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administrative assistant than it is to find an o perations m anager who can r un this place smoothly.”
    She snorted. “You think finding a good admin is ‘easy’?” She brushed a piece of her overgrown red hair out of her eyes. He wondered if she was growing it out. There was a scraggly look to it. Appraising her, he realized she was looking thin and stressed. She was twenty now. No one should be stressed at twenty.
    “You want the job or not?” Truth be told, he didn’t want to make liability insurance decisions, or deal with finding cooks who could be retrained to deal with food al l ergies. All of those issues were important to the ski resort, of course.
    But did he have to be the one in charge of making those decisions?
    No. Hell no. Time to delegate.
    “Uh, yes!” She reached for a file on Mike’s desk and pulled it out. “The job description,” she said, waving a piece of paper in his face. “You realize the salary is…I’d get a sixty percent raise.”
    He smiled wide. “You deserve it.”
    “You are fucking kidding me.” Her eyebrow cocked up. “What kind of CEO are you, throwing jobs around like candy and hiring someone who doesn’t meet the qualif i cations on paper?”
    He looked out at the fresh powder on the double black diamond trail, the tip of th e mountain calling his name.
    “The kind of CEO who needs to do quality control on his own m ou ntain.”
    “Mike!”
    He shrugged into his coat, ignoring the messages and paperwork that would keep him here for ten hours. “You can take over a lot of this,” he said, gesturing at the pile. “Leave the things I need to do. And start your raise and promotion immediately.”
    “But—”
    “I think that you’re struggling to find the right words, Shelly.”
    “The right words?” She looked at him like he was crazy.
    “Thank you. Just say ‘thank you.’”
    He heard the words in a faint shout as he made his way to the outer doors, texting Laura and Dylan.
    * * *
    “ I am going to die,” Laura said in a low, shaking voice.  
    “It’s skiing. Not BASE jumping. You aren’t cage fighting. You’re riding down a tiny slope on skis.” Mike sighed. People let their fear get in the way of the exhilarating push down a mountain. The control, the easy glide, the heart-pumping challenge of the slopes—nothing was better.
    Well, sex was better. And fatherhood. And love. But aside from those…
    “Death on sticks,” she grumbled.
    Try as he might, he couldn’t get her off the bunny slope. This was a source of endless teasing from his staff. When Mike had been “just” a ski instructor here for all those years, he’d had a reputation for being the only instructor who could teach anyone , and have them up on the lower trails within hours.
    Fear? Fear had no place in skiing. Yet Laura was the hardest student he’d ever faced in well over a decade of teaching on the slopes.  
    “Laura,” he whispered in her ear, “there’s no reason to be afraid. Worst case, you fall. And we’ve practiced falling.”
    “ You’ve practiced falling. I’ve just actually fallen. Over and over.” She eyed the bunny slope with trepidation. Someone had put small barrels out to help new skiers to handle turns.  
    He couldn’t help but laugh. That just made her scowl. She looked adorable with her ski goggles, white jacket, and tight white pants. Her golden hair peeked out from under a knit hat, and a white helmet with purple stripes topped her head.  
    A pink nose poked out from under her goggles . It wasn’t cold enough for a balaclava, and the new powder made this a perfect day to spend hours out here instead of chained to a desk. Dylan was in the lodge, playing with Jillian in the new Kid’s Korner they’d installed sho r tly after she was born. The added playroom pulled in a lot of parents of small children, and by letting one couple share a single ski lift pass, he’d gained a huge following among parents of little kids.
    And why not? He, Dylan,