Page 332 of Power Play

“I know. It looks good.”

“You look like you lost a fight with a truck.”

He touched his swollen lip. “Adds mystery.”

“It adds probable stupidity.”

“Women love both.”

“Then stay away from mine.”

The words left before I could stop them, and Briggs went still.

Charm wasn’t mine.

I unlocked the truck and threw my duffel into the back seat hard enough to make the books shift inside it.

“Get in.”

Briggs opened the passenger door without acknowledging the mistake. “Cabin time.”

“Lodge.”

“It has an indoor pool. That makes it a resort.”

“It’s still a lodge.”

“Does the pool change colors?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s an unacceptable lack of research.”

I started the truck before he finished climbing inside.

The lodge sat far enough outside Flint that the highway eventually narrowed into roads lined with pines and heavy snow. The farther we drove from the city, the less the landscape resembled anything real. Gray sky disappeared behind the branches, and fresh snow covered the ground beyond the plowed road, untouched except for narrow animal tracks crossing between the trees.

Briggs lasted almost ten minutes without speaking, which might have been a personal record.

“This place is nice,” he finally said.

“That disappoints you?”

“I expected somewhere more murdery.”

My hands tightened around the wheel as the memory escaped before I could stop it. “Charm thought cabins meant Jason Voorhees.”

I saw her horrified expression when I first showed her the listing and heard the way she asked whether the woods came with a masked serial killer or if that cost extra.

Briggs looked out the passenger window. “Reasonable concern.”

“I wanted her to like it.”

He remained quiet.

The sentence didn’t soften anything inside me. I had wanted a hundred things for Charm yesterday that I no longer intended to give her. Desire was a habit, and mine would need time to understand the future had changed.

The main lodge appeared through the trees, larger than the pictures suggested. Dark timber, stone, and enormous windows faced the frozen lake. The second cabin sat farther east behind a thick line of pines, smaller and quieter, exactly what Vivi needed when the noise inside the main lodge became too much.