The Ice Carver's Christmas Rival

• Chapter 1 Cold Hands, Old Grudges
• Chapter 2 The Festival Roster
• Chapter 3 Close Quarters and Frozen Borders
• Chapter 4 Sparks and Shavings
• Chapter 5 A Flaw in the Ice
• Chapter 6 Blowtorch Diplomacy
• Chapter 7 Midnight Maintenance
• Chapter 8 The First Cut
• Chapter 9 Spiced Cider Truce
• Chapter 10 Shattered Expectations
• Chapter 11 Melting Points
• Chapter 12 Shared Tools, Stolen Glances
• Chapter 13 The Blizzard Warning
• Chapter 14 Trapped in the Tent
• Chapter 15 Heat Beneath the Frost
• Chapter 16 Morning Thaw
• Chapter 17 The Semifinal Showcase
• Chapter 18 Sabotage and Suspicions
• Chapter 19 Chiseled Defenses
• Chapter 20 Working in Harmony
• Chapter 21 The Eve of the Gala
• Chapter 22 Cracks in the Facade
• Chapter 23 The Final Masterpiece
• Chapter 24 Judging Day
• Chapter 25 More Than a Trophy
• Chapter 26 A Warm Christmas Morning

The breath left Nora Hughes’s mouth in a clean, sharp plume that vanished against the gray wool of the morning sky. Outside the cab of her battered Ford F-250, the temperature gauge read twelve degrees Fahrenheit, which was precisely five degrees colder than ideal for unloading three-hundred-pound blocks of Clinebell ice, but at least three degrees warmer than the temperature inside her chest whenever she thought about Pine Ridge, Vermont.

She shifted the truck into park, killed the rumbling diesel engine, and listened to the pinging of the manifold as it contracted in the mountain air. The town green was already a hive of high-visibility parkas, forklift beeps, and the sharp, rhythmic scrape of shovels clearing hardpack snow from the pedestrian paths. Overhead, strung between two towering blue spruces that anchored the south edge of the lawn, a canvas banner flapped stiffly in the breeze: 34th Annual Pine Ridge Winter Carnival & Invitational Ice Carving Championship.

Nora tugged down her knit watch cap, made sure her heavy-gauge wool socks hadn’t bunched up inside her steel-toed insulated boots, and pushed open the rusted door. The cold took a bite out of her cheeks immediately, clean and metallic, smelling of pine sap, exhaust fumes, and the sweet, buttery scent of frying dough drifting from the early-bird concession trailers near the gazebo.

She rounded the bed of her truck and laid a gloved hand on the heavy thermal canvas tarp strapped tight over her cargo. Beneath the insulated blanket lay six pristine blocks of clear, directional-frozen ice, each measuring forty inches by twenty inches by ten inches, free of air bubbles, cloudiness, or fractures. She had driven them four hundred miles north from her studio in the Catskills, nursing the truck over icy mountain passes, treating the cargo bed like an incubator full of glass eggs. If a single block cracked before the preliminary round, she’d be sculpting scrap, and Nora Hughes did not do scrap.

"Hey! You can’t idle in the delivery lane without a municipal tag!"

The voice was thin and reedy, cutting through the low thrum of festival preparation. Nora turned to see a compact man in an oversized town marshal jacket marching toward her, a yellow clipboard tucked beneath his arm like an offensive weapon.

"Engine's off, Carl," Nora said, pulling down her wool scarf just far enough to reveal a tight, polite smile. "And last I checked, the delivery lane ends at the fire hydrant behind you. I'm in artist zone B."

The man stopped, blinking behind wire-rimmed glasses that had fogged instantly around the lower edges of the lenses. He peered closely at her face, his mustache twitching with sudden recognition. "Nora? Nora Hughes? Well, damn my boots. Didn't think you'd come back here after... well, after three years ago."

"Three years is a long time to hold a grudge against a zip code, Carl," she replied evenly, though her knuckles tightened inside her leather work gloves. "Besides, the purse is fifteen thousand dollars this year. That buys a lot of propane and diamond-tooth chain loops."

"Guess it does," Carl muttered, looking down at his clipboard and flipping through three layers of laminated forms. "Still, folks remember. That swan of yours back in nineteen. Pure heartbreak when the wing sheared."

"The wing didn't shear," Nora corrected smoothly, keeping her voice completely level. "A rogue gust of hot exhaust from an unregistered patio heater weakened the tensile bridge at the shoulder joint. It was thermal stress, not structural failure."

"Right, right. Science." Carl scribbled something illegible on the corner of a manifest. "Well, registration is inside the Grange Hall. Coffee’s in the basement, though between you and me, the auxiliary used the decaf grounds by mistake for the first batch. Don't touch the urn with the red tape on the handle."

"Appreciate the warning."

"And Hughes?" Carl paused, looking up from his paper with the particular glint of a small-town busybody who held a winning lottery ticket of local gossip. "You might want to grab your station assignment early. Committee did some reconfiguring this year on account of the eastern wind off the valley. Space is tight."

Nora frowned, but Carl was already turning on his heel, his rubber-soled pac boots squeaking against the salt-strewn asphalt as he headed toward a flatbed trailer hauling portable generators.

She didn't like the sound of reconfiguring. In professional carving, space was everything. You needed a ten-foot clearance radius just to keep spectators safe from flying ice shards when the heavy electric chainsaws dug in. You needed drainage trenches for the slush so your boots didn't freeze into a solid block of floor ice by noon. Most importantly, you needed enough distance from other carvers to ensure nobody else's halogen work lights baked your delicate filigree work from twenty feet away.

Nora pulled her heavy tool trunk to the edge of the tailgate, lowering it with a dull thud onto the salted pavement, then grabbed her clipboard and strode toward the brick municipal building that served as festival headquarters.

Inside the Grange Hall, the air was suffocatingly warm, thick with the smell of wet wool, floor wax, and burnt coffee. Nora unzipped her parka as she pushed through the double doors, stepping into the noisy swell of carvers, committee members, and local volunteers. She spotted several familiar faces immediately—Gunter, the stoic German who specialized in photorealistic wildlife, leaning against a radiator with an unlit pipe between his teeth; the Chen sisters from Montreal, already arguing in rapid-fire French over the density of this year's ice delivery; and old man Henderson, who had been carving the same nativity scene every winter since the Carter administration.

It felt like a reunion, except that half the people in the room would happily watch your primary support beam snap if it meant moving up a spot on the podium.

Nora headed straight for the administrative trestle table set up beneath the portraits of former town selectmen. Behind it sat Beverly Miller, the perpetual chairwoman of the Pine Ridge Cultural Council, wearing a red knit sweater embroidered with jingle bells that chimed softly whenever she reached for a pen.

"Nora, dear!" Beverly beamed, her hands fluttering over an array of badge lanyards. "We were so thrilled to see your name on the master sheet. After that dreadful incident with the swan, we were terrified you'd crossed Pine Ridge off your circuit for good."

"Business is business, Beverly," Nora said, accepting a green laminated competitor badge. "I’m in the open division, single-block and multi-block. Is the perimeter map finalized?"

"Oh, yes, just pinned to the bulletin board behind me." Beverly handed over a packet of rules and a map printed on pale blue cardstock. "Though, dear, before you look, just remember that the committee had to make several difficult decisions this year. The unseasonable warm snap last week meant the town couldn't freeze the southern lawn safely—the ground was sheer mud under the snow. So we had to compress the sculpting zone into the northern quadrant, right by the library."

Nora’s eyes scanned the map, tracking the numbered squares that designated carver stations. "The northern quadrant is half the size."

"Well, yes, but we procured the heavy-duty industrial event tents! Heated tool bays in the back, insulated canvas overhead, full industrial drainage flooring. It’s practically five-star luxury compared to the old open-air stalls."

"If we’re sharing tent footprints, what's the buffer between bays?" Nora asked, her eyes narrowing as she located her name on the schematic.

Station Four was marked with a red marker dot. But right next to Station Four, sharing the exact same rectangular outline, was Station Three. There was no dotted line dividing them. No access corridor. Just a single, large structure designated as Tent B.

"Well," Beverly said, her smile wavering just enough to reveal the nervousness beneath the civic cheer, "due to the square footage limitations, the committee decided to pair the multi-block competitors into shared studio pavilions. It fosters community, we think. A real holiday spirit of collaboration and mutual respect."

Nora didn't hear the rest of Beverly's speech about community. Her thumb was pressed flat against the blue paper, right beneath the bold black ink that identified the occupant of Station Three.

Sullivan, Reid.

The room seemed to drop ten degrees in an instant, the ambient hum of chainsaws and committee chatter receding into a dull white noise.

Reid Sullivan.

"Beverly," Nora said, her voice dropping into a register that had once made an entire culinary school kitchen freeze mid-prep, "tell me this is a clerical error."

"Oh, now, Nora, don't look like that. Reid is a consummate professional, just like you. And he’s the reigning champion! Having the two of you under the marquee tent by the fountain is going to draw thousands of spectators. The town council was unanimous."

"The town council doesn't know the difference between an end-mill bit and a gouge chisel," Nora said through her teeth. "Reid Sullivan is reckless, loud, uses entirely too much water during thermal finishing, and he has the spatial awareness of a freight train. We cannot share a tent."

"I'd say my spatial awareness is pretty damn good, Hughes. I managed to steer completely clear of your fragile ego for three whole years."

Nora didn't jump, but she felt the small hairs on the back of her neck prickle with irritation. She turned slowly, bracing herself before she met the dark, amused eyes of the man standing six inches closer than personal space strictly allowed.

Reid Sullivan hadn't changed, which was infuriating. He was still half a head taller than her, with broad shoulders that filled out a beat-up canvas Carhartt jacket like it was custom-tailored armor. His dark hair was curling erratically from beneath a black knit cap, dusted with flakes of fresh snow that were melting into the thick stubble along his jaw. He smelled of two-stroke engine oil, cold winter air, and the black roast coffee he was holding in a scarred stainless steel mug.

"Sullivan," Nora said flatly.

"Hughes." He offered a crooked, infuriating grin that didn't reach his eyes—not entirely. "You're looking frosty. Fitting for the occasion."

"I was having a perfectly professional conversation with Beverly about logistics before you decided to eavesdrop."

"Wasn't eavesdropping. You could hear you complaining from the front steps," Reid said, taking a sip from his mug. He leaned one forearm against the edge of the registration table, entirely at ease, as if he hadn't spent the last thirty-six months systematically ignoring her existence at every major competition on the East Coast. "Still crying about that patio heater from three years ago, I see."

"It was an illegal thermal source, Reid, and you know it. It was your assistant who wheeled it behind my staging area to warm up your epoxy resin."

"My assistant was nineteen, it was his first festival, and the heater was forty feet away," Reid countered, his tone hardening just enough to strip away the easy banter. "Your ice failed because you hollowed out the center of the breastplate to shave weight, Nora. You pushed the physics too far, like you always do, and the crystal structure gave up. Blaming a patio heater was just saving face."

"Physics is the only reason my work stays standing, while yours looks like it was hacked out of a glacier with a rusty hatchet."

"And yet," Reid said, tapping a finger against the silver championship buckle he wore instead of a standard belt, "the judges seem to like the hatchet work just fine."

Beverly cleared her throat loudly, the jingle bells on her sweater giving a desperate, frantic shudder. "Now, artists! Let’s keep this energy channeled into the ice! The gates open to the public at nine o'clock sharp tomorrow morning for the official block placement. The ice delivery trucks are already staging on Elm Street. If you two could just sign the shared liability waiver..."

Nora looked down at the clipboards Beverly was pushing across the wood. Two identical forms, each requiring their signatures to acknowledge that they would share generator access, ventilation ducts, and a central drainage basin in Tent B.

"I want a partition," Nora said, not taking her eyes off Reid.

"There's no room for a partition," Reid replied coolly. "A curtain catches exhaust and cuts down the airflow. You want to poison us both with carbon monoxide before the quarter-finals?"

"I want you to stay on your side of the floor."

"Gladly. Just keep your laser levels and your drafting compasses out of my tool zone."

"I use precision instruments because I respect the medium," she snapped.

"I use my eyes because I know the medium," he shot back.

They glared at each other over the laminated table, the space between them crackling like dry timber waiting for a match. They had been doing this dance since their second year at the Culinary Institute of America, when they had both realized that sugar work and chocolate were too soft, too forgiving, and that true perfection could only be found in something that fought back against the steel—something that melted if you hesitated and shattered if you rushed.

They had been partners once, briefly, in the mixed pairs division five years ago in Lake Placid. They had taken gold, set a scoring record that still stood, and then spent three days in a motel room screaming at each other about whether the finish on the central arch should have been polished with an iron or carved with a fine v-tooth gouge. They hadn't worked together since. They barely managed to stand in the same tent without things catching fire.

"Sign the paper, Hughes," Reid said softly, his voice dropping into that quiet, gravelly cadence that always made her stomach do an unwelcome, rebellious flip. "Or forfeit now and save yourself the trouble of watching me take the trophy home again."

Nora grabbed the pen from the table, her hand steady and deliberate. She signed her name with a sharp, angular flourish that nearly tore through the second page of the carbon copy, then shoved the clipboard toward him.

"I'm not forfeiting, Sullivan," she said, zipping her parka up to her chin and pulling her leather gloves back on. "I'm going to carve circles around you. And when your brute-force chainsaw work sends ice chips flying into my bay, you're going to sweep them up yourself."

Reid signed his name beneath hers without looking down at the paper, his gaze locked entirely on her face. "Looking forward to it, partner."

"Don't call me partner."

Nora spun on her heel and pushed her way through the crowded hall, the cold air hitting her like a slap as she shoved open the exterior doors.

Outside, the snow had begun to fall in earnest—tiny, hard pellets that rattled against the nylon walls of the massive white tents being erected on the green. Tent B stood directly beside the frozen stone fountain in the center of the park, its arched entrance yawning open to the winter wind like an empty promise.

Nora walked back toward her truck, her pulse thumping hard in her ears, her breath freezing instantly in the biting air. It was going to be a long, brutal week. And the worst part—the absolutely infuriating truth that made her grip the steering wheel until her leather gloves groaned—was that she had never carved better in her entire life than when Reid Sullivan was standing close enough to watch her fail.

The wind coming off the spine of the Green Mountains brought the smell of woodsmoke and cedar down into the hollow where Pine Ridge sat huddled for warmth. By noon, the town green was an obstacle course of heavy machinery, pallets of rock salt, and orange snow fences staking out the competition perimeter. Nora stood by the tail of her truck with a battered metal clipboard in hand, watching a yellow Caterpillar skid-steer deposit four-foot timber blocking directly inside the open flap of Tent B.

The roster packet Beverly had pressed into her hands was twelve pages of micro-printed municipal bureaucracy, but the only two pages that mattered were the competitor dossiers. Every invitational had its hierarchy, its petty politics, and its inevitable landmines.

At the top of the open division was Gunter Haas, the five-time Bavarian champion whose ice bears and mountain goats were so structurally conservative they could have supported a highway overpass. Gunter didn't use electric chain loops; he carved almost exclusively with heavy, wide-bladed Japanese chisels that sounded like gunshots when he drove them into frozen slush with a wooden mallet. He was solid, predictable, and consistently pulled scores in the high eighties from judges who valued classical technique over drama.

Then came the Chen sisters, Vivienne and Claire, who operated like a two-headed hive mind from their commercial ice studio in Montreal. Their specialty was kinetic architecture—spiraling towers, cantilevered ribbons of ice that seemed to defy the tensile strength of the crystalline lattice, and hollow globes that rang like cathedral bells when tapped with a knuckles. They were ruthless, disciplined, and spent their off-hours doing isometric lunges in snow gear to maintain the core strength required to hold thirty-pound saws aloft for four hours straight.

Nora flipped the page. Past Henderson and his eternal stable of sheep and shepherds was a newcomer from Minneapolis named Marcus Thorne, who had made a splash on the midwestern circuit with high-speed pneumatic grinders and an aesthetic that leaned heavily toward abstract post-modern geometry. Nora had watched a video of his work in Minneapolis; Thorne had talent, but he treated ice like stone, ignoring the internal thermal pressures that built up whenever an unshielded power tool sat too long in one groove. Ice was alive; stone was dead. Thorne would learn that the first time an entire quadrant of his plinth popped under the strain of an unbalanced core.

And then there was Reid.

His competitor biography was ridiculous, written with the characteristic swagger that made Nora want to drive a scoring gouge through her own palm. Reid Sullivan, Master Carver, Proprietor of North Branch Ice Works, Stowe. The blurb made no mention of the fact that he had washed out of classical pastry arts because he refused to weigh his butter, or that he had once been suspended from the Lake Placid winter games for setting off the municipal fire alarms while using a commercial roof-thawing torch to flash-polish a twelve-foot marlin.

"Admiring my press clippings, Hughes?"

Nora didn't look up from the page. "I’m looking for the section where you disclose your zoning violations, Sullivan. Or did you bribe Beverly with a crate of maple syrup to keep that off the record?"

Reid materialized around the front fender of her truck, carrying a heavy steel toolbox in one hand and a fifty-foot coiled extension cord slung over his broad shoulder like a bandolier. His cheeks were red from the wind, his knit cap shoved back high enough on his dark hair to reveal the faint white scar along his temple—a souvenir from a snapping winch cable during their junior year.

"Beverly likes me," Reid said, setting the toolbox down with a metallic clatter on the tailgate of his own truck, which was parked just four feet away in the delivery bay. "She appreciates an artist who understands that the public wants scale, not miniature lace doilies they can't even see from behind the crowd barriers."

"The 'doily' you're referring to took third place at the World Ice Art Championships in Fairbanks," Nora said, turning a page with a sharp crack of paper. "And it required seven individual thermal joins at twenty-two degrees below zero. You wouldn't know a clean weld if it bit you in the shin."

"A weld isn't a design, Nora. It's just glue. You spend forty hours building a birdcage, and the people thirty feet back just see a white lump. You have to give them silhouette. You have to give them weight."

"I give them refinement. Some people appreciate the difference between a sculpture and an iceberg that got run over by a tractor."

Reid let out a dry, short laugh that puffed white into the frosty air between them. "Well, that tractor took the governor's cup in Burlington last January, so somebody on the committee disagrees with your delicate sensibilities."

He turned back to his flatbed, tossing off the heavy canvas straps holding down his own blocks. Unlike Nora’s six pristine, clinic-poured Clinebell blocks, Reid’s ice had been harvested from a natural farm pond up near Morristown. The blocks were massive—nearly five hundred pounds each—and possessed the faint, greenish-blue tint of deep natural water. Natural ice was treacherous stuff; it had organic particulates, tiny weed fragments, and irregular oxygen bubbles that could cause a block to split down a hidden fault line the moment a chainsaw tooth hooked into an interior seam. But it also had character, a watery, luminous soul that artificial ice never quite matched under evening stadium lighting.

Nora looked at the massive blocks despite herself. "You're carving pond ice for the multi-block?"

"Harvested it myself on Tuesday," Reid said, his voice dropping into that relaxed, pragmatic tone he used whenever he stopped posturing and actually talked about the craft. "Ten inches of black ice on top of four inches of clear. Cut with an old five-foot crosscut saw hooked up to a tractor PTO. None of your sterile laboratory ice cubes for me."

"It's full of stress inclusions, Reid. Look at the corner on block two. That's a micro-fracture running forty-five degrees to the bed plane. You touch that with an eighteen-inch bar, and the whole right quadrant is going to drop."

Reid leaned over the bed of his truck, squinting at the faint, hair-thin shimmer inside the block where the sun caught the interior crystalline structure. He reached out with a bare, calloused thumb and ran it over the rough, frozen surface, his jaw tightening just slightly. Nora knew that look; it was the look he got when he realized she was right, even though he would rather freeze his tongue to a light pole than admit it.

"It'll hold," he said gruffly, wiping his wet thumb on the thigh of his work pants. "I'll relief-cut the back before I run the block saw through the crown. The weight distribution will pull inward."

"If you say so. Just don't let it slide onto my side of the flooring when it fractures. I have twelve hours of roughing out planned for tomorrow, and I don't need your green pond junk cluttering up my perimeter."

"My side, your side," Reid muttered, grabbing the handles of his two-man ice tongs and hauling the first block toward the edge of his tailgate. "We haven't even gotten the blocks inside the canvas, and you're already drawing lines in the frost."

"Lines are the only things that keep chaos from happening, Reid. Some of us respect boundaries."

"Some of us spend so much time looking at the boundaries they forget how to make something that actually moves people." Reid hopped down from the tailgate, the heavy soles of his pac boots hitting the hard-packed snow with a thud. "Grab an end of these tongs, will you? Carl’s forklift is stuck over by the warming tent, and if I leave this block in the sun another twenty minutes, the surface skin is going to temper and turn brittle."

Nora hesitated. Assisting a competitor during staging was technically permissible under Section 4B of the tournament handbook, provided no actual carving was performed. But helping Reid Sullivan do anything felt like handing an arsonist a box of dry matches.

"Please," he added, the word landing between them like a lead sinker. Reid Sullivan rarely said please. He usually just took what he needed, whether it was the best bay in the studio or the last jug of high-octane premix fuel.

"Only because I don't want your block turning to slush on the driveway and making me slip," she said.

She pulled her heavy split-cowhide gloves back on, stepped up to the back of his flatbed, and gripped the left wooden handle of the heavy logging tongs. Together, they swung the five-hundred-pound block out over the tailgate. The sheer dead weight of it drove Nora’s heels into the snow, the cold radiating through her jacket in an instant, but Reid took the lion’s share of the load, his back muscles bunching under the heavy duck canvas of his Carhartt coat as he guided the block downward onto the rubber-wheeled dolly.

They worked without speaking for ten minutes, their breathing falling into a rhythmic, synchronized pattern that felt entirely too familiar. Five years ago, in Lake Placid, they had moved four tons of ice together in forty-eight hours without a single slip. They had known each other’s center of gravity better than their own. Reid had known precisely when Nora was about to shift her weight to clear a corner, and Nora had known the exact split-second Reid was going to drop his hips to drive a chisel home.

It was an athletic intimacy born of shared hazard. When you were swinging forty pounds of sharpened steel and running spinning diamond chains within inches of each other’s limbs, hesitation was an amputation risk. You either trusted your partner implicitly or you worked alone.

They hadn't trusted each other in three years.

"That's the last of the pond blocks," Reid said, wiping his brow with the back of his wrist, leaving a faint smear of grease on his forehead. "You need a hand with the laboratory specimens?"

"They're not specimens, they're Clinebells," Nora said, adjusting her tool belt. "And no. I have a hydraulic lift cart on the truck."

"Of course you do," Reid smirked. "God forbid you actually use your spine to lift an honest piece of ice."

"Work smarter, Sullivan. Some of us plan on having functional lumbar vertebrae when we're fifty."

Before Reid could reply, the harsh squawk of a megaphone cut through the clatter of the green. Across the lawn, standing on the steps of the band gazebo with a clipboard held high, was Carl, his yellow marshal jacket flapping wildly around his knees.

"Attention all Invitational carvers!" Carl shouted, his voice warbling through the cheap horn. "Official rosters are posted on the kiosk behind the library! Captains' briefing in fifteen minutes in the Grange basement. If you aren't checked in by twelve-thirty, your ice allocation reverts to the open reserve! That means you, Sullivan!"

Reid gave Carl a two-fingered salute that was distinctly lacking in civic deference. "Carl really loves that megaphone. Gives him a sense of purpose."

"He’s doing his job," Nora said, though she had to turn away to hide the small smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth. "Which is more than can be said for half the people on this committee. Have you seen the layout of Tent B?"

"I saw it," Reid said, his demeanor sobering as he looked over at the massive white dome pitched fifty feet away. "It’s tight, Nora. The committee shoved the three-phase power drops into the northeast corner. That means your high-frequency transformers and my heavy-gauge drop cords are going to be crossing in the center aisle."

Nora frowned, looking toward the tent. "Beverly said there was sixty square meters of working space."

"Sixty square meters total, including the melt trenches and the tool banks," Reid countered, stepping closer to her. For a moment, the bickering vanished, replaced by the hard-edged reality of two seasoned professionals looking at a logistical catastrophe. "The clearance between our primary pedestals is going to be less than eight feet. When I start hogging out the rough shape on my base with the five-horsepower saw, my exhaust is going to blow right toward your station unless the ventilation baffle is dialed in."

"Then you adjust your baffle," Nora said sharply, the defensive walls sliding back up. "You don't throw your exhaust onto my block. If you raise the ambient temperature in my bay by two degrees, the internal stress on my filigree work will shear the joints."

"I know how thermal gradients work, Nora," Reid said, his jaw tightening again. "I'm just telling you: it’s going to be crowded. We’re going to be breathing each other’s air for six days. If you're going to jump every time a wood chip or an ice shaving flies over the centerline, we’re both going to end up disqualified."

"I don't jump, Sullivan. I carve."

"Right. You just file formal complaints with Beverly about patio heaters."

"That was a legitimate safety violation!"

"It was an accident, Nora!" Reid took a step forward, his voice rising just enough to turn the heads of the Chen sisters, who were unloading their precision grinders fifty yards away. "Timmy was a kid. He didn't know the wind was drafting around the corner of the pavilion. You acted like I personally walked into your bay with a blowtorch and melted your bird down to a puddle."

"You didn't care, Reid!" Nora yelled, the three-year-old bitterness surging up before she could stop it. "You didn't even apologize! You just took your second-place ribbon, went to the tavern with the Burlington crew, and bought everybody rounds while my entire season went up in smoke!"

"I came to your truck that night!" Reid said, his eyes blazing, stepping into her space until she had to tilt her chin back to hold his glare. "I spent two hours looking for you in the parking lot with a six-pack of cider, Hughes. But you had already packed up your gear, paid your hotel bill, and hit the highway like you were fleeing a crime scene. You didn't want an apology. You wanted to be the martyr."

Nora’s breath hitched in her throat. The cold air burned her lungs, but the heat in her face had nothing to do with the Vermont winter.

"I was not a martyr," she whispered, her voice dangerously quiet. "I was an artist whose work was destroyed because the people around her were too careless to pay attention to their surroundings. And I promised myself I would never let someone else's sloppiness compromise my steel again."

They stood there in the snow, inches apart, the diesel exhaust of a passing tractor swirling around their boots like mist. Nora could see the flecks of gold in Reid’s hazel eyes, the pulse jumping in the side of his neck, the way his knuckles were white where he gripped his tool handle. She hated that she still knew every line of his face. She hated even more that the anger between them felt so electric, so vibrant, compared to the dull, polite professional distance she kept with every other carver on the circuit.

With Reid, there was no distance. There was only the scrape of steel against ice, the heat of friction, and the terrifying knowledge that he was the only person alive who could push her past her limits.

The megaphone squawked again from the gazebo. "Twelve-twenty, people! Briefing starts in ten!"

Reid didn't blink. He kept his eyes locked on hers for another two seconds before slowly, deliberately stepping back. The space between them filled instantly with the bitter wind.

"Get your tools inside, Hughes," he said, his voice level again, though his chest rose and fell with a heavy breath. "The briefing is going to be a waste of time, but if we don't stake our claims on the power distribution box before Gunter gets down there, he'll hog all the forty-amp breakers for his heated boot-dryers."

"I already tagged the top breaker on the manifest," Nora replied, lifting her chin and picking up her clipboard. "I do my paperwork, Sullivan. You should try it sometime."

"Paperwork doesn't carve ice," Reid said, turning on his heel and heading toward the Grange Hall steps with long, easy strides.

Nora watched his broad back disappear into the crowd of carvers entering the hall. Her heart was beating entirely too fast, drumming a frantic rhythm against her ribs. She looked down at the roster in her hands, her thumb smoothing over the wrinkled edge of the paper.

The competition hadn't even begun, the first cut hadn't been made, and she already felt like she was standing on an ice bridge with a crack spreading right down the center. She took a deep, freezing breath, tucked the roster into her parka, and walked toward the hall.