Stacy’s mind filled in helpfully, he had quite a reputation. He would not be unaccustomed to being in some state of undress in front of a lady.
Impossibly, she could feel her cheeks turning even more crimson, and he showed no inclination to put her out of her misery. He regarding her appraisingly, snow melting on his heated skin, a cloud of steam rising around him.
Finally, he seemed to realize it was very cold out here!
“Let’s get in,” he suggested. She heard reluctance in his voice. He did not want her in his house!
She was not sure why, though it didn’t seem unreasonable. A stranger plows into your fountain. You hardly want to entertain them.
But he was expecting someone. He didn’t want to entertain that person, either?
“I’ll take a closer look at your head. There’s not a whole lot of blood, I’m almost certain it’s superficial. We’ll get you into Whistler if it’s not.”
It occurred to her he was a man who would do the right thing even if it was not what he particularly wanted to do.
And that he would not like people who did the wrong thing. She shivered at the thought. He misinterpreted the shiver as cold and strengthened his grip on her, as if he didn’t trust her not to keel over or slip badly on his driveway. He turned her away from her car and toward the warmth of his house.
Aside from her car in the garden, the driveway was empty. The household vehicles were no doubt parked in the five-car garage off to one side.
The house inspired awe. If this was a cottage, what on earth did McAllister’s main residence look like?
The house was timber framed, the lower portions of it faced in river rock. Gorgeous, golden logs, so large three people holding hands would barely form a circle around them, acted as pillars for the front entryway. The entry doors were hand carved and massive, the windows huge, plentiful and French-paned, the rooflines sweeping and complicated.
Through the softly falling flakes of snow, Stacy was certain she felt exactly how Cinderella must have felt the first time she saw the castle.
Or maybe, she thought, with a small shiver of pure apprehension, more like Beauty when she found Beast’s lair.
McAllister let go of her finally when he reached the front door and held it open for her. She was annoyed with herself that she missed the security of his touch instantly, and yet the house seemed to embrace her. The rush of warm air that greeted her was lovely, the house even lovelier.
Stacy’s breath caught in her throat as she gaped at her surroundings.
“It’s beautiful,” she breathed. “Like upscale hunting lodge—very upscale—meets five-star hotel.”
“It suits me,” he said, and then as an afterthought, “far more than my condo in Vancouver.”
Again, her intuition kicked in, and this time the reporter in her went on red alert. Was that a clue that he was going to leave his high-powered life behind him as rumors had been saying for months?
McAllister turned, stepped out of his sandals, expecting her to follow him. Stacy realized she couldn’t tromp through the house in her now very wet—and probably ruined—shoes. She scraped them off her feet, dropped her wet sweater beside them, and then she was left scrambling to catch up to his long strides, as it had never even occurred to him that she was not on his heels.
As McAllister led her through his magnificent home, Stacy was further distracted from the confession she should have been formulating about why she was really here, by not just the long length of his naked back but the unexpected beauty of his space and what it said about him.
The design style was breathtaking. Old blended with new seamlessly. Modern met antique. Rustic lines met sleek clean ones and merged.
There were hand-knotted Turkish rugs and bearskins, side by side, modern art and Western paintings, deer antler light fixtures and ones that looked to be by the famous crystal maker, Swarovski. There were ancient woven baskets beside contemporary vases.
The decor style was rugged meets sophisticated, and Stacy thought it reflected the man with startling accuracy.
“I’ve never seen floors like this,” she murmured.
“Tigerwood. It actually gets richer as it ages.”
“Like people,” she said softly.
“If they invest properly,” he agreed.
“That is not what I meant!”
He cast a look over his shoulder at her, and she saw he looked irritated.
“People,” she said firmly, “become richer because they accumulate wisdom and life experience.”
He snorted derisively. “Or,” he countered, “they become harder. This floor is a hundred and seventy percent harder than oak. I chose it because I wanted something hard.”
And she could see that that was also what he wanted for himself: a hard, impenetrable surface.
“This floor will last forever,” he said with satisfaction.
“Unlike people?” she challenged him.
“You said it, I didn’t.” She heard the cynicism and yet contemplated his desire for something lasting. He was an avowed bachelor and had been even before the accident. But had the death of his brother-in-law made him even more cynical about what lasted and what didn’t?
Clearly, it had.
They walked across exotic hardwood floors into a great room. The walls soared upward, at least sixteen feet high, the ceilings held up by massive timbers. A fireplace, floor to ceiling, constructed of the same river rock that was on the exterior of the house, anchored one end of the room.
A huge television was mounted above a solid old barn beam mantel. It was on, with no sound. A football game in process. A wall of glass—the kind that folded back in the summer to make indoor and outdoor space blend perfectly—led out to a vast redwood deck.
Through falling snow, Stacy could see a deep and quiet forest beyond the deck and past that, the silent, jagged walls of the mountains.
To one side of that deck, where it did not impede the sweeping views from the great room, steam escaped from the large hot tub that her arrival had pulled McAllister from.
The tub seemed as if it were made for entertaining large groups of people of the kind she had written about in her former life. She had never attended a gathering worthy of this kind of space. Or been invited to one, either. As reporter, she had been on the outside of that lifestyle looking in.
The room made Stacy uncomfortably and awkwardly aware she was way out of her league here.
What league? she asked herself, annoyed. She wasn’t here to marry the man! She just wanted to talk to him.
Besides, it seemed to her that a room like this cried for that thing called family. In fact, she could feel an ache in the back of her throat as she thought of that.
“Are
