you like the radio on?’ he questioned, as soothingly as he would to a maiden aunt who was in danger of becoming fractious.
He was making her feel…uncomfortable, and she couldn’t quite put her finger on why. ‘Actually,’ said Keri, very deliberately, ‘what I would really like is to get some sleep, so if you wouldn’t mind…?’
‘Sure. No problem.’ Jay hid a smile which vanished as he drove further into the winter dusk. The flakes of snow had changed from being the innocent ones of storybook pictures—now they were small, and he knew that they would have the bite of ice behind them. The wind was gusting them into bitter white flurries so that they looked like swarms of white bees.
He glanced in the mirror again. She had fallen asleep. Her head had fallen back and her hair was spread out behind it, like a shiny black pillow. The blanket had slipped down and the slit in her skirt meant that her long legs were sprawled out—pretty much the longest legs he had ever seen on a woman. Legs like that could wrap themselves round a man’s neck like a deadly snake. Deliberately, Jay averted his eyes from their coltish display and from the tantalising glimpse of lacy stocking-top. This drive was going to take longer than he had anticipated—far better she slept than distract him.
But the weather was distraction enough. The narrow lanes became more precarious by the second, with the snow falling heavier and heavier, and as night closed in the darkness hid the fall from sight and the car began to slow as it encountered the first drifts.
He knew way before it happened that things were going to get bad—really bad. Instinct told him that, coupled with the experience of having lived in some of the most God-awful conditions known to man.
His windscreen wipers were flicking dementedly, but still it was like gazing into an icy abyss. The road dipped slightly, and he eased his foot back. A dip was good. Slopes ran down into hollows and hollows were where you found people, and they built houses which equalled shelter, and he suspected that they very soon they might need shelter… Except that this was pretty desolate countryside. Unspoiled, he guessed. Chosen for its beauty and its very isolation.
He flicked the light on briefly, to glance down at the map, and then squinted his eyes as the car passed the darkened bulk of a building. Some way after that, Jay realised that he no longer had a choice, and braked. Hard.
The jerk of the car woke her, and Keri opened her eyes, caught in that warm half-world between waking and sleeping. She yawned. ‘Where are we?’ she questioned sleepily.
‘In the middle of nowhere,’ he answered succinctly. ‘Take a look for yourself.’
The sound of the low, tough masculine voice shook her right out of her reverie, and for a moment it startled her, until she realised where she was. She looked out of the window, and then blinked. He wasn’t joking.
While she had been sleeping the snowy landscape had been transformed into one which was now unrecognisable. Night had closed in, and with it the snow. Everything was black and white, like a photographic negative, and it would have been beautiful if it didn’t look so…forbidding. And they were in the middle of it. Of nowhere, as he had said. ‘Why have you stopped?’ she asked.
Why do you think I’ve stopped? ‘Because the fall is heavy here.’
‘Well, how long is it going to take us to get back now?’
Jay shot another glance out, and then looked in the mirror at her beautiful perplexed face. It was clear from her question that she had no idea how bad it was, and he was going to have to break it to her. Gently.
‘If it carries on like this there’s no way we’re going to make it back at all, at least not tonight—we’ll be lucky if we make it as far as the nearest village.’
This was sounding like something out of a bad movie. ‘But I don’t want to go to a village!’ she exclaimed. ‘I want to go to home!’
I want. I want. He supposed a woman like that spent all her time getting exactly what it was she wanted. Well, not tonight. ‘You and me both, sweetheart,’ he said grimly. ‘But I’ll settle for what I can take.’
She let the sweetheart bit go. Now was not the time to get frosty because he was being over-familiar. ‘Can’t you just drive on?’
He pressed cautiously on the accelerator, then eased his foot off. ‘Nope. We’re stuck.’
Keri sat bolt upright. ‘What do you mean?’
What the hell do you think I mean? ‘Like I said, we’re stuck. There are drifts in the road. Snowdrifts. And they’re underpacked with ice. It’s a potentially lethal situation.’
Keri briefly shut her eyes. Please tell me this isn’t happening. She opened them again. ‘Couldn’t you have predicted this might happen and taken a different route?’
He might have let it go, but something in her accusation made his blood simmer. ‘There is no alternative route—not out of that God-forsaken field they chose for the shoot—and, if you recall, I asked you three times to hurry up. I said that I didn’t like the look of the sky. But you were too busy being fawned over by a load of luvvies to pay much attention to what I was saying.’
Was he criticising her? ‘I was just doing my job!’
‘And I’m trying to do mine,’ he said darkly. ‘Which is dealing with the situation as it is, not wasting time by casting around for recriminations!’
Keri stared at the back of his dark head, feeling like a tennis-player who had been wrong-footed. And the most annoying thing of all was that he was right. He might have an arrogant, almost insolent way of expressing himself, but she could see his logic. ‘So what do you suggest we do?’ she questioned coolly.
By we he guessed she meant him. ‘I guess we find some shelter.’
‘No.’ Keri shook her head. What did he think—that she was going to book into a hotel for the night? With him? ‘I don’t think you understand—I have to be back in London. Tonight.’ She eyed his muscular frame hopefully. ‘Can’t you dig us out?’
‘With a spare snow-plough?’ Jay smiled. ‘I don’t think you understand, sweetheart—even if I dug us out, it would only be a temporary measure. This road is impassable.’
She felt a momentary flare of panic, until reason reasserted itself. ‘You can’t know that!’
He wasn’t about to start explaining that he had seen snow and ice in pretty much all its guises. The empty bleached horizons of arctic wastes which made this particular snow scene look like a benign Christmas card. Or swimming beneath polar ice-caps and wondering if your blood had frozen solid in your veins, wetsuit or no wetsuit. Men trapped…lost…never to be heard of again.
A hard note entered his voice. ‘Oh, but I can—it’s my job to know.’ He turned off the ignition, and turned round and shrugged. ‘Sorry, but that’s the way it is.’
She opened her mouth to reply, but the words froze on her lips as she met his eyes for the first time—hard, glittering eyes which took her breath away, and it was a long time since a man had done that. It was the first time she had looked at him properly, but then you never really looked at a driver, did you? They were part of the fixtures and fittings, part of the car itself—or at least they were supposed to be. She sucked in a dry gulp of air, confused by the sudden pounding of her heart, as if it
