Page 36 of Doomsdate

“Generally? Yes.”

She leans back, placing her hands on the curves of her hips. “Look around you, Everett. What ranger’s going to stop us?”

The station has the air of a ghost town. No tumbleweeds, but the wind lightly skittering through the ice-tipped trees gives the same effect. Maisie starts back for the car.

I rush to catch up with her. “What about driving on the ice? You don’t have snow chains on your tires. Don’t SUVs flip a lot? What are the statistics on that?”

“Only ten percent of weather-related car accidents are due to icy pavement. Most people don’t realize that driving in rain is much more dangerous.”

Of course she’d know that.

Maisie smirks as she puts on her seatbelt. “Nice try, Everett, but we’re going in, and we’re camping tonight.” She weaves through the gap we created and past the empty ranger booths. “Besides, the road being closed means no other campers.”

“How can you be so sure?”

She cuts her eyes to me. “Would you go camping in below-freezing temperatures with a debilitating GI virus in a closed national park?”

Okay, she has me there.

I can’t help but marvel at Maisie’s cool, confident demeanor as she expertly handles the SUV along the winding road with its thick, daunting layer of ice. She’s completely unfazed, her entire posture at ease. Where’s the anxious woman who scanned the vegan restaurant for threats during our date? Whose pockets jingled with small weapons, who could barely speak when she first sat down? This Maisie maneuvers us over a particularly slippery drift of iced-over snow with one hand on the wheel, the other idling through her platinum hair, and my dick moves of its own accord.

Concerning, really. I’ve spent half the day terrified of her, and the other half turned on.

Once we reach signs for a campsite, Maisie pulls into the parking lot, tucking the car out of sight behind a snowy bank of trees, but in full view of the sun. She looks more than a little pleased to find a spot with an electric vehicle plug-in, which she inserts into her rig while making smug eye contact with me. The rounded mountains are ruddy brown and gray and gleaming, glowing white, some so covered by snow they look like low-flying clouds against the brilliant blue sky beyond. I get out of the car, Chicken’s carrier in one hand and my duffel in the other, and nearly jump out of my own skin at the loud crack of my boots against the slushy ice. Maisie pauses her descent to the campsite to watch me.

“What is it, Professor? Not an outside boy?” Her lush lips twitch to the side, and she’s off again before I can deliver a devastatingly clever retort. Not that I have one, but still. My dick moves again, as if in salute to its commanding officer. She’s teasing me, but I like it a little too much when she calls me Professor.

True to Maisie’s word, the campsite is empty, and looks as if it has been for some time. The snow beneath the brittle, bare trees is undisturbed, the fire grates doused in white. Even frozen, the pit bathrooms reek, or else I’d have suggested we set up our sleeping bags in there.

“Can’t we just sleep in the car?” I eye the campsite with its still, unbroken blanket of white, nerves crawling with unease I can’t explain.

Maisie begins to unpack her gear. “Not if we want to be warm. I have a tent-safe propane heater, but it can’t be used in a car. Plus, the condensation from our breathing would accumulate in the closed car and dampen our clothes. We could legitimately freeze to death as a result.”

I blink. Goddamn science.

Sighing, I set Chicken down and open the carrier. “You stay close to camp now, okay?”

Chicken bounds out with a rrreow, then trots off, leaving delightful little bean-prints in the snow.

“She’s okay loose like that?” Maisie asks, the first bit of worry I’ve heard in her voice since this morning, when she was cataloging all the ways I was doomed.

“Chicken is a modern woman and needs her freedom,” I respond. “She also stays within ten feet of me at all times.”

“Because she loves you?”

“Because she loves food.”

“Ah,” Maisie says, as if that makes more sense. “Okay, Professor. You pitch the tent, I’ll get the fire going.”

That should be easy enough. I know how to read instructions. But thirty minutes later, I am still wrestling the maze of poles and sockets while an incredulous Maisie sets up the rest of camp.

“I swear I’m an intelligent, capable person,” I grit out.

Maisie’s eyebrows rise, but she says nothing.

When I finally get the tent up, I give her a triumphant, if slightly winded, grin. She nods once, then beckons me over to the park-constructed fireplace.

“That’s all I get?” I lean back, cracking the knots in my spine as I go. “A nod?”