April, Dani - Superstar (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) (3 page)

Chapter Two

The three guys were rowdy and having fun. The truck they were in was driving way too fast for the county road and the blizzard that was just starting to whirl outside. The sun had just gone down, the headlights were turned on, and the wipers were frantically trying to keep the wind shield clear of flying snow. Inside, the heater of the truck kept things warm and cozy.

“Shut up, man!” Ethan, the driver of the truck, yelled at his brother.

“I’m telling you, bro, this is the quickest way to get to the cabin,” Brad responded to Ethan and punched him in the shoulder to quiet him down.

“It might have been the fastest way if we weren’t driving in the middle of a blizzard,” Scott, their baby brother, yelled from the back seat and threw a football up front to Brad.

There was a loud
whoof
from the seat next to him. This was his big overgrown mutt of a dog. “We better make it there soon, guys. I think Skipper has to go to the bathroom.”

“Just cool it, you guys, before you make me wreck the truck,” Ethan screamed back at Scott and Skipper but laughed in spite of himself as his two brothers began a game of catch with the football from front seat to backseat.

“Hand me up another beer, Scott,” Brad called back over the seat to his brother.

Scott complied and handed over the can to Brad. “You want one, Ethan?” he asked his older brother.

“Shove it, man!” Ethan laughed at him. “I’m driving in a frig’n snowstorm now in case you hadn’t noticed. The last thing I need is a brew.”

“Sure tastes mighty good along about now.” Brad laughed, licking the foam off his lip.

Ethan reached over and hit his brother on the shoulder. Both men laughed. A song came over the radio. Even with the storm raging outside, the three brothers were having the time of their lives.

“So, Ethan,” Scott asked from the backseat, “what were you saying about the
all-men woman-haters club
?”

“We’re the charter members right here in this truck,” Ethan told him and wished he could take a sip of that beer.

“You guys are pathetic,” Brad told them. “But you know what? I’ll have to second that notion about the
all-men woman-haters club
. Guess that means I must be pathetic, too, huh?”

“Well, it’s not like any of us have done too well with women,” Scott commented, taking a big swallow of his beer and throwing the football back over the front seat into Brad’s arms. Skipper leaned over his lap, his big, pink tongue lolling out of his wide-open mouth. Scott let the dog lap up a few sips of beer.

“Aw, fuck that,” Ethan said, easing off the pedal a little as he felt the truck slide beneath them in the falling snow.

“That’s what we want to do, bro,” Brad said, and all three brothers laughed. “That’s what we want to do…”

“Yeah, but it’s like the last time I asked a girl out…” Scott had to think for a moment. “Hell, I don’t even remember when that was.”

Ethan retrieved the football from Brad and threw it back at Scott over his shoulder. Skipper barked again and moved out of the way. “That’s because it was a hundred years ago, man!” He laughed.

“We’re on vacation here, remember, bro?” Brad told him. “Let’s move on to brighter subjects.”

“Turn that crap off!” Scott called from the backseat at the country western song playing over the truck’s radio. “Put one of my heavy metal CDs in, please?”

“Not a good idea.” Ethan laughed at him. He had to squint out the window now to see the road ahead in the flying snow. “Heavy metal and beer, you’ll get buzzed, man.”

“I think that’s his general idea, bro.” Brad laughed. He put a new-wave metal group into the CD player to appease his brother, and the sound was soon thumping off the walls of the truck.

In the backseat Scott took out his phone and pulled up the latest weather forecast onto the touch screen. “Blizzard warnings are out for the next seventy-two hours. Damn, this shit’s really coming down.” Scott didn’t really sound worried. He laughed and took another swig of his beer. The monster truck they were driving in had extra wide tires with plenty of traction and four-wheel drive. They could get through no matter how bad the storm came down.

“I thought you said he had to go to the bathroom?” Brad inquired about the dog.

“He does.”

“Then stop letting him drink beer.” Brad banged the football off of Scott’s head.

“I just hope when we make it to the cabin we’re not stuck shoveling snow all week like we were last time,” Ethan said, paying careful attention to the road as he felt the truck slide beneath him again.

“If we do, we’re playing poker for it just like last time,” Brad told him in a loud voice, thumping him on the shoulder harder.

Ethan laughed to himself as he realized his brothers were too wild to drive with during a blizzard. They were making the dog nervous. This should be an interesting drive.

“Relax, guys,” Scott told them from the back. “We only have twenty-eight miles to go. I just saw the mile marker back there.”

Scott threw the football again. Ethan plucked it out of the air and stored it under his seat. There would be no more catch to distract him while he maneuvered the snowdrifts that were quickly forming on the road outside.

“Man, when was the last time the three of us came up here, anyway?” Brad asked.

“Before you even met Gena,” Ethan told him.

“Hey, bro,” Brad cautioned him. “We are on vacation this week. No bringing up bad memories.”

From the backseat, Scott started laughing at the mention of his brother’s former girlfriend and fiancée. “Oh man, I liked Gena. If you could get past the fact she was a bitch most of the time, she was pretty cool.”

“Right, little brother over here used to like her, too. Before he hated her, that is.” Ethan couldn’t resist the urge and punched Brad back, giving as well as he got. Both men laughed.

“No more Gena talk,” Brad told his two brothers in a mock voice of warning.

“Hey, Ethan!” Scott reached over from the backseat and put his hands over his brother’s eyes, causing them to briefly swerve. Ethan quickly swatted him away. “How many women have you gone through in the last year?”

“Don’t ask.”

“Have you slept with every woman under thirty back in Canyon Creek?” Brad asked his older brother, picking up on his reputation as a womanizer.

“Yeah, I have,” Ethan admitted a wicked smile on his face. “Except for one…Gena…”

Ethan exchanged punches with his brother again. He knew he was going to have to calm them all down soon or he would wreck the truck in the storm and send them all plunging to their deaths in one of the mountainous gullies along the side of the road. But damn it, this was their vacation, and he was determined to enjoy every minute of it no matter what Mother Nature threw their way.

“You know, guys, we missed a couple of these all-men winter getaways during the Gena years, but we all ought to make a promise that we’ll do this every year. You know that’s what Dad would have wanted,” Scott told them from the backseat. Skipper barked again as if in confirmation. To Ethan, Scott sounded wiser than his twenty-one years.

Brad raised his beer can. “I’ll drink to that, bro.”

“Guys, have I got a treat for you.” Ethan thought he would try changing the subject and try getting them to their dad’s cabin in one piece. “I brought my entire solid gold DVD porn collection. That’ll give you two losers with the ladies something to think about while you shovel snow all week.”

“Right on, bro.” Brad sounded approving. Ethan patted his brother on the back, then reached around the seat and gave Skipper a pat between his floppy ears. “It’s going to be an incredible week, guys,” he told them.

* * * *

Up ahead about two hundred yards a car had slid off the side of the road and into a giant snow embankment already formed in the first couple hours of the storm. Ethan saw it first and immediately began to slow. From the fresh tire tracks against the virgin snow, the car had obviously just slid off. If it had been going any faster and glided another twenty feet, it would have gone off into the chasm below.

“What kind of asshole would be out driving on a night like this?” Scott asked from the back.

“Assholes like us, bro,” Brad answered him.

“Let’s see if we can help this guy out,” Ethan told them as he brought the truck to a tentative stop right behind the troubled vehicle. It was a little car and clearly didn’t have enough traction to be out on the road that night.

Ethan flipped on the outside floodlights of the truck and turned them onto the car ahead. Skipper barked at them all, angry to be stopping.

“Might as well let him go to the bathroom now, man,” Ethan told Scott.

They opened their doors and stepped out into the freezing cold. The wind blasted their faces. Caught between the mountains on each side of them, it was blowing at close to fifty miles an hour when it gusted. Each of the men quickly zipped up their coats and pulled them tight, but nothing was going to save a person for long in that torturous wind.

Scott trudged across the deserted road with Skipper, accompanying the dog so he wouldn’t get lost while he took care of his business. Ethan and Brad continued forward to the little car in distress, their way lit by the floodlights. Not another car or any living thing was in sight, and the driven snow was even obscuring the mountain peaks that towered a thousand feet straight above them.

Other than the bright flare of the floodlights, all they could see was white, and not very far at that. When Scott and Skipper waded through the snow to the other side of the road, they were quickly lost from sight in the intensity of the storm.

The first thing Ethan heard as he approached the other vehicle was the tiny yapping of what sounded like two small dogs inside the car. The snowdrifts had manhandled the car and nearly turned it on its side. Ethan had to climb up a few feet of a frozen, white hill to get to the driver’s door. This poorly equipped little vehicle clearly was not going anywhere else that night.

Inside the window of the car Ethan saw a young woman. She was beautiful, one of the most striking women he had ever seen. Long, full-bodied, blonde hair fell down well past her shoulders, and she was wearing a thick, black fur coat. She was alone in the car except for two little poodles that were seated together in the passenger seat, making pests of themselves with their repeated yapping.

He tapped on her window. After a few seconds’ delay, the automatic window slid down, the electronic buzz lost against the howl of the wind.

“Have you been stuck here long?” Ethan asked the girl.

She looked very confused and did not say anything. Brad climbed up the snow pile next to Ethan and stared in at the girl with him. She looked like she had been crying, but what girl wouldn’t cry trapped out here in the middle of nowhere in this ferocious blizzard?

“Were you hurt when you slid off?” Ethan tried to reach her again. He found he had to shout over the wind gusts.

“I’m Chrissie…”