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

Good God, this was boring. He couldn’t remember the last time he was this bored.


At least before, he could sit and talk with Ash. Ash might be prickly, and resentful, but at least he was someone to talk to. He had things to say, for crying out loud. Ross had missed the chance to ask him about some of the countries he’d been in. Was there any beauty left in Syria, or was it just a microcosm of the Apocalypse? What about Iraq, or Yemen? And Colombia?


Ross didn’t watch the news all that often. It was depressing, honestly. It was just stuff he couldn’t do anything about, and things he wasn’t sure the US shouldbe the ones to do anything about. He watched sports. He watched some local news, so he’d probably have figured out Ash was in town anyway.


He’d never have realized exactly what Ash was up to. And he had to wonder why that was.


Chapter 24