Taking her empty champagne flute, she whirled downstairs, pasting a smile on her face. Planning to corner her dad at the first opportunity, she spied Mimi and Papaw across the room talking with Bob and Carol Clark, their best friends. Both of her grandparents appeared to be healthy. Mimi’s head was thrown back in laughter, as was her norm, her white hair recently cut into the cutest pixie style. Emily thought it suited her quite well. As small as Mom, Mimi had always reminded her of a little sprite. Papaw was tall, though not as tall as her father; his years of skiing had kept him in tiptop shape. She adored her grandparents, too. They’d bought the resort right after they married, working around the clock to make it the success it was today.

When Emily’s parents married, they both had worked as hard as Mimi and Papaw, making the lodge a hot spot for locals and tourists. On the day her grandparents decided her parents had been, in their words, “well-groomed,” they deeded the resort to them. Yet when needed, they were always there in a pinch. Snowdrift Summit had always been a family operation. The locals flocked to the resort in droves, and tourists from all over the world came to ski the famous slopes, in particular The Plunge.

Other than the six years spent earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Colorado, Emily had spent her entire life in Loveland, Colorado, living and working at the family resort, which she loved. For a while now, she’d had an itch, an urge to try something different. Not necessarily a new career, but maybe working at a different resort. There were several throughout the state, many of them offering more challenging runs than Snowdrift Summit’s. The exception was The Plunge, a massive drop-off on a snow-covered cleft in the rock face where skiers could free fall for almost thirty feet. Then, if you managed to stick the landing on the fifty-degree slope, you had to throw all your weight forward as fast as humanly possible to avoid smashing into the ancient Precambrian rock. From there, The Plunge’s upside-down funnel shape opened into an extremely powdery run, challenging even the most expert skiers.

With her experience, Emily knew she could have her pick of jobs at any of the top resorts, though telling this to her family wasn’t going to be easy, especially because she knew her parents would be retiring soon. They had fantastic employees—three managers who knew the ropes and the slopes inside and out and would easily take charge. Emily truly hadn’t thought about it all in depth.