Snowbound: Discovered by Love

By Carla Laureano

Meg Adamson has been slaving away as a junior associate at a tiny Denver architecture firm since graduation, contributing to significant projects but not making any headway up the corporate ladder. So when she gets the chance to make a last minute bid to renovate an eccentric heiress's mansion in Vail, Colorado, she'll do almost anything to get the job—even risk driving into the high country before an impending snowstorm. If she's quick and careful, she can get the information she needs and be back in Denver before the first flakes fall.
 

That is, until she's confronted by long-time rival—and college crush—Declan McKenzie, who has also been invited to bid on the project. Declan has been one step ahead their entire acquaintance, nabbing the top spot in their graduating class and a coveted job at a world-class architecture firm, barely edging her out every time. Meg has spent her entire career in his shadow, and she's determined that he's not going to get the best of her this time.
 

But when their bickering conceals the early arrival of the massive snowstorm and they find themselves stranded with no heat or power, they'll have to put aside their differences to make it through the weekend. Because as the temperature drops and their competition heats up, the only way out is together... with or without their hearts intact.

 

Length: 34,000 words/approx 103 pages
Genre: Clean contemporary romance

• Language: English
• Publisher: Laureano Creative Media LLC
• Release date: Oct 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781732794023

Carla Laureano

Carla Laureano could never decide what she wanted to be when she grew up, so she decided to become a novelist–and she must be kinda okay at it because she's won two RWA RITA® Awards. When she's not writing, she can be found cooking and trying to read through her TBR shelf, which she estimates will be finished in 2054. She currently lives in Denver, Colorado with her husband, two teen sons, and an opinionated cat named Willow.

Book preview

Snowbound © 2021 by Carla Yvonne Laureano

Published by Laureano Creative Media LLC

P.O. Box 3002

Parker, CO 80134, U.S.A.

CarlaLaureano.com

Cover photograph via Deposit Photos

Cover design by Mark Anthony Lane II

All rights reserved. Except for brief excerpts for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form without written permission from the publisher.

This story is a work of fiction. Characters and events are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is coincidental.

ISBN: 978-1732794023

Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Epilogue

Also by Carla Laureano

This place was a teardown.

That was Meg Anderson’s first impression of the house when she pulled into the cracked asphalt driveway and stepped out of the car. It wasn’t just the state of the house, a few square feet short of a mansion, because despite the peeling paint and piles of fallen leaves drifting into the corners, it wasn’t in that bad of shape. It was the unholy mix of styles that could have only come from the mind of either an insane or drunk architect, a sort of faux-English country mixed with mountain rustic and seasoned with an ill-advised sprinkle of Austrian chalet.

Meg had never wanted a job so badly in her life.

She slammed the door of her Jeep and pulled the lapels of her down parka together against the sudden rush of frigid wind. Her deep determination to win this project for her architecture firm—and prove her worth once and for all—was the only thing that could have compelled her to drive into the Colorado mountains eight hours before what meteorologists were saying could be the storm of the decade. Vail was less than two hours from her home in Denver, but she wasn’t stupid … she’d booked herself a room for the weekend in case the weather shifted and she couldn’t make it home. She might be ambitious, but she wasn’t about to die of hypothermia on the side of the road, waiting for a snowplow to dig her out.

With that cheery thought in mind, Meg marched to the front door and punched in the code she’d gotten from the client. The lockbox snapped open with a reassuring click, revealing a brass key. The fact she was even being given the chance to bid on this project was something of a miracle. Eleanor Gratz was an eccentric heiress who owned homes all over the United States and Europe just in case, on a whim, she decided to summer or winter outside her native Austria. Right now, Mrs. Gratz was living at her house in the Hamptons while she took bids for the full remodel of her Vail ski home; apparently, the first batch of bids had displeased her so much, she’d dumped them all and started searching for what she’d called in the brief lesser known talent.

You couldn’t get much lesser known than Meg.

That thought propelled the key into the lock, and she shoved her shoulder against the door to dislodge it from the frame. It creaked open on disused hinges, disgorging a plume of dust that floated around her head, dusted her shoulders, and made her sneeze. Clearly Mrs. Gratz didn’t employ a caretaker for the home and hadn’t for the past ten years.

Technically, Meg didn’t even need to be here. If this really was a teardown, it meant abandoning the house’s original footprint, scraping the lot, and pouring a new foundation. She could have drafted all that from her office or her own cozy home in Denver instead of walking through a house so cold she was surprised she couldn't see her own breath.

But despite her flippant attitude when she’d first seen the exterior, now she wasn’t so sure. The soaring wood-paneled ceilings with their reclaimed wood were meant to be rustic, but they could go fully contemporary when paired with the massive panes of glass with which she intended to replace the far wall to frame views of the valley. And there was no real reason to close off the foyer with solid wood paneling when she could tell at first glance that the walls weren’t structural.

The wheels started turning in her head, even though she’d just added to her own workload. A teardown was easy to sketch and lay out. Working with the existing structure was harder, especially considering her previous requests for a floor plan had gone unanswered. She wandered around the great room, wishing she’d brought her laser measure with her so she could take some actual dimensions.

She was so focused on the vision in her mind’s eye that she didn’t immediately notice the footsteps outside the great room. Hair lifted on her arms. Her first wild thought went to ghosts, but as quickly as it surfaced, she shook off the thought. Hello? Who’s there?

No answer. For the first time, she realized how isolated she was out here, a full three miles outside of Vail city limits, on the edge of twenty acres with no neighbors nearby. Feeling foolish even as she did it, she reached for the fireplace poker and wrapped her fingers around its comforting heft. As quietly as she could, she moved through the room and back out into the shadows of the foyer … and let out a yelp when she came face to face with a stranger.

His hand came up automatically to grip the poker. What are you trying to do? Take my head off?

Meg froze before she could begin to put up a struggle. She knew that voice. And the stranger scenario was preferable to the presence of the man in front of her.

Declan McKenzie.

You, she whispered. What are you doing here?

Meg Anderson. I thought that was you. Amusement tinged his voice, deepening the Irish lilt that she had once—against her will, of course—found irresistible. He eased the poker out of her hand, retraced his steps, and then flicked a switch near the door. Instantly, warm light flooded the foyer.

Meg flushed in embarrassment. Of course Eleanor Gratz wouldn’t do anything as plebeian as turn off the electricity in one of her homes. And of course Declan, with his prep school upbringing and his famous father, would know that.

The heat in her cheeks intensified as she looked him over properly. She’d seen him at parties and open houses over the last few years, infrequently and distantly enough to convince herself that he couldn’t possibly be as good-looking as she remembered.

She was wrong.

Worse yet, he looked even better than she recalled. Last time she’d spent any length of time with him, they’d just completed an internship straight out of their graduate architecture program at the University of Colorado, Denver: she, twenty-five; he, almost twenty-seven. Now, six years later, the roundness of youth had sharpened into planes and angles, highlighting his high cheekbones, drawing attention to dark-lashed gray eyes that had never failed to enchant his multitude of female admirers. He did wear his hair shorter now, almost military-cropped, with none of those irresistibly youthful curls that just begged a woman to bury her fingers in them.

She shook her head angrily against the errant thought. Her youthful fantasies about him had no business remaining so close to the surface after all these years, especially considering how well-acquainted she was with ugly reality. She would have thought all that had happened between them would have destroyed any lingering attraction.

She cleared her throat and repeated, What are you doing here?

Same as you, I’d imagine. Leave it to Eleanor Gratz to send out a design brief at two o’clock on a Friday before a snowstorm. He thrust his hands into his jeans pockets and rocked back on his heels. The consequences of being second tier, I suppose.

I never thought I’d hear you call yourself second tier.

He shrugged. Even I have my moments of humility.

And only he could be so casual that even that statement seemed arrogant. She rolled her eyes. Do you happen to know if we’re expecting any other … competitors?

Are we competitors now? His eyes danced in a way that made it clear he was laughing at her. Then he sobered under her pointed stare and cleared his throat. No. I think we’re the only two people mad enough to drive up here at the last minute. But since we’re here … He gestured ahead of him, as if he was gallantly allowing her to precede him. Unsurprisingly, it irritated her.

At this point, his very living, breathing presence was an affront.

It hadn’t always been that way. Once upon a time, she’d thought they could be friends. They both had lived all over the world as children; they both had done degrees in architectural engineering, which set them apart from their B.S. and B. Arch classmates. And for about five seconds, she’d thought maybe they could be more than that.

No, that was a lie. He had acted as if they could be something more for all of five seconds. She, on the other hand, had spent an entire semester gazing longingly across a classroom at him, hopelessly infatuated. The situation was all the more embarrassing because she’d never been the type to … pine. She’d dated, she’d had relationships, but they’d all been easy, mutual, and they’d ended that way too. Until she’d laid eyes on Declan McKenzie the first day of her graduate design program, she’d thought the overwrought stories of instant, overwhelming chemical attraction were simply fiction.

But then he’d proved himself to be an arrogant tool. He’d rebuffed her every friendly overture. Argued with her in class. One-upped her in presentations. And most unforgivably, sabotaged her during their shared summer internship at Klein & Company, a top architectural firm in Denver, so that he got an offer of a permanent position and she got an unceremonious farewell. It had taken her eighteen months to land somewhere half-decent after that, at a boutique firm called NCO Architecture