by Stuart, Anne
By this time two or three other late night travelers had straggled into the waiting area, which was just as well. His gut-level reaction to Sybil was powerful enough to make him lose whatever sense of propriety he had, and now was neither the place nor time for unbridled passion, he thought, staring out into the night. The swirling snow had lightened a bit, and outside their row of windows he could see one of Ransome’s small planes being readied.
He opened his mouth to say something, but the bored clerk forestalled him. “We’ll be boarding in the next five minutes. Please have your boarding passes ready.”
“Do you think it’ll be snowing in Vermont?” Sybil asked, eyeing the runway with a worried expression she couldn’t quite hide.
“It’s always snowing in Vermont,” Nick said gloomily. “However I don’t think they’d fly out unless they were reasonably sure they could land.” He put his hand under her elbow, helping her to her feet. “Come on, Sybil. You can drink your way to Burlington and sleep the rest of the way home.”
“How am I going to do that? I have to drive.”
“No, you don’t. The roads will be bad enough as it is; we both don’t need to risk life and limb. I’ll drive, you can sleep and we’ll pick up your car tomorrow when the storm clears.”
“How about I’ll drive and you sleep? I’m the one with four-wheel drive, remember?”
“I also remember that you’re the one who drives like a bat out of hell. If it makes you feel any better, we can drive home in your car, but I’ll do the driving.”
She glared up at him, yanking her arm out of his grip. “Just when I think I might like you,” she said behind clenched teeth, “you blow it.”
“Stop looking for trouble and accept your fate, Sybil,” he murmured. “We’ve been thrown together for a reason; if you’d stop fighting it, maybe we could find out what it is.”
“You were put on this earth to plague me,” she muttered.
Adelle had been an amazon. He’d always gone for long, leggy women, not little sparrows like the defiant creature standing there under his nose. Before he even realized what he was doing, he leaned down and kissed her, swiftly, briefly on her pale mouth. “I was put on this earth to tempt you,” he said. “And sooner or later you’re going to give in.”
“Sooner or later you’ll give up trying.”
He grinned. “Don’t count on it. I can be very stubborn.”
“So can I.”
“Yes, but this time we both want the same thing. It’s just taking you a little longer to realize it.” She opened her mouth to protest again, but he stopped her. “Give the man your boarding pass, Saralee. We want to get home before dawn.”
THERE WAS NO reason why she should feel comfortable with him, Sybil thought as she leaned her head back against the seat in the Subaru. She shouldn’t have sat with him in the plane, trading barbs and witticisms that grew steadily more sexual and more heated in nature; she shouldn’t even have allowed him in her car, much less let him drive; she shouldn’t have spoken to him at the airport. In retrospect, she had had other possibilities. Her cash would have bought her a taxi ride to her old college roommate’s home in Milton, and Margie would have put her on a plane the next day when the weather cleared, but she’d been too miserable and self-absorbed to think of it, and once Nick had appeared, too busy battling him and herself to remember such practicalities.
So here she was, halfway between Burlington and Danbury in the midst of a full-blown winter storm, trapped in the cavelike cocoon of an overheated hatchback with a man she found far too attractive for her own peace of mind.
She didn’t need complications like Nick right now. She needed her own bed, the comfort of the dogs and maybe a glass or two of Courvoisier and she needed to finish the delicious paperback that Nick had taken one look at, sneered in contempt and thrown onto the floor in the back. All together they’d make her forget her miseries. But she’d finished the cognac, the dogs were at Dulcy’s, her house would be cold with only the inadequate kerosene space heater going, and the novel just happened to be a lusty romance. Right now lust and romance seemed a very dangerous pastime.
“Aren’t you asleep?” His voice was deep and sexy as he kept his concentration on the snowy highway ahead of him.
“Yes,” she said, turning her head to watch him. She had to admit, if she’d tried to describe the perfect man for her, at least in a physical sense, then Nicholas Fitzsimmons would fill the bill. He had an absolutely beautiful body. Too tall, of course, and his legs were too long, but damn, they were nice. His shoulders were just broad enough, not too overwhelming and not too scrawny. His hands were especially erotic, with their narrow, beautiful palms and long, artistic fingers.
Not to mention his face. She couldn’t look into those topaz-colored eyes of his without thinking of the devil—not the frightening devil of fundamentalist religions and fire and brimstone, but the mocking seducer who tempted and twisted and stole people’s souls. People went to that kind of devil willingly, just as Sybil wanted to go.
She liked his thick black hair, the widow’s peak, the black eyebrows that only added to his satanic image. But most of all she liked his mouth, that thin, sexy line that could do the most devastating things to hers.
He reminded her more of Dracula—not the vicious, blood-sucking monster but the erotic, elegant lover who sipped blood and drained souls. She could picture herself, stretched out on a bed, Nick leaning over her, his teeth on her vulnerable neck, as she reached for him. . . .
Damn! Why was she letting herself have these erotic fantasies? She needed to remember what a pain Nick was, how infuriatingly pedantic and small-minded and incredibly devious he was. How could she have admitted she was a terrible dowser? He’d never let her forget it.
With a nervous hand she reached up and unfastened her coat. The car was hot, much too hot, though she could see he only had the heat halfway up. There was something otherworldly about the night, the utter quiet of the snow falling around them, the emptiness of the highway. Even the usually obstreperous engine was being more refined than usual.
“Go to sleep, Saralee,” he said. “It’s slow going—we won’t be home for another hour.”
“I used to hate that name,” she said quietly.
“Why?”
“It’s the name I grew up with,” she said. “The name I associate with being a misfit, a changeling, a small brown wren in a family of peacocks. Every time I hear that name I feel small and inadequate.”
“I can’t really see you as a Sybil.”
She sighed. “No, neither can I. It was just wishful thinking on my part. I was hoping I’d grow into it, be the sort of person who conversed with gods, but it hasn’t happened. Not yet, at least. I haven’t given up hope.”
“Have you ever been called by any other name?”
She laughed. “Lots. Skinny, Short Stuff, Tubs . . .”
“Tubs?”
“I was fat when I was twelve. Also Cupcake, because of Saralee, Sis, and then of course my husband called me dear.”
Nick wrinkled his nose. “Sounds pretty tepid.”
“Colin was tepid.”
“Who called you Cupcake?”
Sybil laughed. “A camp counselor. My family couldn’t have a fat child sitting around, so they sent me off to fat girls’ camp that summer. Very degrading at first, but I had one of the best times of my life. You see, no one else in my family had ever been fat, so none of them had been there. I was judged on my own merits, not as Hattie Richardson’s little sister.”
“Somehow I can’t see me calling you Cupcake.”
“Don’t even try it,” she warned. She hesitated a moment. “Actually, I don’t really mind when you call me Saralee. Somehow it sounds different when you say it. Not so disapproving.”
“Saralee it is,” he said. “Unless you p
refer me to call you dear?”
“Try it and I’ll break your nose,” she said sleepily.
“Or darling,” he continued. “Or sweetheart, or honey, or hot stuff, or angel, or sweetmeat, or . . .”
“Cut it out, Nick,” she murmured. “Two can play at that game.”
“Go to sleep, Saralee. You can think of endearments when I get you safely home.”
Saralee, she thought. She liked it too. She especially liked it in Nick’s rich, sexy voice. She also liked the way he said darling, and sweetheart and honey and even sweetmeat. Did he really think she was hot stuff? He certainly seemed difficult to discourage, and she had offered him Dulcy on a silver platter. Maybe she was being a fool for fighting.
Fool or not, she didn’t have any fight left in her. She had just enough energy to sink down lower in the seat and prop her head against the iced-over window. A few moments later she was fast asleep.
When she woke up an hour and a half later she was curiously disoriented, as if she were floating through clouds and space. It took her just a moment to realize that was exactly what they were doing, except that the fluffy white cloud was a snow squall with zero visibility and the floating feeling was all four wheels of the Subaru out of control.
Nick was cursing under his breath, slowly and savagely, as he deftly turned into one skid, then into another, somehow, by sheer force of personality or superhuman driving skills or demonic power keeping the car on the road when he couldn’t even see the road. They were sliding down a steep incline, and for all Sybil knew they were heading off a cliff.
She jammed her feet into the floor, instinctively searching for the brakes that didn’t exist on the passenger’s side, as she clutched the seat with numb hands and began some cursing herself.
“Damn you, Nick, don’t you dare kill me,” she threatened.
“I’m not going to,” he said calmly enough as they slid to the left. “At least, not unless I do it with my bare hands at some later time. We’re almost home.”
“Can’t you stop the damned car?”
“I’m trying to.” Beneath the calm there was a note she didn’t care to encourage. Gritting her teeth, she hunched down in her seat, fingers clenching the cracked vinyl beneath her.
The car slid to the right, straightened out for a brief, glorious moment as the tires caught a last bit of traction, and then lost it again. This time there was no getting it back. Endless moments later they were tilted sideways in a ditch, the nose of her car crushed against what had to be the hardest maple tree in the state of Vermont.
They sat there for a brief, stunned moment. Nick reached over and turned off the lights that made no dent in the swirling white-out, then the ignition. “Are you all right?”
“Just peachy.”
“We were only going about seven miles an hour when we hit the tree,” he said in a damnably even voice. “With luck it didn’t do much damage.”
“Do you have the faintest idea where we are?” she demanded, unable to get too worked up over a car that had failed her in a crisis.
“Halfway down my driveway.”
“Thank God,” she breathed. “At least we aren’t going to freeze to death.”
He looked over at her. He’d left the overhead light on, and the dim bulb provided faint illumination in the darkness. “You’re wearing a skirt, stockings and high-heeled shoes. The driveway hasn’t been plowed, and even if we manage to head in the right direction we’ll be slogging through at least a foot of new, wet snow. There are no lights, I don’t really know how far we are, and—”
“We’ll freeze in the car,” she said.
“Right.” He tried to open the door, but it was wedged shut against the snowbank. He shoved again, cursing, and then turned to her. “Lead on, Macduff.”
Chapter Fourteen
PULLING THE HANDLE, Sybil shoved at the passenger door with all her strength. It didn’t move. She grunted, shoving at it again, and panic began to creep up her spine.
“It might help if you unlocked the door,” Nick said mildly.
“It’s not locked. I never lock it.”
“I locked it while you were asleep. I didn’t want to risk having you tumble out onto the highway.”
“God damn it . . .”
“Just unlock the door. We’ll argue about it later.”
He was right-it was a waste of time to fight him. She pulled her thin gloves on, unlocked the door and shoved.
A moment later she was lying face-first in cold, wet snow. She lifted her head, blinking away the slush that clung to her, but she couldn’t see a thing. It was a curious kind of chiaroscuro, the blackness of the predawn sky, the invisible whirl of white snow.
Nick’s strong hands pulled her to her feet, and she clung to him, ignoring any remnants of pride, as he made a futile attempt at brushing the snow off her. He was right, the snow was at least a foot deep, and she might as well be barefoot for the protection her high heels and stockings afforded her.
Well, she was a tough Vermonter, he was the flatlander. Or at least she had two more years of Vermont winters than he did. It was up to her to get them out of this mess. “Come on,” she muttered, pulling away from him and heading out into the storm.
She didn’t get far. His hands caught her, jerking her back. “You’re heading in the wrong direction,” he said, his voice muffled by the driving wind. “The house is back this way.”
“Of course,” she said, shivering, wrapping her thin cloth coat around her and wishing that she had her ratty down one with her. Not to mention boots and pants and long underwear. “Let’s go.” She took two steps back the way she came, her high heel collapsed beneath her, and she tumbled full-length into the snow again.
For a moment she just lay there and cried, hot tears pouring down her icy face. This time Nick didn’t help her up; this time he picked her up, tossed her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and started off into the blinding snow.
She started struggling, but a swift, hard smack on her well-padded bottom shut her up. “The sooner we get out of here and into the house the happier I’ll be,” he shouted through the howling wind. “And we’ll get there a lot faster if I carry you.”
She subsided, doing her best to lie there passively, not liking it one tiny bit. There was nothing about the situation she liked, not the cold, not the snow, not the wind and not the company. Or at least, not in her present position.
He slipped once, sending both of them sprawling, but before she could scramble to her feet and try to make it on her own he was up again, carrying her with seemingly no effort at all and heading directly into the storm.
She dropped her head down, thankful that he had a better sense of direction than she did. She had absolutely no idea where they were going, it seemed to be taking five times as long as it should have, and for all she knew they were bypassing the Black Farm and heading directly into the woods. Maybe John Black’s ghost decided to make an appearance and lead them to their doom, and they’d die locked in each other’s arms.
It wasn’t that unpleasant an idea. If they made it safely to the house, to the warmth and comfort of the old farm, then maybe she ought to find a suitable way to celebrate their close escape, maybe she ought to give in to those ridiculous potions and—
The breath was knocked from her as Nick walked directly into a solid unyielding object that turned out to be the old farmhouse. Once more they ended in the snow, and this time Nick didn’t reach for her again. He was too busy cursing.
Sybil ignored him, pulling herself up on shaky, frozen legs and groping for the door. Of course it was locked, and Sybil’s own curses matched Nick’s.
“Calm down,” he muttered, taking forever to find the lock in the pitch blackness. “We’re almost inside.”
“Almost isn’t good enough,” she managed through chat
tering teeth. “Haven’t I told you you don’t need to lock your doors around here?”
“Old habits are hard to break.” The lock gave, the handle turned and the door opened. The two of them tumbled in, into the dark, warm cavern of safety, and collapsed on the hall floor. Nick kicked the door shut behind them and lay there, half on top of her, his breathing deep and labored.
As for Sybil, she was sheer ice from the hips down, her hair was frozen, her hands were frozen, her teeth were chattering so hard she could barely speak. No doubt Nick would count that a blessing.
“Didn’t you turn down the heat when you left?” she grumbled in his ear, trying to shift out from under him. In his present snowy state he was only making her colder.
“No, thank God,” he said, his voice infinitely weary. “Thank God,” she echoed. “You . . . w-w-w-want to get off me? You’re like a blanket of snow.”
“Always willing to oblige a lady,” he muttered, rolling off her and standing. He pulled her up beside him, and her legs buckled. She fell against him, against his cold, snow-covered body, and she quickly pushed away. Standing on her own shaky two feet was preferable to embracing a polar bear.
He flicked on the light. The glare was so strong she shut her eyes against it, swaying slightly in the warmth. “I want you to go in the bedroom and take off all your clothes,” he said.
“Forget it.”
“And then get into the hottest shower you can stand, and stay there until you’ve thawed out. I’m not talking about sex, Saralee, I’m talking about survival. When you’re warm enough, you can find some clean clothes in my drawers. In the meantime I’ll get a fire going and find us something to drink.”
“No love potions,” she mumbled. “Two doses are more than enough.” DOSE
“Two doses? Who gave you the second?”
“Never mind.” She opened her eyes just a crack against the glaring light. “Point me in the right direction.”
