by Lissa- Sugar
Snow. Just that fast. Snow, not the kind you saw on resort postcards. The kind that meant business. Within seconds, it began blanketing her cotton jacket.
Lissa put down her suitcase, opened her shoulder bag and took out her cell phone. Marvelous things, cell phones. They meant safety. Security. Human contact…
Mostly, they meant they were useless if you couldn’t see those miserable little bars on the home screen.
“Hello?” she said. “Hello? Hello? Hello?” Nothing. “Dammit,” she said, dumping the phone in her bag and her hands in her pockets.
Man, it was cold! And that snow… It was coming down like crazy. You lived in La La Land long enough, you forgot about snowstorms. This one was doing its best to obliterate everything.
Lissa’s teeth began to chatter.
She could see the headline now. Spring thaw leads to discovery of body of woman dumb enough to fly into a place devoid of humans. No signs of life except for vultures and bears and…
Hell. Vultures and bears and…
And, what was that?
A light. A pair of lights.
“Yes!”
Headlights were slicing through the wall of snow.
And now she could see something. A speck. A blob of red. It was a car. No. A truck, bouncing toward her at breakneck speed, its engine howling like a demented beast.
Well, no.
It wasn’t howling. It was wheezing and groaning like a creature in its death throes. And it wasn’t red, it was the color of rust because, Jesus, it was rust. It was a pickup truck, probably older than she was.
And it was coming straight at her.
Lissa stumbled back. Felt her foot catch in something. Grass under the snow. A tree root. What did it matter? Her foot caught and she went down on her ass.
The truck skidded to a stop a couple of feet away.
The engine stopped groaning, the sound replaced by a tick-tick-tick and by the sound of its windshield wipers. Correction. Its windshield wiper. Swish, swoosh, creak. Swish, swoosh, creak.
Lissa got to her feet.
The pickup didn’t move.
The doors didn’t open.
The windows didn’t slide down.
Just that single wiper blade, sweeping across the windshield.
The cracked windshield.
A chill that had nothing to do with wind or snow or cold danced down her spine.
“Hello?” she said. The word came out a croak. “Hello?” she said again, louder and stronger.
The cold of this graceful Montana spring had soaked through her jeans. Her feet were wet and numb inside her canvas sneakers.
“Dammit,” she said, but louder and stronger were no longer useful adverbs. Old, awful movies were flashing through her head, especially the one about the demon truck with no driver at the wheel.
Wrong.
There was a driver.
She knew that because now, the door was opening. A booted foot emerged. A denim-clad leg. Then a hand. A big hand, gloved in beat-up leather. An arm. A crutch.
A crutch?
It was definitely a crutch.
The gloved hand planted it firmly in the snow. A powerful-looking arm settled over the top.
A man swung down from the cab.
Her first impression was that he was big.
Really big.
Six two, maybe six three. Broad-shouldered. Long-legged.
In other words, big.
He was dressed in denim. Jeans faded and ripped. Jacket with a tear in the elbow. Beat-up boots. An equally beat-up Stetson pulled down so low that she couldn’t see his face.
He was, in a word, scruffy. Scruffy even to her, and she’d grown up on a ranch. A real one. Cowboys, ranch hands, were not Hollywood’s idea of the cool Western hero. They were often big men. They definitely wore denim and boots and Stetsons. They worked hard; you got dirty, working hard.
But this man was, well, scruffy.
And if he and his rusted truck were the duo responsible for meeting guests at the airstrip and driving them to the resort property…
Something didn’t feel right.
Guests often flew into El Sueño. Friends of her father, the general. Of the family. Her brothers ran charity events a couple of times a year.
Guests were met at the airstrip by well-groomed cowboys driving well-cared for vehicles.
They weren’t met like this.
The wind whipped a strand of pale blond hair across Lissa’s face. She grabbed it and shoved it behind her ear. Tried to, anyway, but her fingers were almost numb with cold. All of her was. She was minutes away from turning into Frosty the Snowman, and the guy sent to meet her had yet to say a word or reach for her suitcase. All he did was stand next to the truck, lean heavily on his crutch and stare at her. At least, she assumed he was staring. She couldn’t tell because of that hat.
No way was this right.
Why hadn’t she asked Marcia more questions? If she’d known the name of this place last night, she could have Googled it. She could have Googled the owner—and who, exactly, was the owner? She didn’t know that, either. All she knew was that she didn’t like the feel of things, didn’t like how they were going or not going, to be accurate, and—
“Who the hell are you?”
The cowboy’s voice was rough. Raw as gravel. It suited how he looked.
“I asked you a question, lady. Who are you?”
She was a woman who wanted to blink her eyes open and discover that this was just a bad dream, was who she was, but this was not a dream.
She was alone in the middle of a rapidly-worsening snowstorm with a man who looked like an extra from a really, really bad spaghetti Western.
“Are you deaf? I said—”
“I heard what you said.” Lissa lifted her chin. “A better question is who are you?”
The man hadn’t expected that response. She could tell by the way he cocked his head.
Good.
She had lived in Paris, and not in an arrondissement favored by tourists. She’d lived in Chicago, and not many tourists had frequented those streets, either. Even Hollywood had its dark side.
The bottom line was that she was street-smart. And showing fear was a sign of weakness. Never mind that her heart was trying to claw its way out of her chest.
She had attitude. That was all she had right now, and attitude was going to have to be enough.
“Answer the question. Who are you?”
Lissa drew herself up. “My name is Lissa Wilde.”
“No.”
“Yes. I am Lissa Wilde. The new chef.”
“The cook?” His gaze ran over her. “The hell you are.”
“I was hired last night and—” And, why in hell was she explaining herself to him? Lissa narrowed her eyes. “What is your name?”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why? I want to know to whom I’m speaking.”
He laughed. More or less. It certainly wasn’t a nice sound.
“To whom?”
“To whom. Exactly. I want to know to whom I’m speaking so that I can tell your employer how insolent you are.”
“It’s Nick.”
“Nick what?”
“Nick Bannister. You want me to spell that for you?”
“And what is the name of your employer?”
“Don’t you know? You think you’re the new cook, but you don’t know the name of the man you’ll be working for?”
Lissa felt a flush rise in her cheeks.
“As I said, I was offered the position only last night and—”
“And you jumped at it. What’s the problem, Ms. Wilde? You desperate for work?”
“You aren’t just insolent, Mr. Bannister, you’re rude.”
“And we’re both going to get snowbound if we stand here much longer.” Nick Bannister limped forward a couple of steps. Lissa took an automatic step back. So much for the no fear thing. “Hand over that suitcase.”
“I’ll take care of it m
yself.”
“Sweet Jesus, lady, I’m not going to steal it. Hand the damned thing over.”
“Is it possible for you to complete a sentence without using an obscenity?”
“You think those are obscenities? You’ve got a lot to learn. Now, give me the suitcase.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
He cursed again, a string of words that she’d heard in some of the kitchens she’d worked back when she was just starting out. Then he closed his hand around the handle of the suitcase.
Around her hand.
His was big. It all but swallowed hers. And it was hard. Lissa had strong, hard hands for a woman. Years of chopping and slicing and handling oversized skillets had that effect on a woman’s hands, but his grip was far more powerful than hers.
Still, she fought him for control of the suitcase.
“Goddammit,” he said and as he did the crutch slipped and he teetered on the snow-covered ground.
Lissa reacted automatically, let go of the handle, reached out to steady him. He jerked back.
“Did I ask for your damned help?”
“Trust me,” she said coldly. “I wasn’t trying to help, I was trying to shove that crutch out from under your arm so you’d fall on your ass in the snow!”
There was a second of stunned silence. Then he laughed. Or, at least, he made that sound again, the one that resembled a laugh.
It made her even more angry. “You think this is funny?”
He stared at her while the seconds ticked away. Then he grabbed her suitcase and headed for the truck.
Now what?
Did she go with him to who knew where, or did she…
What?
There was no place else to go. Besides, once he dropped her off at the ranch house, the office, the main building that was surely not too far way, she’d never have to set eyes on him again.
Lissa gritted her teeth and marched to the truck, reached it in time to see the cowboy dump her case in the back, limp to the driver’s door and toss his crutch inside the cab.
He climbed in. It wasn’t easy; his leg was stiff as a board and he had to grab it with his hands to get his foot positioned under the dashboard.
“You can drive like that?” she said, before she could censor the words.
He looked at her.
She couldn’t see his eyes, but she felt the cold rage in the look he gave her.
“I can drive just fine,” he said tightly. “Now, are you getting in or am I going to leave you here?”
Head up, back straight, she went to the passenger door. The door wouldn’t open. She pulled at the handle, jiggled it, but nothing happened until Nick Bannister leaned across and shoved the door open.
She climbed inside the cab.
To her surprise, it was clean. More than clean. The dashboard was polished. So was the old-fashioned leather bench seat. The cab even smelled good. Leather. Pine. Cold, clean mountain air.
“You might want to hang onto your seat. I drive fast.”
“Good. The faster, the better. I can hardly wait to meet your boss and tell him—”
“—that I’m rude and, what was it? Oh yeah. Insolent. Trust me, lady. It’ll be a waste of time. He already knows all about me.”
“Maybe you think the fact that you got me out of the weather will save you, but I promise you, it won’t.”
“I’d do the same for a heifer. Damned if I want the trouble of finding you frozen stiff come the spring thaw.”
Lissa swung toward him. “Just in case nobody’s told you, you are one unpleasant, nasty SOB!”
“Sorry to disappoint you, Duchess, but you’re not the first.”
“I’m happy to hear that there are others here who are as discerning as I am. And do not call me duchess.”
“Must you always get the last word?”
“Yes.”
She thought that maybe his lips twitched. She still couldn’t see much of his face, just enough to know that he had a cleft chin, a square jaw, and probably a week’s worth of dark stubble. Not that she gave a damn what he looked like. Count Dracula or Prince Charming, Nick Bannister was a foul-mouthed, mean-tempered piece of work.
All that mattered was reaching the lodge and meeting the person who’d hired her.
There was no point in judging the place by the isolation of the airstrip or by her surly escort.
No point at all, Lissa assured herself…
And hoped to hell that she was right.
CHAPTER THREE
It took twenty minutes to reach the first signs of civilization.
Actually, that was an overstatement.
What they reached was a cluster of wooden outbuildings barely visible through the heavy snowfall, and a handful of what she assumed were corrals.
On a rise in the distance, she could see glimpses of a dark structure. Was that the lodge? It was big, but not big enough to house many guests. Maybe what she was looking at was a separate building from the lodge. A dining room. A card room. A bar.
She sat forward in her seat.
“Is that the Triple G?”
“Is what the Triple G?”
She looked at the cowboy. The short exchange was the first since they’d driven away from the airstrip, but his tone of voice was that of a man who’d been beleaguered with endless questions.
“That building, of course. Is it the Triple G?”
He looked at her, then back at what she assumed was the road. It was difficult to tell because of the snow.
“You’ve been on the Triple G since the plane landed.”
Lissa rolled her eyes. “I’m not an idiot, Bannister. I understand that we’re on Triple G land. What I meant was, is that building ahead of us the hotel?”
He looked at her again.
“The what?”
God. Which one of them was the idiot?
“The hotel,” she said with exaggerated patience. “The main house. The lodge. The resort. Whatever you want to call it. Is that where the guests stay? I thought it would be bigger… What?”
He was laughing. Laughing! The desire to add him to her People She Wanted To Slug list was strong, but so was her will to survive. Hitting a man driving an old truck far too fast through a snowstorm was probably not a good idea, and it showed just how far from reality she’d fallen that hitting a man who used a crutch didn’t even enter into the equation.
“What’s so funny?”
His laughter stopped as quickly as it had begun.
“Nothing.”
“Don’t give me that ‘nothing’ routine! What were you laughing at?”
She might as well have been talking to a statue. Bannister clamped his lips together—she could see that they were firm lips, nicely shaped, which was pretty amazing when you realized that nothing else about him was nice—and stepped even harder on the gas.
The truck gave an alarming lurch. The engine coughed like Mildred Pierce’s dying daughter and really, why on earth did she watch all those old movies? The tires whined and spun before finally gripping the gravel hidden beneath what looked like several inches of snow as the cowboy, not only Insolent and Rude but also Despicable, stepped hard on the gas. The truck lunged forward, made it up the rise, through an open gate, and came to a bone-jarring stop right in front of the building.
It was a house. Just a house. Nice, but nothing remarkable about it. A house that was two stories high, a house that was made of wood, a house with a front porch…
Nick Bannister shut off the engine.
Tick, tick, tick.
Lissa took a deep breath. Held it. Then let it out.
OK. She’d misunderstood Marcia. The Triple G wasn’t a resort. It was a house people rented for long pseudo-Western weekends…
Except, why would they rent a house like this? Handsome, yes, but not spectacular. Not something out of Architectural Digest. Not something that would be featured in the Sunday real estate section of a big city newspaper.
/> Tick, tick, tick.
Lissa was ticking, too. Be cool, she told herself. There had to be a logical explanation.
“So,” she said, very calmly, “what’s this? The office?”
Mr. Despicable hobbled down from the cab of the truck, hauled his crutch from behind the seat, shoved the padded part under his arm and looked up at her.
“You getting out?”
“I asked you a question.”
“You’re good at asking questions.”
She craned her neck, her eyes following him as he made his way to the rear of the pickup. When she saw her suitcase somersault into the snow, she opened her door and climbed down.
“And you suck at answering them. I said, is this—”
“No.”
She reached for her suitcase. He brushed past her and picked it up.
“I can do that,” she said.
“Do you think I can’t?”
The question was filled with hostility. Lissa thought of half a dozen answers and discarded every one of them. Instead, she followed in his footsteps as he crabbed his way up the two steps to the porch. The man was spoiling for a fight and she’d be damned if she’d oblige.
“You didn’t answer my question,” she said.
“Which question?”
“Is this building the lodge office?”
“No.”
No. That was it. All of it. Could a person actually feel her blood pressure rise?
“If it isn’t the office, what is it?”
“I told you. It’s the Triple G.”
“Dammit, Bannister—” Lissa swallowed the rest of her words. She drew a long, steadying breath. She had to calm down. Letting this—this unpleasant cowboy piss her off wouldn’t solve anything. “What I mean is, is this all of it?”
He paused at a big, weathered wood door and turned toward her.
“What you mean is where are the hot tubs? The fire pit? The luxury accommodations? The candlelit dining room? The bar with its four-hundred-bucks-a-bottle vintage wines?”
There was an edge to his voice. And there was something else about his voice…
It seemed familiar.
How could that be? She’d yet to get a real look at his face, but if she’d ever met him before, she’d know it. Who could forget somebody this unpleasant? Still, he seemed familiar in other ways. His height. Those shoulders. The way he held himself. And that voice, aside from the edge to it, was, well, familiar, too. Deep. A little rough. And, despite everything, sexy.
