up the slopes. There had been no pleading for him to listen to her and no trying to tempt him out of his foul mood. He had been spoiled by women who tiptoed around him. Despite her open, chatty nature, she was as stubborn as a mule.
‘Perhaps I should have been a little less...insistent,’ Lucas drawled, pushing aside the file he had given up on and watching the way she was deliberately avoiding eye contact with him. ‘But you don’t know this area and you don’t know how fast and how severe these snow storms can be.’ This was the closest he was going to get to an apology and it was a damn sight more than he would have offered anyone else.
‘Is that your idea of an apology?’ Milly asked, finally turning to look at him.
He must have showered during the time she had been upstairs, taking as long as she could in the bath without shrivelling to the size of a prune. His dark hair was slicked back and still damp, curling at the nape of his neck, and he was in loose grey jogging bottoms and a sweatshirt that managed to achieve the impossible—it was baggy and yet announced the hard muscularity of the body beneath it. He hadn’t shaved and his jaw was shadowed with stubble.
He looked insanely gorgeous, which made her feel even more of a fool for having been sucked into thinking that he was Mr Nice. Since when were insanely gorgeous guys ever nice?
‘Because if it is,’ she continued, folding her arms, ‘Then it’s pretty pathetic. I told you that I was sorry for not having paid sufficient attention to the weather, but I left very early this morning so that I could do a little skiing before I went into town and, yes, it was snowing, but nothing like it’s snowing now...’
Had she just told him that his apology was pathetic?
‘I’m not going to waste time discussing whether you should or shouldn’t have been on the slopes in bad weather.’
‘And...’ she carried on, because she wasn’t ready to pack in the conversation just yet. They were going to be spending at least another night under the same roof and she might as well clear the air or else they would be circling one another like opponents in a boxing ring, waiting to see who landed the first blow.
‘There’s more?’
‘You had no right to storm into that café and start laying down laws as though you’re my lord and master. You’re not.’
‘I never said I was.’
‘I’ve been taken for a mug by my ex and I haven’t come over here for a complete stranger to pick up where he left off!’ Okay, so some exaggeration here but, the more Milly thought about her idiocy in actually thinking that Lucas was a nice guy, the angrier she became. She thought of the high-handed, autocratic way he had delivered his command for her to follow him or else find herself stuck trying to get into a hotel—because she wouldn’t be able to make it back to the lodge, presumably because he would have had no qualms about leaving her to her own devices, having made sure grudgingly that she hadn’t died on the slopes...
Lucas was outraged at that suggestion. She had somehow managed to swat aside the small technicality of her rashly having ventured out without due care and attention because she had wanted to have a little ‘early-morning ski’ before ‘dashing to the shops for something and nothing and a cup of hot chocolate’. While he had been worried, imagining her skiing round and round in ever decreasing circles in a wilderness of unfamiliar white, she had been gaily sightseeing! And, when he’d run her to ground, not only had she expected an apology but she had the barefaced nerve to compare him to an ex-fiancé who had made off with her best friend!
Was there a crazier way to join dots?
‘So now I’m on a par with a guy who strung you along before he got caught in bed with your best friend?’
‘I’m drawing a comparison.’ Milly pushed herself away from the counter and turned her back on him so that she could make herself a cup of coffee. She could feel his eyes boring into her back. Typical! He was charm personified when she was obeying his rules but the second she so much as expressed an opinion that didn’t happen to tally with his, the second she stood up to him and refused to let him treat her like a kid, he suddenly couldn’t see her point of view!
‘It’s a ridiculous comparison and I’m not having this conversation. The phone lines are temporarily dead, and it looks as though I’m going to be staying on here a little longer than I originally anticipated, so you might want to rethink your sulkiness—because it’s going to be a little charged if you’re either jumping down my throat or stalking around in surly silence.’
Had he actually considered the challenge of bedding the woman? Was there a less appropriate candidate? He shot her a glance of pure exasperation. How much more illogical could one human being be? And how much more temperamental? One minute, she was as chirpy as a cricket, pouring out her life story with gay abandon. The next minute, she was a raging inferno, behaving as though his act of kindness in putting himself out to find her had been offensive somehow.
‘I just bet you’re like that with all those women who fling themselves at your feet,’ Milly snapped, turning back to face him and plonking herself at the kitchen table with her mug of coffee in front of her.
‘Are we still embroiled in this pointless argument?’ Lucas flung his hands in the air and then raked his fingers through his dark hair and folded his arms. ‘Like what?’ He wondered why he was being drawn into this when there was nothing to stop him getting up and walking out of the kitchen, leaving her to stew. ‘What am I like with all those women who fling themselves at my feet?’
Histrionic scenes annoyed him. In fact, he could think of nothing more unacceptable than a woman having a hissy fit. Women should be obliging, soothing, a source of undemanding pleasure to interrupt the ferocity and stress of his working life.
He assumed that the only reason he was putting up with the red-faced, throbbing little ruffled angel in front of him was because she wasn’t his woman.
More to the point, he wasn’t exactly awash with choices, considering she was in his lodge, sharing his space.
But you could always walk away, a little voice in his head pointed out, and Lucas brushed it aside. This was not an occasion for walking away.
‘High-handed and annoying!’
‘You’re telling me that you find me annoying?’
‘You think you can do whatever you like because of the way you look.’
Lucas smiled, a slow, devastating smile that made her pulses jump. ‘Is there a backhanded compliment in there somewhere?’
‘No. I bet you play the field and lead women on because you can...’
Lucas stifled a groan. ‘You’re like a dog with a bone.’
‘I take it there’s a backhanded compliment in there somewhere?’ Milly parroted tartly and his smile broadened. How was she supposed to get on with the business of being angry with him when he smiled like that? How was she supposed to remember what an arrogant jerk he could be?
Lucas tilted his head to one side, as though seriously considering her rhetorical question.
‘Possibly,’ he said slowly, his dark eyes roving over her flushed face. ‘I’m surprised you stuck it out in a job where you were forced to take orders.’
