Baby, It's Cold Outside (4 page)

His first step outside delivered both magic and menace. Nothing more beautiful than an Alaskan winter, no question. But you couldn’t breathe ice, and no amount of clothing totally protected from the cold. Rick knew he couldn’t last long, but a couple things had to be done.

The first was making sure he had access to the
woodshed—which didn’t take more than shoveling out the door under the overhang. That only took a few minutes, but the second problem—the biggest priority—was the lodge roof on the west side.

The lodge had been built right, with a high slant to the roof, and material that reflected sun. But this particular storm had been unusual, started up after a rare stretch of warmish temperatures. So the first layer on the roof was ice. Thick ice. Heavy ice. Followed by at least three, maybe four feet of snow on top of that.

It was the overall weight that worried him.

If the blizzard were over, it probably wouldn’t matter—but it wasn’t over, and there was no guessing how much more weight the roof could take. He looked at the massive job, shook his head, doubted he could make a dent before the next pounding blast of storm hit—assuming the cold didn’t wipe him out first. But he had to try, at least get as far as he could.

Time passed. Who knew how much? He wasn’t an idiot, kept a sharp eye on the sky, stayed conscious of how cold he was getting. It was the sudden sound of a voice that distracted him.

“What on earth are you
doing?
”

He turned around, looked down, and for the first time in a blue moon wanted to let loose a plain old silly belly laugh. Emilie had the sense to search for her dad’s winter gear, rather than wear her own city-girl jacket, but damn, she looked like a robot. Her head was covered with an ear-flapping fur cap. Both her parka and leggings were way too long. Her mittens would have fit a mountain man, and the boots were almost bigger than she was.
When she tried to walk, she resembled the abominable snowman.

She said something else, but it was hard to understand, because her mouth was completely covered by a woolen muffler.

“Yeah,” he said, “I’m really shoveling the roof.”

She pushed down the scarf. “Just tell me straight, Hunter. Did you start out the morning
drinking?
”

“Don’t I wish.” Damn. She made him want to laugh all over again. “Head back inside the house, Doc. You don’t need to be out here.”

“That’s what I thought, too. But now I realize you’ve turned into a complete lunatic on me, I can hardly leave you out here alone.”

He got serious fast. “Emilie, this is the deal. We got a ton of snow, too much snow, from one direction. I was afraid the roof could cave under the weight. I just want to shovel off the first layers. We’d be okay, except that there’s even more snow coming. The roof’s in good shape, it’s just that this blizzard is in the humdinger class.”

She said something. He couldn’t understand her, so she shifted the scarf again. “My roof. My problem, too. Not just yours.”

“You can’t do this. It’s all right. Just go back inside.”

He should have known better than to suggest she couldn’t do something. Might as well have waved a red flag in front of a bull.

She started toward him, but even to take a few steps, she had to extend her arms for balance, like a child stuffed in a snowsuit. In spite of himself, in spite of
aching arms and a biting-hurt shoulder and exhaustion starting to beat at him, he sat down in a heap of snow and laughed.

“Erl!”
she said through the scarf.

“I’m not making fun of you, I swear. I appreciate your willingness to help, honest to Pete, but there’s no way you could hold a shovel, much less navigate with one.”

She responded with more garbled swearwords—or the equivalent of swearwords. Her attitude was clear enough, even if she couldn’t be clearly understood. At least she didn’t attempt to shovel. She just scrambled up the mountain of snow to the roof, and started scooping up heaps of snow with her mittens.

He was going to object again…but then didn’t. She crawled up with the agility of a monkey, in spite of all her oversize clothes, and managed to climb higher than he had or could. He’d been using a shovel, haphazardly loosening any snow he could, heaving it off the roof, just hoping to make a difference before the next storm hit. Her method of attack showed her doctor personality, all fastidious perfection. She’d scoop off snow, but then tidy it all up, make each section look neat and even.

They tangoed. It didn’t matter how or who was doing what. They were making a difference.

Only then he heard it. The wind waking up. The first sound started out like an ogre’s innocent yawn, but it was enough to snap his head up immediately. He looked back, saw the ominous black sky coming toward them like a tsunami.

“
Emilie!
That’s enough. We’re going back in the house.
Now
.”

But she wasn’t done. She wanted her part of the roof cleaned off just so, no uneven ends or heaps left hanging. She was doing her damnedest to make scalpel-straight edges, wanting everything exactly right.

He heard it again. The ogre waking up. For a few more seconds, there was complete silence, but then out of nowhere came a slow, slow, slow roar that built and built….

“Emilie.” He scooched up, grabbed her arm. “
Now
. In the house.
Now
.”

“But I’m almost—”

The snow hit like the slam of a door—fierce, hard, sharp. That fast, he couldn’t breathe, literally couldn’t take air that cold into his lungs. Even trying to move a few feet, he got sick-headed, dizzy, made tougher because of needing to pull Emilie with him.

She hadn’t initially understood—but she did now.

Her instinct seemed to be to curl up in a ball.

Anyone’s instinct would be the same. The slug of wind, the slap of snow, the punch of icy air could have beat up a prizefighter. Within seconds, visibility changed to a complete whiteout and the temperature dropped. Although he knew they were still on the roof, he couldn’t actually see any part of the lodge—or anything else. Everything was a blinding, slashing white.

Fear could be paralyzing, Rick knew. But the worst threat right then was the debilitating cold. He wasn’t certain how long it took to move them two feet. Then three.

He was losing sensation in his hands and feet, but he was far more worried about Emilie. She’d swaddled up good, but in clothes too big for her, snow and cold could
easily have sneaked under the layers. Even minutes mattered, but he was literally blind, groping through nothing but white to find purchase, balance, something, anything solid that he could recognize.

Finally he felt the drop—they both tumbled off the roof. He pulled Emilie up and glued her against his side.

He found the door, battled with it. It took forever—
forever
—for him to get the damned thing open. He pushed her inside first, not meaning to be rough, but out of breath and out of strength both. Then he shut out the wind, secured the door and slumped against it, heaving in a lungful of oxygen.

He couldn’t move. Not for a while yet. When he realized how hard he was shaking, he mentally swore at himself for allowing Emilie to stay out so long. He’d known the storm was picking up again. Known she was an Alaska rookie, no matter how many times she’d stayed at the family lodge. She hadn’t lived here. Didn’t know danger or blizzards.

As soon as he got some wind back, he started peeling off gloves, then boots. His snowsuit was crusted with heavy ice and snow, making it harder and heavier to negotiate. He seemed to be moving slower than a slug. His hands were just too frozen, but the stinging tingles meant there was no real harm; he was getting his circulation back. Even his eyebrows seemed to be shedding snow, which would probably tickle his sense of humor. Later.

Right then, as soon as he regained his mobility—and his senses—he tracked down his doc. He found her on the floor in the big room, crawling on all fours toward the fireplace, and almost there, but still in all her gear.

“Hey. You okay?”

“No,” she said.

For a man who hadn’t laughed since he could remember, she seemed to provoke him into smiling in spite of himself. She was talking. So she was all right.

She stopped in her tracks when he hunched down beside her.

“I’m too cold to walk, too cold to talk. Too cold to think,” she said.

“I know.”

“I changed my mind about coming to Alaska for Christmas.”

“I know.”

“It was fun. On the roof. For a while.”

“Shh,” he said. The silly hat with the flapping fur ears, he threw a distance. Slowly, then, he started peeling off the layers, the mittens past frozen fingers, the scarf so stiff it didn’t want to bend.

“Don’t take anything off! I’m freezing now!”

“Shh. We’ll get you warm.” The boots didn’t want to tug off. He tugged them. Then the first layer of socks, then the second. It was bare feet and bare fingers that were the most endangered. The extremities. Toes. Fingers. Nose. Ears.

She was clearly shiver-cold. White-cold. Miserable-cold. But there was color slowly shooting back to her skin. He couldn’t move fast, not when his own fingers still felt as if each were five inches thick. And he was too damned worried to smile yet, but by the time he’d tugged off the peripheral gear, she’d crashed on the hearth rug like an immobile zombie. He tugged off the giant-man snow pants, the parka.

“Are you getting feeling back in your hands and feet?”

“More feeling than I ever wanted to.”

“Is there any body part you can’t feel?”

“My nose.”

He loomed over her, checked out the pink nose. Her eyes shone softly in the firelight, and her hair was a glistening tousle around her face. “Rick?”

Her voice was still thicker than molasses.

“Don’t worry about talking. You’ll feel stronger in a bit. Just go with it. Rest.”

“It’s just…I didn’t know. That blizzard could kill us.”

He sobered. “But it’s not going to.”

“We could die.”

“But we’re not going to.”

“I’ve always thought of rough weather as…a nuisance. A serious nuisance sometimes, but nothing more than that. It never occurred to me to be afraid before. But that storm, Rick. That blizzard. It’s alive.”

E
MILIE COULDN’T GET OVER IT
—how fast the storm had come back. How completely blinded they’d been by snow and wind; how they’d been laughing at the impossible job of shoveling the roof—and yeah, it had been physically taxing and freezing, but they’d still had fun. She’d been laughing, the way she hadn’t laughed in weeks. Then…

That sudden paralyzing cold.

The wind screaming in her ears.

The fear so huge that she couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe.

“It was like a demon, that wind. It sounded as if it were alive, personally attacking us….” Abruptly Emilie realized that she was the only one talking. She still didn’t have the strength of a pansy. When Rick started peeling off her wet, heavy outer clothes, she’d just let him.

It really hurt when he first pulled off boots and socks, and her bare feet suddenly started to get sensation back. Her nose, cheeks and chin were all stingingly coming back to life again, too. As Rick yanked off her dad’s old snow pants, then unzipped her ice-crusted parka…she couldn’t have stopped him, didn’t want to.

He was shedding her clothes.

She was still shedding her fear.

Nothing suddenly changed, exactly. She just seemed to notice a tiny detail. All her outer layers had now been peeled off, and yet he was still shedding her clothes.

Although she’d been looking at Rick the whole time they’d been talking…now she quietly, carefully, really looked at him. The firelight crackled beside them, shimmery, warm, golden. His eyes had that same golden warmth, focused intensely on her face.

Maybe he wasn’t talking, but his hands were masterfully communicating. His fingers unfastened the last button on her cardigan, then peeled off the sweater as carefully and competently as he’d gotten rid of her jacket and scarf. Only this wasn’t an outer layer. This was a lot closer to her bare skin. To her bare heartbeat.

Her lips parted. She thought she was going to say something else about the weather, but somehow disasters like blizzards and near dying of cold now seemed insignificant.

His hands reaching for the snap of her corduroy pants…now that was significant.

She felt danger of an entirely new kind.

So much for the silly blizzard. So much for the life-altering decisions facing her. So much for everything else.

Her heart stopped, then started again, beating wildly fast, worried fast. It was the look in his eyes. The slow, steady, intense look. She could stop him; she knew it absolutely.

But he wasn’t going to stop unless she pulled the halt card.

A log fell in the grate, shooting stars and sparks against the screen. The constant growl of the generator echoed in the distance. Yet nothing seemed to distract her from the look in his eyes, the expression on his face.

Moments later, her shirt seemed to have disappeared. Her pants seemed to have formed a heap under the coffee table, another magical impossibility. It was perfectly obvious to Emilie that this wasn’t really happening. In real life, she never slept around casually, never slept with strangers, couldn’t be doing it now. She barely knew this man…but she knew enough to believe there was about zero chance they’d ever meet again once the blizzard was over.

She thought, maybe he was bored.

She looked in those deep, intense eyes, and shivered. Nope, he wasn’t bored.

She thought, who knew he’d even been attracted to her?

But she looked again, at the hard-boned hunger in his expression, and swallowed. She’d known. She’d felt it. It just never occurred to her that either of them would conceivably do anything about it.

When he finished stripping her down, he stretched next to her, balancing on an elbow, and lifted a hand to her face. A fingertip whisked a strand of hair from her forehead, then whispered across her chin. His hands were rough, yet somehow his touch and tenderness made her feel softer than satin.

“Still afraid of the blizzard?” he asked.

“No.”

“Still cold?”

Seconds before, she had been. Now, she felt as if a
furnace of heat was licking up her veins, igniting crazy thoughts in her head.

She knew what he was inviting. Didn’t care. The more she looked in those eyes, the more she felt the sneaky intoxication of temptation. Chopping thoughts kept zooming through her mind. The stupid man, alone up here in this wilderness. Wounded from the inside out. Letting one woman’s betrayal isolate him from all life’s choices.

And he wasn’t the only stupid one.

She’d strived to meet everyone’s expectations for as long as she could remember, always done what she had to do, let others define what was right and wrong, define who she was.

But right now, this second, held all the promise of possibilities. This second…this could be for her. This man could be for her. This moment could be totally for her.

And without her even knowing it, without ever saying a word aloud, a decision was suddenly made. She leaned over, closed her eyes and kissed him.

His lips were firm, thin, yielding. She tasted recklessness, the silk of risk, and went back for more.

He didn’t need any further invitation. His fingers sieved through her hair, anchoring her for a second kiss, a deeper, darker kiss involving tongues and teeth. She sank back. Her hands chased up his arms, careful of his shoulder, but needing to touch, to stroke, to experience the feel of him.

He responded like lightning to dry tinder. He’d seemed so patient before, so clearly willing to let her make the decision, no push, no pressure. Now…it seemed as if he
were a powder keg of pressure, had been storing up an arsenal of emotion and need and hunger for months.

He tugged off her long-sleeved silk tee and found her mouth again before the shirt was even over her head. Fingers fumbled at her cinnamon-colored lace bra, seeking the hooks in back…finding the hooks in front. There was a moment’s laughter…and then another chuckle, when his bare foot brushed hers and she let out a short shriek—his toes were still cold. Ice cold.

Those cold feet of his inspired her to warm him up, the way he’d warmed her. She rubbed, tugged, smoothed. Used the heels of her hands. Her mouth. Her breasts and abdomen. And while she explored sensations on him, with him, she stealthily went after his clothes.

He’d started out with more layers on than she had—sweater, shirt, then a tech top beneath that. And his pants didn’t want to come off those long, lean legs. He was such an alien species, so different from the manicured city men she knew. He was all calluses and hard edges, all muscle and brawn. In so many ways he struck her as a pirate, a stealer of virtue and senses, a man who pillaged a woman’s common sense, who took and took and gave her back…

Everything.

At one point, they both seemed to rear back, gasping for breath. He stared at her as if trying to comprehend where all the fire was coming from…. Her? Him? Whatever the source, they seemed to be compounding it with every touch, every sound, every taste. By the time she had him completely naked, his skin had been sheened by the fire, gold and damp.

And she wasn’t waiting any longer. Her heart seemed
to think she’d waited her whole life for this, for the chance to experience making love with no pretenses, no agenda, no worrisome expectations. She knew him somehow. He wasn’t a friend or a neighbor or a medical community person or any of the other people she saw every day of her life.

But she knew Rick in some unexpected basic, primal way. His heart—she sensed how to reach it. His emotions—she sensed how to touch them. His naked vulnerability—and yeah, they were both naked by then. It was more than bare skin against bare skin. It was her mouth, confessing loneliness and need. It was his hands, expressing tenderness and wonder. It was both of them, coming together in fear and fire, not alone for the first time in so, so long….

Emilie realized, for herself, that it was the first time in forever.

R
ICK FELT AS SAPPED AS
a beached whale. He’d yanked a cover over her. Got up, because he had to, couldn’t let the fire go down…but after feeding the monster fresh logs, he sank back against her as if he couldn’t hold himself up a second longer.

Her eyes were closed. He thought she was napping. She
should
need a week of solid rest after all the energy she’d just vented, luxuriously, on him. His gaze roamed her face, the tangle of hair, the golden shoulder in the firelight. Where had all that passion come from? Who’d have guessed so much explosive power could be contained in such a compact little body?

Abruptly he realized she was awake. Her eyes were
sleepily looking right back at him. “Pretty serious look on your face, fella,” she murmured.

“Just trying to figure it. How the two of us could have moved heaven and earth, yet if we had that kind of power, how come we haven’t been able to shut down the blizzard?”

A shy smile turned into a chuckle and made her face softly radiant. “I was hoping I wasn’t the only one who heard the earth move.”

“Oh, no. You weren’t alone.” He wanted to see that radiant smile again, couldn’t believe how it transformed her from a damned pretty woman into…breathtaking. It seemed a measure of how unhappy she’d been, how long since she’d just let loose a natural, simple, easy smile. “I told you I tended to be suspicious of women, didn’t I?”

“You did,” she affirmed.

“And I told you I’d kind of turned into a…well, basically a misogynist.”

“You definitely implied you were allergic to women these days, yes.” She lifted a hand, knuckled his scrubby cheek. “Listen. If you go around hating women like this, I’m surprised you haven’t collected a harem over at your place.”

Darn woman warmed his heart. Nobody warmed his heart. His heart had atrophied into stone a long time ago. Or so he’d thought. “Hey.”

“Uh-oh. That sounded like a serious ‘hey.’”

“It was.” He clutched in a breath. “I didn’t plan this, I swear, Emilie.”

“I doubt either of us dreamed there was any possibility of this happening,” she agreed.

“The point is—I didn’t use anything. I didn’t have anything on me.”

Her expression turned pensive. “I’m on the pill. Not because I’ve been sexually active or because there’s anyone in my life right now. But because I was raised to be the Ultra Girl Scout.”

“Always prepared.”

“That’s the theory. But I can’t say I was remotely prepared…for you.”

Silence seemed to fall. The fire, the generator, the storm—the same sources of background din were just as prevalent…yet somehow all he heard at that moment was the intense, intimate silence between them.

“Are you going to regret this?” he asked her.

“Never. I will
never
regret this,” she said fiercely. “You? Are you regretting we did this?”

“Are you kidding? Not in this life.” He lifted a gruff hand, pushed a tangled curl from her brow, aware she was still touching him…aware he couldn’t seem to stop touching her. “But…”

She froze the minute she heard that “but,” jumped in before he could possibly finish the comment. “But, of course, this was all just a moment’s craziness. No one has to know. Neither of us are going to make too much of it. Why would we?”

“Why would we,” he echoed, and couldn’t fathom why his pulse suddenly clunked. “It’s not as if you had any interest in staying in Alaska.”

“Or as if you had any interest in moving back to the lower forty-eight. Good grief. I don’t even know where your home used to be.”

“Used to be Denver.”

“Whew. A long way from Boston.”

She was still smiling, but his pulse kept skidding down a long, dark luge run. She seemed in a major hurry to shut down the possibilities for them. He should have been in an even bigger hurry.

Pretty damned ridiculous to imagine how they could be a couple when this was all over.

God knew how the idea had even popped in his mind.

“Is your back okay?” she asked suddenly.

“My back?”

“The burns. I think I should look at it again—”

“I think you caretake more than enough people without adding me to the list.” Damned if he wanted to be another responsibility in her life. “I’ve got an idea.”

“What?”

“Steak. Cooked on the fire—”

“We still have stew left over from yesterday.”

Yeah, they did. He’d tasted her stew. “Doesn’t steak sound good? Smothered in onions and mushrooms? Maybe see what else we can conjure up from that huge pantry? Make a real feast?”

F
OR A WOMAN WHO’D NEVER HAD
a silly side, Emilie couldn’t remember laughing so much. The steaks were juicy and sizzling and fabulous, slathered with onions and mushrooms and some kind of sauce he’d concocted. Dessert was some kind of bread pudding he threw together—took a lot of rum—that he served with a flourish and a candle on top.

The lodge had a major liquor stash, but usually no
wine. He’d scrounged around, though, found a bottle for her in the back of a cupboard, and after wiping off a couple inches of dust, opened it. She took one sip and sputtered it all over the floor. Apparently it had turned into vinegar.

She could drink some of her father’s whiskey—aged thirty years, the good stuff—but only by holding her nose.

He made Irish coffee to top off the meal, although by then, he was lying on the carpet, with his feet up on a log, watching—as he put it—her eating bird bites.

“I’ll bet you’ll be done by midnight,” he said with awe.

“Would you quit teasing? I was starving. I practically ate like a wolf, shoveling it in.”

“Ah, yeah. That’s you. Uncouth. No manners. Just a pig at the table.”

“Thanks.” She lifted a napkin and delicately dabbed a corner of her mouth. “People have always teased me for being fastidious.”

“You?”

“That’s the thing. I’m free to let out my closet pig with you.”

She thought he’d be ill. He started choking, and then laughing, and couldn’t seem to stop.

She sank back against a couch cushion, delighted. Beyond delighted. Laughter lit up his face, his eyes, took away the shadows. He was wearing bulky layers, as she was. Double wool socks, as she was. Their picnic feast was on the gnarled coffee table, as casual as she’d eaten since she could remember. And she’d made him laugh.