Heart of Winter Read Free Page A

pressed on the accelerator, and her body was reacting to the feel of his shoulder against hers in ways she hadn’t expected. He made her tremble with awakening sensation, made her feel alive as she hadn’t felt since her late teens. She didn’t like that, or him, and her face took on the hardness of stone as the road wound on and on, through fir trees so tall and thick that Nicky stared in fascination at their girth. The forested areas were becoming thick now that they were off the rolling plain that had led to them, down country roads where houses were miles apart and traffic was practically nonexistent. Nicky, who’d read about Montana, hadn’t been prepared for its vastness, or for the glory of orange-tipped aspens with their thin silvery trunks, and cottonwoods fluffy and yellow-hued, and those incredibly big pines. Or for the sheer splendor of the mountains and the crisp, clean coldness of mountain air. She watched, rapt, as the mountains shot up in front of them. Winthrop turned onto a tiny dirt road and they started to go up.
    â€œNot what you expected, Miss White?” Winthrop chided as she stiffened on a sudden hair-raising curve as he gunned the truck up what seemed like a mountainside. “Montana isn’t all pretty little photographs in coffee-table books.”
    â€œIt’s very mountainous,” she began.
    â€œThat it is.” He wheeled around another curve, and she got a sickening view of the valley below. It was just like the Great Smoky Mountains, only worse. The Smokies were high and rounded with age, but the Rockies were sharp and young and much higher. Nicky, who had no head at all for heights, began to feel sick.
    â€œAre you all right, Nicky?” Gerald asked with concern. “You’ve gone white.”
    â€œI’m fine.” She swallowed. Not for the world would she let Winthrop see what his careless wheeling was accomplishing. She held onto her purse for dear life and stared straight ahead, her jaw set, her green eyes unblinking.
    Winthrop, who saw her stubborn resolve, smiled faintly to himself. Nicky might have been surprised to know how much it took to make him smile these days.
    Another few miles, and they began to descend. The valley that opened before them took Nicky’s breath away. She forgot her nausea in the sheer joy of appreciation. She leaned forward, with her slender hand on the dash, her eyes wide, her breath whispering out softly.
    â€œHeaven,” she breathed, smiling at maples gone scarlet and gold, at huge fir trees, delicate aspens and fluffy cottonwoods and the wide swath of a river cutting through it all, leading far into the distance like a silver ribbon. “Oh, it’s heaven!”
    Winthrop’s eyebrows levered up another fraction as he slowed the truck to give her a better view. At the end of the road was a house, a huge sprawling two-story house that seemed part of its environs. It was made of redwood, with decks on all sides and an enormous porch that seemed to go all the way around it. It had to have fireplaces, because smoke was coming from two chimneys. Maples were all around it, too ordered not to have been planted deliberately years before, and with the mountains all around, it had a majesty that a castle would have envied.
    â€œLovely, isn’t it?” Gerald sighed. “Every time I leave it, I get homesick. Winthrop hasn’t changed a single thing about it, either. It’s been this way for forty years or more, since our mother planted those maples around the house when our father built it.”
    â€œI thought they looked as if someone had planted them.” Nicky laughed. “They’re in a perfect semicircle around the back of the house.”
    â€œSome city people might think that trees grow in perfect order,” Winthrop mused, glancing coldly at Nicky. “Amazing, that you were able to pick it out so easily.”
    â€œOh, Nicky grew up on a farm, didn’t you,