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What was I supposed to do? My cell service was patchy, and the driver I’d hired to bring me up the mountain had already gone back to the small town that airport shuttle had dropped me off at. A town withnohotel.
Without this room, I was stranded.
“I checked. You’re not there,” the receptionist said. “Our rooms are often booked a year in advance. If you didn’t get your reservations last Christmas, I doubt we have anything for you.”
Lovely. The panicking monkeys started juggling balls and riding unicycles.
Concern cloaked the receptionist’s gaze. She chewed her lip for several seconds before her outlook brightened.
“Hey, this is just like the Christmas story, isn’t it? No room at the inn. Except you’re not pregnant—that I know of—and we don’t even have a stable for you. I’d offer you the barn, but that sounds awful, doesn’t it?”
The receptionist’s quick change of topic threw me for a moment. I’d seen the bright red barn as I’d entered minutes ago. It was quintessential, and a man wearing a cowboy hat had been leading a horse into its wide-open door.
Hope flickered like a candle in the wind.
“Doyou have rooms in the barn?” I asked.
The receptionist’s smile fell. “No. Not really.”
There it was. I was miles from home with nowhere to stay.
From the view through the tall windows on either side of the entrance, snow covered the mountainside. Sure, it was beautiful from this side of the glass. But going back out in it? Days in the snow weren’t going to cut it.
Helplessness slid into my gut with all the coldness of an ice cube. I didn’t travel much on my own. My last trip had been to visit my sister Stephanie in Louisiana when she’d gotten married two years ago—and I’d gone with my parents.
The receptionist stared at me with a pitying kind of expression. Sad eyes, and all that.
“I’m so sorry,” she said again. “I can offer you a complimentary ticket to our dining room. Our chef is world-renowned. He’s?—”
Behind me, the bell over the door jangled. A woman with red hair wearing a puffy ski jacket stepped inside with a man at least a foot taller than she was. Smiling, the woman smacked him on the chest as though reprimanding him for making her laugh.
The receptionist cut off and cleared her throat, and her message was beyond clear:
I was in the way.
Okay, then. It was time to get going.
The only problem was, I didn’t know where to go.
“Do you mind if I sit in the lobby for a minute?” I asked, holding my suitcase handle to keep it from tipping again. “I just…I need to think.”
“Sure. Go right ahead. Though, you can’t stay there, either.”
“I get it,” I mumbled as frustration built within me.
Tucking my elbow tightly to keep my leatherbound notebook in place, I left the puddle behind and dragged my suitcase toward the living room. I was sweating beneath this coat—another item I’d bought solely for this trip.
The monkeys were tearing their hair out, and I couldn’t help my jerky walk or the way it felt as though heat was rising beneath my eyelids. What was I going to do?
Only a few people loitered. A woman holding a terrier in one arm was attempting to coerce her young daughter from the room with her free hand.
“Hang on,” the little girl said, eyeing something on the table across from the fireplace. “Look at this.”
I wheeled my suitcase past them toward the fireplace, moving with patchy vision as though my brain were short-circuiting because the monkeys had started gnawing on the wires.
The fire in the hearth crackled, sending yet more heat toward me so I unzipped my coat and stared at the painting above the mantel. It was of a forest in summer, featuring a cottage built of stone and climbing with ivy. Even now, my muse didn’t get the hint that I was stranded. It kept generating ideas—a fantasy wood filled with faeries and sprites.
Picturesque. Otherworldly.
