Wriggling back into her clothes at speed—it was too damn cold out to risk another half-dressed escape—Tori kept one eye on Jasper as he stirred again, one arm flung over his eyes as he flipped to his back and started to stretch. Definitely waking up.
Grabbing her boots to put on later, Tori slipped out of the bedroom door, checking the corridor was clear before padding down the stairs. Hopefully, Liz and Henry would be busy enough with their unexpected guests that they wouldn’t notice her sneaking out.
She was in luck. Dodging a couple of small children racing out of the restaurant dormitory, she manoeuvred herself towards the exit and, pulling on her boots, back into the snow. The knee-high leather boots weren’t really suitable for the snow, but neither was the suit she’d worn to tour Stonebury the day before. But they were the only clothes she had with her, so they’d have to do.
The guilt landed on her within the first few snow-crunching steps, but guilt was a feeling so tied into her connection with the Moorside Inn she found it easy enough to shrug off. Yes, she should have stayed to help Liz and Henry serve breakfast to the other stranded travellers, but she had at least left them Jasper as a dogsbody. And besides, she just couldn’t stay there a moment longer, fighting off the memories.
She’d just walk as far as the road, she decided, and find out what the situation was. If she was really lucky they’d already have opened it—although she suspected someone would have been up to the inn to tell them that already if they had. But perhaps they’d be close to doing so. Perhaps she’d be able to return to the Moorside with the good news that they’d all soon be free to get on their way again.
But she should have known better than to hope for that sort of luck.
‘Can’t see them opening it today, to be honest,’ the young policeman guarding the police cordon told her. ‘There’s more snow scheduled this afternoon for a start, and there’s already been a mini rock slide in the canyon.’
‘What about opening it the other way?’ she asked, a little desperate. If they couldn’t cross the moors the quick way, surely they could go back the way they’d come and escape to the main roads?
But the policeman shook his head. ‘Too much snow. They’ve closed it that way too, right back at the turn off from the main road, to stop anyone else stupid enough to try and cross the moors in this weather.’ He seemed to realise what he’d said a moment too late, as his cheeks turned even pinker than they already were from the cold, but Tori waved away his stuttered apology.
She didn’t care what some stranger thought about her plan—or, actually, Jasper’s plan—to take this road. The only people alive whose good opinion mattered to her were her business associates, and her aunt and uncle.
And they probably weren’t thinking lovely thoughts about her for skipping out this morning.
With a sigh, Tori turned away from the road and trudged back to the inn, pulling her phone from her pocket and dialling as she walked.
‘Tori? Everything okay?’ Felix’s voice came sharp over the line as he picked up on the first ring. ‘I got your text last night, but it didn’t make a lot of sense...’
Probably because she’d said as little in it as possible. Felix was a friend, a good one. But he didn’t know about the Moorside or her family, and she had no intention of telling him now.
‘Everything’s fine,’ she said, calmly. ‘Like I said in my text, we got caught in the snow and a road closure, so stayed the night at a local inn.’ She took a deep breath. ‘And it looks like we might be stuck here a little longer, too. Apparently it could be tomorrow before the roads are clear again.’
‘So you and Jasper are stuck in the middle of nowhere together?’ Felix barked a laugh. ‘Well, try not to kill each other, yeah?’
‘No promises,’ Tori said dryly. ‘Can you let the earl know what’s happening?’
‘Yeah, of course. Now, while I have you, I had a couple of questions about the set-up for the Christmas market...’
By the time she hung up, the inn was almost in sight again. At least the fresh air had cleared her head a little—and she’d escaped from an awkward morning-after-the-revelations-before moment with Jasper.
She wondered how he was coping with being cooped up at the Moorside with all those families and kids. He’d grown up in Flaxstone Hall, probably with a whole suite of rooms to call his own, and the ballroom to use as a playroom. The Moorside, with its low ceilings and poky rooms—and especially in its current state of overcrowding—wasn’t at all what he was used to. Last night it had all still been a game to him. Tori suspected that by this morning he’d be losing patience.
But as the inn came fully into view, so did Jasper, his head visible above the wall that surrounded the grounds of the Moorside. His companions, however, were hidden by the snow-covered stone.
She could hear them, though.
‘Jasper! Jasper! Use my scarf for the Mummy snowman!’ one of the kids chattering around him called.
‘But then your neck will get cold,’ Jasper pointed out, taking off his own scarf and wrapping it around the neck of his snow creation.
There was a whole row of them, Tori realised, of varying shapes and sizes. Big snowmen, little snowmen, and something that might have been a snow dog, with a stick in its mouth.
‘How long was I gone?’ she asked as she reached Jasper’s gang, still amazed at the sight of Viscount Darlton playing with a horde of little kids. ‘We seem to have been invaded in my absence.’
Jasper looked up at her voice and gave her a careful smile. It hadn’t escaped his notice that she’d done a runner this morning again, then.
‘The grown-ups are all eating breakfast inside,’ he explained. ‘But kids eat fast, and it just seemed cruel to keep them all cooped up when there was all this snow out here to play with.’
Tori raised her eyebrows. ‘If all the grown-ups are inside, what does that make you?’
He shrugged, and this time his grin felt real. ‘Maybe I’m just young at heart.’
Handing a carrot that she imagined he’d filched from the kitchen to the tallest of the children, Jasper moved past the crush to join her by the wall, calming their groans of complaint with a promise that he’d be back to play more soon. ‘You went to check the road?’
Tori nodded. ‘Still closed. Both ways. The policeman I spoke to reckons it won’t be open until at least tomorrow; there’s more snow forecast for this afternoon, but hopefully temperatures might rise after that.’
Jasper looked back over at the kids playing by the snowmen. ‘Looks like I’d better come up with some more activities to keep this lot entertained, then.’
Pushing away from the wall, he headed back to his little gang, clapping his hands together and asking, ‘Who reckons they can take me in a snowball fight?’
As a dozen hands went up, and Jasp
er used the distraction to toss the first soft snowball at the nearest kid, Tori laughed, despite herself.
This was definitely a side of Jasper she hadn’t expected to see this week.
Then she turned to go inside and saw Uncle Henry waiting for her, and her smile disappeared again.
Time to face the music.
CHAPTER FIVE
JASPER’S FINGERS WERE taped together for the thirteenth time. The little girl—Sasha—sitting on his right stifled a giggle as she looped another strip of paper perfectly through the last circle, selected a piece of tape from the edge of the table beside them and taped it in place, another brightly coloured loop in the paper chain.
‘Obviously this is a job for little fingers,’ Jasper said as he shook off the tape again. But he reached for the next paper strip anyway, and fed it dutifully through the loop and taped it in place.
All around him, Christmas music hummed softly from the speakers hidden behind the ceiling’s wooden beams, the sound of jingle bells and children’s choirs ringing. A fire crackled and popped cheerily behind a fireguard—and far away from kids with kindling—and an old, skinny greyhound lounged in front of it, clearly happy with its lot. Outside, snow was falling again; big, fat flakes that tumbled onto the already white-covered ground. The sun had already started to dip behind the horizon, and Jasper knew that soon Henry would want to start on dinner, and that he would go and help again, because at least that way he was being useful, he was doing something in this world of forced inactivity.
Across the room, Tori’s Aunt Liz sat cutting festive wrapping paper into strips to add to their piles, smiling at him approvingly. All around him, industrious kids were adding to the, to quote Sasha, ‘most epic paper chain in the history of paper chains’. Jasper suspected it would loop around the whole pub several times over by the time they were done.
The kids’ parents sat at the bar, obviously grateful for the ongoing reprieve from having to entertain their children while they were stranded. Tori’s news—and the subsequent visit from a policeman who looked about twelve to confirm that the road would be closed until at least tomorrow—hadn’t gone down well with anyone. Well, except maybe the kids, who were having a whale of a time. And Jasper.