He laughed as he pulled out a pair of tweezers, causing me to swallow hard. Images of me running screaming from my mom as a child whenever she’d wielded those tiny instruments of pain assaulted me. He held them in his elegant fingers as he looked up. “You’re going a little green, Syd.”

“I don’t like tweezers,” I whined.

A small grin appeared. “It’s not going to hurt.”

“That’s what everyone says, but I know it’s not true. It is going to hurt, because you’re going to start digging around and—”

“I’m not going to dig around. I’ll be in and out before you know what I’m doing. Promise.”

I wanted to run from the room, but I forced myself to stand there like an adult. “Okay.”

“You sound pitiful,” he remarked as he tucked the edges of the towel into the back of my jeans, exposing all of my stomach. He placed his fingers on either side of the glass splinter and pulled the skin taut.

The tweezers hovered over my skin, and I cringed away.

“You big baby, stop moving.”

“Shut up.”

He chuckled. “This isn’t going to work if you keep squirming away from me every time I get within an inch of the glass. You’re making this worse by delaying it.”

Sounded logical, but I wasn’t a fan of logical thoughts right now. After managing to move a full foot before Kyler cornered me between him and the counter, he distracted me. “I tried using my phone to see if I could get a hold of the main lodge. You know, to ask if anyone else has been having problems with windows being shot out or psychos on snowmobiles.”

“Okay.” I obsessively stared at the top of his bowed head.

“I couldn’t get a call out. Looks like the storm is messing with cell service, too. Couldn’t even get on the damn Internet, but from what I remembered from the weather alert, we have about another day of heavy snow and then it should taper off.”

“How long do you think it will take them to clear—” There was a pinching sensation that caused me to yelp.

Kyler’s head shot up. “Sorry, but good news, baby, I got it out.” He waved the tweezers around. “See? Wasn’t too bad.”

“It wasn’t.” I smiled as he went back to studying the minor cut. His long lashes fanned down. “Thank you.”

“My pleasure.” He grabbed the bottle of peroxide and wet a cotton ball. “It will probably take a day for them to get the highways cleared and another one to get the roads around here cleared out.”

There was a little burn as he swiped at the cut. “Three more days?”

“Probably.” He stood gracefully and put the bottle on the counter, along with a couple more cotton balls. “Let me take a look at the rest of you.”