Trusting a Stranger

by Melinda Di Lorenzo

  The first would mean initiating lockdown mode. Which Graham wasn’t in the mood for.

  The second meant someone was trying to reach him on purpose.

  And only one person knew where he was.

  “G.C., do you read me?”

  Dave Stark. A friend. A confidant. The only person who’d stuck by him over the years. He was the man who’d placed the call to Graham on that morning. Whose voice threw Graham back every time he heard it.

  “You there?” Dave asked.

  Graham swung his legs from the bed and reached down to flip the switch.

  “I should be asking if you’re there. And why you’re calling me sixteen days ahead of schedule. We’re regimented for a reason.”

  “G.C., stop being your bullheaded self for one second... I have good news.”

  Graham went still. Good news? He wasn’t sure what to do with the statement.

  “Come again?”

  “I found the man we’ve been looking for.”

  The world spun under Graham’s feet. His mouth worked silently. Four years of waiting to hear those words, and now that he had, he couldn’t think of a single damned thing to say.

  “You still there, G.C.?”

  Graham cleared his throat. “Where is he?”

  “A place you know well.”

  “Stop being cagey, Dave. It doesn’t suit you. Or the situation.”

  “Home.”

  Home. Forty-nine miles of nearly inaccessible terrain and two hundred more of straight highway driving is all that stands between you and the man who very likely killed your wife and son, and robbed you of your life. Michael damned Ferguson.

  Hmm. Graham was far from stupid. What were the odds? And why had he surfaced now?

  “He’s there on business. Must’ve thought enough time had gone by that no one would be looking,” Dave added as if in answer to Graham’s silent question. “Booked in a hotel under another name, but I swear to God, G.C., I’d recognize the man in my sleep.”

  “You’ve got the snowmobile ready to go?” Graham asked.

  There was the slightest pause. “Yeah. But there’s a weather advisory out. They’re expecting a blizzard and the whole town is shut down already. No one can get in or out. Blockades up and everything.”

  “You can’t get around them?”

  Another pause. “Of course I can. But I won’t. Had to flash my ID just to get away long enough to come up to the tower.”

  “So flash it again.”

  “It’s taken me this long to find him, I don’t want to get caught because of a stupid decision. The blockades will be up all night, and probably into tomorrow. If it’s clear enough by morning, I’ll find a way out. One that won’t arouse the suspicion of every rent-a-cop in the area.”

  “If he gets away—”

  “He won’t. His hotel reservation in Derby Reach is good until Wednesday morning, G.C., and I paid the clerk a hundred bucks to watch him. Two full days is plenty of time.”

  Graham stifled his frustration. “Fine.”

  “Over and out.”

  By the time the radio screeched, then went silent, Graham was already pulling clothes from his freestanding closet. No way was he waiting another twenty-four hours to get to Dave.

  And Ferguson.

  Chapter Two

  Keira stepped on the gas and squinted into the snowy onslaught, then glanced in the rearview mirror, trying desperately to see...anything. It was a hopeless endeavor. Someone could be right on her bumper, and she wouldn’t know the difference.

  Just minutes after she pulled her car onto the road that led up to the resort, the big, friendly flakes had turned into tiny, angry ones that threatened her vision.

  Then she’d heard the announcement. They were closing the roads down. Emergency access only. She couldn’t turn around, even if she wanted to. She just prayed that she’d get there in one piece.

  In fact, if her calculations were right, she was kind of sure she should already have gotten there.

  She gripped the wheel tightly.

  The terrain underneath her car seemed to be growing steadily more uneven and the front-wheel drive hybrid was starting to protest.

  But she pushed on.

  “So much for signs,” she muttered, and shot Drew’s briefcase a dirty look.

  Keira looked at the rearview again.

  If someone was behind her, would they be able to see her, even with the lights on?

  Unconsciously, she pushed down on the gas again, and her car heaved underneath her.

  “C’mon, you stupid thing,” she muttered. “Any second we’ll reach the turnoff for the resort and you can go back to being your eco-obsessed self again.”

  After another few minutes of driving, the trees on the other side of the road still hadn’t thinned out, and there was no break in the blizzard.

  It really did seem to be a blizzard now. Even though it was technically daylight, the whiteness of the snow somehow darkened everything in Keira’s line of vision.

  So that’s what a whiteout means.

  She flicked on her high beams. They made no difference.

  At last, Keira turned to the logical voice in her head for guidance.

  Its reply was an unexpected shout.

  Moose!

  The huge, hairy beast stood out against the blank whiteness. It stared down the car. And it wasn’t moving.

  It’s not moving!

  “I know, dammit!” Keira yelled back at the voice.

  She swung the steering wheel as hard as she could. In reply, the tires on the hybrid screeched their general disapproval of the maneuver. As the speedometer dropped down to ten miles an hour, the car skidded past the moose and, for just a moment, relief flooded through Keira’s body. But when she tore her eyes away from the animal, she saw that she’d simply traded in one disaster for another. A yawning chasm beckoned to her hybrid.

  And all she could do as she sailed over the edge was close her eyes and pray.

  * * *

  AS GRAHAM STOMPED through the ever-thickening storm, his feet grew heavier. Even his snowshoes seemed to protest the slow trek. The route was steep and a lot of it bordered on treacherous. The bonus was that vertical climb turned a forty-mile hike into a ten-mile one instead.

  Sweat built up on Graham’s skin, dripping down his face and freezing in his beard. He flicked away the ice and paused to take a breath. The air was cold enough to burn. But neither the snow nor the wind were enough to block out the raging of his thoughts.

  You knew the storm was coming but you picked this path anyway and you don’t have a damned thing to complain about. You’re sure as hell not giving up.

  He slammed down his snowshoes with even more force and moved on. His internal monologue was right in so many more ways than he’d meant it to be. He hadn’t just picked this particular path at this particular moment. He’d picked all the paths that led up to the metaphorical storm—perfectly matched to the actual one—which was his life.

  The king of bad decisions.

  With a crown of regret.

  He almost laughed. Today of all days was not the day to turn into a poet.

  Been alone far too long, he thought.

  Then he did laugh. Solitude was so much more than a choice. It was an absolute necessity.

  So, no. He didn’t need poetry or cynicism or even hope. Cold, hard facts. That was where this was leading. A long-awaited resolution.

  He laughed again, and the rumble of his baritone chuckle punctuated the cold air for just a second before the wind cut through and carried it away. As the laugh faded, another rumble followed it, this one far deeper, and so loud it echoed over the sound of the storm.

  Graham froze.

  An ava
lanche?

  This thought was quickly overridden as he realized the noise was actually a human one.

  A car engine and tires on the icy pavement.

  It had been years since he’d been close enough to any kind of traffic to hear the sound. Graham’s eyes lifted in search of the road above. With the snow as heavy as it was, he couldn’t see anything more than a few feet ahead.

  The rumble continued, growing even louder.

  What kind of maniac is out in these conditions? Graham wondered, then shook his head.

  Clearly someone who had even less regard for their own safety than he did.

  Graham took another few steps, expecting the noise to fade away. It didn’t. In fact, it seemed to be building. And then it stopped abruptly.

  Something wasn’t right.

  Graham’s ears strained against the muted broil of the storm and caught a high-pitched shriek, almost indiscernible from the wind. Then his eyes widened. The horizon was blank no more.

  A purple streak shot off the cliff above, crashed through the trees, dropping first a dozen angled feet, then another ten. Then—incredibly, unbelievably—it slammed to the forest floor somewhere ahead.

  Move!

  He didn’t stop to think about the consequences, but tore across the snow, beating branches out of his way as he ran. He was too determined to reach the site of the crash to let his awkward, snowshoed gait slow him, and in only a few minutes, he reached the car.

  A girl.

  He went very still for a very long second.

  The driver was a young woman. With a flaming crown of auburn hair and her head pressed into the steering wheel, arms limp at her side.

  The smell of gasoline was all around him, and the threat of explosion was very real.

  And Graham felt something shift inside him.

  Every part of him that had gone numb with shock now went wild with a need to save her.

  Chapter Three

  Keira couldn’t open her eyes. She had no idea if minutes had passed or if had been hours. She only knew that she was cold. Frozen right through her secondhand, designer sweater and her teeny-tiny dress to the bare skin beneath. A little pseudodrunkenly, she wondered why she hadn’t dressed for the weather.

  She should probably move. Try to get warm. But the chill was the bone-freezing kind that makes it impossible to move anything but chattering teeth.

  Sleep threatened to take her, and though she knew instinctively that she should fight it, she was really struggling to find a good reason to stay awake.

  The click of a seat belt drew her attention.

  A car.

  Her car. She was driving. Then falling.

  Now she was being lifted.

  Good.

  But her relief was short-lived.

  Next came the ripping, and the tearing off, of her clothes.

  I’m being attacked.

  The assumption slammed home fear and brought with it a burst of furious energy. Keira’s arms came up defensively while her feet lashed out with as much aggression as she could muster. She wasn’t going down without a fight.

  Her knee connected with something solid, and for a moment she was triumphant.

  Her eyes flew open, and this time when she froze, it was from something other than cold.

  A pair of dark-lashed eyes, so gray they were almost see-through, stared back at her. They were set in a fully bearded face, partially obscured by a knitted hat, and they were pained. And angry. Furious, even.

  Keira tried to shy back from their icy rage, but she was positioned in a deep dip in the frozen ground, and the hard-packed snow all around her was as unyielding as the man above her.

  Roll over! Roll away!

  Except she couldn’t. Because the man had one hand over her collarbone. His palm was just shy of the base of her throat.

  “Please,” she gasped around the pressure he was exerting just below her trachea. “Please don’t hurt me.”

  His eyes widened in surprise. Then very, very slowly, he shook his head. Then he let go of her neck. Cold air whipped across the exposed skin, making her shiver uncontrollably.

  The man pulled away and disappeared from view. And the r-r-r-rip of fabric started up again immediately.

  Oh, God.

  In spite of the way Keira’s body was shaking, she attempted to sit up. But in less than the time it took to draw in one ice-tinged breath, the man’s hand shot out once more, closing over the same spot he’d released just moments earlier. He pursed his lips, and in spite of the cover of the beard, Keira could see the frustrated set of his jaw. He shook his head again.

  What did he mean? Did he want her to just lie there while he stripped her down?

  Keira didn’t realize she’d spoken aloud until he nodded.

  She tried to tell him she wouldn’t do it—that she couldn’t do it—but when she opened her mouth, the wind swept in and cut the words away.

  She thought he must’ve taken her silence as acquiescence, because he disappeared again, and suddenly Keira was stripped almost completely bare. Her dress had been so skimpy that she hadn’t even bothered with a bra. And without the dress, all she had left were her lacy boy-cut undies, and if she remembered correctly, they didn’t leave much to the imagination.

  Very abruptly, Keira didn’t feel cold anymore. She had a bizarre urge to look down and check if her panties were as revealing as she believed them to be.

  Not a good sign.

  She tried to lift her arms, and when she found them to be too leaden to move, frustration shot through her.

  “I need to see my panties!”

  The words came out in an almost shout, and they struck Keira as hilarious. A giggle burst from her lips.

  The bearded man was at her side in an instant, concern evident on his face. Keira thought that was funny, too. One second he had her by the throat, the next he was worried about her.

  “What are you staring at, hmm, Mountain Man?” she asked.

  Her laughter carried on, and even though it sounded a little hysterical, she still couldn’t stop it.

  The man stood up abruptly. From her position on the ground, Keira could see he was huge. Strikingly tall. Wide like a tree trunk.

  And he was dressed in clothes that her mind couldn’t make sense of. His enormous shoulders were draped in white fur, but underneath that was a Gore-Tex jacket. The hat—which she’d noted before—was incredibly lopsided and almost laughable. His pants were leather, but not the kind you’d find on a biker or on badly dressed club rat. Tucked into boots crafted of the same suede and held together with wide, sinewy stitches, they looked like something out of a seventh-grade social studies textbook.

  Keira’s giggles finally subsided, but only because her jaw had dropped to her chest.

  In a move that made Keira concerned for his safety, the man began to undress.

  What the heck?

  He tossed the weird ensemble off without finesse.

  For several long, inappropriate seconds, Keira had an opportunity to admire his naked form. Her gaze traveled the breadth of his muscled torso, taking in the cut of perfectly formed muscle. He had well-defined pecs and biceps, and a puckered scar just above his left collarbone.

  Unclothed, he looked less like a mountain man and more like...well, more like a mountain itself.

  Keira’s eyes moved south, even though she knew she should stop them. Just as her gaze reached his belly button, though, he tossed the long underwear–style T-shirt he’d had under his jacket in her direction. It ballooned up, then settled about four inches above her head, suspended there by the walls of the dip where she was lying.

  Before Keira could ask what he was doing, the man dove in beside her.

  Very quickly, he slipped his boots onto her
feet, then used the rest of his clothes to build a cocoon around them. His pants hung over their chests. The white fur that had been on his shoulders covered their legs and feet.

  When he was done, he rolled Keira over forcefully. He wrapped the jacket around them and pulled her back into his chest. The world seemed to be vibrating, and it took her a long moment to realize it was because she was still shivering.

  Without her permission, Keira’s body wriggled into the stranger’s, trying to absorb all the heat he was emitting. She attempted to fight it. She told her hips they shouldn’t fit against his legs so perfectly. She mentally commanded her head not to tuck into the crook of his arm.

  But it was a losing battle.

  He inhaled deeply. And with his exhale, he flung his free arm over her waist and dragged her even closer. His bare leg slipped between Keira’s newly booted feet and she couldn’t even pretend to fight the need to be right there, exactly like that.

  At long last, her shaking subsided.

  Don’t fall asleep.

  But that, too, was an inevitability.

  Great. Crash your car, then get stripped down and forcibly cuddled by an equally crazy man. Only you, Keira.

  His heat lulled her. His solidity comforted her. His presence made her feel unreasonably safe.

  And as she drifted off, she finally clued in to the Mountain Man’s intentions. He wasn’t trying to hurt her at all. He was just trying to keep her warm.

  And he was very likely saving her life.

  * * *

  NAKED FLESH PRESSED to naked flesh. The oldest trick in the Boy Scout handbook for staving off hypothermia. It was effective, too, judging from the amount of heat in the snowy alcove.

  The girl beside Graham adjusted a little, and one of her hands grazed his thigh.

  Okay maybe Boy Scout is the wrong choice of words, Graham amended.

  Every bit of movement reminded Graham that he was the furthest thing from a do-gooder kid in a uniform. Especially now that the panic that she was going to die on his hands had worn off.

  The girl shifted beside him once again, wriggling ever closer and heightening his awareness of her petite form all the more. Her mess of auburn hair tickled his chest, and its light scent wafted to his nose. Her silky skin caressed him.