Body Heat (Vintage Category Romance) (2 page)

The man at the small store several miles back had told her exactly how to find Darian MacGlenary.
Down the “holler,” he’d said, about two miles until she couldn’t drive anymore, follow the ridge through the woods till she hit the briars, and then look for the line of sycamores bordering the creek. Follow the creek till she got to a sandy beach, then backtrack up the hill until she saw the barn, and then go over the hill and the cabin should be in the bottom land.
If
she’d followed his directions correctly.
If,
she thought. What kind of directions were they anyway? Hollers, briars, sycamores, barns? Didn’t these people ever hear of road signs? Or even roads? This was ridiculous.

And the man
’s last words still haunted her with every step.
Good luck, honey.
Blaire guessed that it really wasn’t the words themselves that bothered her, but the inflection in his voice and the deep throaty laugh afterward that still gave her chills. But it had taken her over seven weeks of research to get this far, and now that she practically had Darian in her hip pocket, she’d be damned if she’d turn back now.

Questions still loomed in her brain, though.

Why would a thirty-six year old man hole himself up in no-man’s-land for the past four years? And where was he for the fourteen before that? She could find nothing. Blaire shook her head. It didn’t make sense. Especially when one knew his pedigree.

Minutes later, after walking through
what seemed like miles of scratchy briars and dried weeds, Blaire found herself under a sycamore tree at the creek’s edge. Right or left? What had the man told her? Glancing one way and then the other, Blaire decided to go right. But before she took one step, she reached down to examine her ankle. The tiny space between the top of her socks and the bottoms of her jeans’ legs was exposed during her trek through the briars and weeds. And it hurt like hell. Now Blaire knew why. Tiny cockleburs and thorned twigs had stuck to her socks and were scratching and digging into her skin.

S
he sat on a boulder at the waters’ edge, slipped off her tennis shoes, peeled her socks off her feet one at a time, cuffed her blue-jeans up around her calves, and slid her feet up to her ankles into the cool water.

Oh. Nice. No more itch…

It was November, but the afternoons lately had been warm enough, sixty degrees or more. The creek was near icy, though—and the crispness felt so good on her tired feet.

Blaire looked at her watch.
It was just after noon and it felt like she’d been walking for days. Eyes growing heavy, she momentarily closed them. The thought that popped into her mind was the picture of Darian MacGlenary in the back pocket of her jeans. An eighteen years old picture. Half his lifetime earlier. She thought about how good-looking he had been at eighteen. Wondered how well he’d aged.

A brisk gust of wind whipped up the creek bottom and Blaire opened her eyes. This
was the craziest thing she’d ever done in her life. That breeze was cold, which told her the temperature was dropping. Her thin sweatshirt and jacket were definitely becoming inadequate dealing with changing weather. She jerked her feet out of the water and worked to get her socks and shoes back on her damp cold feet.

Stupid. She
’d closed her eyes for only a second, right? Stiff and chattering, she rose and tried to stretch the kinks out and then began stumbling on, praying she was going the right way.

The man at the general store hadn
’t said how far or how long she’d have to walk the creek to get to the wide sandy area, but after forty-five minutes of traipsing up the creek, Blaire decided she’d gone the wrong way. The man said down the creek, hadn’t he? Down the creek would mean with the flow of the water, right?

She was going the wrong way.

It took another forty-five minutes to place her back under the sycamore where she’d started. Her gait slowed as she trampled on. Another hour passed. Stiff ankles and worn-slick tennis shoes were definitely not the stuff of hikers, she decided. The creek’s shoulder was narrow, a solid wall of earth to her left, boulders to walk on, the creek to her right. Three times she’d slipped from a mossy rock and plunged thigh high in the creek, once turning her ankle, the sudden pain shooting up her leg as she hit bottom. Each time she slowly, but determinedly hoisted herself back up and trudged on. Soon, she was so chilled, any discomfort but the cold was forgotten.

By the time she reached the wide sandy bank, she was nearly frozen, shivering so,
that her teeth chattered. But she wasn’t about to give in. Besides, she had no choice. To give in would be defeat. Or worse. And it was a helluva long walk back to her car. Not to mention she’d already spent nearly twenty-five hundred of the five thousand dollar advance Reva MacGlenary had paid her to find her nephew.

And it was her first real case.
So her credibility was at stake here. Just think of the business she’d rack up when the news was out she’d located the long, lost grandson of Maximillian MacGlenary. No, there was no way in hell she’d give up. No one ever said Blaire Kincaid was a quitter.

No one, that is, except Mastin.

At that thought, Blaire gritted her teeth, ignored the pain in her ankle, the throbbing in her palm, the clattering of her teeth, and turned toward the hill. Slowly, and determinedly, she made her way up the rise to the barn, hoping like nobody’s mother that MacGlenary’s log cabin was nestled in the bottomland on the other side.

****

Darian arched his back as he slung the mallet over his head and brought it down with such force on the splitter that the two wedges of wood flew sideways upon impact. It was then that he looked up and saw her coming over the rise in front of his cabin.
What the hell?
He glanced at his watch. Nearly five o’clock. He’d given up on her long ago.

H
e’d left his tree stand about ten and then slowly hiked down the ridge to his cabin, periodically watching, but then lost her. At one point, he’d even contemplated looking for her but then thought better of it. He didn’t want to be found, remember? He didn’t like visitors. No matter how persevering they were. He just figured she’d given up and gone back to her car.

But
now here she was. She’d found him. And he’d soon learn the purpose for her perseverance.

What the hell was the reason she had come to disrupt his life?

Darian slipped behind the cabin, sure she’d not yet seen him, and then circled around to the opposite side. As he cautiously approached the front porch, he felt his stomach knot at the prospect of a woman within the confines of his home. The thought frightened him. His home. A man’s home. Rough-hewn. Hard edges. Primitive. Rugged. Impenetrable to femininity. Just like him.

Just like
me.

He
rounded the corner. At first, he didn’t see her; then two more steps forward and he caught her backside near the opposite corner. Darian moved several steps in her direction and then stopped. Bracing his feet and legs in solid stance behind her, he crossed his arms. As if she sensed his presence, her movements still. Slowly, she rotated toward him.

The
woman’s blue eyes zinged out to him like a life-giving beacon on a cold dark night. Her eyes flashed wide, almost as if in fright. She shivered once, and then before he knew it, she crumbled into a heap at his feet, her blue eyes rolling back in her head as she fell to the ground.

Damn
, I didn’t know I’d grown that ugly.

He went to her.
The moment he touched her, he knew something was wrong. Her skin, icy to the touch initially, bit back with fire as he lifted her and held her close to his chest. The soaking dampness of her jeans gave him even greater cause for concern, and he knew immediately that in this cold and wind, she’d have been a goner if she hadn’t happened on his cabin when she did.

Darian tamped down the tendrils
of dread building up within him at the breaking of his very first rule of thumb:
Never get involved
. Then as he crossed the threshold into his cabin, placed her square in the middle of his bed and looked down on her, he felt too many things he didn’t want to feel, breaking his second rule: Never feel
anything
. But they were there and growing—concern, worry, fear for her life. And then as he momentarily ran his gaze up her body and looked into her face:
physical desire
.

Fuck.
He turned them all off. Each emotion, no matter how small, tossed aside like nobody’s business. Then he began to deal with the tasks at hand. Without emotion. Without connection. Without feeling. Simply see to the woman’s needs, he told himself. Anyone else would do the same. Patch her up and get her the hell on her way.

So he began.

And he knew he needed to work quickly.

H
e untied her shoes, carefully pulling them off her tiny, frozen feet. He knew the stiff toes would suffer first if they were not warmed quickly enough. Gingerly he held one swollen ankle—had she sprained it?—in his hand. Alarmed, he realized that her injuries possibly went beyond hypothermia, and that he might need to inspect all of her to determine other injuries.

Get her
wet clothes off.
Deft fingers went to her waist and he swallowed hard as he fought to impersonalize himself from the situation. Impersonalize, hell! There was hardly anything more personal that removing someone’s clothing. A beautiful woman’s clothing, to boot. But she could die, he told himself. He had to do this. It was a necessity. He had to do what needed to be done.

He
’d almost convinced himself of that fact until he slid his hands inside the waistband of her jeans, and in one swift movement removed them and her panties all at once, his hands barely skimming her cold flesh. Soft, cold flesh. A woman’s flesh.

It had been a long time—t
oo long, as a matter-of-fact—but the stinging urgings of desire broke through as he, for just a mere second, looked down at her laying half-nude on his bed.

Unconscious body, you asshole. Get a grip.

Darian jerked himself back into awareness. He’d been a lot of things in his life, he told himself, but a pervert wasn’t one of them. And he’d be damned if he’d take to ogling helpless young women as they lay defenseless on his bed. He’d be damned.

So he continued to remove her clothing.
The jacket and sweatshirt were not nearly as wet, just at the bottom edges, and came off quickly. Then her bra. He took a quick assessment of her injuries and then covered her with several layers of blankets and quilts. Really, the only attention she needed now, he told himself, was warmth. The ankle would heal with elevation and time. The cuts and scratches needed a simple good dousing of antiseptic—but the temperature of her body, he suspected, had slipped way below normal—and she simply needed life-giving warmth.

Darian stepped to the fire and threw two more large logs into the fireplace
and then poked at the embers, sending up sparks to ignite the additional wood. He grabbed several large towels and threw them over the backs of his kitchen chairs and let them warm next to the fire. Then glancing at the heap of wet clothing on the floor, did the same with them.

A
s he picked up the woman’s jeans, something fluttered to the floor at his feet. He bent to pick up the square of white paper, a little damp, but still intact, and then rose and turned it over.

He stared into a picture of himself.
High school graduation. The last day he’d lived in Vermont. The day he’d left hell.

Darian stared at the picture
and then slowly lifted his gaze to the woman banked beneath a mound of covers in his bed. Contemplating why a woman with an eighteen-year-old picture of him in the back pocket of her jeans would go to such lengths to find him, he shook his head, not coming up with the answer. Without a second’s hesitation, he flicked the photograph into the fire and watched his likeness fade into nothingness.

Appropriate
. It was what he was then, and now. Nothing.

His gaze fell back to the woman. How dare she
. Someone had sent her. Someone who wanted something from him, although he couldn’t guess what. He had nothing of value, nothing anyone else would want. Nothing to offer. Stepping closer to the bed, he looked into the pert face.

Not even himself.

Darian drew in a long, deep breath as he stood over her and then let it out very slowly. He reached out and touched her cheek with the forefinger of his right hand. Letting his knuckle slide down her chilled skin, it came to rest at her neck. Instinctively, he poised two fingers over the pulse point of her neck, closed his eyes, and became one with the rhythmic beating of her heart. Too slow. Her heart rate was way too slow.

And his was way too fast.

Darian snapped his eyes open, jerked his hand away, and stood perfectly still. He was right. His heart was pounding too fast. Entirely too fast.

A raspy cough followed by a series of sneezes broke through the silence of the cabin.
Darian knelt beside her. He cooed soft words until she finished the coughing and sneezing spell and then watched as she trembled noticeably beneath the blankets. He wondered if she was coming to, but after she’d stilled for a minute, decided she was not. Then just as he thought she’d calmed down, she uttered a word. One word. A name?