now. Has anything in those documents changed your mind?” Her gaze finally flickered. “Or anything in our discussion?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “As I told you—I haven’t learned anything from those papers that I didn’t know before,” he said. “And I haven’t heard you say anything I hadn’t heard you say before, either, have I?”
She shook her head slightly. “I suppose not.”
“So, no. Nothing has changed. The odds were one in a million before you got here, and they remain one in a million now.”
“Are you sure?” She turned her deep, wide gaze on his face, her eyes studying his searchingly. “You see, Robert really can’t afford to cherish hopes that are worthless. If there isn’t even that one remote chance in a million, we’ll need to pursue other options.”
“Other options?” He let his skepticism seep into the words.
She flushed, but her voice was firm. “Yes. So I hope you’ll be honest, and you won’t hold out false hope just so that things won’t be so awkward while we’re stuck here together.”
“Awkward?” Putting his coffee mug back on the end table, he stood up. The motion brought him within a foot of where she stood, and he could smell the sweet floral scent of her perfume, which had been released by the warmth of the fire. He felt a sudden flare of irritation toward Robert Hamilton for letting her venture out into the corporate jungle to do his dirty work for him.
“I’m not afraid of ‘awkward’, Lindsay,” Daniel said bluntly. “In fact, where business is concerned, I thrive on it.” He gestured toward the telephone. “So go on-call Robert and tell him the fates have given him a reprieve. It’s a million to one right now, but you’ve got until this blizzard passes to improve the odds.”
Half an hour later, Lindsay followed the rhythmic sounds of a pounding ax until she came to the source of the noises, a small woodshed just outside the kitchen door. Assuming that she would find Roc splitting logs, she eased open the door just a few inches and poked her head out.
To her surprise, though, it was Daniel, not Roc, and immediately all other thoughts slipped out of her mind like rain down a windowpane. No longer in the suit and tie he’d been wearing when she first saw him, he now wore jeans and a blue-striped shirt, the sleeves of which had been rolled up above his elbows to allow a greater range of motion.
He didn’t seem to notice the cracked door. His attention was focused on the large, squat cylindrical log that stood on some sort of pedestal in front of him. His legs were planted with a squared-off determination, and his bare arms were raised high and to one side. They seemed to hold just a second, and then, with a sudden, violent grace, they swept down, burying the head of the ax several inches deep into the log. Bracing one boot- clad foot on the pedestal, he worked the ax free and then set up a new log and prepared to strike again.
And again, and again. Lindsay was mesmerized, watching as those powerful arms swung up and down, the head of the ax winking in and out of the pale light that filtered through the cracks in the boarded walls of the shed.
It was obviously strenuous work. Though his breath condensed in the frigid air, and snowflakes blown in through the open door dusted the curls on his head, still Daniel was damp from his exertions. Sweat beaded along the gold-ribboned muscles of his forearms and ran in rivulets along the column of his throat. Lindsay shivered, her senses confused by the startling discordance of moist heat against this chilling cold.
Shutting her eyes, she gripped the doorknob, awash with a sense of her own inadequacy. She was a city girl, a Southerner by birth who had never spent a winter north of Phoenix, where she and Christy now lived. She found it disturbing in some primitive way, this display of brute force aligned against nature. And somehow humbling. Never before had she appreciated what was required to create the firewood that crackled so merrily in her Christmas hearth. Now she saw that each log must be wrenched, unwilling, from the massive forest that covered this mountainside.
“How’s Robert?”
She opened her eyes, and when her focus returned she saw that Daniel had set down his ax and was standing, his foot propped on the pedestal and his arms folded over his knee, looking at her. Though he still gleamed with sweat, he wasn’t even breathing heavily. He was, she thought, no stranger to hard work in spite of his immaculately groomed business persona.
“He’s okay,” she said. “Still groggy, though. They’re giving him a lot of pain pills, I think.”
Daniel wiped his brow, then raked his fingers through his hair. When he brought his hand down, his fingertips were damp with melted snow. “Did you tell him about the blizzard?”
She nodded, reluctant to discuss that part of her conversation. Robert had been horrified to hear that Lindsay was trapped on the mountain with Daniel McKinley. He had berated himself so unmercifully for putting her in that predicament that Lindsay had been almost unable to calm him down. Only her promise that she’d be extremely careful had helped at all. So promise she had, though she wasn’t sure exactly what Robert wanted her to be careful of.
Could he have been jealous, worried that she might find herself attracted to Daniel? Well, if that was it, Robert had nothing to worry about. She hadn’t ever been interested in domineering, macho types. And Daniel McKinley looked just as arrogant here, splitting logs in his shirtsleeves, as he ever had in his business suit. She looked at the logs that had fallen so easily under his ax, and she swallowed hard. Maybe more so.
“That looks exhausting,” she said, hoping to change the subject before he asked more about her conversation with Robert. “Can I help?”
He raised his brows, obviously surprised. “Thanks, but it’s under control,” he said. “We were already stocked up, but I thought we’d better have some extra logs lying around in case we lose electricity. Heating three bedrooms will really eat up the wood.”
Three bedrooms. She was the problem, then, the reason that he was laboring out here in the bitter cold. “I’m sorry to be an extra burden—” she began, but he broke in impatiently.
“You’re not to blame for the blizzard.” He picked up the ax and drove it into the pedestal, as if that were its natural storage spot. “You’re just as much a victim of the weather as we are.”
“I know, but…” But what? She didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t say what was really on her mind, that she couldn’t imagine how she was going to get through the next twenty-four hours. All this idle time cooped up with a man with whom the only thing she had in common was a short, disastrous past acquaintance and a mutual distrust. All this artificial intimacy with this intensely male autocrat who didn’t even like her.
She wished Roc would come back from making up the guest room. Or, better yet, she wished she had something to do. Yes, that was the answer. She needed to contribute somehow so that she wouldn’t feel so helpless and dependent.
“How about if I make some dinner?” She cast a quick glance behind her into the large, intelligently arranged kitchen, and her mood lightened at the thought of puttering about in here. It had been ages since she’d had such a luxurious setting—and so much free time—in which to indulge her favorite hobby. The kitchen in her apartment at home was neat and clean, but tiny. And she was always in a flurry, bolting in the door after work and trying to throw something simple together while helping Christy with her algebra.
She turned back to Daniel, but to her dismay he was shaking his head. “Roc
