By accident more than attention, she found herself standing at the west window at the same time he was. The lodge was shadowed in that corner, firelight blocked from their view, but the darkness enabled them to see clearly outside. The medieval table was right there, with a dozen chairs around it, but neither seemed ready to sit. They both couldn’t seem to stop looking out at the beauty and silence of the landscape.
He reached over to cuff her close to him, but it wasn’t a lover’s invitation, more just…affection, she thought. “Afraid our problems aren’t over just because the storm is, Doc. Can’t imagine that we’ll have power for days. No way to get out of here yet. Tomorrow morning, I’ll start splitting logs for more firewood.”
She hadn’t planned on getting out for several more days, anyway. But she suspected both of them would suffer cabin fever if trapped inside forever. She wondered if they’d make love again. He’d touched her, been touching her, as protectively as a lover, but his gaze had turned distant, his mood quiet. She didn’t know what that meant…but it seemed obvious that once they realized what the day was, their thoughts had turned inward.
“What did you do when you were a kid at Christmas?” she asked.
He leaned back against the window. “Had heaps of relatives over. There was always lots of noise, lots of food, lots of kids running around. When the women were getting serious about holiday doings, they’d kick out all the kids and guys to cross-country ski. When we got back, there’d be piles of presents under the tree. Families packed in together, stayed overnight usually. The kids would be three in a bed, the floor littered with sleeping bags.”
“Sounds like enormous fun.”
“Yup. Great fun, great family. Things started changing over time, of course. By the time the parents retired, the extended family seemed to be scattered all over the place. Everyone who can still gets together.” He hesitated. “Initially, when I got married, that was a serious part of the dream for me. I wanted to create more family like that. Cousins and brothers and sisters close enough to play together. Heaps of noise. Always a baby crying, a baby being rocked. Always so much food the table could hardly hold it all.”
Emilie felt a thick lump in her throat, thinking again of all the repercussions of his ex-wife’s betrayal. The woman had not only destroyed a marriage, but a whole dream of a life—for what, just some selfish affair with another guy? How easy it was for her, to go out and create her brand of Christmas and family…but she’d left Rick as shrapnel.
“How about you?” he asked gruffly. “How was the holiday at your house?”
She didn’t mind answering, but she had to move, couldn’t just stand idle to talk. Not about this. “Right now, at this very moment, my dad and uncle will both be asleep in their chairs, probably with Jimmy Stewart on the tube. Christmas Eve, my brothers’ and uncle’s family will all have come over. They’d open the family presents, do the church thing. But Christmas morning, the single people would all congregate at my dad’s house…my dad and uncle are both widowers, and I’m not married, nor is my one older brother….”
She ambled past the kitchen, with Rick ambling beside her, stopping to grab a cookie from the counter. She aimed back toward the warmth of the fireplace. “My dad will have made breakfast this morning. He’s not a cook, but he has one dish he makes. They’re a special kind of crepe, made with rum. They’re so rich, they’re to die for. We would have had an early-afternoon dinner—pretty much leftovers from the day before. Dad’s always had it catered. We could have any from five to twenty at the table, depending on everyone’s schedules. But it would be an awfully rare Christmas we made it through both days without one of us being called to the hospital.”
“You’re missing it,” he said.
She perched on the end of a couch, but as soon as he sat down, he scooped her next to him. His warmth, his strength, made her aware how tense she’d suddenly become. “Your traditions sound more fun than mine…but I also suspect everybody tends to remember the funny goofs rather than the perfect holidays. I remember one Christmas dinner where the turkey slid off the plate. Another, where all the food was served, and four of us got paged at once to head for the hospital. And another one, when we sat down and realized my oldest brother was AWOL. We found him outside, a little too much scotch before dinner, I suspect, lying in the snow making snow angels and singing. Oh, he was in such disgrace with my dad.”
“Sounds like your family are ‘good people.’”
“So do yours.”
He leaned his head back, slouching down the same way she was, using the coffee table for a footrest. “But you’re here, instead of with your family.”
She closed her eyes. “I had all my presents for everyone under the tree before I left. They know I love them. Know I’ll miss them. But if I were there…I’d be hearing an endless round of heavy-duty advice. I’ve heard it all before. I have to get back in the saddle. When you’re a doctor, you have to deal with life and death. You can’t always win those battles. It’s not on you. You still do what you can. And you’ve been moping enough.”
“From everyone?”
She nodded. “I’ve already heard the same thing, over and over. Christmas would have amounted to a lynching with the whole group ganging up on me. I’m happy not to be there. Happy to have made the choice to come here, blizzard or no blizzard. I needed the time. That’s no crime, darn it.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“And I found you. Even if it’s only for a few days,” she said, “I found you.”
Abruptly she twisted in his arms, hooked an arm around his neck, and kissed him. His mouth was familiar now, the taste and texture, the mesh and melt he created for her and with her, and her eyes were already closed. She didn’t want to talk about herself anymore, was tired to bits of thinking about her life, herself, her reality right then.
She wanted her lover.
She wanted the only man who’d ever spun her out of herself, who gave as aggressively as he took, who made her forget who she was and everything she didn’t want to be. With him, when his arms were around her, she was nothing more, nothing less, than a woman in love.
Whether this was the kind of love that lasted…she didn’t give a damn.
Her mouth took his. Her arms enfolded his. Her body took him in. That was all she knew, all she wanted to know.
CHAPTER FIVE
EMILIE WOKE UP IN THE MIDDLE of the night to a familiar dream. It wasn’t the kind of nightmare that made her shake, but the opposite. It was the kind of nightmare that made her ache.
It was just that little boy’s face in her head. The so-long eyelashes. The two untamable tufts of hair, boyish cowlicks. The pinched fear in his face when she’d first walked in. The trusting smile she’d worked so hard to win from him before surgery…now gone. The light in his eyes…gone.
The loss of that child…aching in her heart like an insidious piranha.
Rick’s voice came from the darkness. “Try talking about it.”
She didn’t know she’d wakened him. Didn’t remember exactly how they’d gotten from the couch to their makeshift bed by the fire. She remembered making love—exquisitely well—but now she seemed to be spooned against him, her back to his chest, his arm around her side. Maybe because she wasn’t looking at him, maybe because it was the darkest time of the night and she was exhausted from wrestling the problem on her own, she started to spill.
He responded in a deep, sleepy voice, and offered her all the empathy she could conceivably want. “Why should you?” He echoed her own words. “Why should you feel you have to take on the responsibility of life and death?”
“Exactly. I’m not God. I never wanted to be God.”
“You could make a mistake. Everyone does. Nobody can avoid making an occasional mistake, but when you do it, someone could die. Not this kid. He wasn’t your fault, of course. But someone else. And then that mistake would be on your conscience forever.”
“Yes. Exactly. You understand.” It was such an
enormous relief, to have someone listen to her, someone agree with her.
“Someone else can take that responsibility. Why should it be you? There are lots of other doctors. Lots of people who love that power over life and death. And there are lots of people who really don’t give that much of a damn, because they just don’t feel things that deeply. They won’t go through what you’ve been going through.”
She frowned. “Exactly,” she said again, but somehow not as strongly.
“The job is probably done better by someone who doesn’t care. They don’t get hurt that way.”
Abruptly she shifted in his arms. It was too dark to see his face clearly, but his eyes met hers, clear and calm. He’d sounded so sympathetic. He looked so sympathetic. But now she got it. He was being manipulative, saying between the lines that she had to go back to work—because she did care. Because she did hurt.
“Hey,” she said, “I thought you were on my side.”
“I am. Aren’t I saying the right things?”
She narrowed her eyes. “I don’t think I love you anymore.”
“I didn’t know you loved me before this.” He sounded more amused than hurt by that revelation.
“Well, I did. I was wildly in love with you yesterday. Wildly in love, stupidly in love, totally in love for the first time. But no more. You threw that away. So don’t try being smarter than me ever again.”
“Did I say I was smarter than you?”
Under the covers, she poked his bare chest. “And another thing. You’re up here for the same reason I am, cookie. Because you don’t want to get hurt again. Pretty idiotic, for someone of your talents and skills and experience, to play out your life as a hermit.”
“I’ll be darned. Did I ask for your opinion?”
“Yeah, well, I probably wouldn’t have given it, if we hadn’t made love. You’re an extraordinary lover. How can you think it’s a good idea to live alone forever, the rest of your life, without sex? When you’re so fabulous at it?”
“Was that a slap or a compliment?”
“It was a slap, you jerk. Can’t you tell when you’re being insulted?”
“Apparently not with you.”
“And another thing—”
He shuddered. “Oh, God. Not that. Anything but that. Every time a woman says ‘and another thing’…nothing ever follows that a guy wants to hear.”
Even though he retucked the covers around her neck, she poked him in the chest again. “And another thing,” she said firmly. “I don’t know why she cheated, but it’s not on you. It’s nothing you failed to do or did.”
His voice dropped the teasing tone. “You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do.”
“You couldn’t possibly know that.” He was starting to sound just a wee bit outraged.
She sighed. “She was shallow. And stupid.”
“For Pete’s sake. You don’t know that at all.”
“Yes, I do. A bright woman would never leave a great guy because of a momentary click for another man. First off, she wouldn’t open that door. And second off, she’d fight for what she had. Love. A good man. The vows and commitment she made. And third off, if she was that unhappy with you, then she should have gotten out of the relationship, before cheating. Because that’s ethics.”
“And you think you’re the final word on this, because you’ve had so much experience with relationships?”
“Oh, quit giving me a hard time. You know what I’m saying is true. She hurt you. Maybe it was such a bad hurt that you’ll never forget it. But if you think her cheating is somehow your fault, that’s just dumb. She had a major fault line in her ethics. In her values. Frankly, you can do better.”
“Is it because we had sex that you suddenly decided I needed this major lecture on stuff that’s none of your business?”
“We didn’t have sex. We made love,” she corrected him.
“Damn right we did.” He loomed over her. “And we’d better do it again, right now and fast. Before this fight goes to a place that neither of us wants to travel.”
“We shouldn’t fight on Christmas,” she agreed, even as she was reaching for him.
“How about if we don’t fight at all. We may not get out of here for a couple of days…but that’s not much time left.”
She hadn’t forgotten. The real world was waiting for her out there—her world. She had decisions that had to be made, a career to decide on, a life to put back together. This was just a short oasis of time. That was all it was, all it could be.
Suddenly she was kissing him for all she was worth. She wasn’t denying or evading. She was just in an uninhibited hustle to be with him, to cleave, to shore up memories. Who knew if love that sprang up this fast could possibly last? But the bond was real. Her connection to him, with him, was potent and wonderful and infuriatingly real. In her heart, she knew irrevocably that she’d never feel this way about anyone else.
WHEN RICK WOKE THE NEXT morning, she was curled around him like a petal on a rose, soft and sweet—and completely unnerving. Emilie was unlike him in every way, had a life that couldn’t possibly mesh with his. Yet he woke up, thinking of stuff he wanted to tell her about. Thinking he already wanted to make love with her again. Thinking that he was already so attached that separating was going to feel like cutting off a limb.
He didn’t trust women. How had he forgotten that so fast?
He edged out of the covers, tried to quietly do the obvious first round of activities—a fast shower, feeding the fire, checking the generator. He figured she’d be awake by then, but she was curled up under all those blankets, just the tip of her blond head showing.
Didn’t look as though she was missing him.
He started suiting up. The wood supply had gotten them through so far, but it was a good thing the storm had quit, because he could get out to the woodshed, start splitting more. He wasn’t positive how much physical exertion the shoulder burn could take, but he knew darn well his brain needed the exercise.
Hard work was always a good way to kick some sense into a man. He pulled on gloves, checked on her one last time.
She was still sleeping. Sound as a baby. Clearly didn’t miss him.
He stepped out, felt the slap of icy air and told himself it felt good. A slap upside the head was exactly what he deserved. Trudging the distance to the shed took all the wind out of his sails—it was only fourteen feet off the back door, but the snow was deep and heavy.
Inside the dim shed, at least he was out of the wind. Cords of wood were already neatly stacked, but he wasn’t about to touch that. No one in this neck of the woods took advantage of shelter without leaving the place stocked as he found it. A few cords in back were clearly still aging, too wet, would smoke if they were used too soon. He prowled around until he found what he wanted—some good seasoned wood and a sharp axe. He left the door open for light, yanked off his hat, took off the top parka layer, and started in.
A half hour passed. Then an hour and more. By then, he was starving for breakfast, starving for Emilie, and he’d split three-quarters of a cord.
When he stood up and wiped his brow, his heart slammed to a stop. He smelled something dark and ripe even before he turned around and saw the big, hulking shadow blocking the shed doorway.
It wasn’t the first time he’d seen a brown bear. Alaska was their stomping grounds, after all, not humans’. Rick loved the big beasts, had never done anything to invite bear trouble, never had trouble with one. Before.
The big guy didn’t look good. His cinnamon-brown fur was ashy; his body too lean. Standing up, he stretched maybe nine feet. He’d probably been sleeping most of the last month, but brown bears didn’t hibernate all winter. When they did wake up, it was because they were hungry. If the bear had been trapped for the whole last week of storm, he wouldn’t have had a chance to get out and find food.
He had that look.
Hungry.
Angry-hungry.
Rick told his heart to quit
slamming, because he had to think—damn quick and damn well. The bear blocked the only exit to the shed.
He had no way out. He had the axe, so he wasn’t completely without a weapon. But the bear spotted the glint from the axe, and suddenly let out a roar worthy of Tarzan.
Maybe Rick had the axe, but fear shot through his pulse faster than bullets. This wasn’t just a bad situation. It was downright ugly.
EMILIE WASN’T SURE WHAT woke her—but she lurched to a sitting position from a dead sleep. She thought for a second a patient was in trouble—a ridiculous thought, of course—but she’d always had a strange sixth sense, sometimes knowing when a patient was in trouble before there was an ounce of evidence to make her worry.
Obviously that wasn’t the issue here. The only rotten-wrong thing was obvious. Rick was gone.
Not just gone from the pillow next to her. There was an emptiness in the place, a lack of sound and life. A lack of him.
She pushed off the covers. It didn’t take two minutes to know he was outside—his parka and winter gear were gone. So he was cutting wood, she guessed. Maybe she wasn’t up to wielding an axe, but she could help haul in the firewood.
She hit the bathroom, cleaned up, brushed up and started heaping on fresh layers—silk long underwear, flannel pants, thick socks, a tech shirt, then a wool sweater layer. In principle, she wanted coffee and a hot breakfast, couldn’t think of a single reason why she should charge outside in that blistering cold. Their making love had been terrific, but she hadn’t forgotten their fight before that.
It hadn’t been a clean fight. It’d been a go-for-the-sore-spots fight. He’d said what she didn’t want to hear. She’d told him some home truths he definitely didn’t want to listen to.
She yanked on boots, thinking it was crazy. She was crazy. Because she’d rather be fighting with him—even if it meant being downright miserable—than not be with him. Even for a second.
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