style="font-size:15px;"> How could it be possible McAllister was out here in his driveway, one hand gripping her firmly, glaring at her tires, when he was dressed in nothing more than a pair of shove-on sandals, a towel cinched around his waist?
The shock of it made her release the arm she clutched, and the wisps of her remaining sympathy were blown away as if before a strong wind. All that remained was awareness of him in a very different way.
She would have staggered back—and probably slipped again—but when she had let go, he had continued to hold on.
His warmth and his strength were like electricity, but not the benign kind that powered the toaster.
No, the furious, unpredictable kind. The lightning-bolt-that-could-tear-open-the-sky kind. The kind that could split apart trees and turn the world to fire.
Stacy realized the hammering of her heart during the slippery trip into the mountains, and after she had bounced over the curb into the fountain, had been but a pale prelude to the speeds her heart could attain!
KIERNAN MCALLISTER WATCHED the pulse in the woman’s throat. The accident had obviously affected her more than she wanted to let on. Her face was very pale and he considered the awful possibility she was going to keel over, either because she was close to fainting or because her shoes were so unsuited to this kind of ground.
As he watched, her hand, tiny and pale, fluttered to her own throat to keep tabs on the wildly beating tattoo of her pulse, and McAllister tightened his grip on her even more.
“Are you okay?” he asked again. He could feel his brow furrow as he looked in her face.
He had told his sister, Adele, not to send assistance. He had told her, in no uncertain terms, that he found it insulting that she thought he needed it. She seemed to have agreed, but he should have guessed she only pretended to acquiesce.
“I think I’m just shaken.”
The girl—no, she wasn’t a girl, despite her diminutive size—had a voice that was low and husky, a lovely softness to it, unconsciously sexy. She was, in fact, a lovely young woman. Dark curls sprang untamed around a delicate, pale, elfin face. Her eyes were green and huge, her nose a little button, her chin had a certain defiant set to it.
Kiernan’s annoyance at his sister grew.
If she had needed to send someone—and in her mind, apparently she had—he would have hoped for someone no-nonsense and practical. Someone who arrived in a car completely outfitted for winter and in sturdy shoes. In other words someone who coped, pragmatically, as a matter of course, with every eventuality. If he was going to picture that someone he would picture someone middle-aged, dowdy and stern enough to intimidate Ivan the Terrible into instant submission.
Now, he felt as if he had two people, other than himself, to be responsible for!
“You’re sure you are all right?” He cast a glance at her car. Maybe he could get it unstuck and convince her to disobey his sister’s orders, whatever they were, and leave him alone here.
Alone. That was what called to him these days, the seduction of silence, of not being around people. The cabin was perfect. Hard to access, no cell service, spotty internet.
His sister didn’t see his quest for solitude as a good thing. “You just go up there and mull over things that can’t be changed!” his sister had accused him.
And perhaps that was true. Certainly, the presence of his little nephew did not leave much time for mulling! And perhaps that had been Adele’s plan. His sister could be diabolical after all.
But the woman who had just arrived looked more like distraction than heaven-sent helper, so he was going to figure out how to get her unstuck and set her on her way no matter what Adele had to say about it.
For some reason, he did not want the curly-headed, green-eyed, red-shoed woman to make it past the first guard and into his house!
He regarded her thoughtfully, trying to figure out why he felt he did not want to let her in. And then he knew. Despite the fact the accident had left her shaken, she seemed determined to not let it affect her.
Look at the shoes! She was one of those positive, sunny, impractical people and he did not want her invading his space.
When had he come to like the dark of his own misery and loneliness so much?
“Yes, I’m fine,” she said, her voice, tremulous with bravery, piercing the darkness of his own thoughts. “More embarrassed than anything.”
“And well you should be.” The faint sympathy he had felt for her melted. “A person with a grain of sense and so little winter driving experience should not have tackled these roads today. I told her not to send you.”
She blinked at that. Opened her mouth, then closed it, looked down at her little red shoes and ineffectually tried to scrape the snow off them.
“I detest stubborn women,” he muttered. “Why would you travel today?”
“Perhaps it wasn’t my most sensible decision,” she said, and he watched the chin that had hinted at a stubborn nature tilt upward a touch, “but I can’t guarantee the result would not have been similar, even on the finest summer day.”
He lifted an eyebrow at her, intrigued despite himself.
“My second name is Murphy, for my maternal grandfather, and it is very suiting. I am like a poster child for Murphy’s Law.”
He had the feeling she was trying to keep things light in the face of the deliberate dark judgment in his own features, so he did not respond to the lightness of her tone, just raised his eyebrow even higher at her.
“Murphy’s Law?”
“You know,” she clarified, trying for a careless grin and missing by a mile. “Anything that can go wrong, will.”
He stared at her. For a moment, the crystal clear green of those eyes clouded, and he felt some thread of shared experience, of unspeakable sorrow, trying to bind them together.
His sense of needing to get rid of her strengthened. But then he saw the blood in her hair.
* * *
Stacy could have kicked herself! What on earth had made her say that to him? It was not at all in keeping with the new her: strong, composed, sophisticated. You didn’t blurt out things like that to a perfect stranger! She had intended it to sound light; instead, it sounded like a pathetic play for sympathy!
And, damn it, sometimes when you opened that door you did not know what was going to come through.
And what came through for her was a powerful vision of the worst moment of anything that can go wrong will in her entire life. She was standing outside her high school gym. She closed her eyes against it, but it came anyway.
Standing outside the high school waiting anxiously, just wanting to be anywhere but there. Waiting for the car that never came. A teacher finding her long after everyone else had gone home, wrapping her in her own sweater, because
