LITMIR.BIZ

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scream.

      There were times for impulse control—and times when a woman was justifiably fed-up, ticked-off, had-it, and every other multiple-guess choice there could possibly be.

      She turned off the damn car, grabbed her damn purse and overnight bag, and then wrenched open the damn door. Her elegant Italian boots promptly sank into two-foot-deep snow. Naturally she fell. Abandoning all pride, she clawed and crawled her way up from the damn ditch to the damn road.

      In that brief period of time, her toes and nose froze solid. Her red cashmere coat and fuzzy hat were designer French; her bags and gloves were Swiss. She’d have traded all of it—including her Manolo Blahnik boots—for a practical L.L. Bean jacket. The kind she grew up in. The kind she swore she’d never wear again as long as she lived.

      Eyes squinting against the battering, blustering snow, she trudged toward home. She was exasperated beyond belief, she told herself. Not scared. Daisy Campbell-Rochard-now-Campbell-again simply didn’t do scared. There was a world of difference between being gutless and being careful. She knew exactly how serious a Vermont blizzard could be. There were snowstorms…and then there were snowstorms—the kind that shut down the community for days. The kind where, if you fell in a drift, no one would likely find you for a good week. The kind where, if you had a brain, you wouldn’t be outside at all, much less if you weren’t dressed for serious weather.

      But then—in spite of the shrieking wind and the fistfuls of snow—she recognized the rail fence. Then the toboggan hill. Then the big old maple tree.

      And finally, there it was. Home. The base structure was as old as the first Campbell who came over from Scotland—right after the Mayflower, her dad always claimed. Rooms had been added on, but the house was still basically the same sturdy, serious house with white trim and a shake roof. For a moment, fierce, wonderful memories flooded her of coming home other times—smoke puffing from the chimney, lights warming every window, Colin and Margaux flying out the front door to greet their oldest daughter, Violet and Camille laughing and gossiping.

      Just that quickly, though, Daisy’s heart sank. It didn’t seem like home when there were no lights, no sign of life. The place looked cold and hauntingly lonely. No one had plowed the road in weeks.

      She told herself it was totally stupid to feel at such a loss. Obviously, there couldn’t be a welcoming committee when no one knew she was coming home—and she’d known ahead of time that the house was empty.

      In fact, when it came down to it, Daisy took a ton of credit for everyone being so happy and busy these days. Her mom and dad were retired and basking in the Arizona sunshine, thanks to her researching their ideal retirement home.

      Camille, the baby of the family, had stopped home for a few months last summer, needing to recover from a god-awful personal tragedy—but Daisy had stepped in there, too, got the family together and organized some subtle matchmaking. Camille and her groom—and his kids and critters and dad—were hanging out in Australia for the next six months.

      Violet, their middle sister, had holed up in the farm house for a longer stretch—at least two or three years after getting divorced from the Creep of the Universe. She’d been scaring off men, and likely still would be—if Daisy hadn’t stepped in and sent home a man who was brave enough to take her on. Now Vi was married, too, and not as big as a blimp yet, but due in a couple more months. She was living with her new husband somewhere in upstate New York.

      Daisy was outstanding at fixing everyone else’s lives, if she said so herself. It just never seemed that easy to fix her own—although, to give herself credit, she did learn from her mistakes. If the Adonis of the Universe crossed her path, she wouldn’t go out with him for a million dollars.

      Five million, even.

      But where men were an easy problem to solve—by giving them up, permanently—her current predicament was a little more challenging. Right now she desperately needed to get out of the violent wind and blistering cold before it got any darker, any colder, the snow any deeper. Too fast, scary fast, she was losing feeling in her hands, her feet, her chin. Her fuzzy hat had flown off somewhere, and her hair was wildly whipping around her face.

      She battled to get to the back door and then fumbled for the house key in her purse. Her fingers just couldn’t seem to function well enough to unsnap the purse, hold the key, aim the key in the lock, turn it.

      Finally her fumbling paid off and the door pushed open. Relief surged through her. It was all she needed, all she wanted—home, a place to hole up and hide out for a while. Inside, that awful screaming wind was immediately silenced. The temperature was still freezing, of course, but all she had to do was flick on the furnace, get some hot tea going, get warmed up. Everything was going to be okay.

      She dropped her bag and purse, yanked off her snow-crusted gloves, and took her chattering teeth and shaking hands over to the thermostat. She flicked the dial, expecting to hear the gentle woomph of the furnace starting up.

      But there was no woomph. No sound at all.

      Frowning, she reached for the light switch, thinking that she’d misread the dial in the gloom.

      No light turned on. She tried the light over the sink. No light there, either. She flew for the telephone then, but obviously she should have guessed there’d be no functional phone with no one living in the house right now, and she hadn’t been home from France long enough to get a cell phone. For a moment she stared blankly around the kitchen, thinking it had been blue and white the last time she’d been home. Now everything was red—red tiles, chintz curtains and rocker cushions. Violet must have done it. The Live Well, Love Much, Laugh Often sign, the girl stuff and country-corny doodads all looked like Violet, too. Daisy didn’t care if it wasn’t her decorating taste. The drumbeat in her pulse just kept reassuringly thumping home home home.

      Only she couldn’t stay here. If there was no power, no furnace, there was no way to get warm. No way to cook. She couldn’t go out in subzero temperatures in the middle of this storm and chop wood. Frantically she jimmied the thermostat dial again, pushing it back and forth, praying for the sound of the furnace. But there was nothing.

      Okay, she told herself, okay, thinking that if she could just calm down and not panic, she could think up a plan.

      No plan emerged. She needed heat. Serious heat. The blizzard could go on for days. She needed heat, food and shelter now, before she was any colder, any more exhausted, before the day turned any darker.

      For just a second the traitorous thought seeped in her mind that once, just once in her life, she’d like a hero. Someone to take care of her for a change. Someone she could depend on. But that thought was so silly that she readily abandoned it.

      Daisy had never had a problem attracting men—but they were always the wrong men. The ones she took care of. The ones who were never there when the chips went down. She knew better than to expect anything else, so there was no point in whining—or panicking.

      She mentally kicked herself in the fanny and moved. Quickly. All her stuff was being shipped from Europe, but she had the small overnight case. The back hall closet still had some of Dad’s old coats, her mom’s old boots. There were always spare gloves and hats under the back hall bench. Most of it was older than the hills and worn, but who cared?

      She simply had to be covered enough, protected enough, to get to a neighbor. This was White Hills. No matter what reputation she’d had years ago, there wasn’t a soul who wouldn’t help a Campbell—or who she wouldn’t help, for that matter. The MacDougals were gone, because Camille had married into them. But across the sideroad to the west was the Cunningham Farm. The Cunninghams were old, seventies at least by now. But she knew they’d take her in, and undoubtedly try to feed her. Mr. Cunningham would know something about furnaces. Or he’d have ideas.

      She plunked down in the rocker and leaned over to tug off her wonderful—and now ruined—boots. They didn’t want to come off. They were frozen to her feet, stiff enough to make tears sting her eyes to get them loose. Beneath, her feet and toes were red as bricks, and stung.

      Not good,

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