“You realize you’re trapped,” he hollered from behind his car.

“I have the high ground and access to the house,” she shot back. “I could lock you out.”

He shot off three quick snowballs. “You wouldn’t.”

“Not for a long time, anyway.” Really, not at all, but it wasn’t like he didn’t know that already.

He laughed and shot off another snowball, but it went wide, hitting the front door with a splat. And so it went, snowballs flying through the air as he circled the porch, dodging her limited-supply snowballs. The rest of it all didn’t matter. For the moment, there wasn’t a world beyond their little snowed-in patch of earth, and Shelby gave in to the absolute joy of that freedom.

That anxious feeling always in the bottom of her gut, the one that had kept her from walking into the media room a few weeks ago, it shrank into nearly nothing. There was only here and now. Before, that had only happened in the moment between buzzed and drunk that she’d tried to ride for way too long. This was so much better. In the mix of everything, she’d forgotten how to let go and just have fun.

By the time they were out of snowballs, Shelby had snow down her shirt, her socks were soaked to her toes, her fingers were half frozen, and her cheeks hurt from laughing so hard. After kicking off the snow stuck to their boots outside, they shucked them off just inside the door, leaving them on the thick weatherproof mat, and hurried to the fireplace to start to defrost.

“I’ve got to get out of this,” she said. “Turn around. No peeking.”

Ian grunted in agreement, his shirt already half off. Fighting the urge to freeze to death so she could watch him finish taking off his shirt, she turned and faced the staircase. Getting off wet jeans with icicle hands was second only to trying to take off a sweaty sports bra on her worst-clothes-to-remove list, but she managed. By the time she had on a pair of yoga pants, a long-sleeve T-shirt, and a pair of wooly socks, she’d started getting feeling back in her toes.

“Is it safe to turn around?” she asked.

“You’re clear,” he said.

She turned and nearly ran into Ian, he was so close. He was mismatched in joggers and a fisherman’s sweater, the thick cream-colored kind that made her fingers itch to touch him—it! She wanted to touch the sweater, not him. Really. Sorta. Maybe. Oh God, not at all.

He took her hands in his, cupping them and bringing them up to his mouth to blow on them. “You’re freezing.”

“My gloves weren’t made for snowball fights.” The knit gloves had been soaked through by her third snowball. “I hadn’t been planning on going to war.”