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He was right. Her feet were stylishly clad in a ballet slipper style shoe by a famous designer. She had bought the red slippers—? la Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz—when she had been more able to afford such whims.
The shoes had no grip on the sole. Stacy was no better prepared for snow than her car had been, and she was inordinately grateful for his steadying hands on her shoulders.
“What have you got on?” he asked, his tone incredulous.
The question really should have been what did he have on—since she was peripherally aware it was not much—but she glanced down at herself, anyway.
The shoes added a light Bohemian touch to an otherwise ultraconservative, just-above-the-knee gray skirt that she had paired with dark tights and a white blouse. At the last moment she had donned a darker gray sweater, which she was glad for now, as the snow fell around her. Nothing about her outfit—not even the shoes—commanded that incredulous tone.
Then, she dared glance fully at her rescuer and realized his question about what she had on was not in the context of her very stylish outfit at all. He was referring to her tires!
“Not even all seasons,” he said, squinting past her at the front tire that rested on top of what had been, no doubt, a very expensive shrub. His tone was disapproving. “Summer tires. What were you thinking?”
It was terribly difficult to drag her attention away this unexpectedly delicious encounter with the Kiernan McAllister and focus on the question. She felt as if her voice was coming from under water when she answered.
“I’ve never put winter tires on my car,” she confessed. “And if I were going to, it would not occur to me to do it in October. It is the season of falling leaves and pumpkins, not this.”
“You could have asked for me to send a car,” he said sternly.
Stacy contemplated that. She could have asked the Kiernan McAllister to send a car? In what universe? Obviously—and sadly—he was expecting someone else.
Or, was there the possibility Caroline had done more than give her an address? Did she have some kind of in with him? Had she set something up for Stacy?
That was her imagination again, because it was not likely he would be so intent on giving an interview he would send a car!
“Were you not prepared at all for mountain driving?”
“Not at all,” she admitted. “I was born and raised in Vancouver. You know how often we get snow there.”
At his grunt of what she interpreted as disapproval, she felt compelled to rush on. “Though I’ve always dreamed of a winter holiday. Skating on a frozen pond, learning to ski. That kind of thing. Now, I’m not so sure about that. Winter seems quite a bit more pleasant in movies and pictures and snow globes. Maybe I should just fast-forward to the hot chocolate in front of the fire.”
Was she chattering? Oh, God, she was chattering nervously, and it wasn’t just her teeth! Shut up, she ordered herself, but she had to add, “Humph. Reality and imagination collide, again.”
Story of her life: imagining walking down the aisle, her gorgeous white dress flowing out behind her, toward a man who looked at her with such love and such longing...
She did not want to be having those kinds of treacherous thoughts around this man.
“I always liked this reality,” McAllister said, and he actually reached out his free hand and caught a snowflake with it. Then he yanked his hand back abruptly, and the line around his mouth tightened and Stacy saw something mercurial in his storm-gray eyes.
She realized he had recalled, after the words came out of his mouth, that it was this reality—in the form of an avalanche—that had caused the death of his brother-in-law.
Sympathy clawed at her throat, as did a sense of knowing he was holding something inside that was eating him like acid.
It was a lot to understand from a glimpse of something in his eyes, from the way his mouth had changed, but this was exactly what Caroline had meant about Stacy’s ability to get to the heart of a story.
For some reason—probably from the loss of her family when she was a child—she had a superhoned sense of intuition that had left her with an ability to see people with extraordinary clarity and tell their stories deeply and profoundly.
Not that McAllister looked as if he would be willing to have his story told at all, his secrets revealed, his feelings probed.
Stacy had a sudden sense if she did get to the heart of this man, as Caroline had wistfully suggested, she would find it broken.
McAllister’s face was closed now, as if he sensed he had let his guard down just for that instant and that it might have revealed too much to her.
“What did you do when you lost control?” he asked her.
Of her life? How on earth could he tell? Was he has intuitive as she herself was?
But, to her relief, his attention was focused, disapprovingly, on her tires. He was still keeping her upright on the slippery ground, his hand now firmly clamped on her elbow, but if he was feeling the same sensation of being singed that she was, it in no way showed in his face. He had the look of a man who was always composed and in control.
“What did I do? I closed my eyes, and held on for dear life, of course!”
“Imagining a good outcome?” he said drily.
She nodded sadly. The collision with reality was more than evident.
He sighed, with seeming long-suffering, though their acquaintance had been extremely brief!
“You might want to keep in mind, for next time, if you lose control on ice, to try and steer into the spin, rather than away from it.”
“That doesn’t seem right.”
“I know, it goes against everyone’s first instinct. But really, that’s what you do. You go with it, instead of fighting it.”
The sense of being singed increased when Stacy became suddenly and intensely aware that, despite the snow falling in large and chilly flakes all around them, despite the fact the driveway was pure ice, the question really should not have been what she had on for tires—or for clothes! That should not have been the question at all, given what he had on.
Which was next to nothing!
Maybe she had hit her head harder than she thought, and this whole thing was a dream. The scene was surreal after all.
How could it be possible McAllister was out here in his driveway, one hand gripping her firmly, glaring at her tires, when he was dressed in nothing more than a pair of shove-on sandals, a towel cinched around his waist?
The shock of it made her release the arm she clutched, and the wisps of her remaining sympathy were blown away as if before a strong wind. All that remained was awareness of him in a very different way.
She would have staggered back—and probably slipped again—but when she had let go, he had continued to hold on.
His warmth and his strength were like electricity, but not the benign kind that powered the toaster.
No, the furious, unpredictable kind. The lightning-bolt-that-could-tear-open-the-sky kind. The kind that could split apart trees and turn the world to fire.
Stacy realized the hammering of her heart during the slippery trip into the mountains, and after she had bounced over the curb into the fountain, had been but a pale prelude to the speeds her heart could attain!
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_bb43e2f2-7638-51d2-8141-ef9145934939)
KIERNAN MCALLISTER WATCHED the pulse in the woman’s throat. The accident had obviously affected her more than she wanted to let on. Her face was very pale and he considered the awful possibility she was going to keel over, either because she was close to fainting or because her shoes were so unsuited to this kind of ground.
As he watched, her hand, tiny and pale, fluttered to her own throat to keep tabs on the wildly beating tattoo of her pulse, and McAllister tightened his grip on her even more.
“Are you okay?” he asked again. He could feel his brow furrow as he looked in her face.
He had told his sister, Adele, not to send assistance. He had told her, in no uncertain terms, that he found it insulting that she thought he needed it. She seemed to have agreed, but he should have guessed she only pretended to acquiesce.
“I think I’m just shaken.”
The girl—no, she wasn’t a girl, despite her diminutive size—had a voice that was low and husky, a lovely softness to it, unconsciously sexy. She was, in fact, a lovely young woman. Dark curls sprang untamed around a delicate, pale, elfin face. Her eyes were green and huge, her nose a little button, her chin had a certain defiant set to it.
Kiernan’s annoyance at his sister grew.
If she had needed to send someone—and in her mind, apparently she had—he would have hoped for someone no-nonsense and practical. Someone who arrived in a car completely outfitted for winter and in sturdy shoes. In other words someone who coped, pragmatically, as a matter of course, with every eventuality. If he was going to picture that someone he would picture someone middle-aged, dowdy and stern enough to intimidate Ivan the Terrible into instant submission.
Now, he felt as if he had two people, other than himself, to be responsible for!
“You’re sure you are all right?” He cast a glance at her car. Maybe he could get it unstuck and convince her to disobey his sister’s orders, whatever they were, and leave him alone here.
Alone. That was what called to him these days, the seduction of silence, of not being around people. The cabin was perfect. Hard to access, no cell service, spotty internet.
His sister didn’t see his quest for solitude as a good thing. “You just go up there and mull over things that can’t be changed!” his sister had accused him.
And perhaps that was true. Certainly, the presence of his little nephew did not leave much time for mulling! And perhaps that had been Adele’s plan. His sister could be diabolical after all.
But the woman who had just arrived looked more like distraction than heaven-sent helper, so he was going to figure out how to get her unstuck and set her on her way no matter what Adele had to say about it.
For some reason, he did not want the curly-headed, green-eyed, red-shoed woman to make it past the first guard and into his house!
He regarded her thoughtfully, trying to figure out why he felt he did not want to let her in. And then he knew. Despite the fact the accident had left her shaken, she seemed determined to not let it affect her.
Look at the shoes! She was one of those positive, sunny, impractical people and he did not want her invading his space.
When had he come to like the dark of his own misery and loneliness so much?
“Yes, I’m fine,” she said, her voice, tremulous with bravery, piercing the darkness of his own thoughts. “More embarrassed than anything.”
“And well you should be.” The faint sympathy he had felt for her melted. “A person with a grain of sense and so little winter driving experience should not have tackled these roads today. I told her not to send you.”
She blinked at that. Opened her mouth, then closed it, looked down at her little red shoes and ineffectually tried to scrape the snow off them.
“I detest stubborn women,” he muttered. “Why would you travel today?”
“Perhaps it wasn’t my most sensible decision,” she said, and he watched the chin that had hinted at a stubborn nature tilt upward a touch, “but I can’t guarantee the result would not have been similar, even on the finest summer day.”
He lifted an eyebrow at her, intrigued despite himself.
“My second name is Murphy, for my maternal grandfather, and it is very suiting. I am like a poster child for Murphy’s Law.”
He had the feeling she was trying to keep things light in the face of the deliberate dark judgment in his own features, so he did not respond to the lightness of her tone, just raised his eyebrow even higher at her.
“Murphy’s Law?”
“You know,” she clarified, trying for a careless grin and missing by a mile. “Anything that can go wrong, will.”
He stared at her. For a moment, the crystal clear green of those eyes clouded, and he felt some thread of shared experience, of unspeakable sorrow, trying to bind them together.
His sense of needing to get rid of her strengthened. But then he saw the blood in her hair.
* * *
Stacy could have kicked herself! What on earth had made her say that to him? It was not at all in keeping with the new her: strong, composed, sophisticated. You didn’t blurt out things like that to a perfect stranger! She had intended it to sound light; instead, it sounded like a pathetic play for sympathy!
And, damn it, sometimes when you opened that door you did not know what was going to come through.
And what came through for her was a powerful vision of the worst moment of anything that can go wrong will in her entire life. She was standing outside her high school gym. She closed her eyes against it, but it came anyway.
Standing outside the high school waiting anxiously, just wanting to be anywhere but there. Waiting for the car that never came. A teacher finding her long after everyone else had gone home, wrapping her in her own sweater, because Stacy was shivering. She already knew there was only one reason that her father would not have come. Her whole world gone so terribly and completely wrong in an instant...left craving the one thing she could never have again.
Her family.
She had hit her head harder than she thought! That’s what was causing this. Or was it the look she had glimpsed ever so briefly in his own eyes? The look that had given her the sensation that he was a man bereft?
“You actually don’t look okay,” he decided.
She opened her eyes to see him studying her too intently. Just what every woman—even one newly devoted to independence—wanted to hear from Kiernan McAllister!
“I don’t?”
“You’re not going to faint, are you?”
“No!” Her denial was vehement, given the fact that she had been contemplating that very possibility—heart implosion—only seconds ago.
“You’ve gone quite pale.” He was looking at her too intensely.
“It’s my coloring,” she said. “I always look pale.”
This was, unfortunately, more than true. Though she had the dark brown hair of her father, she had not inherited his olive complexion. Her mother had been a redhead, and she had her ultrapale, sensitive skin and green eyes.
“You are an unusual combination of light and dark.” She squirmed under his gaze, until he tightened his hold.
“Remember Murphy’s Law,” he warned her. “It’s very slippery out here, and those shoes look more suited to a bowling alley than a fresh snowfall.”
A bowling alley? “They’re Kleinbacks,” she insisted on informing him, trying to shore up her quickly disintegrating self-esteem. The shoes, after all proclaimed arrival, not disaster.
“Well, you’ll be lyin’-on-your-backs if you aren’t careful in them. You don’t want to add to your injuries.”
“Injuries?”
Still holding her one arm firmly, he used his other—he seemed to have his cell phone in it—and whipped off the towel he had around his waist!
Still juggling the towel and the phone, he found a dry corner of it, and pressed it, with amazing gentleness, onto the top of her head. “I didn’t see it at first, amongst the chocolate curls—”
Chocolate curls? It was the nicest way her hair had ever been described! Did that mean he was noticing more about her than his sack-of-potatoes hold had indicated?
