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

The next sound was so loud even Ross heard it. “Get down!” Ash tackled Ross and Porthos to the ground, covering them with his own body. Ross felt fur as Porthos burrowed in beside him and then, less than a second later, little bits of plaster dropped around him.


The crash that followed was like thunder.


Ash woke up with a pounding headache. For a second, he couldn’t quite remember what had happened. Everything around him was dusty, and he was pretty sure that wasn’t right. There was a warm body underneath him, though, and Porthos was next to him, so dust and a mess didn’t matter so much to him anymore.


Then Porthos groaned and coughed, and Ash remembered. The warm body underneath him wasn’t there because he had some fun last night. It was there because Ash had thrown him to the ground. Awesome. I tackled a cop. How’s that going to go?The pain in his chest and in his arm came from impact. If he had to guess, he’d say he had a head injury.


Chapter 28