he’d wounded her pride more than her heart.
Karen kissed Melinda’s cheek. “This one’ll hurt for a while, there’s just nothing you can do about that. And I know it’s only been two days, but you’re not going to sit here moping over that asshole all alone—”
“Mom!”
“—so get started packing. Then come do the garlic bread for me, the salads are up in ten.”
Melinda set her teeth. She couldn’t care less about the garlic bread. The asshole in question might not be worth her tears, but Mitch Gaveston had broken her heart, and there was no stopping the constant flood of pain in her chest. It made it hard to breathe.
“But—” Melinda broke off at the sound of approaching footsteps.
“Hey, chicken legs,” Jacob Tanner called out as he bounced into the room. “Oh, sorry.” He stopped short on seeing the two women perched on Melinda’s bed. “Everything okay?”
“Of course,” Karen answered. “Did you need something, Jake?”
“Ah, no. Just wanted to say hey to Mel.”
Both juniors at Cal State Fullerton, she and Jacob had been friends their whole lives, as welcome and comfortable in each other’s homes as their own—not to mention all the shared family trips, weekend barbecues and pool parties, movie or game nights, and most holidays, including every single Halloween and Fourth of July. Jacob and his parents were part of nearly every milestone and major memory in her life, as she, her brother, and her parents were in Jacob’s.
“Hey,” Mel said, dragging up a weak smile.
Though they’d driven home for break together, Jacob had been busy since then with a volunteer project for their local fire department, and she’d spent most of her time either helping her mother or out with Mitch. She’d only seen Jacob once in the past ten days. Prior to Christmas. Back when she and Mitch had still been she and Mitch.
Jacob jerked his chin in acknowledgement of her greeting, though his whiskey-colored eyes scanned her face with concern. They’d talked on the phone and texted a few times over break, but normally they saw each other every day. He didn’t know about her breakup.
He quirked an eyebrow. She gave a small shake of her head. Later.
Accepting the silent message, Jacob turned a megawatt, deeply dimpled grin on Karen. “Is that your awesome spaghetti I smell downstairs?”
“It is.”
“Meatballs?”
“It’s not spaghetti without meatballs, son.”
“Hot damn!” he said, punching both fists in the air. “When are you going to drop Stan and run away with me?”
“As soon as you make your first million,” Karen answered, as she always did. Her blue eyes twinkled. “In the meantime, why don’t you grab Eddie or Wendell and set the tables for me.”
“On it!” he said, flipping them both a casual salute. “Later.”
“He’s such a dork,” Melinda said after Jacob bounded back down the hall.
“Yeah, but he’s a nice dork. And a cute one, too.”
That was true enough. Jake was a cutie, and he’d always been one of the good guys. A good friend.
Her
best
friend.
“Cute or not, he has an awful lot of energy for such a big guy.” Melinda sniffed.
His energy she was used to, though at the moment it made her extra tired by comparison. The handsome thing was a relatively recent, post-high-school development.
It still took her by surprise sometimes, though she’d always thought him way cuter than most girls their age had given him credit for in their school days. Then he’d grown out of his gangly-colt stage and into his long limbs, great big puppy feet, and six-foot-four height. His skin had cleared of its adolescent havoc. The strong features that had sat awkwardly on his teenaged face looked good on the man, as did his well-muscled physique, and his smooth, deep voice had made more than one girl’s eyes go soft and dreamy in Melinda’s viewing.
Jacob’s exterior finally matched the guy he’d always been inside.
But he was still a spaz.
Karen chuckled, brushing Melinda’s hair out of her face. “You’re only saying that because you’ve been holed up here for days like a slug. You need fresh air and exercise and company. This trip will do you good.”
Melinda shrugged. That remained to be seen.
“Jacob isn’t bringing anyone, is he?” she asked.
The face of his current squeeze, Nicole something-or-other, popped into her head. Melinda twitched her shoulders, hoping he still planned to travel solo. Nicole was not her favorite person. He’d brought a girl on the ski trip for the first time last year, much to his mother’s displeasure and his dad’s barely concealed amusement. Kimberly or Kylie or somebody. Kayla? She couldn’t remember, although they’d roomed together at the condo. Some bleached-blond with a high, squeaky voice, who snored like a lumberjack. She’d seemed nice enough, if extremely possessive of Jacob. And about as bright as a plastic jewel.
Thankfully, Jacob had broken it off with her not long afterward.