Snowfall

By Carolina Valdez

Sweethearts on the high school ski team, Riley and Jean-Claude always expected to marry and stay together forever. But as they become world-class skiers, they drift apart, and Jean abandons Riley.

Years later, Jean appears unannounced to train at the resort where Riley works. He's still charmingly irresistible and physically powerful, and is the US's hope for a second Olympic downhill gold. Once Riley herself expected to win gold, but a skiing accident dashed those hopes. Jean never sent any condolences, and he shattered her heart when he married -- and quickly divorced -- a skier she dislikes.

Anger and pain flare between them, and Riley ignores Jean's attempts at friendship to insulate herself from further hurt. Yet the old longings and the love they once shared resurface. What will it take for her to come to terms with the past? Or can she?

• Language: English
• Publisher: JMS Books LLC
• Release date: Jan 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9781634865562

Carolina Valdez

For Carolina Valdez, books and writing have been a major pleasure in her life. Multi-published and winning awards in nonfiction and fiction, Valdez had no idea what she was writing until a member of her critique group mentioned her “romance.” Enthralled by that genre, she has focused on it ever since. She is a member of RWA-PAN (the Published Author Network of Romance Writers of America) and RWA's Orange County, California, and Pasic chapters. Suspense and murder crop up in her romances because she's also a member of the Los Angeles chapter of Sisters in Crime. She and her husband reside in southern California, only minutes away from mountains, desert or beach. For more information, please visit carolinavaldez.com.

Book preview

8

Chapter 1

What a glorious day! Riley filled her lungs with the icy air. The seat of the chairlift slid under her and she settled onto it, gripping the arm with her right hand, holding her poles with her left. The seat was as cold as the air, but her insulated pants and jacket protected her from a chilly invasion of her firm derriere and muscular thighs. Looking out as the lift pulled her upward, she saw the night’s storm had floated fresh powder not only over High Mountain, but as far as she could see.

Riley smiled with excitement. Fantastic. We’ll be busy today, and if the weather holds, we’ll have a white New Year’s Eve. Had to use the snow machines at Christmas, but this week all the snow will be nature-made.

 Everyone—staff and guests alike—would love that.

Angels Ski Resort was on the California side of the Sierra Nevada range, and as an instructor, she worked at the base of the lift and runs. Today her task as a ski patroller was to do a trail safety sweep. Arriving early, she’d keyed open the drive terminal, stepped inside to set the chairlift in motion, and went out again to relock it.

Then, she’d unlocked the nearby building that held the instruction rooms and patrol offices. Still wearing her Yukon cap—ear flaps snapped in the up position—she’d entered and removed her heavy gloves, but worked in her insulated jacket and turned up the heat so the chill would be off the rooms by the time her team arrived.

She frowned as she lifted the lid on the large, staff coffeepot. The rule was it had to be clean by closing time each night. I’ll have to remember to check the schedule to see who messed up. One of her least favorite jobs in this position was coming down on someone for this sort of thing. It seemed so small, but if the resort suddenly closed due to a blizzard and didn’t reopen for weeks, the pot could end up moldy. That might even ruin the entire pot, which the crew, not the resort, had chipped in to buy.

Since it involved crew property and wasn’t a firing offense, she would tell Paul about it, but it was hers to handle. Paul dealt with the bigger problems.

Riley dumped yesterday’s filter with the old grounds into a waste basket that hadn’t been emptied either, adding another mark to the lazy crew member’s tally. She rinsed the holder and pot before filling it with deliciously unadulterated mountain spring water. Working the grinder, she inhaled the wonderful smell of beans being ground—Moroccan French roast, the scent even more intense. Somewhere she’d read the smell of freshly ground beans contained a feel good chemical separate from that of the caffeine when you drank it. As her spirits lifted, she confirmed the truth of the story.

Riley opened her backpack and schooled herself against claiming this early in the day one of the bear claws she’d bought in the resort bakery. Her mouth watered in anticipation of the savory taste of cinnamon combined with the sweetness of the tracks of white icing dribbled across the bread, but she laid all of them out on the table intact.

Those chores completed, she’d strapped on her skis, bundled up, and headed for the lift.

Now, a flash of color drew her gaze upward. A man in red ski clothes and helmet trimmed in dark blue stood at the top of the closed, double-black diamond run named Satan’s Domain. He stood poised as if waiting for a starter to yell Go!

 Hey, you! Stop! she yelled, waving one of her poles as anger and concern flared. The runs are—

Before she’d finished her warning, he mimicked breaking through a gate, pushed hard with his poles, and set a blistering competitor’s pace down the fall line of an extremely dangerous piste, or run.

Whoever you are, you’re an idiot. You have no right to be on one of our trails before we’ve officially opened them to skiers. And now, dammit, I have to go after you! Lord, help me. I hope you don’t get a concussion, break a leg…or tear an ACL.