else she knew too much. She could list his likely qualities, just by knowing what he did for a living, and that he was new in town, and that he was on his own in a bar at seven in the evening on Christmas Eve. Was a fling with a bachelor ski instructor really what she wanted?
Why not?
“She, uh, left?” Lee mimicked part of his last statement.
He shrugged and gave an apologetic kind of smile. “She was interested in a longer evening. I wasn’t.”
“Are you usually?”
He said very firmly, “She was nice. Pretty. But no, not with clients.”
A handful of words, and they’d covered an awful lot of ground. Lee had learned that he could have slept with an attractive and willing woman tonight, and that he’d turned her down because on principle he didn’t get involved with clients.
If he did make a habit of such a thing, she decided, he could probably have had a different bed partner every night. He was pretty good-looking. Yet it seemed he wasn’t just about getting women into bed, and was polite enough to go for a drink when a client needed or wanted it, despite his lack of secondary motivation. He’d apparently charmed the pants off this particular one, since she hadn’t been ready to let the evening go.
“You?” he added. His voice had dropped in both pitch and volume, and it drew her in, tightened the circle of deepening intimacy around them.
She shook her head. She didn’t date clients, either. That kind of thing could get so messy. And she’d never dated another instructor. That particular form of mess might be even worse.
So why am I thinking about it? I don’t even know his name.
“It’s Mac, by the way,” he said, having apparently read her mind. “Mac Wheeler.”
“Lee Cherry.”
“I’ve seen your name on the notice board in the ski school office. We must have been at the morning meetings together, the past couple of days, but I don’t remember seeing you.”
“It’s a big ski school.”
“I’m still finding my feet. New town. Back instructing. I haven’t done it for a while.”
“Oh, you haven’t?”
“I’d moved over into the administration side, at a resort that will remain nameless for the moment.”
“Ah.”
She wasn’t exactly asking for an explanation, but he gave her one anyhow. “Didn’t see eye to eye with the boss on a certain personal issue. Flung down the gauntlet at the wrong moment. Not that I regret it. It was the only choice.”
“Flung down the gauntlet? This is the way you talk?” When you talk, which at first we weren’t, and which I have a feeling we might not be doing for all that much longer...
“I’ve been reading a really long fantasy series. The vocabulary is starting to stick. I quit, if you prefer it simple, and there was nothing more for me in Sn— I’ll tell you where when we know each other better.”
“Right, when,” she replied mildly, in a drawl, because she didn’t want his assumptions to get too out of hand.
Even though his assumptions are correct...
He gave a slow smile, and said in a tone of meek apology, “If?” There was nothing remotely meek or apologetic about him.
They lasted three hours in the bar, which was pretty impressive, she considered. It was clear where this was going to end, but they weren’t in a hurry to get there. They shared another bowl of wings, with fries, and each had another beer before they both switched to soda. He called it pop, which told both of them that they weren’t from the same part of the country.
He was from Idaho, it turned out. “Coeur d’Alene. My mom’s a teacher, my dad works for the city. I have a sister there, too, married with two kids.”
Lee supplied her own basic biography. Mom, Dad and two sisters. Opposite side of the country, but strong similarities all the same. Both of them were mountain-born, growing up in resort towns where dramatic vistas of lakes and mountains were a major part of the attraction. Both of them had started skiing as kids and then turned to it as a career, although Mac had fairly quickly moved into the management side, and had a degree in the field.
“Can I ask about your skin?” he said at one point. “Do you mind?”
“Of course I don’t mind. It was a kitchen accident,” she answered. “Big splash of hot oil. Eleven years ago, nearly.”
“Right.” He nodded. “I thought it looked like a burn. Must have hurt.”
“They gave me nice drugs.”
He laughed, and they were done talking about her scars, so check off another item on the biography list.
But who was she kidding? Maybe they covered those kinds of things, but it was all the stuff going on underneath the conversation that really counted. The way his shoulder brushed against her when he reached for his drink, and the way she leaned into the contact instead of away from it. The smiles, lazy and slow, making her feel like the cat that got the cream.
The noise of the bar faded into the background. In fact, the noisier it became, the more they seemed enclosed in their own little cocoon, having to lean even closer to hear each other speak. They were comfortable with one another, instantly familiar.
He was the one to say it, finally, muttering just inches from her mouth, “So shall we get out of here?”
“Let’s.”
“Where?” he asked, as they threaded their way between the crowded tables. He was behind her, not touching her to claim possession the way some men did. She liked that he could keep his hands to himself, in his jacket pockets, and didn’t feel the need to signal the kind of look-what-I’ve-got message that she’d seen played out in this very bar by countless couples.
Once in the snowy dark, she suggested, “My place?” and he nodded.
“Has to be better than mine. Haven’t had a chance to find anything decent, yet. I’m sleeping on a friend’s couch.”
“Boy, you really did come here in a hurry.”
He shook his head, looking angry. “I don’t handle unjustified accusations well.”
“No?”
“Boss thought I was coming on to his wife. I wasn’t.”
“Did she think you were?”
“No. And she told him he was wrong, but that was after he’d tried to punch me, so as far as I was concerned, it was too late. He drinks too much. He’s a disaster. He wasn’t going to let it go. He would have been watching me every moment from then on. He was on a hair trigger about it.” Mac shook his head again. “Better for all three of us if I took myself out of the equation.”
“But it’s mucked up your life,
