She blushed.
“Oh, Prissy, I’m going to make you laugh so much.” And he wasn’t referring to tickling her funny bone.
Rafe took Helen’s hand across the table then, and they talked of inconsequential things. Usually, he didn’t like to chitchat after sex. He just wanted to fall asleep, or go home. Everything about sex with Helen was different.
Was it love that made the difference?
Shaking his head at that disarming cliché, he rose and pulled on a pair of pants and boots. He needed to go outside for a nature call and to get some more firewood.
A few moments later, Helen was straightening out the bed linens when she heard Rafe yell, “Helen, come here! Quick! You won’t believe this.”
Helen glanced toward the door, alarmed by the rising pitch of Rafe’s voice. She wrapped a blanket tightly around her shoulders and rushed outside.
It was snowing. Hard. A regular blizzard.
And Rafe stood with his arms outstretched joyously in the moonlight, his tongue catching snowflakes. Apparently he didn’t see much snow in L.A.
“Isn’t this great!” he said eagerly, letting snowflakes settle in his hair and on his chest and bare shoulders, oblivious to the cold. He reminded her of a little boy.
She leaned against the doorframe, feasting on the glorious sight. She wished she could freeze the scene for all time. “I’m going to paint this picture when I get back to the future,” she told him softly.
“Yeah. What’re you gonna call it?”
“‘The Man I Love.”
“Too unoriginal. It’s got to be something like ‘Snow in the Sierras,’ or ‘Wild Man in Angel Valley.’ ”
“I like my title better.”
“Okay,” he said agreeably, and opened his arms to her.
She stepped toward him and opened her blanket, enveloping them both in its warmth. When he’d heated both their bodies with his kisses and roving hands, she showed him how to make snow angels, in the nude — yes, she was losing her mind — and Rafe showed her how to have snow sex — yes, they were both losing their minds.
The next day, they awakened, burrowed under the quilts, to find even more snow had fallen — ten more inches — and it was still coming down. They looked at each other, coming to the same conclusions.
“Zeb and Hector aren’t coming back soon.”
“We’re going to be snowed in.”
They exchanged a smile. The gods were smiling on them, it seemed.
After a breakfast of bread and honey — Rafe kept complaining about the wax — he showed her another fantasy. It involved honey. She’d never realized what a versatile food honey was.
Later, Rafe dressed warmly and went out to care for the animals and gather up his tools and bag of gold dust, bringing them up to the cabin. As he went out the door, he commented dryly, “Too bad you won’t be able to dig up any more carrots with all this snow.”
“We can still have liver and onions,” she called after him.
“Hah! If you make me eat liver and onions, I’ll make you have foot sex.”
For a long time after he was gone, she pondered his words. Foot sex? He was teasing, of course.
That afternoon, Rafe suggested they try another one of her fantasies.
“I don’t have any more. Really.”
“Invent one then.”
Flushing pink from her scalp to her curled toes — she was still nude under a blanket wrapped toga-style around her body — she offered hesitantly, “Well, there is the rocking chair.”
They both glanced at Zeb’s armless rocker, then at each other.
Rafe broke into a slow, lazy grin. “Helen, Helen, Helen. You are a very quick learner.”
For a week, they were marooned in the cabin, going out only to take care of bodily functions, feed the horses, and bring in firewood. They weren’t bored. They made love and talked and read books aloud and made love and shared secrets and ate enough venison to grow hooves and indulged Rafe’s numerous — really numerous — fantasies and her burgeoning ones, and they planned for their future.
Of course, their idyllic interlude had to end eventually. It did, with a bang.