Most of the time, I was fine with being alone. I could tell myself I was better off without love. Human beings were disloyal, greedy, ugly, shallow, selfish creatures. I didn’t need them or that sappy excuse of love to hide my fear of being alone. I had seen the worst in mankind and quite frankly, no thank you.
But sometimes …
I would see something unguarded like the couple in the car and want it. Hell, I would hurt for it. Not for the sex, although that wouldn’t hurt none. I wanted someone to laugh with. Someone to protect me. I wanted that best friend I’d never had. And if he were hot too … now that would be the icing and the cherry on the cake.
“Oh God, stop it, Katrina. You sound like a damn child. Whimpering and carrying on. Grow a pair.”
I began the ascent. The road twisted up, and I fought the car against the heavy wind. The creek below was a marker for my turn. I was close. I looked down. Jesus.
“Best to look ahead or up,” I told myself.
My stomach jittered from looking down at the inhospitable ravine below. One careless move and everything would be over. I stared ahead, but it didn’t help. It was mostly nerves at what lay ahead of me.
A row of aspen trees blocked my view to the lower road where I’d just been. They dropped off and from the corner of my eye I saw a truck.
“Shit.” I doubted myself. “It can’t be.”
Another hairpin twisted around. Through gaps in the trees I craned my neck to see if it was Chuck Pearson’s baby-sick beige truck. In the last glimmers of daylight I couldn’t be sure if it was him. I sped up all the same. A dense area of trees reached over the road concealing any remaining light and the driver behind me. I kept my speed up. The road curved around in a ‘C’ shape that cupped the mountain. As I came out of the bottom side, a truck exactly like Chuck’s entered the top half.
“Damn vulture.”
“Come on, baby. We can do this,” I said, hitting the gas. The car made a grinding sound. “Ugh, why do I have such a piece of shit car?”
I put a larger gap between us. After a hairpin into another section of dense trees, I noticed that the day was turning quickly into night. His headlights were still hovering behind me. I couldn’t let him see me turn off onto the access road coming up so I floored it just before taking a hard turn.
I gripped the wheel to keep control of the car, but I took that turn too fast. It snapped the passenger side chains off causing my tires to slip off the road. I fought the wheel to pull it back up, but it was sheer naivety on my part. I had already completely lost control. I was hitting every tree on that side of the mountain.
It’s funny what you think about in those moments of not knowing if you’re going to die. The car bounced about like a matchbox, and all around me were monstrous noises, but I didn’t even scream.
Time had slowed down.
As the car hurtled towards a massive tree, nothing mattered anymore. Absolutely nothing mattered. Nothing I’d ever done wrong in the past, nothing I’d been dreaming of doing. My dreams, my goals, it all went in a fraction of a second that felt like a million years long.
For the first moment in my life, I didn’t worry about anything. My sister. How I’d find the money for her. What I was going to do next. It was almost a sense of relief. The responsibility had been taken off my shoulders. There was nothing I could do to change what was happening, or anything that had happened before.
If it all disappeared into the blackness it was OK with me.
My life was shit anyway.
Cade
There was nothing in the world except the fire crackling in the woodstove, the snow falling quietly outside my window, and me sharpening my axe. Until a monstrous sound suddenly shattered the air. It reached into me like an invisible entity. My head jerked up, my body became still as I listened to it sweep over the forest air.
I had a split-second flashback.
The sight of jagged metal wrapped around still-warm human flesh. White bone broken and protruding obscenely out of human flesh, crimson blood gushing, dripping, spreading. Human flesh I had loved. The memory was etched into my cells forever. I couldn’t forget no matter how much I tried.
Branches continued to snap and metal screeched together monstrously. Without thinking I was on my feet. The axe clanked on the floor. I flung open the door, and ran blindly in the direction of the sound. I’d done this before. Run in the direction of horror.
Was I crazy?
I had hidden out here to get away from the nightmare and here I was running right back to it. My boots pounded the icy ground and hit a slippery patch. I steadied myself, jumped off the frozen track, and continued on the virgin snow. Hurdling over snow-covered fallen trees and brush, I hurried down the mountain in the last slivers of daylight.
It never ceased to amaze me how life could change in an instant. A moment ago I was relaxed by the fire, the sound of my axe lulling me into an almost dreamlike state while big, soft snowflakes fell over the creek.
Now my lungs were pinched from running in the thin air, and my blood ran cold with the fear of what I might find. I knew what the piercing sound was. Will the past, the demon I’ve been running from for two years, sink its teeth into my flesh, and pull me under again?
I pulled myself over a boulder, and scanned the area. It was difficult to see now that the last of the sun had slipped behind the mountain, but fifty feet ahead of me, just below Dogwood Pass, a car was wedged into some aspen trees. Oh fuck! I forced myself to get closer.
Please, don’t let there be kids in there.
Through the window I saw long golden hair spilling over the inflated airbag. She was alone and obviously unconscious. My heart was pounding hard as I ripped the door open and gently pulled her away from the airbag. She had a small gash above her eyebrow, but even in the circumstances it was impossible not to notice in fading light how beautiful she was.
I put my fingers to her neck to check for a pulse. It was strong … and her skin felt warm and silky.
It was cold and snowfall was growing heavier. She was bleeding. Responsibility for some stranger was the last thing on earth I needed, but I had no choice but to take her back to my cabin and lay her by the fire. When she came to I’d explain what happened and drive her into town tomorrow. And that would be the end of the matter. My life need not change in the slightest.
I would just be doing the decent thing.
It was not like I had a choice, anyway.
I unhooked her seatbelt, slipped one hand around her back, the other under her knees, and scooped her out of the car. She was slender, but I still felt her soft curves press into me. It’d been so damn long since I’d held a woman this close.
Cade
My heart was pounding hard as I kicked open the door to my cabin. There was nothing fancy like a couch. She’d have to make do with the floor. I laid her down on the rug in front of the wood-burning stove, and pushed an old cushion under her head. Then, I found some blankets in a wooden box and wrapped them around her. Her hair lay across her face like silky gold strands. For a second I hesitated, then I smoothed it back to reveal her features. In the firelight, they were soft and delicate. Her mouth looked like it’d been dropped lightly on her face like a cherry on whipped cream.
I began to stir in a ravenous way.
Like a wild wolf.
Hardly surprising, given I had been without a woman for two years, but even so. Disgusted at myself, I jumped up and moved away from her. Restlessly, I put a log in the wood burner and looked around for a way to occupy myself. I filled the whistling kettle with fresh water and put it on the gas stove. Blowing out the matchstick, I turned to look at her. She had not moved at all. The sight of a woman, such a beautiful woman in my one room cabin, was stifling. Agitated, I rubbed the back of my neck. I need something to do with my hands. I returned to finishing my work sharpening the rest of my knives for tomorrow.
But I couldn’t concentrate.
I thought about the lumpy old cushion I had shoved unde
r her head. It probably stank of smoke. I let my knife drop to the floor and climbing the ladder to the bed above us, I snatched my pillow. I lifted her head and placed the pillow beneath it. Her hair was threaded through my fingers. I gazed down at it in horror.
Fuck, I didn’t want to let go.
I forced myself to release her, and go back to my knives and sharpening block.
Out here by myself, I could completely lose myself to the rhythm of the blades as soon as I found a good flow on the straight blade. For some strange reason, the scrape of the blade against stone was not sinister, but incredibly satisfying.
Today the zen-like peace from sharpening my knives was nowhere to be found.
Instead the tangled rope of desire and restlessness inside me grew. Hell, I wanted her to wake up so I could take off her clothes piece by piece and run my hands down the inside of her curvy thighs …
“Damn.”
I turned away from her and sharpened harder. Straight blades need a figure of eight motion over the stone. Back and forth, forward around and back, I built up faster and faster. A thought of her flashed into my head, it tripped my concentration. The knife slipped and cut me. My own blood welling up was enough to jolt me out of my uneasy trance. The kettle started whistling. Before I could go to it, the wide-eyed blonde sat up, alarmed. Her enormous eyes were trained on me. They were the most amazing color, emerald green.
We stared at each other for a long unreal moment. Awake she was so fucking beautiful, it robbed me speechless. She looked like what I imagined an angel would look like. Long blonde hair, huge green eyes, heart-shaped face. Then, I remembered myself. I dropped my knife on the floor and went across to take the kettle off the stove. A clothesline ran across the cabin above my head. I reached up and took down a t-shirt with holes in it and ripped a strip off it. I wadded up and pressed over the gash in my hand.
“Hey,” I said.
She stared at me silently.
“You crashed your car. You … got a cut on your head.”
Her mouth parted slightly, but she didn’t say anything. Just kept looking at me with those big green eyes. The old feelings and emotions of my life as it was before the accident came flooding back to me. I was never good at showing tenderness. I felt it, but it got locked up somewhere in my chest and never came out. I went to the cupboard in the kitchen area for the first aid kit and knelt down by her side.
“You speak English?”
She looked at the kit then back up to my face and finally nodded.
“You do know who you are and all that? Where you came from?”
She nodded again.
I tore another strip off the old T-shirt. “You want me to boil this up so you can clean your wound?”
She shook her head and I handed the strip to her. She took it from me and put it straight to her head.
Fortunately, it was only a scratch, but she winced in pain. “Argh!”
I stepped to the window. Snow was falling hard. Heavy snow and strong winds meant we were not going anywhere tomorrow, and unless it stopped, the days after either. Which was very bad news.
The cabin was already full of my desire for her. I didn’t know what to say, how to talk to her. Yes, I was out of practice, but I was never good with women in the first place. I had very limited uses for them. All of them without exception ended up hating me with a passion matched only by their professed love earlier.
Even my wife.
I didn’t turn around to look at her, but I could feel her gaze, smell her body. I wrapped the make-shift bandage around my cut and tied it with the help of my teeth. I looked up and saw the reflection of her hair shining like spun gold in the glass pane. Our eyes met. She shouldn’t be in this cabin. I could feel my lust squeezing at my chest.
She bit her lip.
I averted my eyes and sat down opposite her on a wooden stool. I took my knife back up. “Where you headed? You got anybody who’s going to be looking out for you?”
She looked startled, like she was wondering if I was an axe murderer or something.
I frowned. “Look, I don’t mean you any harm. Your car is wedged between some aspens. You won’t be driving out of here tonight in it. I’m just saying, with the weather coming down like it is, there’s no way you can get anybody to come out and tow your car, especially on Dogwood. They’ve probably closed the road by now anyway. You’ll have to stay here at the very least until morning.”
She looked like she understood what I said, but still she said nothing. I went back to my sharpening stool.
“What’s your name?”
Her voice startled me. I expected when she finally spoke that she would have a quiet voice, sweet like the angel of my imagination, but it wasn’t. It was gravelly and rolled over her lips in a seductive tone. I was put off guard. “What?”
“I said, what’s your name?”
“Cade.”
“Oh.” She nudged at the corner of a blanket on the floor with her boot.
“There something wrong with the name Cade?”
“No, no it’s good. I like it. It’s just not the name I would expect a burly, bearded mountain man, living alone in a cabin to be called.” She smiled at me suddenly, and a deep laugh tumbled out of her. It was luscious, without an ounce of phoniness to it. It did things to me. I’d been too long on the mountain if a woman’s laugh could tie me up in knots like this. I turned away from her. “What sort of name are mountain men supposed to have?”
“I don’t know, Grizzly, Jedediah, Something like that?”
“I don’t. Just Cade.” I was struggling to be near her so I stood and went out on the front porch. I needed the biting, cold air. A few steps away I kicked at the stack of wood. An unwanted thought popped into my head. I should have left her there for someone else to find, and someone else to keep her overnight. There are other men living on this mountain. They would have heard the car crash too.
This was dangerous for me. I needed to be alone; to be far away so I couldn’t hurt anyone else. I didn’t need this complication. The weird thing was I liked her already, and I didn’t want to like anyone.
Everything was fine, or rather becoming closer to fine, but now she was here I was in danger of everything going wrong again. It’s just one night, I told myself. I would find a way to send her away tomorrow. Somehow.
“My name’s Katrina.”
I turned to see her standing behind me, wrapped in blankets, her hair draped around her. She was stunning. Fuck it. I couldn’t take this for much longer.
“I’ll drive you into town in the morning.”
Something flashed across her eyes. As if my rejection had hurt her. “Aren’t you going to make fun of my name too?”
“No.” I turned away from her. I couldn’t stand to look at her. I wanted to consume her, drink her in. I wanted to let my eyes fall all over her flesh and discover every inch of her with my hands, my lips, my cock. “I’ll find a way to get you into town tomorrow. You can get a signal there. Call somebody to come help you.”
“There’s no one expecting me. No one will miss me for a while.”
“I find that hard to believe,” I mumbled. I hoped she didn’t hear me. I sounded like a fool. “Look, if you’re hungry I’ve got some soup. Some jerky. Not much else. I don’t do a lot of cooking.”
“Soup sounds good. Can I help? I feel bad you’re having to go to all this trouble for me.”
“I didn’t intend to make it myself. If you want some soup you can heat it up yourself. It’s in the cupboard.”
She looked at the old wooden table where I normally prepared food, then at the cupboard. “Well, what about you? Aren’t you hungry?”
“No.” I know I’m an asshole.
Silence grew between us. It was like an impenetrable wall.
She looked at me with wide, hurt eyes. Then she blinked hard, as if fighting back tears. She must still be in shock. Hell, what a brute I was.
“What happened on the road?”
“My chains
snapped. I lost control and went off the road. If it had been on the other side my car could have plunged off the side of the mountain. It was terrifying.”
She shivered and the blanket slipped from her shoulder. My gaze fell on the curve of her neck. She pulled the blanket tighter against her.
That was precious. I was hot and she was cold. “I’ve got some whiskey. Want a swig?”
She laughed, that glorious, rocky laugh again. “Now you’re starting to sound like a real mountain man. Yeah, I think a swig is just what I need right now.”
Katrina
“This’ll warm you up.” Cade handed me a shot of whiskey and took a swig straight from the bottle. A few drops dribbled down into his beard. He wiped it away with the sleeve of his flannel, checked shirt. Come to think of it, he was wearing the full mountain man uniform from head to toe, and he was wearing it well. I guess I never expected to be sitting in a cabin in the middle of the woods tonight with such a virile bear of a man, a hermit who obviously did not want my company. A fact I found unexpectedly attractive.
Our eyes met and I dropped my gaze to his hands. They were rough and weathered, covered in little nicks and cuts. I liked how they pulled through his beard straightening it every now and again, or how his hands, strong but relaxed, fell to rest on his knee, or brush over his strong chest.
“You want some more?”
“No, thanks. I don’t want to get drunk and stupid. Just a little to make my head hurt less and warm my bones.”
Cade grunted, then put another log in the stove. I watched him move, sure and assured and felt a slight flutter in my stomach. This was crazy. It must have been the hit to my head. The last thing I remembered was being in the middle of nowhere and trying to outrun Chuck-pervert-Pearson, but here I was with this gorgeous, enormously sexy, mountain man, who didn’t seem to like the idea of sharing his space with me.
His Frozen Heart Page 2
