Snowbound with a Stranger Read Free Page B

the scenery.
    There was a reason he came up here so often, with or without Stevens. The deep woods were always quiet, but nothing compared to the stillness of an Appalachian snowfall. Even the roaring of the wind felt hushed. It drew the chaos right out of him.
    Lee leaned for a moment into this peace, until Dannie quickened her pace and came up level beside him.
    “How are you finding your way in this mess?”
    “Muscle memory.” Lee slowed slightly, matching his pace to hers. “We come here a lot.”
    She was covered in snow. White flakes crystallized along her eyelashes and made her brown eyes appear depthless. Out of nowhere Lee was seized with a sight-memory, a gut-memory, of another woman—ten years earlier, covered in gray-white dust and stumbling away from the towers at the World Trade Center. She’d gripped his arm momentarily as she passed, as he tried to run toward the building along with so many of his friends and colleagues.
    He’d thought of that woman many times over the years. Had she made it home? Was she sick now with the respiratory illnesses so many of them got? Had she recovered? He couldn’t know.
    Lee shook his head. He came up here to forget things like this. To put these memories out of his head, at least temporarily. To give his mind a little rest from the endless playing back and playing over. Of that day. Of the days that followed. Of Caroline.
    “You seem like you know what you’re doing.” Abruptly Dannie brought him back to the present.
    “Enough to get by, yeah. How about you?” He risked a sideways glance at her, careful to cover the tracks of his morbid thoughts. “You held your own out there until I met up with you.”
    “I don’t know about that,” Dannie scoffed. “I was just about to start freaking out when you got there.”
    He grinned, which felt like ice cracking since his face was practically frozen. “What, you had a freak-out scheduled for three-fifteen?”
    “Roughly, yeah.” Dannie smiled in return.
    It made the laugh lines show around her eyes and struck a low chord in the pit of Lee’s stomach. And, truth be told, lower.
    Stevens had said she was pretty. In a tell-anyone-I-said-so-and-I’ll-lose-my-job undertone, of course. But Lee hadn’t believed him. Stevens had strange taste in women. He’d once brought a lady with a parrot to Thanksgiving dinner, and the parrot had talked more than she did.
    In Dannie’s case pretty didn’t really cut it.
    His eyes had found her as soon as he’d stepped out of his car this morning. He saw her see him, and then look away.
    She’d been wrapped up like a mummy and three hundred yards away, but even so, when he’d looked at her it felt—immediately—like a swift kick in the chest.
    It was disconcerting, to say the least. He hadn’t felt such a strong reaction to a woman since…well, not for a long time. A long damn time.
    Beside him Dannie trudged forward through the snow. “Were you a Boy Scout when you were a kid?”
    “Yes, ma’am.” He tried not to react to the husky lilt of her voice. She had a voice like a smoker. Like a truck driver. Like a stripper. He cleared his throat. “How’d you know?”
    “Wild guess.”
    Up ahead a thick log lay across their path. It was too long to walk around and too large to simply step over. Lee braced his boot against the top of the trunk and scaled it. Standing above her, he extended his hand to help her up.
    Dannie hesitated.
    It was obvious that she needed assistance to scramble over the log, and equally clear that she didn’t like it.
    Okay. A damsel in distress she was not. Lee narrowed his eyes against the snow and buried a small smile. He gazed up ahead at some indiscernible point on the trail, and then back at her.
    “Ten minutes from here, tops. Come on.” He reached out his hand to her again.
    She might not be a wilting flower, but she wasn’t an idiot either. She let him take her hand.
    Once she was safely atop the log, Lee jumped down. Before she could