Snowbound, Part 9
By RocknVaughn

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I thoroughly enjoyed writing this chapter; I hope you enjoy it as well.

Thanks again for taking the time to review. They mean the world to me and keep me inspired. Thanks!

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Gingerly, Josie undid the tie at her waist and shrugged the thick terrycloth off her shoulders, moaning with pain from the movement. Even knowing that Sam was a gentleman and would never take advantage of their situation, Josie couldn't stop herself from crossing her arms protectively across her front. Her hands rubbed briskly up and down from shoulder to elbow partly from nervousness and partly in an effort to keep warm.

Hesitantly, Josie raised her gaze and stared intently at the makeshift screen that Sam had concocted. Once convinced that she couldn't see through it (and therefore, neither could Sam), she relaxed her hold and let her arms slide back to their sides. Still in her fuzzy slippers, Josie scuffed back toward the table and bent over it to unzip her toiletries bag. Rummaging through it for a moment, she located a hair clip from the bottom and placed it between her teeth as she used both hands to sweep her golden hair from her neck to pile it into a haphazard bun. Then, holding it in place with one hand, she retrieved the clip and held her hair in place.

As a particularly fierce wind whistled down the chimney and around the little cabin, a chill ran down Josie's back, making her shiver for a moment before she edged herself closer to the steaming tub. Josie gave one last glance toward the bed sheet blocking the doorway and then slipped off one slipper and stepped gracefully over the side of the metal tub.

A hiss of half-pain, half-pleasure slid between Josie's teeth in reaction to the near-scalding water that encased her leg up to her calf. After taking a moment to acclimate herself to the water temperature, she slid the other slipper off and stood fully inside the metal tub. Placing both hands at the small of her back, Josie bowed backward, trying to stretch the kinks out of her stiff spine and neck before slowly lowering herself into the hot water.

Gradually, carefully, Josie slid her body into the water, leaning back against the side and arranging her limbs so that she was surrounded by heat to just under her neck. As she leaned her head back against the side of the tub, a sigh of pure bliss bubbled from her lips. Ah… Josie thought drowsily as her eyes slid closed, Now this is heaven!

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After slipping under the sheet to escape to the living room, Sam crossed the room and immediately began to tend to the dying fire. It took only a moment to rearrange the wood in the rack and to add new pieces to get the flames to leap back to life. With a satisfied nod, Sam put the poker back in its holder next to the hearth and settled back down on the sofa with his long-forgotten tome of Jane Eyre.

Sam was barely two paragraphs into the chapter when he heard a pained groan issuing from the direction of the kitchen. Despite his determination to remain aloof and detached from the situation, deep-seated worry drew his eyes like a magnet in Josie's direction. Instantly, his eyes locked on the makeshift screen blocking Josie from his sight and then he cursed under his breath.

In Sam's haste to put space between he and Josie (not to mention stop thinking about the fact that Josie was about to be naked only feet away from him), he didn't consider the placement of the lantern providing light to the kitchen. He'd left the lantern on the kitchen table…and Josie's tub was positioned between it and the sheet.

So, while he'd put up the sheet in order to provide Josie more privacy, it had, in effect, become the screen upon which Josie's perfect silhouette was cast by the light behind her.

Although Sam knew the polite thing to do would be to avert his eyes, his body was just not cooperating with what his mind told it to do. Instead, he gaped stupidly, held rapt by the sensuousness of Josie's innocent movements behind the curtain. He watched as she slowly lifted both arms to pin her hair up, and his mind filled in all the missing details: the flush in Josie's cheeks from the warm steam wafting upward from the tub, how her soft, pale skin would glow in the lamplight, how soft tendrils would escape the clip atop her head to gently caress the sides of her face and neck…

Sam's stomach muscles clenched and he felt the beginnings of a smoky desire building within him; watching Josie's motions in real life was more erotic than any dream he'd had of her months ago. Disgusted with his own lack of self-control, Sam rolled violently onto his side and forced himself back to the written words on the pages in his hand.

That budding concentration was broken seconds later when he heard another hiss of reaction from behind the curtain. As if beyond his control, Sam's eyes slid back upward in time to watch Josie's silhouette lift her other foot over the side of the tub. His mouth dropped open as he watched her turn to the side so that her entire profile showed in glorious detail, and when Josie stretched backward, catlike, showcasing her rather ample bosom, the book Sam had been holding fell to the floor with a soft thump from his slack hand.

Thankfully, Josie's figure turned and slowly sank from view as he heard water sloshing around the tub, displaced by her movement. Sam closed his eyes as if to block it out, but that only brought his own internal vision of Josie to the backdrop of his eyelids. Sam turned abruptly to lie on his back and opened his eyes to stare at the innocuous ceiling, trying to rein in his wayward mind…not that it helped. Because the moment Josie's soft, contented sigh issued from her lips, Sam's pulse jumped to double-time and the front of his jeans suddenly felt two sizes two small.

Springing up from the couch as if he were on fire, Sam propelled himself to the far side of the room to stand in front of the bookcase…the only part of the room from which he could not see the kitchen doorway. He rested his forehead against the cool wood of a partition in the bookcase, closed his eyes, and tried to regulate his breathing by shutting out his rather sudden reaction. After a moment, he thought to himself, Damn it! Damn it! Damn it! in time to hitting his head softly against the bookcase, hoping to knock some sense back into himself.

Turning around and slumping his body against the wall of books, Sam thought, Oh God…I think I'm in hell.

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After a few minutes, Sam was able to get reasonable control over himself and he returned to the couch under the guise of doing more reading. However, after reading the same passage seven times in a row and still not comprehending it, it became evident that reading was a lost cause.

No matter how hard Sam tried, he could not tune out the sounds of water sloshing about in the tub and the occasional soft moan or sigh, and that was proving to be very hazardous to his mental health.

Making a decision, Sam crossed the room, put on his coat and grabbed his hat and gloves. Then he walked over to stand in the kitchen doorway, taking care to keep his eyes averted on the off chance he might actually be able to see through the sheet. Softly, Sam cleared his throat. "Uh, Josie?"

There was a second's pause, as if perhaps Sam had caught Josie dozing. Her voice was thick with relaxed bliss when she answered, "Yes?"

The husky quality of Josie's voice made Sam's stomach flip-flop. It immediately brought to mind visions of lazy mornings after late nights, tousled hair and flushed cheeks, and…

Sam shook his head as if to clear it and continued, "You doing okay in there?"

Another long pause confirmed Sam's suspicions that Josie might be falling asleep in the tub. When she finally answered, it was little more than a murmur. "Mmmmhmmm…."

Again, unbidden pictures of golden hair splayed across his pillow and her warm body curled up next to his popped into Sam's mind, forcing him to take deep steadying breaths and start mentally naming the current Mets team roster…in reverse alphabetical order. "Look…" he replied once he'd regained control again, "I'm going to go out and shovel a path to the wood pile and check on the generator, okay?"

This time, Sam heard the water in the tub slosh, as if perhaps Josie had sat up, and her reply was clearer, stronger. "Okay."

Sam stuffed the fur-lined hat on his head to cover his ears and pulled the collar up on his coat before slipping his hands into his gloves and heading outside into the relative safety of the blizzard.

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As Sam stepped over the threshold into the outside, a biting westerly wind slapped across his face and sandblasted snowflakes against his skin. He almost relished the stinging onslaught because it finally gave him something to think about besides Josie naked in the tub (or anywhere else he'd been imagining her).

Sam leaned his forearm on the shovel handle and surveyed his surroundings. Already there were several inches of snow on the ground, and with many hours of the storm to go, not to mention the strength of the winds blowing off the lake, Sam wondered if trying to shovel now was an exercise in futility. Still, he knew that he'd need to bring in more wood from the pile if he and Josie had any intention of keeping warm for longer than the next 12 hours. (He had to force his mind not to contemplate other ways in which he and Josie might keep each other warm…)

Shaking his head ruefully, he placed his hands on the handle of the shovel and pushed aside his first shovel full. If nothing else, Sam reasoned, the physical exertion would help cure his ills.

His ills… Pausing in his shoveling long enough to take a glance backward through the window into the warm of the cabin, Sam snorted at the huge understatement.

Josie. His continued reaction to her puzzled him. He just couldn't seem to stop thinking about her in ways he shouldn't. Yet, if Sam's vehement reactions to even Josie's most innocent moments could have been explained away as a simple case of lust, he would have been satisfied. After all, Josie Geller was a beautiful woman… Add to that being trapped together for several days in a tiny three-room cabin and that explanation would make sense. However, (and the pace of Sam's shoveling increased as he admitted this truth to himself) deep down, he knew that his attraction had seeds in emotions he refused to name. And it was that fact that haunted him.

Sam wanted desperately to be impervious to Josie's sweet, sexy-but-shy allure. Yet, just as it had been months before, it was still his Achilles heel. Her manner woke every possessive, protective urge in him, worming its way under any shell or defense he tried to muster up. Even his shroud of irrational anger had provided little defense against Josie's charms today. And this was only the beginning. It was quite possible that he and Josie would be trapped alone here for several more days.

The lack of willpower he'd shown thus far in his dealings with Josie only served to infuriate him. Damn it, he'd thought he'd learned more from his last experience with her than this! What Josie was doing to him at present—invoking that same shy innocence—had been his undoing when she was at South Glen South.

Josie Geller had used his feelings for her as a tool to gain status at her job. That's all he had been to her: a means to an end. And when she hadn't gotten the story she had planned, she'd used him anyway by writing the kind of feel good, underdog-trying-to-succeed story (with him at the center of it) that never failed to win over people's hearts.

Everyone's except his, that was. At least he'd been able to hold out that much and not make a complete lovesick fool out of himself.

As Sam's shovel clanked against the bottom of the woodpile at last, he wondered again about Josie's behavior. After all, what did she have to gain by trying to entice him now? Her story about him had come and gone and she'd obviously gotten the promotion she'd wanted. Shaking his head as he cleared snow off the top of the pile, Sam stopped trying to make sense of her actions. Obviously, she must have some agenda, even if he didn't yet know what it was.

Well, whatever it is, Sam told himself, determined, it's not going to work. I won't be played for a fool twice.

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With an armful of wood and a new determination in place, Sam pushed open the door to the cabin and placed the snow-dusted wood in a holder near the hearth, where they could safely defrost and dry. Without even bothering to shut the door between trips, Sam made quick work of filling the holder with logs. He pulled the shovel back inside, knocked the snow off his boots and then quietly shut the door.

Pulling off his gloves and hat and placing them on the hearthstone before the fire, Sam pulled back his coat sleeve and was surprised to discover that almost two hours had passed.

Glancing around, he half expected to see Josie curled up under a blanket on the sofa reading a book. But she wasn't. Nor was she in the bedroom, as Sam discovered by toeing the bedroom door ajar. That only left…

Quietly, Sam approached the kitchen and called out softly, "Josie?"

There was no answer. Sam tried again, a little bit louder this time. "Josie?"

But there was still no answer.

While realistically, Sam knew that most likely Josie had simply fallen asleep in the tub, a sliver of irrational worry laced through his veins. After all, he'd been warned about the possibility of a concussion, and with the other aches and pains that had come on so suddenly, it was possible she could have had an adverse reaction while he was outside. It was this concern that finally won out as he carefully pushed the sheet aside and stepped under it into the kitchen.

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Sam could not possibly have prepared himself for the sight that greeted him. Josie lay shoulder-deep in the water, her head softly resting upon the side of the metal tub rim. Indeed, as Sam had imagined earlier, soft tendrils of golden hair had slipped from the comb atop her head to damply curl around her cheeks, framing her face, which was beatific in slumber. Miniscule beads of perspiration slicked Josie's shoulders, neck, and face, giving her skin an ethereal glow in the dying lamplight.

The only saving grace was that, from the angle at which Sam viewed the scene, he could see little more than scant traces of what lay beneath the water. Instead, the golden light from the lantern dappled the surface that rippled slightly with each breath Josie took. She could not have appeared more innocently sensual at that moment if she had tried.

Sam's breath caught in his throat. He wanted to escape, wanted reclaim his senses, but he couldn't move; he couldn't wrench his eyes from the scene before him. Josie was like a golden water goddess just emerged from the deep, her siren song reaching deep into his soul, pulling him toward her against his will.

Heeding her call, Sam took one step closer, then another. He just couldn't help himself. In his mind, he could already feel the silk of Josie's skin against his palms, the warmth of her kiss against his lips. Before he'd even realized it, Sam was kneeling beside Josie, gently tucking the unruly strands of hair on the left side of her face behind her ear before whispering a ghost of a kiss along the sensitive skin of her jaw line.

As a soft sigh slipped past Josie's lips, Sam reached upward with one hand to pull her head closer to him, to finally give in to the aching need to kiss her properly that had plagued him for months…

A sudden awareness of what he was doing doused Sam in icy waves, as he froze in mid-motion, horrified. Rocking himself backward onto the balls of his feet, he put some much-needed space between himself and Josie, letting his breath leave him in a rush. Had he not just vowed to himself moments before that he would not fall prey to Josie Geller's plans, whatever they were? Had he not promised to remain impervious to her "innocent" charms?

Pushing himself back up to a stand, Sam suddenly recognized the trap he'd almost fallen into. He could now clearly see how Josie had planned to use this scenario to her advantage, using his concern for her welfare to wile him into giving in to his desires for her.

Well, it's not going to work, Josie… Sam thought wryly. This time I've got you figured out.

Pushing aside the strung-up sheet, Sam exited the kitchen and crossed the living room. If you want to toy with me, Josie Geller, then go ahead and do your worst. I'm ready. Let the games begin.

And on that thought, Sam wrenched open the front door to the cabin, pulling it as far back as it would go on its hinges…and then slammed it with all of his might.

The almighty bang echoed around the walls of the tiny cabin. As Sam heard the telltale sounds of sudden splashing coming from the direction of the kitchen, he knew his plan had worked; Josie was now most definitely awake.

Smiling with relish, Sam chuckled under his breath as he thought to himself: Sam Coulson – 1, Josie Geller – 0.

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