long-fingered hand to assist her. An unsought thought emerged out of nowhere: she had skin as smooth, soft and tempting as whipped cream.
‘I wasn’t in the middle of the road…I was scared you would drive on without seeing me,’ Hope explained, wincing at the freezing chill of her clothing as she let him pull her upright. He was impossibly tall, so tall, she had to throw her head back on her shoulders to look up at him.
‘You were standing in the centre of a very narrow road,’ Andreas contradicted without hesitation. ‘I had to swerve to avoid hitting you.’
Hope looked back down the road to where his car still smouldered. It was obvious even to her that when the last of the little flames died down, it would be a charred wreck fit only for the scrapyard. She could see that it had been a sports model of some kind and probably very expensive. That he appeared to be blaming her for the accident sent a current of guilty anxiety travelling through her.
‘I’m really sorry about your car,’ she said tautly, striving to sidestep the possibility of conflict. Having grown up in a family dominated by strong personalities, who had often been at loggerheads, she was accustomed to assuming the soothing role of a peacemaker.
Andreas surveyed the pathetic remains of his customised Ferrari, which he had only driven for the second time that day. He turned his arrogant dark head back to his companion and flicked his keen gaze over her at supersonic speed. He committed her every attribute to memory and dismissed her with every cold succeeding thought. Her clothes were drab and shabby. Of medium height, she was what his father would have called a healthy size and what any of his many female acquaintances who rejoiced in jutting bones would have called overweight. But no sooner had he reached that conclusion than he recalled how soft and feminine and sexy her full, ripe curves had felt under him and a startling spasm of pure, unvarnished lust arrowed through him at shattering speed.
‘It’s such a shame that you weren’t able to avoid the tree,’ Hope added, intending that as a sympathetic expression of regret.
‘Avoiding you was my priority. Never mind the fact that, in the attempt, I could easily have killed myself,’ Andreas countered with icy bite at what he interpreted as a veiled attack on his skill as a driver. Having dragged his attention from her, he had felt the heat of that startlingly inappropriate hunger subside as swiftly as it had arisen. He decided that the crash had temporarily deprived him of his wits and caused his libido to play a trick on his imagination: she had to be the least attractive woman he had ever met.
‘But mercifully,’ Hope bravely persisted in her efforts to offer comfort, ‘we both have a lot to be grateful for—’
‘Educate me on that score,’ Andreas sliced back in an invitation that cracked like a whiplash.
‘Sorry?’ Hope prompted uncertainly, turquoise eyes locking to him in dismay.
‘Theos mou! Explain exactly what you believe that I have to be grateful for at this moment in time,’ Andreas demanded with derision, snowflakes beginning to encrust his cropped black hair as the fall grew heavier. ‘I’m standing in a blizzard and I’m cold. It’s getting dark. My favourite car has been obliterated from the face of the earth along with my mobile phone and I am stuck with a stranger.’
‘But we’re alive. Neither of us has been hurt,’ Hope pointed out through chattering teeth, still keen as mustard to cheer him up.
He was stranded with Little Miss Sunshine, Andreas registered in disgust. ‘May I make use of your mobile phone?’
‘I’m sorry…I don’t have one—’
‘Then you must live nearby…how far is it to your home?’ Andreas cut in, taking an impatient step forward.
‘But I don’t live round here,’ she answered ruefully. ‘I don’t even know where I am.’
Ebony brows drawing together, Andreas frowned down at her as though she had confessed to something unbelievably stupid. ‘How can that be?’
‘I’m not a local,’ Hope explained, trying to still a shiver and failing. ‘I’m only in the area because I was attending an interview and I got a lift there. Then I started walking…I followed this signpost and I thought I couldn’t be that far from the main road but I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere—’
‘How long were you walking for?’
‘A couple of hours and I haven’t seen any houses for absolutely ages. That’s why I didn’t want you to drive past. I was getting a little concerned—’
Watching her shiver violently, Andreas noticed that her coat was dripping. ‘When did you get wet?’
‘There’s a stream in that ditch,’ she told him jerkily.
‘How wet are you?’
Having established that she was soaked through to the skin, Andreas studied her with fulminating intensity, brilliant eyes flashing tawny. ‘You should have said,’ he censured. ‘In sub-zero temperatures, you’re liable to end up with hypothermia and I don’t need the hassle.’
‘I’m not going to be any hassle,’ Hope swore hurriedly.
‘I saw a barn a couple of fields back. You need shelter—’
‘Really, I’ll be fine. As soon as I start walking again, I’ll warm up in no time,’ Hope mumbled through fast-numbing lips, for of all things she hated to make the smallest nuisance of herself.
‘You won’t warm up until you get those clothes off,’ Andreas asserted, planting a managing arm to her spine to urge her along at a pace faster than was comfortable for her much shorter legs.
Her lips were too numb for her to laugh at the very idea of getting her clothes off in the presence of a strange man. But she was tickled pink by his instant response to what he saw as an emergency. In a flash, he had abandoned all lament about his wrecked car and his own lack of comfort to put her needs first. At a similar speed he had found a solution to the problem and he was taking charge.
Wasn’t that supposed to be a typically male response? Only it was not a response that was as common as popular report liked to suggest, Hope reflected thoughtfully. Neither her father nor her brother had been the least bit tempted to help her out by solving problems. In fact both the men in her life had beat a very fast retreat from the demands placed on them by her mother’s long illness. She had been forced to accept that neither man was strong enough to cope with that challenge and that, as she was capable, there was no point blaming them for their weakness.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked him. ‘I’m Hope… Hope Evans.’
‘Andreas,’ Andreas delivered grimly, watching her attempt to climb a farm gate with incredulous eyes. With purposeful hands he lifted her down from her wobbly perch on the second bar so that he could unlatch the gate for their entry.
‘Oh, thanks…’ Wretched with cold as she was, Hope was breathless at having received that amount of attention and shaken that he had managed to lift her without apparent effort. But then she could not recall anyone trying to lift her after the age of ten. She would never forget, however, the cruel taunts she had earned at school for the generous bodily proportions that had been the exact opposite of the fashionable slenderness possessed by the most popular girls in her form.
As she lurched into a ditch
