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“Small community. Everyone knows everyone. I’m talking about the locals, obviously. The population swells by a few thousand tourists all year round.” He turned the wheel and eased carefully into the long road that twisted and turned through the forest toward the lake. “Where did you grow up? I’m guessing not in the country.”
“London.” It was a typically brief answer and Jackson wondered whether it was because she didn’t want to talk about herself or because she was careful to always focus on the client.
They passed the sign for snow Crystal and she tilted her head. “Someone built a snowman.”
“Favorite activity for kids around here.”
She studied the carefully sculpted snow and the twig arms and mouth. “Was it yours?”
“Mine was stuffing snow down my brothers’ necks and then running like hell before they could retaliate. We were more into destroying than creating.”
“I suppose that’s what happens when you have three boys. Tell me about your other brother.”
“Sean? He’s an orthopedic surgeon. I take credit for that choice… .” He slowed as the surface became more uneven. “I broke my arm snowboarding when I was seven. Ran into a tree. Instead of running for help he stood there staring at the bone sticking out.”
“Oh, please—”
“I was yelling at him to get help, and all Sean could do was wonder how it was going to go back under the skin. He insisted on coming with me to the hospital so he could find out. He went to Harvard and then spent time at the Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore indulging his fascination for difficult fractures, before switching to sports medicine. At the moment he’s working in Boston and when he isn’t wearing scrubs he dresses in smart suits, drinks fine wine and dates beautiful women.”
He’d done the same, he remembered. There was a time not so long ago when he’d worn smart suits, enjoyed fine wines in good restaurants and dated beautiful women.
Now he rarely wore a suit, and apart from a couple of friendly evenings out with Brenna, who had grown up on the farm nearby and followed them around when they were kids, he hadn’t dated anyone. For the past eighteen months his life had been about saving the business.
“So he’s not back in the family fold?”
“No, but he’ll be home for Christmas.” Following an impulse, Jackson pulled over and parked. “This is one of my favorite views of Snow Crystal. From here you can see the lake, the mountain and the forest. If you come here early in the morning and late at night in the summer you can sometimes see black bear and moose.”
“Thanks for the warning.”
He smiled. “It wasn’t a warning. The wildlife is important to the tourists. Have you ever seen a bear?”
“Never. And truthfully, I hope not to. I don’t think it would be my thing, although I do meet quite a few sharks in my job.” Her eyes gleamed. “Any other wildlife I should know about apart from bear and moose? Er—anything small and friendly and less likely to kill you? A cute rabbit perhaps?”
“The animals leave you alone if you leave them alone.”
“I’ll be leaving them alone. No doubt about that. So what else interests the tourists here?”
“The view.” He considered himself good at reading people but he was finding it hard to read her.
“I’ve already written that down. The view. See?” She turned the screen toward him. “It’s on the list, above ‘moose.’”
“Instead of writing it down, why don’t you try looking at it?”
“At a moose?”
“At the view. Get out of the car.”
“Get out—you mean actually go outside and stand in the snow?” She said it slowly, as if he’d asked her to strip naked and run in circles. “You’re the client, so if you think it’s necessary then of course I’ll—” Taking a deep breath she opened the car door and then gasped and slammed it shut again. “Crap, it’s freezing out there.”
The brief loss of control convinced him he preferred Kayla with her guard down. “If you wear the right gear, you won’t feel the cold.”
“I’m definitely wearing the wrong gear. I felt it right down to my bones.” She shivered. “All right, I can do this. It’s the whole Snow Crystal experience, frostbite and all.” Opening the door gingerly she slid out of the car, one limb at a time, as if bracing herself to enter a cold swimming pool.
Jackson strolled around to her, his feet crunching on new snow. “Close your eyes.”
He could see her weighing up the risk of trusting him against the potential downside of arguing with a client.
She closed her eyes. “If the next thing I feel is a bear’s jaws closing on my arm, I resign the account. I really don’t want the whole Snow Crystal experience to include being a bear’s breakfast.”
He closed his hands over her arms. “No bears. Turn around.” Her hair brushed against his chin and the scent of it mingled with pine and freezing air. He decided that Kayla Green smelled as good as she looked. “Now open your eyes. Look through the trees.”
“What am I looking at?”
“The lake.”
She focused, her breath forming clouds in the air. “I—Oh. People are skating.”
“In Vermont the weather is the ultimate wild card, but the one thing we always have in winter is ice.
“You can skate on the lake?” Her tone was wistful. “That’s magical.”
“You want to try it?”
“It’s not that magical. I think I’m probably more of an indoor skater. But I can see others might find it charming,” she added hastily. “I’ll add it to the list underneath ‘view’ and ‘moose.’”
“Skating is fun.” He tried to imagine the businesslike, composed Kayla Green falling on her butt and then decided not to waste time imagining something that was going to be reality soon enough. There was no way she’d keep her footing in those elegant and totally impractical chocolate leather boots.
Back in the car, he turned the heating up and steered the vehicle back onto the road. “If you look through the trees to the right you can see one of our log cabins.”
She turned her head, the movement sending that blond ponytail swinging. “Is that mine?”
“No. You asked for secluded.” Had he misjudged? Why would a single girl on her own over Christmas want to be in a secluded cabin? “You can change your mind and be closer to the main lodge if you prefer.”
“A secluded cabin is my dream.”
It seemed like an odd dream for a bright, twenty-something woman.
Then he thought about the life she led, the busy nonstop adrenaline rush that was her working day. Maybe she needed a rest. There were plenty of days when a secluded cabin sounded good to him, too.
“Your cabin is right on the boundary of our land and it backs onto a deer wintering area so you’ll probably spot white-tailed deer. You might see snowshoe hare, fox, coyote, bobcats and the odd porcupine.” He slowed as he negotiated the narrowing track. “I’ll give you time to unpack and settle in before you meet the rest of the team.”
Team? He almost laughed. They weren’t a team, they were a circus.
“Do you live with your family?”
“No. I love them, but there are limits. I converted the barn.” So that he could have his own personal brick wall to bang his head against when they drove him crazy.
He drove straight along the forest road that followed the edge of the lake and pulled up outside the little rustic gate that marked the track leading to the cabin.
“We have to walk from here.”
IT WAS PERFECT.
Kayla stepped onto the path and stood for a moment, breathing in the smell of the forest and the crisp winter air. Trees soared upward, branches drooping under the heavy burden of snow. The light was fading and the last rays of the sun glinted off the frozen surface of the lake, giving it a mystical, ethereal quality. Everything was still, the silence broken only by the occasional soft thud as snow tumbled from overloaded branches.
It felt a million miles from Manhattan. A million miles from her life.
A million miles from the all-consuming madness of Christmas.
She smiled.
She could have been the only person on the planet.
And then she heard the car door slam and remembered she wasn’t the only person.
He was here.
The chemistry was a tight knot in her stomach and the frantic race of her heart.
She’d spent the journey with her head down, trying not to think about the man in the driver’s seat next to her, trying not to think about his hands, strong and sure on the wheel or his thighs, hard and muscular, dangerously close to hers. But Jackson O’Neil wasn’t easy to ignore. And he’d kept glancing at her, as if trying to work out who she really was behind the person she projected.
He made her edgy.
Striving for normality, she reached for her phone, but he shook his head as he put her bag down next to her.
“The signal is patchy here. It’s better in the cabin. I’ll leave you for a couple of hours to catch up on whatever you need to do, then I’ll pick you up and take you to the main house. I’ll do my best to keep the experience as painless as possible.”
It seemed an odd thing to say. Or maybe he thought she was nervous with no team to back her up. “It’s a meeting. I’ve taken plenty of meetings in my time.”
“This one might be a little different.”
“Different keeps things interesting. I’m looking forward to meeting your family and getting straight down to business.” She emphasized the word business as much for her benefit as his.
She didn’t want this to be about anything other than work.
As far as she was concerned, the chemistry was as unwelcome as Santa.
Telling herself that all she had to do was ignore it, Kayla turned to pick up her bag only to find he was already holding it.
“This path can be icy. You might want to hold my hand.”
What?
Certain that holding his hand would be a fast route to the dark side, she curled her fingers into her palm. “I’ll be fine.”
“We sweep the snow but there are always a few icy patches.”
She’d rather hit an icy patch than lay a hand on any of his muscles. That was a line she definitely didn’t want to cross. “I have natural balance.” Trying to look professional, Kayla adjusted her scarf. “I do yoga and Pilates.”
“Natural balance.” He watched her with a lazy, hooded gaze. “That’s good to hear.” Turning away, he unlatched the gate, carrying her bag as if it weighed nothing. “The place should be warm. There should be plenty of logs for the fire but if you need more, let me know.”
Kayla stared at those wide, powerful shoulders now encased in a warm, winter jacket.
It was obvious he’d chopped a lot of logs in his time.
Dressed in a suit, he’d unsettled her, but with a great deal of mental effort she’d managed to box him together with all the other men in suits she met on a daily basis.
Now he’d punched his way out of that box.
Given that he had his back to her she allowed herself one indulgent, entirely feminine glance of appreciation.
Stacy was right. He was insanely hot.
And because life had a way of doling out what you didn’t want at the most inconvenient moment, he turned and caught her looking. “Something wrong?”
“Just enjoying the view.” Hoping he didn’t guess exactly which view she’d been enjoying, she kept her head down and walked quickly past him. Too quickly. Her feet made brief contact with ice. There was a horrible stomach-swooping moment where she fought gravity, arms flailing like the rotor blades on a helicopter, but it was a useless battle and she landed flat on her back in the deep snow at the side of the path.
Cold oozed through the soft wool of her coat, which she hadn’t bothered fastening, and snow enveloped her. It tumbled on her face, on her chest and trickled down her boots. Snow crystals froze to the back of her neck and dampened her hair until she was chilled right through to her skull. Somehow, in the general indignity of the fall, her smart pencil skirt had managed to ride up high on her thighs, and she could feel ice numb her legs.
Kayla lay there, pinned to the ground by shock and snowflakes while Jackson strolled across to her, maddeningly secure on the slippery path.
She gritted her teeth. “If you so much as mutter ‘I told you so,’ I’m resigning the account.”
“You should have held my hand.”
“It would have felt weird holding hands with a client.”
“More weird than lying flat on your back in front of a client with one leg in Vermont and the other in New Hampshire?” He was laughing now, and the sensual curve of his mouth made her insides curl.
“I always like to conduct at least one client meeting on my back. I find it breaks the ice, although in this case it may have been my head that’s broken the ice.”
“I warned you.” His gaze moved from her face to her legs and the look in her eyes made her feel as if someone had touched her with the flame of a blowtorch.
“I preferred snow when it was my desktop image. Wearing it doesn’t feel so good.” She was trying desperately not to laugh. Her dignity was already buried under snow; she didn’t want to make it worse by having a fit of the giggles but she couldn’t help it. A gurgle of laughter escaped. So much for good impressions. “Am I fired?”
“If I hadn’t already given you the business, I’d give it to you now.” He towered over her, six foot two of solid male muscle and raw power.
“Because you’ve seen my legs?”
“Because you laughed.” His voice was dark velvet and any desire to laugh vanished.
“I’m allowed to laugh, but if you laugh I’m on the next flight back to New York and you will never find out what I would have done with this place.”
“Noted.” He held out his hand. “Do you want help getting up or are you planning on lying there for a while?”
She wasn’t sure she trusted herself to touch him. She was used to feeling sure of herself. In control. Right now, she was neither of those things. “You wanted me to enjoy the whole Snow Crystal experience so I don’t want to rush this. And then there’s the fact that I don’t think I can get up.”
Dark brows met in a frown. “You’re hurt?”
