“Are you lost?” she asked.
He stepped through the deep snow and stopped next to her. “I made a wrong turn.”
“Where were you headed?” Her neighbor ran a yurt touring company on his ranch. He’d converted his eight bedroom house into a bed-and-breakfast. Maybe he was trying to find it.
“A friend of mine has a cabin near here.”
She looked through the snow at his truck. There was no one else inside. “Who?”
“Julio Chavis.”
The name sounded familiar, but she hesitated. Gandalf stomped his foot and snorted, eager to be moving in the heavy snow.
“It’s his vacation home,” the man said.
Savanna patted Gandalf’s neck as he stomped and snorted again. “Are you alone?”
“Yes.”
Why would anyone come up here to be alone? Recalling her conversation with her mother, she realized that may not be so unusual. Besides, she knew of a man who owned a cabin two miles up the highway from her road and across from the yurt touring lodge. She’d never met him. He rarely came here; at least that’s what Hurley over at Lost Trail Lodge had told her.
Reluctant to open her home to a stranger, she looked at his truck again, buried to the top of the wheel wells in snow. He wasn’t going anywhere tonight.
“Do you have a plow?” he asked.
Returning her gaze to him with a frown. “No. I hire out for that.”
“When will you hire out to plow it this time?”
He seemed as annoyed as her, wishing she’d have kept her road passable.
“I can have someone out here in the morning.”
He nodded with a grim line to his mouth. He wasn’t keen on being stuck here. He’d rather be at his friend’s cabin. Alone. She could relate to that.
In her silence, he twisted to look back through the falling snow. “It wasn’t as deep through the trees. Should have turned around in there.” He tipped his face up to the sky. “It’s worse than I thought.”
“Common for this area.” She contemplated him some more, Gandalf shifting his feet with another snort. Well, there was nothing else that could be done. “Get your things and climb on. You can stay here for the night.”
“Maybe if I could use your phone.”
And do what? Call a cab? “No one will come out here tonight, not in this storm.”
After a few seconds of internal debate, he went to the truck and retrieved a duffel bag, then turned off the engine and locked the vehicle.
Rather than take her hand, he grabbed the saddle horn and propelled himself up onto the horse’s back behind her.
Gandalf pranced through the snow and then leaped into a trot, his gait smooth and belying the deepening snow.
Turning her head, she asked, “What’s your name?”
“Korbin Maguire,” he answered. He had a deep, gravelly voice that tickled her senses and caught her off guard. “And you are?”