She lifted her arm, testing it as they crossed the threshold, passed the kitchen, and hustled straight into the living room with its ginormous stone fireplace that looked like it just might have been here centuries before the house. The clock on the microwave had gone dark, the lightbulbs in the deer-antler chandelier were off, and the heat that had been pumping out of the vents was no more. Oh shit. Any hope that the wire the limb had taken out before landing on her wasn’t the power line vanished.

“I’m okay,” she said under her breath, willing it to be true.

“Well, then,” Ian said, unceremoniously dumped her onto the couch, and kept walking, flexing his hands as if carrying her had stung. “I’ll get started on the fire.”

Okay, obviously Ian did not take that the way she’d meant it. She sat up, slipped off her boots, then clutched a pillow to her chest and practiced her deep breathing. Panic attacks weren’t really her thing, but neither was being trapped without power in a cabin with someone who seemed to hate her even as he rushed to her aid.

While her annoyed knight-in-ass-hugging-jeans squatted down in front of the fireplace, Shelby took off her coat and pulled her arm out of the sleeve of her sweater to get a better look at where the limb had hit. A purple bruise was already starting to bloom, but that seemed to be the worst of it.

Finally, something was going right. Really, at this point something had to land on her side of the ledger.

“Why are you getting undressed?” Ian asked, his voice gruff.

Glancing up from the monster bruise forming on her arm, she rolled her eyes at him. “I’m not.”

He gestured at her bare arm.

Oh for the love of— “I’m wearing a tank top under my sweater and it’s literally just my arm. Why are you being weird?”

Instead of answering, he just grunted and turned back to the fire.

Okay, Mr. Chatty.

After slipping her arm back in her sweater, she took her phone out of her coat pocket and swiped the screen. Just as she had the night before, she only had half a bar. Well, it was worth a try. She dialed Lucy’s number and waited as a message reading “connecting” appeared above the keypad and stayed there. Moving the phone in hopes of catching the elusive second bar, she walked around the living room with no luck. Without giving Ian a second look—okay, much of a second look, he was wearing a Henley for God’s sake and had biceps for days—she stuffed her feet into her unlaced snow boots and went out onto the porch. She got as far as the railing before the call started to ring through.

Thank you, snow fairies.