A Virgin River Christmas by Robyn Carr Read Free Book Online

going to get her where she needed to go. She was going to have to sit it out until he understood—she wasn’t done with him yet. And this whole business was going to get complicated, since there were good odds he was actually nuts.
    She tried to gnaw at her sandwich, even though she now had no appetite. The sun sank slowly, and she ended up wrapping it up and putting it back in the grocery sack, unfinished. The thing was—if you didn’t eat that much, you didn’t feel like eating that much.
    The sun dipped below the horizon, the lights in the cabin shone, and a thin curl of smoke rose from the little chimney. She leaned back against the sleeping bag, physically comfortable even if she was an emotional wreck. But the decision had been made—she was sitting right here until she figured out what to do.
    On a more practical matter, she really hoped she wouldn’t have to pee in the night. She’d been choosing her sleeping spots carefully, so that if nature called in the dark of night, she wouldn’t have to venture far from the little bug.
    She’d never been any kind of camper, never had been good at relieving a full bladder on a whim. Never had quite figured out that squat; it seemed like she’d always wet her right foot. But after a little over a month of searching the hills and sleeping in her car in various parking lots, quiet residential streets, rest stops and country roads, she had it figured out. She could squat, whizz, get the job done, jump back in the car and lock the doors in just over a minute. There were showers available at the YWCA and at workout rooms in community colleges where they didn’t check ID’s too closely. She’d indulged in motels the first week out and then quickly realized her money would go further if she slept in her car. And with no hints of Ian’s whereabouts, she needed to make her money last.
    Then she remembered—that was an outhouse out there, wasn’t it? Wow, how hilarious to think she’d be glad to see an outhouse! Life had gotten real interesting.
    Drew and especially Erin would absolutely die if they found out she’d been sleeping in the bug. She shook her head. I’m as nuts as he is, for sure. And then she noticed snow flurries against the window of the bug. Very pretty, light, fluffy snowflakes in the waning light with a narrow streak of sunlight in the west through the clouds—the flakes glittered as they fell. The view over the ridge was amazing—there was a rainbow shining through the snow drifting down onto the tall pines—it was magnificent. She just couldn’t be upset in this place. Not with Ian, in any case. Maybe he had forgotten they were friends.
    He probably wanted her to think he was crazy, roaring like that, but she wanted to believe that, underneath the bluster, he would still be all the things Bobby said he was, all the things he’d been in their early letters, before Ian got out of the Marines—strong, compassionate, gentle, loyal. Brave. He’d been so courageous to do what he had done.
    With the snow lightly falling, and the sun causing the rainbow to fade into dusk, she relaxed and closed her eyes for just a second. To think.
     

Three
    I an tried to keep himself from looking out the window; he’d be damned if he’d open the door. The silence in the mountains was such that if she’d turned the ignition to start the car, he could have heard the click. So he refreshed the fire in the woodstove, fired up the propane cookstove and heated large pans of water for a bath.
    He’d made it a year in this cabin without a tub, shower or electricity, but he had made a few adjustments; he bought a generator and wired up a couple of lights inside. He found an old clawfoot tub in a salvage yard that he’d repaired and patched, enabling him to wash out of something larger than the kitchen sink.
    It was always a shallow bath—a couple of pans of cold water hand pumped into a pot in the sink from the spring-fed well under the house, and a couple of large