Tangled Web: A Small Town Romance (The Cortell Brothers Book 6) by Giulia Lagomarsino (an ebook reader txt) 📕

keep us warm. We needed more firewood. There was no way that I was letting him help me haul in the firewood. He needed rest, not that last night could be considered rest…But since I hadn’t been able to get him to a hospital, I had to be sure that he took it easy today.

I found my phone laying on the ground just a few feet from us and checked for service, but it was still dead. Sighing, I flopped back down and stared up at the ceiling. I needed to shovel out a path to leave. What if he needed help? I couldn’t just assume that he was okay because he fucked me last night.

Slipping out from under the warmth of the covers, I shivered and quickly pulled on my clothes, rummaging through the laundry basket that I lived out of for warm socks. Glancing over at him one last time, it was clear that he wasn’t waking up anytime soon.

I slid the door open as quietly as possible, closing it behind me to save the warmth of the room. I grabbed my coat, hat, and gloves, then slipped on my snow boots. When I opened the door, an icy blast of air smacked me in the face. There was so much snow that had drifted up on the porch that by the time I made it to the corner of the house, I knew I would have to shovel first. The problem was, my snow shovel was not where I left it.

I couldn’t see where the porch steps were and where the ground started. It was just one big, snowy blanket. So, I trudged out across the lawn in search of my snow shovel. The way the snow was drifting, I had a feeling I was headed in the right direction. The wind nipped at my nose and my fingers were already feeling the bite of cold, but as I got closer to the shed, I saw my shovel sticking up out of a snow drift. I was going to have to find a chain and anchor it to the porch.

It took me twice as long to get back to the porch after retrieving my shovel. I was already exhausted, and I knew there was no way I would be able to shovel us out. I just needed a path to get to the firewood. The stack was closer to the back door, but the fireplace we were currently using was at the front of the house. And if I went through the back door, I would be tracking snow through the whole first floor. But I could always stack the firewood inside the door and then bring it to the fireplace.

With a plan in place, I shoveled enough to make a path to the firewood, and then to the back door. I figured I would need a path either way. It felt like hours had passed by the time I was done. My fingers were frozen in my gloves and my legs felt like jelly, and I could tell that my face would be chapped from the cold and wind when I went inside. It was so tempting to just go back inside, but we would need the firewood for making food and keeping us warm. Every log that I put in my arms felt like a million pounds, but somehow, I hauled some wood up into my arms and headed for the back door. Back and forth, I carried load after load, setting it just inside the door. My body dragged with every load I carried, my feet just barely shuffling across the porch. I just barely made it inside with my last load before my arms gave out.

“What the hell are you doing?” Andrew barked at me, rushing forward. He caught me just as my legs collapsed underneath me. I was so cold by now and my whole body ached from the effort. My teeth were chattering and I just wanted to be warm. Andrew swung me up into his arms and carried me into the living room, setting me down on the couch. I sat there shivering as he left the room, only to return with the load of wood I had brought in. He quickly tossed some logs on the fire and then came over to me, pulling off my gloves and wincing at the sight of them.

“Why the hell did you do that?”

“We n-needed wood.”

“Yeah, and you could have woken me up to help you. Look at you!”

I would have laughed at the ridiculous notion, but I was too frozen. He stood and walked into the other room, returning with a bowl of water.

“We need to slowly warm up your fingers. God, they’re like ice.”

He gently lowered my fingers into the water and I hissed, trying to pull them out. He took my hand and held it in the water. It felt like a thousand tiny knives stabbing at my fingers. Andrew sat back, running a hand through his hair.

“Why didn’t you wake me up?”

“You needed sleep,” I chattered.

“Do you have any idea what could have happened? What if you collapsed out there and I was sleeping in here? You could have died. You have to be smarter than this.”

I wanted to argue with him that I was only trying to keep us alive and warm, but that seemed like a moot point at the moment. As my fingers warmed up slowly in the water, Andrew started tugging off my boots, setting them to the side as he ran his hands over my feet, trying to warm them up. My toes were red and I barely felt his hands on them. I just felt numb.

He methodically went about pulling off my snow pants and my coat, hanging them up to dry, and then he carried me over to the fire and tucked me under the blankets, shoving a pillow under my head. Leaning forward, he pressed a kiss to my forehead.

“You stay