Her Christmas Phoenix by Zoe Chant

Author:Zoe Chant [Chant, Zoe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zoe Chant
Published: 2020-12-14T18:00:00+00:00

13

LUCKILY, THIS WAS EXACTLY the kind of weather you would want for an impromptu penguin exhibition.

The weather mattered a lot because Avery didn’t like to take the snowmobile too close to where her penguins lived; she didn’t want to scare them, and she didn’t want to influence them. She knew that, unavoidably, any observer influenced her subjects of study just by being there, but she tried to minimize it as much as possible. So she always parked her noisy, scary snowmobile about a quarter of a mile away from her penguins and closed the rest of the distance on foot. She did it even in lousy, wet, stormy weather, if it was miserable but still safe, but she couldn’t have asked Emmett to do the same thing. The crystal clear air, bright blue skies, and relative lack of gusts were a relief.

And she needed some relief, because she was nervous.

She didn’t know what he was going to say. What secret could he have that he thought he needed to disclose before things went too far? What would be that important?

She could come up with a thousand scenarios, ranging from the worst possible options (he was actually a figment of her imagination) to the harmless (he had some kind of birthmark he was self-conscious about that he was worried about showing once their clothes came off; he had only been pretending to like her cookies this whole time; he really had let her win at foosball, the liar).

Then she realized that there was nothing she could come up with that really worried her. Sure, in the abstract, a mystery guy from a mystery base could have had any number of dark, troubling secrets. He could be married, the kind of man who worked his wedding ring off his finger the second he was away from his wife.

Or—even worse, at least to her—he could be deeply involved in top secret work that was secret because, if people knew about it, they would be appalled. History had no shortage of horrifying scientific projects and people hijacking pure research for awful, destructive ends. Under other circumstances, her mind could be busy generating a laundry list of terrifying possibilities. She would definitely be too busy to think about the weather.

But with Emmett...

With him, she fundamentally didn’t believe that anything like that was even on the table. He wasn’t like that. He might let himself be worked to the bone by Frostfire, in really unfair conditions of isolation, but he wouldn’t participate in anything that hurt anyone else. He wouldn’t even act as caretaker for a base where that kind of work was done, not if he knew about it. And he was absolutely not the kind to hide that he was married. Even if he was some kind of Mr. Rochester, in a horrible marriage without the possibility of divorce, he wouldn’t have let it get this far without telling her about it. He just wasn’t that kind of man. He was good. He was honest.

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