Christmas With A Stranger_Forbidden

by Catherine Spencer

  And with that he marched back to his car and doused the headlamps, leaving only hers to bathe the shelter in their glow. She heard a door slam, another open. Saw an interior light go on as he rummaged around at the back of what appeared to be a large utility vehicle. And knew, as the chill already invading the inside of her car crept deeper into her limbs, that she had little choice about what to do next.

  He could be a serial killer, a deranged psychopath, a man intent on choking the living breath out of her, but, if she chose to ignore his less than gracious invitation, she’d wind up dead by the morning anyway.

  Swallowing doubts and reservations along with what was left of her pride, she rolled up the window and stepped out of the car. As though crouching in wait for just such an ill-prepared victim, the cold took serious hold, knifing through her mohair winter coat as if it were made of nothing more substantial than silk.

  Just as she approached, her reluctant knight jumped down from the tailgate of his vehicle, which turned out to be a Jeep whose heavy winter tires were looped with snow chains. “Smart decision,” he said, shrugging free of his jacket. “Take off your boots and coat, then hop in.”

  She liked to think she’d outgrown any tendency toward foolish impulse and indeed spent a good portion of her tenure as headmistress counseling her students to think before they spoke, to temper spontaneity with deliberation. Yet the question was out of her mouth before she could prevent it, gauche and horribly suggestive. “Why do we have to take off our clothes if all we’re going to do is sleep?”

  He stood before her, the interior light of the Jeep enhanced by the glow of a candle set in a tin can on the floor under the dashboard. Quite enough illumination for her to take in the powerful breadth of shoulder beneath the heavy jacket and lean, athletic hips snugly clad in blue jeans. Was it also enough for him to detect the sweep of color that flooded her face?

  If it was, he chose to ignore the fact, instead pointing out what would have been painfully obvious to anyone of sound mind. “I stand six three in my bare feet. Last time I checked, I weighed in at a hundred and ninety-four pounds. For that reason I bought an extra-large sleeping bag but it’s still going to be a snug fit for two. I no more want your snowy boots in the small of my back than you want mine in yours. As for the coat, you might want to roll it up and use it as a pillow.”

  “Of course,” she muttered, chagrined. “How stupid of me.”

  “Indeed!” He rolled his eyes and gestured her toward the Jeep with a flourish. “Climb aboard, stash your boots in the corner, and make yourself comfortable.”

  Comfortable? Not in a million years, Jessica thought, trying to keep her sweater in place as she slithered into the sleeping bag.

  No sooner was she settled than he slammed closed the tailgate and raised the rear window, rather like a jailer securing a prison cell. He then went around to the driver’s door, pulled it closed behind him, shucked off his boots and, tossing his jacket ahead of him, proceeded to crawl over the seat and join her in the back of the Jeep.

  Inching into the sleeping bag, he turned on his side so that his back was toward her. Why couldn’t she have left it at that? What demon of idiocy compelled her to try to make pillow talk?

  Yet, “This is really quite absurd,” she heard herself remark, in a voice so phonily arch that she cringed.

  He sort of shifted his shoulders around and tugged his folded jacket into a more comfortable position beneath his head. “How so?”

  “Well, here we are in bed together, and we don’t even know each other’s names.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m Jessica Simms.”

  “Are you?” he said indifferently. “Well, goodnight, Jessica Simms.”

  As snubs went, that rated a ten. “Goodnight,” she replied huffily, and went to turn her back on him. Except that, now that he was hogging most of the sleeping bag, there really wasn’t room for such maneuvering, a fact he was quick to point out.

  “Quit fidgeting and nest up against me,” he said impatiently. “Every time you shuffle around like that, you let in cold air.”

  “Nest?” she quavered, refusing to allow the import of “up against me” to take visual hold in her mind.

  “Like two spoons, one around the other.”

  And just in case she hadn’t understood he reached back one arm and yanked her close so that her breasts were flattened next to his spine and her pelvis cradled his buttocks. Truly a most compromising situation and one she could only be thankful none of her colleagues or students was likely to hear about.

  “Thank you,” she said politely. “You’re very kind”

  She felt his sigh, rife with exasperation and heartfelt enough that it lifted the sleeping bag and let out a little gust of warm air. “For crying out loud, go to sleep,” he said.

  Of course, it was an order impossible to obey—for him as well as for her, at least to begin with. For the longest time, he lay next to her, long, strong and tense as steel. But gradually, as the night progressed, his muscles relaxed, and she must have dozed off herself because the next time she became aware of her surroundings he was sleeping on his stomach with his face turned toward her.

  In the steady light of the candle, she saw that he was not as old as she’d first supposed and looked to be only in his late thirties. It was fatigue that etched his face, carving deep lines beside his mouth and between his eyes, and making him appear older.

  Even as she watched, he seemed to sink further into sleep, so that the grooves relaxed, then faded away until she had nothing left to look at but his long, silky lashes touching softly against the lean austerity of his cheekbones.

  How handsome he was, she thought.

  What colour were his eyes?

  Dreamy brown? No, he was not the dreamy type.

  Icy green? Possibly. Despite the warmth generated by his body, she sensed that he was a cool, reserved man. Cold, even.

  Her arm had grown numb from being cramped beneath her. She flexed her fingers and, with excruciating care, slid her wrist out and across her waist. But cautiously, without creating the least little draft, so that not even the candle flame wavered.

  His eyes flew open anyway, alert and noticeably blue, and caught her staring.

  Was the spark of sexual awareness that blazed briefly between him and her a figment of her imagination?

  “What?” he muttered, the word laced with suspicion, and she decided that, yes, it must have been her imagination.

  “Nothing. My arm—” She levered the rest of it free and waggled her fingers, wincing at the pins and needles trying to paralyze them. “It went to sleep.”

  “Pity you didn’t.” he said, his head with its thick, dark hair lowering again to the makeshift pillow.

  As suddenly as he’d woken, he fell asleep again. She shivered, less from the cold air lurking around them than from the stark lack of sympathy she sensed in him. She was inconveniencing him terribly, no doubt about it, and even less welcome in his sleeping bag than a bed bug.

  Selena’s latest crisis couldn’t have come at a more inappropriate time, Jessica thought uncharitably. By now she should be lounging beneath a sun umbrella in balmy Cancun and trying to pretend she was more than a lonely, thirty-year-old woman most of whose dreams seemed unlikely to come true, not risking life and limb to be with a sister who had little use for her except when disaster arose.

  But the avalanche wasn’t Selena’s fault; nor was it hers. And if her sleeping partner thought their present arrangement was inconvenient, how much worse would he have found it if she’d sped through the shed fast enough to wind up trapped under the snow at the other end? Or would he have left her to her fate and gone calmly about the business of making himself comfortable for the night without sparing her a thought?

  Remembering how irritably he’d reacted to her lack of preparedness, she suspected he’d have left her to suffocate. It irked her enough to want to punish him, enough for her to make no attempt at stealth or silence when she struggl
ed to her other side so that she was facing the deep perpendicular embrasures of the snow shed and no longer tempted to look at him.

  He reacted with the same ill temper he’d displayed before. “For Pete’s sake settle down,” he grumbled. “You’re worse than a pair of puppies wrestling in a gunny sack.”

  And again, just as before, he ensured her compliance by anchoring her in place, but this time so that he was snugly cushioned against her behind, and one of his long, strong legs pinned down hers, and she could feel his breath on the back of her neck.

  It was an exceedingly...intimate situation.

  Exceedingly!

  Her watch showed ten minutes past eight when she awoke to find herself alone in the back of the Jeep. A fresh candle burned in the tin can under the dashboard and the start of another day seeped through the upper sections of the narrow vents on the downhill side of the shed to cast a pale, chill light along its length. Pushing herself into a sitting position and finger-combing loose strands of hair back from her face, Jessica saw him coming toward her from the far end of the tunnel.

  Quickly, she shuffled free of the sleeping bag and pulled her clothing into place. By the time he hauled open the tailgate, she had her boots on and looked as respectable as could be expected, given the circumstances.

  “Have they come to rescue us?” she asked, putting on her coat.

  “No.” He reached under the dashboard on the passenger side of the Jeep and pulled out a small knapsack.

  “Then what were you doing at the end of the shed?”

  He handed her a foil-wrapped cereal bar and raised his dark, level brows wryly. “Same thing you’ll probably want to do before much longer,” he remarked pointedly.

  To say that she blushed at that would have been the understatement of the century. She felt herself awash in a tide of pure scarlet. “Oh...yes—I...um...I...see what you mean.”

  “Don’t let modesty get the better of you. The sun’s barely up and I don’t hold out much hope of us being dug out for at least another half hour. Too risky for the highway crew, when they can’t see what the conditions are like up the mountain. And that’s always assuming that there isn’t three feet of snow blocking the road between them and us.”

  Jessica’s gaze swung to the nearest embrasure beyond which the narrow strip of sky now showed the palest tint of pink. “And if there is?” She could barely bring herself to voice the question. The thought of being imprisoned another day with him and with such a total lack of privacy didn’t bear contemplating.

  “We might be here until mid-morning. Possibly even longer. It’d take a bulldozer to cut a path through anything that deep.” He hitched one hip on the tailgate and swung one long, blue-jeaned leg nonchalantly, as if picnic breakfasts in avalanche sheds were an entirely usual part of his weekly routine. “So, Jessica Simms, want to tell me what persuaded you to drive up here with nothing more reliable than a set of all-weather radials and a road map to get you where you’re going?”

  “I’m on my way to visit my sister in Whistling Valley.”

  “That’s another seven hours’ drive away. You’d better stop in Sentinel Pass and get yourself outfitted with a set of decent tire chains if you seriously want to get there in one piece.”

  “Yes.” She squirmed under his scrutiny, aware that while he seemed to be learning quite a bit about her she knew next to nothing about him. “You haven’t told me your name yet.”

  “Morgan. If you knew you were coming up here for Christmas, why the hell didn’t you plan ahead? BCAA or any travel agency could have warned you what sort of conditions to expect.” He took another bite of his breakfast bar, then added scathingly, “Maybe then you’d have chosen clothing more appropriate than that flimsy bit of a coat and those pitiful excuses for winter boots you’re currently wearing.”

  He was worse than a pit bull, once he got his teeth into something. Clearly, he found her apparent incompetence morbidly fascinating. “I didn’t have time to plan ahead, Mr. Morgan. This trip came about very suddenly.”

  “I see.” He crushed the wrapping from his breakfast into a ball, tossed it, backhanded, into the open knapsack and unearthed a bottle of mineral water.

  She shook her head as he unscrewed the cap and offered her a drink. She wasn’t about to let a drop of liquid past her lips until she was assured of more civilized washroom facilities. It was all very well for a man to make do but for a woman....

  “Some sort of family emergency?”

  “What?”

  “This sudden decision to visit your sister, was it—?”

  “Oh!” She tucked her hands into the pockets of her coat and hunched her shoulders against the cold, which seemed even more pervasive than it had been the night before. “Yes. She hurt her back in a ski-lift accident and at first it seemed that her injuries were serious.”

  “But now that you’re up to your own neck in trouble they don’t seem so bad?”

  “No,” Jessica retorted, bristling at the implied criticism. “I phoned the hospital again before I left the hotel yesterday and learned her condition’s been upgraded to satisfactory.” She sighed, exasperation adding to the tension already gripping her. “It’s just that Selena’s always been prone to getting herself into difficulties of one kind or another.”

  “Must run in the family,” he said mockingly, and took another swig of the water.

  She was spared having to field his last observation by the rumble of a heavy engine outside the east end of the shed.

  He shoved away from the tailgate and recapped the bottle. “Sounds as if the rescue squad have made it through already. Couldn’t have been much of a slide, after all.”

  They were heaven-sent words.

  “Thank goodness!” She scrambled down after him. “And thank you, Mr. Morgan. You undoubtedly saved my life and I’m very grateful.”

  “I undoubtedly did, Miss Jessica, and you’re welcome.”

  “Have a very merry Christmas.”

  She thought perhaps a shadow crossed his face then, but all he said was, “No need to race back to your car. It’ll take a while before they clear a way out for us.”

  “It’s a miracle to me that they even knew where to come looking.”

  “They have sensors strung all along the vulnerable stretches of highway. The minute one gets wiped out, they know there’s been a slide and they usually don’t waste much time getting to it.”

  “I see.” She pulled the collar of her coat more snugly around her neck. “Well, I think I’ll wait in my car, just the same. The cold’s making its presence felt again.”

  “As you like.” He closed the tailgate and raised the rear window of the Jeep. “Just don’t fire up your engine until we see daylight. Wouldn’t want to die from carbon monoxide poisoning when we’ve made it this far, would we?”

  “I’m well aware of the danger from exhaust fumes, Mr. Morgan,” she said loftily, resenting his confident assumption that, because she’d been ill prepared to cope with an avalanche, she must be some sort of congenital idiot.

  Half an hour later, however, she was half convinced his assessment might not be far wrong. By then enough passage had been cleared for one of the road crew to come into the shed to check on its occupants.

  “Start her up, ma’am,” he said kindly, stopping at her window. “You’ll be on your way in about ten minutes, but you might as well be warm while you wait.”

  After a bit of coaxing, her car sputtered to life and shortly after she heard the roar of the Jeep’s engine. Outside, she could see that although the sun had not yet risen above the surrounding mountains the sky was such an intense blue that its reflection trapped hints of mauve in the snow heaped up along the road.

  Perhaps if she hadn’t been so mesmerized by the sight of freedom she’d have noticed sooner that her troubles were far from at an end. Only when one of the road crew waved her forward did she switch her attention to her car and see the red warning light on her dashboard.

  Instinct led her to do
exactly the right thing and switch off the car’s ignition immediately. The damage, however, was already done, as evidenced by the puff of steam escaping from under the hood.

  Behind her the Jeep’s horn blasted impatiently, but even a fool could have seen that her car wasn’t going anywhere.

  With mounting dismay, Jessica watched as her sleeping companion jumped down from the Jeep, exasperation and resignation evident in every line of him, and, in a dismaying rerun of last night’s fiasco, approached her window.

  “Don’t tell me,” he jeered, coming to a halt beside her. “Either you’ve forgotten how to take your foot off the brake or your damned car’s broken down.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  ANY hopes Jessica might have entertained that the extent of the problem was not too serious the almighty Mr. Morgan quickly put to rout.

  He surveyed her engine, which continued to puff out little clouds of steam like a mini-volcano on the verge of erupting. “It figures,” he drawled, rolling his eyes heavenward, and beckoned the road crew to come see for themselves the latest misfortune she’d brought down on her hopelessly inept head.

  “Release the hood,” one of them called out to her, and, after they had it propped open, they clustered around the innards of her car with the rapt attention all men seemed to foster for such things. There followed a muttered discussion to which Jessica, still slumped disconsolately behind the steering wheel, was not privy.

  Eventually, the Morgan man came back and leaned one elbow on the roof. “Might as well face it, Jessica Simms,” he announced conversationally, his voice floating through the window which she’d opened a crack. “The only way this puddle-hopper’s going to move is hitched to the back end of a tow truck.”

  She could have wept, with disappointment, frustration, and rage. “I suppose,” she said, hazarding what seemed like a reasonable guess, “that my radiator’s overheated?”

  “On the contrary, it’s frozen. Better phone your sister and tell her not to expect you at her bedside any time soon. Sentinel Pass is the nearest place you’ll find a service station and they’re working around the clock to keep emergency vehicles on the road. Types like you go to the bottom of their list of priorities.”