About Party of Two

by Julia Talbot
16 pages / 4100 words
Ebook zipped file contains - html, lit, Adobe and Sony optimized pdf, prc, epub

Liam has all sorts of reasons for climbing one of Colorado’s many Fourteeners, but a death wish isn’t one of them. Which is why he’s relieved to be saved from a blizzard by impossibly hot Matthew and taken to a cabin in the woods. Matthew is glad for the company, even if he has reasons of his own to live far away from the rest of the world. Can he and Liam understand each others’ secrets?

Sample

The glow had to be Hell.

It was sort of the dark red of fire, and there was warmth, so it had to be Hell, right? There was a burning sensation in his hands and feet, so he figured they were waiting for him to come back to his body to start the heavy duty torture. Though if he was really in Hell, then he didn't have his body anymore. He had some sort of soul torture that felt physical.

Liam opened his eyes and found Hell looked a lot like a cabin in the woods. It was homey, with some homespun-looking curtains and wood furnishings with horn accents. Very Jackson Hole meets home on the range.

Dude, he'd thought Hell would look like a big box discount store.

He tried to sit up, but his body just wouldn't do it. Huh. Okay, maybe this wasn't Hell after all. The glow was from the hearth, but he could see snow outside the curtain cracks, and he had a flash of cold so harsh that it bit all the way to his bones, of his body trying to curl up and die in a shallow depression on the side of the mountain...

Maybe he was in some kind of madman's cabin, instead of in Hell. Maybe this was some person who went around pulling frozen dead guys from the mountain and took them home like a psychotic roadkill cafe.

Donner, party of three? Donner, party of two...

The soft scraping sound of a chair on a wood floor stopped his hysterical thinking, and Liam turned his head with a massive effort, staring.

The most amazing man he'd ever seen sat next to the bed Liam lay on, staring at him, hands hanging loosely between long thighs. The guy had white hair, but Liam would bet that was premature, and he had eyes that looked like blue ice, the kind on a frozen lake. His skin wasn't pale; it had the dark tan that skiers and snowboarders often got from being so close to the sun with so much light reflecting off constant snow.

"Are you going to eat me?" was all Liam could think to ask, having that Donner party idea all over again.