the police waiting room didn’t look quite so bad. Compared to facing Will again. ‘Right now?’
The woman glanced at the clock on the wall. ‘As soon as your taxi gets here. Looks like it’s your lucky day!’
Lucky.
Right.
It wasn’t as far as the airport official had implied, as the crow flew, but no self-respecting crow would be out in this weather. The roads gouged through the hardening Boreal sog were slow going, impossible to see more than ten feet ahead of the old SUV that served as one of Churchill’s two taxis. It crept along deeper into the forest until they finally pulled up in front of a shadowy cabin with dim firelight glowing inside.
Proper Snow White territory.
‘Here we are,’ the driver chirped as a hooded figure appeared in the cabin’s entrance. He reached across Kitty to open her door and she clambered out into the bitter cold in pumps already soggy from the dash across the airport car park. Immediately her lungs started hurting with the cold.
‘Enjoy your stay,’ the driver grunted, more to himself than to her, before crunching his vehicle in every ice-topped puddle back up the long drive.
She turned and stared at the shadowy forest cabin.
‘Heat’s escaping,’ a gruff voice called from the open doorway. Then the figure turned and went back inside and only the puffs of mist where his words had been remained, backlit by the light pouring out of the cabin.
Lord…
Time had done nothing to diminish the effect of his voice on the hairs on her neck even as they gathered frost straight out of the sub-arctic air. The gruff rumble turned her insides to jelly just as much now as it had in Nepal. Fortunately, jelly couldn’t stand up to the frost in her chest any more than the frost outside it.
Ice was good like that.
The timber protested underfoot as she eased herself up the frosty steps and squelched into the cabin’s boot room where she kicked her sodden purple pumps off amongst the rugged footwear already lined up there. The blanket was doing almost nothing to keep her warm, now. But the cabin beyond the boot-room door glowed with warmth and it was enough to lure her over the threshold and back into Will Margrave’s world for the first time in five years.
‘Help yourself to coffee,’ he rumbled from the shadowy back of the cabin, somehow managing to make the friendly offer about as unfriendly as it could possibly be.
‘Right,’ she said, glancing at the large coffee pot simmering on the old stove. ‘Thanks.’
She turned the steaming mug in her numb hands as Will came back into the room, his face still shielded by the fleeced hood of his coat, only adding to her tension. He passed her, wordlessly, and moved into the boot room to shrug the coat off and onto a hook.
Sense memory kicked her square in the belly.
A stranger hearing him for the first time would expect some kind of old salt of the woods. But the man who returned, bootless and coatless, seemed scarcely older than the thirty he had been in Nepal five years ago. His brown hair was messy thanks to his hood and it hung down over his eyebrows. Stubble followed the angles of his jaw up to his cheekbones. He looked as if he should be in a cologne advertisement on a billboard.
Kitty cleared her throat to clear her mind. ‘Thank you for—’
‘You still okay with dogs?’
The question finally drew his eyes to hers and she found herself as breathless as the very first time she’d ever gazed into them. Iceberg, she remembered. The ethereal, aquamariney, underwater part. An old ache spread below her skin. She had never expected to look into those eyes again.
Will tired of waiting for her answer and broke the spell by moving to the door and opening it wide. Two thick-coated dogs burst in and, behind them, a third. Before Kitty could do more than twist away from them, three more bounded into the room and immediately pounced on her. A seventh held back, lurking by the door.
‘Oh…!’
Will barked their names but Kitty was far too busy protecting herself from the onslaught of their wet noses and tongues to pay attention to who was who.
‘You keep your dogs in the house?’ she cried out of surprise as their assault finally eased off.
Those ice-blue eyes weren’t exactly defrosting as the snow on her blanket had. ‘You think that they should be out in the weather while you enjoy the comfort in here?’
Well, things were getting off to a great start!
‘No, I…it’s just that you kept them outdoors in Nepal.’
And winters there could be brutal, she was sure. She flinched as doggie claws scraped on her bare arms.
‘Churchill isn’t Nepal,’ Will grunted, then made a squeaking noise with his lips and six of the seven dogs happily mauling her immediately turned and grouped around his legs. The seventh needed some manual assistance from Will.
As he reached around the dog to pull it back, his hand brushed her thigh where her summery skirt stopped. Her skin was too cold and numb even to feel it, let alone to blush at the unexpected contact, but her imagination was in no way impeded by the cold. If anything it was doing double duty standing here in this cabin with Will.
‘You’re freezing,’ Will observed, unhelpfully. ‘Not exactly dressed for the conditions.’
A sense of injustice burbled up immediately, as strong as it had once before. Only this time she defended herself. ‘Actually, I was perfectly dressed for Zurich where I departed, and for Los Angeles where I should be stopping over by now.’
Two tiny lines appeared between his brows. ‘You don’t have anything else to put on?’
She shuffled her blanket more firmly around her and wished the fire would do its job more quickly.
‘Our luggage won’t be released until tomorrow.’ Assuming it hadn’t been damaged in the fire. As if to make his point, her body unhelpfully chose that moment to shudder from the chill.
Those glacial eyes stared needles into her but then he broke the gaze by sweeping his thick sweater up over his head and tossing it gently to her. ‘Put this on, my body heat will help warm you faster. Tuck the blanket around your legs while I get you some socks. And stay by the fire.’
The sweater he removed smelled exactly like the cologne she’d imagined him advertising before. With a healthy dose of man for good measure. Because he’d left the room again in search of emergency socks and because she could disguise it in tugging the thick sweater over her head, Kitty stole a moment to breathe his scent deeply in.
Her eyelids fluttered shut against the gorgeous pain.
All the progress she’d imagined she’d made in the years since Nepal evaporated into nothing as Will’s scent filled the spaces between her cells. She’d come to believe she’d fabricated her memory of that smell, but here it was—live and warm and heady—exactly as she
