Snowbound with a Stranger

by Rebecca Rogers Maher

  For now she simply sat and waited.

  * * *

  Dannie wasn’t the type to panic. Countless shifts at an urban hospital had made her reliable in a crisis. She’d learned how to remain calm and do her job no matter what happened around her.

  Right now what was happening around Dannie was a severe winter storm. It was already three o’clock. She hadn’t strayed from the spot where she’d last stopped except to pace in an effort to keep her blood moving. Snowflakes covered her face but with wet gloves any effort to brush them off only made matters worse. And by now she was too frozen to care. The sky was dark enough with the storm clouds overhead, but in a matter of hours it would be night, and then she would really be screwed.

  Despite her training, Dannie was scared. There was plenty of snow-covered brush in the woods but she didn’t have the first clue how to make a shelter. No doubt there were animals in these woods that would be all too happy to come upon a tasty snack like her in the middle of the night. Although she’d tried, she couldn’t seem to make a fire with the wet wood around her.

  She tried not to think about how cold she was. Her many layers could only offer so much protection against the ocean of ice she was standing in. She’d practically dug a trench on the trail with her endless walking back and forth, but even so, her fingers and toes were numb. Her face stung from the frozen wind. The backs of her legs prickled with fiery cold.

  The cabin couldn’t be far from where she now stood—maybe an hour’s hike—but she had no idea which direction it was in. Looking for it would at least give her a goal, though. A chance to do more than sit here and catalog the medical stages of hypothermia. She shook the snow off her back and reached for her pack.

  In the distance a branch snapped.

  Dannie froze.

  On their last hike they’d seen a bear down the trail and had chosen to wait, silent, for it to pass before they continued.

  Didn’t bears hibernate? So there wouldn’t be one tromping around the forest in the middle of a snowstorm, right?

  It was an early storm, though. It was only November. Maybe it was getting ready to hibernate, and looking for some extra meat to bulk itself up before the long sleep. A nice big hunk of living flesh like her. She squatted down, hoping to make herself invisible.

  Weren’t you supposed to make noise, though, to scare them? She thought she’d read that somewhere once. It would be able to smell her anyway; it wasn’t like she could hide. She stood back up and blew her whistle as loud as she could.

  Silence.

  A gust of frozen wind flew against her face.

  And then out of the wall of white came an answering whistle.

  Dannie’s knees buckled and she actually fell to the ground. Oh, God. Oh, thank God.

  “Dannie?”

  A deep voice called out from the distance.

  “I’m here.” Her voice was shaky. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Here. I’m right—”

  A dark mass came down the trail toward her. She started toward it, walking quickly, and then running, slipping on the snow. She almost fell into his arms. “I’m here.”

  “Okay.” A pair of strong hands gripped her shoulders. She could barely see him through the snow. He gathered her into a hard hug. “You’re okay.”

  She was shaking. When had she started shaking? She’d felt so brave a minute ago, planning her fool’s errand to the cabin.

  He pulled back to examine her face. It was Lee. Considerably more windburned than when she’d first seen him in the parking lot. He touched a gloved palm briefly to her cheek, and then to her shoulder. “Are you hurt?”

  “N-no.” To her shame, Dannie’s chin began to tremble. Only it was too cold to really feel it. “I’m not hurt. I’m just…just—”

  “All right.” He gave her a gentle shake. “You’re all right now. Come on.” He pulled something out of his pocket.

  “Where are the others?”

  “Hang on one sec.” He held a rectangular device in his hand and pressed the button. “Stevens.” He waited. “Stevens, it’s Lee. You read?”

  A burst of static emerged from the device.

  “You have a walkie-talkie?” Dannie almost fainted with relief.

  “Lee?” Dr. Stevens’s muffled voice crackled out of the speaker. “Any sign?”

  “I got her. Repeat. Found Dannie. Heading to the cabin.”

  “You found her? Oh, thank God.”

  “Affirmative. Hiking to the cabin before dark falls. You all okay?”

  “Yes. Fine. At the hotel safe and sound. You take care, okay? Be careful.”

  “Will do.”

  “Thank you, Lee. Seriously, man. Thanks.”

  “You bet. Over.”

  Lee tucked the walkie-talkie back into the pocket of his pants.

  “You know the way to the cabin?”

  He nodded. “It’s about an hour’s hike in this weather. Can you handle that?”

  “We can’t go to the hotel too?”

  “The roads are impassable, Dannie. We’d never make it down the mountain. Cabin’s closer. Can you do it?”

  “Yes. Of course I can.”

  Lee smiled briefly. “Let’s go.”

  “Wait.” She grabbed his arm. “Thank you.”

  Now that she’d had a moment to adjust to the reality that she wasn’t actually going to die alone out here in the woods, she was able to truly take him in.

  And she could see why, from that first moment in the parking lot, she hadn’t wanted to.

  He was gorgeous. Wrapped in about a hundred layers of clothing. A little fucked-up looking. And genuinely gorgeous.

  Her heart seemed to literally stop beating. Every one of his features was just slightly off center. His nose was crooked and too big, and his lips…well, she had no business looking at those. She brought her gaze back to his dark green eyes and found them examining her in return. To her surprise he waggled his eyebrows at her and despite everything, she laughed.

  He covered her hand with his and squeezed. “You’re welcome. Now let’s get the hell out of this storm.”

  Chapter Three

  The trail was long and fairly arduous for an amateur hiker. Lee noted with approval that Dannie trudged forward anyway, her shoulders braced against the wind. She had to be tired. By now the adrenaline of being lost and then rescued must have worn off; no doubt she was digging deep to find the strength to move forward.

  He led the way up the increasingly invisible path. As long as Dannie’s footsteps behind him remained regular, they’d keep moving forward. He looked back frequently to make sure she was okay but otherwise spoke little.

  Lee had been reasonably confident that their paths would cross eventually. He knew the terrain, and was well-equipped for the search. Even so, after three full hours of stomping up one trail and down another, he had started to worry for Dannie’s safety. Stevens had assured him that she was tough, but even smart-ass Brooklyn girls were susceptible to hypothermia.

  Now that he’d found her and could see that she was healthy and in good spirits, Lee could relax enough to enjoy the scenery.

  There was a reason he came up here so often, with or without Stevens. The deep woods were always quiet, but nothing compared to the stillness of an Appalachian snowfall. Even the roaring of the wind felt hushed. It drew the chaos right out of him.

  Lee leaned for a moment into this peace, until Dannie quickened her pace and came up level beside him.

  “How are you finding your way in this mess?”

  “Muscle memory.” Lee slowed slightly, matching his pace to hers. “We come here a lot.”

  She was covered in snow. White flakes crystallized along her eyelashes and made her brown eyes appear depthless. Out of nowhere Lee was seized with a sight-memory, a gut-memory, of another woman—ten years earlier, covered in gray-white dust and stumbling away from the towers at the World Trade Center. She’d gripped his arm momentarily as she passed, as he tried to run toward the building along wit
h so many of his friends and colleagues.

  He’d thought of that woman many times over the years. Had she made it home? Was she sick now with the respiratory illnesses so many of them got? Had she recovered? He couldn’t know.

  Lee shook his head. He came up here to forget things like this. To put these memories out of his head, at least temporarily. To give his mind a little rest from the endless playing back and playing over. Of that day. Of the days that followed. Of Caroline.

  “You seem like you know what you’re doing.” Abruptly Dannie brought him back to the present.

  “Enough to get by, yeah. How about you?” He risked a sideways glance at her, careful to cover the tracks of his morbid thoughts. “You held your own out there until I met up with you.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Dannie scoffed. “I was just about to start freaking out when you got there.”

  He grinned, which felt like ice cracking since his face was practically frozen. “What, you had a freak-out scheduled for three-fifteen?”

  “Roughly, yeah.” Dannie smiled in return.

  It made the laugh lines show around her eyes and struck a low chord in the pit of Lee’s stomach. And, truth be told, lower.

  Stevens had said she was pretty. In a tell-anyone-I-said-so-and-I’ll-lose-my-job undertone, of course. But Lee hadn’t believed him. Stevens had strange taste in women. He’d once brought a lady with a parrot to Thanksgiving dinner, and the parrot had talked more than she did.

  In Dannie’s case pretty didn’t really cut it.

  His eyes had found her as soon as he’d stepped out of his car this morning. He saw her see him, and then look away.

  She’d been wrapped up like a mummy and three hundred yards away, but even so, when he’d looked at her it felt—immediately—like a swift kick in the chest.

  It was disconcerting, to say the least. He hadn’t felt such a strong reaction to a woman since…well, not for a long time. A long damn time.

  Beside him Dannie trudged forward through the snow. “Were you a Boy Scout when you were a kid?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He tried not to react to the husky lilt of her voice. She had a voice like a smoker. Like a truck driver. Like a stripper. He cleared his throat. “How’d you know?”

  “Wild guess.”

  Up ahead a thick log lay across their path. It was too long to walk around and too large to simply step over. Lee braced his boot against the top of the trunk and scaled it. Standing above her, he extended his hand to help her up.

  Dannie hesitated.

  It was obvious that she needed assistance to scramble over the log, and equally clear that she didn’t like it.

  Okay. A damsel in distress she was not. Lee narrowed his eyes against the snow and buried a small smile. He gazed up ahead at some indiscernible point on the trail, and then back at her.

  “Ten minutes from here, tops. Come on.” He reached out his hand to her again.

  She might not be a wilting flower, but she wasn’t an idiot either. She let him take her hand.

  Once she was safely atop the log, Lee jumped down. Before she could hop off herself, he closed his gloved hands around her waist and lifted her down to the ground.

  For half an instant, his hands lingered on her hips and her eyes met his. They seemed to soften, gazing at him. And then he let her go. He began walking again, up the path.

  “This way.” He could hear the sudden gruffness in his voice.

  He’d have to get that under control.

  He was single now, it was true. Single for nine years, although he couldn’t quite make himself believe it had been that long.

  He’d had girlfriends. One or two had even tried to make it stick.

  But nice as they were—and they had been decent women—he hadn’t wanted any part of what they offered. Loneliness was better, sometimes, than pretending you felt something you didn’t.

  Which was why Dannie disturbed him.

  Because from the first moment he’d laid eyes on her, he’d wanted to put his hands on her. With the kind of urgency a starving man feels. With a viciousness that worried the hell out of him.

  They were bound to be stuck together at the cabin for the weekend, at a minimum. The best thing he could so, for both of their sakes, was keep a six-foot distance between himself and her at all times.

  He walked on, the memory of her unspeakably sexy shape alive against the palms of his hands.

  As promised, ten difficult minutes later, they turned on to the path to the cabin.

  * * *

  Dannie had never been happier to see a porch in her entire life.

  All she wanted was one moment alone in a safe place to pull herself together. Suppressing a groan, she stepped up the stairs to the front door.

  The cabin was dark, rustic and draped in a thick layer of white. Red curtains covered the windows, which were too frosted with ice to see through anyway. A sturdy overhang offered Dannie her first relief from the unrelenting wind in hours. She sagged against the frame of a snow-covered Adirondack chair while Lee fumbled through his pockets.

  “Dr. Stevens gave you the keys?”

  “Yeah. Electricity’s probably out, though.” Lee pulled off his hat and pushed through the heavy door. He shook the snow from his boots, yanked out the laces and kicked them off, and tried the light switch. Nothing. “Yeah. Thought so. Better get a fire going.” He shrugged off his parka.

  Dannie stepped in and closed the door behind her.

  After the swirling confusion of the storm, the inside of the cabin was an oasis of quiet. It was dry, clean and very cold.

  She unzipped her coat and lowered her aching body to the floor to remove her boots. Across the room, Lee was already kneeling before the fireplace, loading kindling into the grate.

  Stripped of his outer layers, he was a compact man. A few inches taller than she was, and muscular. Like a boxer. But for all that, he moved with a kind of gentleness, building the fire bed with quick efficiency. He was up and brushing himself off before she’d even removed her coat.

  “You’re quick.”

  “Yeah.” He bent to check the flue of the chimney and light a match to the wood. Rising, he looked her over. “You must be frozen stiff after all that time outside. You need to get by the fire.”

  Dannie shook the snow off her hat and coat. “The hike warmed me up a little. You?”

  “I’m fine. Listen. Come sit down. I’ll make us some coffee.”

  “You can make coffee when there’s no electricity?”

  “He’s got a battery-powered coffeepot. Power goes out a lot up here. Sit.”

  “I need to wash up, actually. Is that possible? I feel filthy.”

  “Well…” Lee hesitated. “Let me check something.” He ducked down the hall, and then doubled back and ran up the stairs.

  Dannie removed her outer layers and hung them over the back of a chair near the entryway. She kept on a pair of black thermal leggings and an almost knee-length red wool sweater, pulled her hair back into a ponytail and moved toward the fire.

  Wood beams crossed the cabin’s high ceilings. Opposite the front door lay a large kitchen facing out into an open dining and living area. The furnishings were simple and spare—worn leather couches, pine tables, a few landscape paintings. Beside the kitchen a staircase led to another level.

  Lee bounded down the steps, pausing momentarily when he reached the bottom. His eyes swept over her body.

  Dannie took one self-conscious step back. Was her sweater too tight? She tugged it down lower over her hips.

  Lee blew out a breath. “We got lucky. Stevens hedged his bets and filled both of the bathtubs. It’s well water here, with an electrical pump, so no running water when the power’s out. Plenty of bottled water in the kitchen for drinking. And the bathwater means we’ll be able to flush toilets, which is a plus.”

  “Uh, yeah. True.”

  Lee grinned. “You can take a bowlful here and there to wash your face and hands. We should have enough for a
couple of days.”

  “Days?”

  Lee stood with his heel on the bottom step. His face was flushed, his green eyes lit with the growing flames in the fireplace. Dannie sat down on a sofa before her knees could buckle again.

  “It’s a bad storm, Dannie. No good roads up here.”

  “Yes, but…days? I have to work on Monday.”

  “Yeah. Me too. But unless you can fly, we’re here until the storm decides to move out and they can get the roads cleared.”

  “Damn.”

  “Hey now. Don’t hurt my feelings.”

  “What?” Dannie ran a hand over her face, and then remembered how dirty she was. She stood up and headed toward the stairs. “Sorry. It’s not you. It’s just—”

  Lee angled his shoulder so she could pass him. It was probably her imagination, but the breath of air between their bodies seemed to crackle. “Think of it like a little vacation.”

  Dannie made it halfway up the stairs, and then turned. “A…vacation? From what?”

  “From everything. From life.” Lee went to the fire and fed a dry log into the heat.

  When he turned and smiled at her, her stomach dropped down to her knees.

  “I’m gonna go wash up.”

  Rounding the top of the stairs, Dannie tiptoed across the floor as though expecting to disturb someone up there. It was strange to walk into Dr. Stevens’s house like this and poke around in his stuff. She reminded herself that he had sent them there, that she wasn’t doing anything wrong. Still, she opened the bathroom door carefully.

  Gusts of wind whined through the cracks around the window above the tub, releasing a cold draft across the room. Dannie stripped out of her clothes and cleaned up as well as she could in the sink, splashing plastic cups of freezing water against as much of her body as she could reach. She brushed her teeth with a spare toothbrush from a package and what looked to be a hundred-year-old tube of toothpaste. She caught her own eye in the mirror. Her cheeks were a vivid red.

  Chapter Four

  In the kitchen, Lee dug out the old battery-operated coffeepot and water heater. He was starving and so, probably, was Dannie. Nothing in the world made a person hungrier than a good hard hike in the open air. Well, almost nothing.