Massachusetts State Trooper Ross Huber is giving one last sweep of the roads before heading in for the night. The nor’easter hitting the Boston area is worse than expected by an order of magnitude, and the governor has just issued a travel ban. Ross finds a wrecked car half-buried in a snowbank and rescues its human and canine occupants from carbon monoxide poisoning, but is forced to take shelter with them in a vacant or abandoned house when the roads are blocked. When he gets the victims indoors, he thinks the human looks uncomfortably familiar ... Ash Machado has been through a lot in his career as a war correspondent. Sidelined by an injury, he’s returned to Boston to take up a job as a news anchor. After he loses control of his car on an icy road, he wakes up in an unfamiliar home, looking into the face of the guy who broke his heart in college. Neither Ross nor Ash are the same men they used to be, but now they’re trapped in the abandoned house with no place to go. Can they get past old hurts long enough to get through the storm, or will the same misunderstandings that drove them apart years ago make this confinement unbearable?

Snowed In: Ross and Ashton

He held his phone up and started recording. “Hi. This is Ash Machado with WILL News Boston, Boston’s best news source. I’m still out here someplace that’s probably in Maynard, holed up in an abandoned house with my dog and the state trooper who saved our lives. This is my dog, Porthos.” He showed Porthos on camera, and then brought the phone back up to focus on his own face. “You’ve probably got questions. You’ve probably got a lot of questions about being snowed in with a dog and not being able to get out to get help, get food, or let the dog out.


“Well, I can’t help you with getting out to find help or food. Hopefully you’re safe in your own home and you’ve got lots of canned beans or something, or plenty of ingredients for French toast. But I can show you how we solved the problem for poor Porthos, and for the poor people whose house we had to commandeer.” He opened the back door to show his little cave.


Chapter 14