Sleigh Bells in the Snow (O'Neil Brothers 1)

Snow Crystal might be in a whole heap of trouble, but it was nothing compared to the heap of trouble she was in.

CHAPTER EIGHT

JESS SAT CURLED up on the window seat in her bedroom, her arms around Luna as she stared at the snow falling in the darkness. Ash lay on the floor next to them, his head on his paws, watching her with those pale, beautiful eyes. The two Siberian huskies were her best friends, and Snow Crystal was her favorite place in the world.

Better than her home in Chicago, where there wasn’t a mountain in sight. When she was younger she’d had no interest in dolls or anything pink and glittery, and a few years on she had no interest in boys or shopping malls.

Other girls had posters of Justin Bieber on their walls. She’d had a poster of her dad skiing the Hahnenkamm in Austria, one of the most terrifying and dangerous downhill runs in the world. A run so steep that only the best made it down to the bottom in one piece. The top of that slope was a terrifying seventy-three degrees. Seventy-three degrees. Shit. That wasn’t skiing, it was flying. Or falling.

She angled her hand and tried to imagine it. Imagined the adrenaline and the death-defying speeds you’d reach shooting out of the start gate onto a slope so steep you couldn’t see where you were landing.

One day she wanted to ski that course, but it was an ambition she’d shared with no one.

She felt out of step with her friends and even her family. Most of the time she felt like a stranger, living a stranger’s life.

Only here did she feel as if she fit. Only here did life make sense.

This was the only place she’d lived that felt like home.

One hand buried in Luna’s fur, Jess rubbed the windowpane with the other and peered into the darkness.

Her mother hated Snow Crystal. She hadn’t been back since the day she’d walked out, taking Jess with her. She hated everything about the place. She hated the snow, the mountains and, most of all, she hated Tyler O’Neil.

She wouldn’t have his name mentioned in the house so Jess made scrapbooks and kept them hidden under her mattress. Ever since she’d been old enough to know what to do with a stick of glue, she’d kept pictures of her dad. Her grandmother and great-grandmother had cut out pictures for her, and at Christmas when she’d come to stay, they’d stick them in a new book together. She had photos of him skiing the most famous and prestigious downhill runs on the World Cup circuit. She knew their names and all the details. As well as the Hahnenkamm there was the Lauberhorn in Switzerland, the longest downhill of them all and a real test of stamina—the list went on, and the one thing those runs had in common was that her dad had skied them all. And if that hadn’t made her want to burst with pride, there were the two gold medals he’d won at the Olympics and the World Cup title.

She’d boasted about him in school once, but most of the kids hadn’t believed Tyler O’Neil was her father.

She knew her mom wished he wasn’t.

Her mom could have married him, but instead she’d chosen Steve Connor, because Steve had wanted to be a lawyer and could give them a better life than a guy whose only ambition in life was to get from the top of a mountain to the bottom faster than any person alive.

Once or twice, Jess had tried explaining how much skill that took, but her mother hadn’t wanted to hear it. Skiing wasn’t a “proper” job and Tyler O’Neil wasn’t a suitable father figure.

The past year had been hell, not that she’d shared that detail with anyone.

She might have told her grandmother, but she knew she was still hurting, and Jess figured if her dad could break a leg and then get up and ski to the bottom of the run on the one leg that still worked, she could cope with the shit her family had thrown at her without falling apart.

The truth was, she was never going to be the daughter her mother wanted her to be.

Janet Carpenter had done everything she could to knock the O’Neil out of Jess. She’d dragged her to piano lessons, extra French, debating, dancing—

All Jess wanted to do was ski as fast as humanly possible.

The final straw had been when she’d skateboarded down the stairs in the house and almost broken her stepfather’s leg.

“You’re just like your father,” her mother had screamed, and Jess had hugged the words tightly because they were the best words her mother had ever spoken to her.

She wanted to be just like her father.

She was her father’s daughter and always had been, and that drove her mother mad.

And now the baby had arrived, her half sister, a squalling tiny being with a wrinkled face and a shock of hair, and her mother was too absorbed by this second chance at parenthood to waste time molding a child who was all the wrong shape and always had been.

Jess had heard her on the phone that night, yelling at Tyler.

“She’s your daughter, so you can have her. I can’t cope with her anymore.”

And so Jess had been shipped off to Snow Crystal for Christmas, just as she always was, the only difference being that this time she wouldn’t be flying home at the end of the holidays.