Snowed

by Pamela Burford

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he snarled.

  She bit back a scathing retort. “Where are you hurt, James?”

  “Ankle.” He winced and touched his right leg, stretched out in the snow. “Slipped on the ice when a rabbit ran in front of me.” She reached for him, but he brushed off her efforts. “I can do it.”

  “James, you’ve been out here over half an hour. Let me help.” She grabbed his arm and he shoved her away.

  “I can do it, damn it. Get back in the house.” Using the scrap of wood as leverage, he attempted to rise. He made it halfway to his feet, using his powerful arms to raise himself, but the instant he put weight on the bad right ankle, his face contorted in a rictus of agony and he slumped to the ground. He groaned and closed his eyes.

  Now Leah wanted to curse. “And they say I’m muleheaded! You might’ve broken that ankle, you stubborn fool. What are you trying to prove?” She must have inherited her obstinacy from the Bradburn side.

  “Not broken,” he said. “I don’t think.”

  “Why not?”

  “Broke it before. It’s different.”

  “You broke that ankle before?”

  He nodded, his features rigid. “Two years ago. Thrown from a horse.”

  Leah groaned inwardly. His fall must have aggravated the old injury. This wasn’t a simple sprain as she’d hoped. No wonder he couldn’t put his weight on it.

  A full moon glowed in the eastern sky. She looked toward the estate’s apple orchard several hundred yards to the south. She could just make out the bare branches of the trees against the gunmetal sky. She had to act fast. James might be the most exasperating man she’d ever met, but even he didn’t deserve to succumb to exposure this close to his own home. She patted his shoulder. “Hang on a second, James.”

  She scouted the woodpile until she found a collection of odd scraps, one of which looked long enough to serve as a walking stick for a man of his height. She tossed away the piece of wood he’d been using and placed the longer one in his gloved hand.

  “Just help me get on my feet,” he rasped. “Then I can—”

  “Shut up.” She’d reached the limit of her patience. “Save your king-of-the-jungle act for a more appreciative audience.”

  She crouched next to him and looped his right arm around her shoulder. Clutching his right hand, she braced her other arm behind his back and said a quick prayer to the patron saint of arrogant macho jerks. Slowly she straightened her legs, struggling to keep her balance on the ice. Helping him stand took every last ounce of her strength—he had to outweigh her by seventy pounds or more. Finally he was upright, leaning on her and the stick.

  His strong fingers clamped her hand as his face contorted in pain. She gave him a moment to catch his breath, then slowly began guiding him back along the ice-slick path. His body still shivered violently.

  “James, stop putting weight on that foot. You can lean on me. I’m stronger than I look.”

  She heard something like a growl in response. But he did as he was told, allowing her to take a little more of his weight. She felt the muscles of his back shift and bunch under her arm as he limped along the path.

  It seemed to take forever to reach the mansion’s side entrance, and by then she felt as if her back were breaking. Balancing him with one arm, she fumbled in her coat pocket for the key she’d taken off a hook in the mudroom, unlocked the door, and slipped the key back into her pocket.

  “Don’t sit yet,” she commanded, leading him through the mudroom and kitchen and down a corridor. “Didn’t I see a bedroom around here?”

  “Maid’s room.” He pointed to a door.

  They shuffled into the small room and an exhausted James sat heavily on the antique mahogany bed. He tossed his suede gloves onto the night table. Leah switched on the bedside lamp and flopped onto the nearby armchair to catch her breath.

  He didn’t speak—his expression remained stony. The ignominy of having a “conniving female” like her rescue him wasn’t likely to improve his temperament. She told herself she didn’t care.

  Rising, Leah shed her coat and gloves and crossed to the hearth, where she found logs and kindling already laid. Apparently every fireplace was kept in readiness. She opened the flue and started the fire, wanting to provide extra warmth for James as he’d done for her the night before.

  She turned and looked at him. He was as pale as death. “Time to get that boot off and have a look at your ankle.” She crossed the room and knelt by his right foot. “Ready?”

  He nodded curtly.

  As slowly and carefully as she could, she began pulling on his right boot. When his foot turned, his entire body snapped taut. His knuckles were white where he crushed the crocheted ecru bedspread in his long fingers.

  She deliberately avoided looking at his face, knowing intuitively that he wouldn’t want her to see how much the pain was getting to him. She tried to convince herself that after the unjustified accusations he’d treated her to, she should relish every moment of his misery. But watching him suffer was torture for her. All she wanted was to make it better.

  Knowing that pausing would only prolong the agony, she held her breath and kept pulling on the boot, gently but steadily, until it was finally off. Even through the thick woollen sock she could see how swollen his ankle was. He, too, had been holding his breath, and now he released it in a gusty sigh.

  “I can handle it now,” he said dismissively.

  She stood and treated him to a withering stare. “Fine. Handle it. Hop up and fetch yourself some ice, and an Ace bandage, and some aspirin. Maybe you’d like to go skiing while you’re at it.” He answered her with an expression of icy contempt. “I should let you handle it yourself,” she snapped, and stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind her and stalking off to the kitchen.

  Cupboard doors flew open, pots and pans whapped on countertops. Cooking had always been her relaxation therapy of choice. Better than Valium. Stieglitz regarded her curiously. “Cat, I don’t know how you put up with that man.”

  Leah put spaghetti water on to boil and started cooking some Italian sausages she found in the fridge. Thirty minutes later she loaded a tray with a mountain of pasta, salad, and garlic bread, as well as a bottle of Maker’s Mark and an ice-filled glass, an elastic bandage, a full ice bag, and a bottle of aspirin. When she reentered the maid’s room she saw that James had flopped onto his back on the bed, but otherwise he was exactly as she’d left him a half hour earlier, his feet on the floor, one boot on, one off.

  Pathetic.

  Stieglitz was lounging on his chest, breathing on his face.

  “Are you humble yet?” she asked.

  He stared at the ceiling. No cutting remark, no disdainful sneer. Gee, Leah thought, maybe he is humble. He sniffed the air with interest.

  “Spaghetti and sausages,” she informed him. His eyebrows shot up and his stomach grumbled. “And bourbon.” At last he turned to look at her, his ice blue eyes round. “I like it when you’re speechless,” she said, setting the tray on the night table.

  He sat up, and Stieglitz bounded off him with an indignant yowl. “You made this for me?”

  “You forgot the end of that sentence. It goes, ‘You made this for me even though I’m an arrogant, ungrateful clod who clearly doesn’t deserve it?’” It must have been her imagination. For an instant he looked almost sheepish. “Dig in,” she ordered.

  “I’ve got something stronger,” he said, indicating the aspirin bottle. “A prescription painkiller left over from the ankle break. It’s in the bathroom down the hall.”

  When she returned with the pill bottle, he was holding the plate, diving into the spaghetti. Watching him eat the food she’d prepared for him suffused her with a primal bliss she told herself was purely irrational. He took the prescription bottle and shook out one capsule, stared at it a moment, then shook out a second capsule and washed them down with a long pull from the whiskey bottle before she could stop him.

&nbs
p; “Whoa! Hold on there.” She tried unsuccessfully to wrench the bourbon out of his tenacious grasp. “That prescription’s a narcotic, James. You can’t go mixing this stuff with booze.”

  “Watch me.”

  She read the pill label. “And you’re supposed to take only one of these.”

  “I’m a big guy and this ankle hurts like a son of a— hurts a lot,” he said, upending the bourbon bottle once more.

  “So glad I brought a glass,” she muttered. “Just tell me where you keep the stomach pump.”

  Leah was the image of efficiency. She removed his other boot and his socks. His right ankle was alarmingly swollen around the bone and beginning to discolor. She helped him sit on the bed against some pillows, his bad leg elevated with more pillows. Finally she placed the towel-wrapped ice bag on the ankle. Stieglitz jumped back onto the bed and poked curiously at the cold contraption with his nose.

  She said, “Keep the ice on it for twenty minutes. Later I’ll wrap it with the bandage.”

  He was still digging into the meal, washing it down with swigs from the bourbon bottle. She sighed in resignation. At least he wasn’t getting loaded on an empty stomach.

  James stopped eating only long enough to snicker, “Looks like I got myself snowed in with Florence Nightingale.”

  Leah wondered how he’d look wearing that spaghetti. “Last year I went out with a med student,” she explained. “I helped him study.”

  He offered a glassy-eyed smirk as he lifted the bottle. “I’ll bet. Did you teach him all about anatomy?”

  And the bourbon, Leah thought. Yes, she was sure he’d look splendid wearing some of that Maker’s Mark. Better than she had, certainly. “Needless to say, I found our dates less than thrilling,” she continued, pausing for a beat, watching closely as he tilted the bottle back. “I dumped him when he got to the chapter on inflamed boils.”

  Bingo. A mouthful of bourbon exited via his nose. His eyes watered fiercely. It was true what they said, she thought with a silky smile. Timing is everything.

  “James, maybe you should change your poison of choice,” she said solicitously. “You seem to have trouble with bourbon.”

  He eyed her suspiciously as he blotted his sweater with a napkin. “Never used to.” He gave up on cleaning the sweater and pulled it off over his head, tossing it onto the floor. His undershirt followed.

  The low light from the bedside lamp and the fire played across his skin and the black hair on his chest, throwing the solid contours of his body into vivid relief, from his powerful shoulders to his lean waist. Leah knew just how soft that chest hair was. It had tickled her cheek as she’d fallen asleep in his arms the night before. Her eyes seemed to have a will of their own as they followed the furry trail south to where it narrowed and disappeared under the low waistband of his faded jeans.

  When his fingers began to unzip those jeans, exposing his underwear, she nearly jumped. “I’ll, uh, get rid of these.” She hurriedly snatched up the tray with his dirty dishes.

  She took her time in the kitchen, washing dishes and putting them away. When she returned, he was still trying to struggle out of his pants without involving the bad ankle. He flopped back against the pillows, exhausted, resigned, obviously still in pain and thoroughly inebriated.

  She tried to emulate Stieglitz’s air of feline detachment as she commandeered the task, easing the jeans over his hard thighs. He lifted his hips off the bed to help her, and she found her face inches from the front of his underwear, with its intriguingly generous contours.

  “Uh...tell me if I hurt you,” she said, fixing her gaze on his face.

  His mouth opened in a gigantic yawn. He looked preposterously relaxed. Only when she pulled the leg of his pants gingerly over his swollen ankle did he flinch. She replaced the ice bag and arranged the bedcovers over him. His glassy, half-closed eyes tracked her movements.

  He cleared his throat and spoke carefully, but his words were slurred all the same. “You don’t have to do all this.”

  “I know,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You can handle it.”

  “No, I mean...I ’preciate it, Leah.”

  Momentarily speechless, she shrugged and replied lightly, “You’d have done the same for me.” After a moment she added, “Thank you for last night. You know—when I had that nightmare.”

  At last a smile teased the corners of his wide mouth. “What a pair we make. Reduced to quivering helplessness by bad dreams and bunny rabbits.”

  She sat on the bed. “If I have a nightmare about a bunny rabbit tonight, it’ll probably send me right over the edge.”

  He took another pull on the bottle of bourbon, nearly spilling it as he brought it unsteadily to his mouth.

  “James, I wish you’d slow down with that stuff.”

  He appeared not to have heard her. He clutched the bottle tighter and stared into the popping fire. “I used to have nightmares.”

  “What?”

  “When I was a kid.”

  “What were they about?” she asked.

  “My father.”

  Her heart stuttered painfully. “Why did you have nightmares about your father?”

  His drowsy expression hardened in bitter remembrance. His tone was fierce and unforgiving. “’Cause the man was a sadistic bastard and I was scared to death of him.”

  Leah didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t expected her intensely private half brother to open up like this, and she had no doubt the pills and whiskey were responsible. She felt ashamed, as if she were listening in on a private conversation. “James, you don’t have to—”

  “Every day I thank God the son of a bitch wasn’t my real father.”

  Chapter Six

  Time stood still, the only sound that of the blood rushing in Leah’s ears. She knew she was breathing, yet somehow she couldn’t seem to get enough air. When she finally found her voice, she didn’t recognize it as her own.

  “What—what do you mean?”

  James didn’t move or speak, lost in his own private hell of remembrance.

  Not my real father...

  She cleared her throat and controlled her voice with an effort. “You were adopted?”

  He stirred, turned to look at her, and something in his face subtly changed as his eyes swept over her and his surroundings. She saw caution—a pulling back into himself, as if he’d already said too much. That door closing again. She wanted to scream her frustration.

  Suddenly he appeared almost sober. “Yes,” he said hoarsely.

  He was adopted! She and James weren’t related. The realization struck her with the force of a thunderbolt.

  In a way, it had been simpler when she thought he was her brother. She felt the unconscious shield she’d erected within herself dissolve, as if her mind were now permitting her to see him as a man—and to want what she saw.

  Questions bombarded her mind, but this wasn’t the time to pursue the issue. Leah needed time to come to grips with this latest development, and James’s internal shields were firmly in place. She lifted the blankets at the foot of the bed and removed the ice bag. His ankle was turning dark. She carefully wrapped the elastic bandage around it, glad to see that the pills and whiskey seemed to have helped control the pain. Then she gently wrested the bourbon bottle from his sleepy grasp, urged him to lie flat, and pulled the covers up to his shoulders.

  Even as she bent and brushed his hair off his face, she chided herself for the protective feelings she was experiencing—and for those other feelings, too, if she was being honest with herself.

  His injury may have caused a temporary truce, but she knew his opinion of her hadn’t changed. He still despised her and suspected her motives for being in his home. How much more would he hate her if he knew she was the flesh-and-blood daughter of his detested adoptive father?

  She turned out the light. “Go to sleep, James. I’ll be here if you need anything.” His eyes drifted shut and he was asleep within seconds.

  She had no choice but to s
pend the night with him. He could wake up at any time, disoriented and in pain. She’d never hear him if she were upstairs—and if she couldn’t hear him, she’d never relax enough to get any sleep herself.

  She spent the evening in the armchair near his bed, reading—he never stirred—then went upstairs and changed into one of his long flannel shirts, which came down nearly to her knees. Back in the maid’s room, Leah slowly and carefully slipped under the covers next to James. The heat of his body drew her like a magnet, but she forced herself to curl up on her side of the bed and shiver until the sheets warmed.

  In the dim light from the fireplace she watched his sleeping profile, the first opportunity she’d had to stare at him unhindered. The steep Roman nose and strong lines of his face gave him a regal appearance. She leaned over and touched her lips to his, softly, savoring his warmth, his taste, the feel of his breath mingling with hers. Then she scooted back to her side and commanded herself to go to sleep.

  *

  Leah felt her mind stirring to wakefulness, and resisted. Not yet...She was happy where she was, floating in a dream state of sensual abandon where the warmth and weight of flesh on flesh pressed down on her. Exploring hands...hungry lips...the sinuous movement of a warm, hard body. Her hips lifted, reaching, and were answered with a pressure that made her sigh deeply and open her legs.

  No...not yet. Don’t take this away just yet.

  A sharp sound woke her—her own gasp. Leah’s nipple burned with a piercingly erotic sensation. Even as she arched into the source of that sensation, her mind reeled with sudden wakefulness and the stunning realization of what was happening. James was on top of her, his fingers at her breast, his mouth at her throat. His body moved against hers, languidly, sensually.

  She was paralyzed with shock for a long moment until his mouth claimed hers, his long fingers splayed on her cheek. He tasted of bourbon, a pleasant, smoky taste. Though she could see in the near darkness that his eyes were half-open, she knew from his sightless expression, directed inward, that he wasn’t conscious of his actions.