A Cold Creek Holiday

“You have no idea how the windchill can work its way even through the best chinking in these log structures. I don’t feel right about leaving you down here in the cold. We’ve got another generator at the house, plus a couple of wood fireplaces that can keep things plenty toasty. The girls are already camped out in the great room with their sleeping bags. We can find space for one more.”

Near the girls he had warned her in no uncertain terms to stay away from? She might have a difficult time doing that when they were sharing the warmth of a fireplace. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll suck them further into my dastardly plan to break their little hearts when I leave Pine Gulch?”

He frowned and she felt bad for her sarcasm when she saw his mouth tighten with discomfort.

“This is an emergency and can’t be helped,” he answered. “These walls don’t have much insulation. I can’t leave you down here with no heat source. Even an hour in this cold could be deadly.”

The gravity in his voice disconcerted her. She swallowed. As much as she wanted to lash back after his blistering words this afternoon, perhaps this wasn’t the time. He had come down in the howling storm to make sure she was warm and safe. She ought to be grateful he didn’t let her freeze to death.

“Can you give me a moment to change my clothes and put a coat on?”

“As long as it’s only a moment. I don’t like leaving the girls alone up at the house in this kind of weather. Here. Use the lantern. I’ve got a flashlight.”

She nodded and reached outside the throw to take it from him. As she did, something hot flashed in his dark eyes for just an instant then was gone, and she realized that while her silk long underwear wasn’t what anyone could call sexy, it still clung to every curve.

Her heart pounded at what she considered completely unreasonable speed. She snatched the lantern from him and hurried to the bedroom, closing the door firmly behind her. Inside, she quickly slipped a soft mint-green velour workout suit over her long underwear, then ran a brush through her sleep-tangled hair and pulled it back into a ponytail.

If she had any sense, she would pack up her rented SUV right this moment, head back to the airport and catch the first flight back to Virginia.

Whatever happened to her peaceful escape? She never expected Mother Nature to thrust her into this awkward situation, forced to spend even more time with a man who obviously wanted her out of his life.

Her sigh puffed out a little breath of condensation. She could handle this. With luck it would only be for an hour or two, then the power would be back on and she could hole up back here at the cabin until she finished the Spencer Hotels project, not venturing out until the holidays were over.

When she returned to the living room, she found Nate waiting for her just inside the door. Unfortunately, her boots were on the mat right beside where he was standing and there was no room around the furniture in the small space for her to grab them without being practically on top of him, an image she absolutely did not need racing through her head right now.

“I, um, need my boots,” she said, gesturing to them.

“Oh. Right.” He moved as far as he could in the other direction, but she still barely had space to squeeze past the table and grab them.

She was aware of the heat emanating from him. If there were more light in the small space, she wouldn’t be surprised to see steam puffing off his coat. Was he always this warm or was it only the contrast between his body heat and the icy air inside her cabin?

She pushed away the question as completely irrelevant and focused on shoving her feet into her boots and throwing on her coat.

“Ready?” he asked, barely veiled impatience in his voice.

“As I’ll ever be,” she muttered.

He opened the door and the breath was snatched from her lungs by the cold and stinging snow.

“I’ll take point on the way back to the house,” he said, and she remembered him referring to himself as an army Ranger. She could easily see him parachuting out of an airplane over hostile territory or leading a team into a hostage situation somewhere.

“Just hold on to my coat and follow my tracks in the snow and you should be okay,” he growled over the wind.

She might have thought the warning was overdramatic, maybe even intended to scare her, but the moment they stepped off the porch, the wind and snow raged even harder. She could see nothing but black with frenzied swirls of snow beyond the pale light from the lantern and the more focused beam of his flashlight.

As they began their painstaking trudge through the snow, she almost laughed when she remembered how she had thought the snow the night before was a blizzard. Compared to this, that was just a mild flurry. She could barely make out any kind of landmark in the darkness without any ambient glow from a porch light or a vapor light and what she could see was buried in snow.

She remembered reading in school once about how early pioneers were sometimes forced to run a rope between their house and barn during blizzards so they could hang on to it to safely while they made their way back and forth to take care of their livestock. Without that anchor, they could become hopelessly lost in moments and freeze to death before they found their way back home, not ever knowing they might be a few feet from their door.

She clutched the hem of Nate Cavazos’s coat like it was her only lifeline, the only safe thing she had to hold on to in this surreal landscape.

At last, when her lungs were heaving from the cold and from the rapid pace the man set for them through knee-high snow, they reached the porch. He gripped her elbow to help her up the steps that hadn’t yet seen a shovel and then he opened the door to the main ranch house.

Though she could still see the condensation of her breath here, blessed warmth from the fire crackling in the great room eased its steady way through the house and into her aching muscles.

Compared to the fury that lurked outside the door, it felt like the tropics in here.