Christmas With A Stranger

Christmas With A Stranger
Catherine Spencer

FORBIDDEN! Her Christmas fantasy! As an unexpected guest at Morgan Kincaid's palatial home, Jessica planned to turn his Christmas into the best ever. She'd always dreamed of how special this time of year could be, and here at the Kincaid mansion she could indulge herself to the full - with a proper tree, decorations and festive food … and Morgan, the most attractive man she'd ever known.A firecracker in the hearth, there was mulled wine and it was Christmas Eve, a time for magic and fantasies. Morgan was all hers for tonight - and Jessica was determined that by Christmas Day they would no longer be strangers… .When passion knows no reason… . FORBIDDEN!

“I don’t find you plain at all, Jessica. On the contrary, I find you quite irresistibly lovely.” (#u56f88f10-6ef2-5edb-9879-486f8b478a51)About the Author (#u6a913ff8-a7fd-51e7-8568-50913e25e146)Title Page (#u40cd6e8d-32b5-5226-b687-c463523304c7)PROLOGUE (#u27bbf97f-8acd-5057-af0e-69c518ab43fd)CHAPTER ONE (#udad60042-8b18-5f5f-a34c-e4e380611b38)CHAPTER TWO (#ud2097a35-3dd8-57dd-9671-f183966833fe)CHAPTER THREE (#ue510cd88-fa85-5215-9ec4-9ef50a5f7229)CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

“I don’t find you plain at all, Jessica. On the contrary, I find you quite irresistibly lovely.”

Just for a second everything in the room seemed to hang in frozen tension. The pretty Christmas tree ornaments stopped twirling, the lights ceased their tiny reflective flickerings. Even the flames in the hearth grew still. She held on to that moment as long as she could, then came straight out and asked him, “Are you married, Morgan?”

“Not anymore.”

“And do you find me intimidatingly sensible?”

“I don’t intimidate that easily, Jessica.”

“Then why haven’t you tried to make love to me?”

CATHERINE SPENCER, once an English teacher, fell into writing through eavesdropping on a conversation about Harlequin Romance. Within two months she changed careers and sold her first book to Harlequin in 1984. She moved from England to Canada thirty years ago and has four grown children—two daughters and two sons—plus three dogs and a cat. In her spare time she plays the piano, collects antiques and grows tropical shrubs.

Christmas With A Stranger

Catherine Spencer

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

PROLOGUE

HE WAS on the outside again. On the run. Eventually, of course, they’d catch up with him, and when they did they’d put him away for an even longer stretch. But meanwhile time was on his side. Time in which to carry out the plan he’d spent nine years perfecting. Time to exact punishment for the injustice meted out to him.

Oh, he’d been a model inmate! So clever, fooling all of them with the mealy-mouthed responses they’d wanted to hear. So eager to be rehabilitated, so willing to admit the error of his ways. Oozing humility and remorse enough to make a thinking man’s stomach revolt.

But they weren’t thinking men, they were fools. Fools and tools of the system that had rejected him—except for the man who’d put him behind bars. He was an adversary worth taking on. Outwitting him would be a triumph, something in which to take delight when they caught up with him again.

What else, after all, had he to nourish his soul? No wife, certainly, and a child who called some stranger “Father”. No home, no job. And no future. Model prisoner or not, his past would go with him wherever he went. For the rest of his life.

It was the way things were done these days. Forget all that nonsense about a man having paid for his crimes. He never wrote off the debt because they plastered his face and name on community notice boards and labeled him a dangerous offender, even if he’d been judged guilty of only one crime—and that vindicated in the eyes of God-fearing people.

Vermin, that was what he’d stamped out. A temptation of the devil’s making best wiped off the face of the earth. A cheap flirt dolled up to look like decent folk, preying on a man’s weakness when he was most vulnerable. Reaching across his desk in such a way that he was filled with the scent of her.

It would have been different if he’d been allowed his conjugal rights, but Lynn had refused him ever since she’d almost lost the baby in her fifteenth week. That had left nearly six months during which he’d been denied his husbandly prerogative. Small wonder he’d fallen victim to the other woman’s wiles.

He hadn’t meant to kill her. It had been an accident—a panic reaction. She’d made a scene when he’d told her he wouldn’t leave his wife for her, and threatened to phone his home, to tell Lynn what a louse she had for a husband, and for a few blind moments he’d lost control and it had just...happened.

He might have been acquitted—at worst found guilty of nothing more heinous than aggravated assault resulting in death. The judge had seemed inclined to sympathy at times, and the jury might have found in his favor—if it hadn’t been for Morgan Kincaid.

Kincaid was the one who’d taken everything away and left him with nothing to lose.

Well, Merry Christmas, Mr. Crown Prosecutor!

It was payback time.

CHAPTER ONE

THE snow began in earnest just as darkness fell. Dense, feathery flakes whirling across the beam of her headlights to imprison her in a closed and isolated world.

Jessica hadn’t been comfortable with the driving conditions from the start. She was used to a milder sort of winter on the island, one of west coast sea mist and wind-driven rain, not the breath-freezing cold of the high Canadian interior.

She’d spent last night in a small town tucked between a lake and the highway, in a country inn built to resemble a Swiss chalet. There’d been logs blazing in the fireplace in the lobby and a twelve-foot Christmas tree that filled the air with the scent of pine, and French onion soup smothered in melted cheese for dinner. It had been a warm, safe place now some three hundred miles behind—much too far to merit her turning back.

If she wanted shelter from the weather again tonight, her only option was to tackle the eighty miles of switchback mountain road that lay between her and her next stop on the way to Whistling Ridge.

Smearing a gloved hand across the windshield, she squinted through the swirling snow, her heart lurching as the wheels of the car skidded suddenly to the right. Upright poles planted at intervals to measure the depth of the winter snowfall were all that stood between her and the swift, steep drop to the valley below.

This was insanity and only the fact that Selena had been injured in a ski-lift accident could have induced her to abandon her original holiday plans and embark on such a journey. But then, wasn’t that how it had always been, ever since they were children? With Selena getting into trouble of one kind or another, and Jessica dropping everything to come to the rescue?

Another forty-five-degree bend loomed up ahead. Cautiously, she steered into the turn. Halfway around, she saw the flicker of headlights below her as another driver navigated the road, but more quickly, with an assurance she sorely lacked.

Once on the straight again, she increased her speed. She had little choice. The car behind was gaining rapidly, there was no room to pass and the snow was, if anything, falling more thickly. In great fat clumps the size of footballs, in fact, that rolled down the mountainside and bounced across the road.

Headlights dazzled in her rear-view mirror. A horn blared, repeatedly, furiously. Panic choked her throat. Was the other driver mad? Trying to run her off the road?

All at once, the open mouth of an avalanche shed yawned blackly a few yards in front, offering a brief haven of safety where she could let whoever was in such a hurry behind get past her.

Clutching the steering wheel in a death grip, Jessica pressed down on the accelerator and shot into the shelter with the other vehicle practically nosing her bumper from behind.

And then the air was filled with thunder and the earth seemed to rock beneath her. And the road, which was supposed to run all the way to Whistling Valley ski resort where Selena lay in a hospital bed, came to a sudden end at the far end of the avalanche shed.

At first Jessica didn’t believe it and, pulling as far over to one side as possible to allow the other driver to get by, kept her car idling forward. Until she saw that there was no way out of the shed, that its exit truly was blocked by a wall of snow, and that, far from trying to pass her, her pursuer had drawn to a stop also, and was climbing out of his vehicle and coming toward her.

Incongruously large and implicitly threatening in the light cast by his car’s headlamps, his shadow leaped ahead of him on the concrete wall of the shed. Reaching for the control panel on the console, Jessica snapped the doors locked and wished she could as easily subdue the tremor of apprehension racing through her.

Approaching her window, he stooped and stared in at her. She had the impression of a man perhaps in his early forties; of dark displeasure, well-defined brows drawn together in a scowl, and a mouth paralleling the same vexation. Of wide shoulders made all the more imposing by the bulky jacket he wore, and of masculine power composed not just of sinew but of command, as though he was not inclined to tolerate having his authority thwarted by anyone.

The way he rapped on her window and ordered, “Open it,” bore out the idea, especially when she found herself automatically obeying the directive and lowering the glass an inch.

“Do you have a death wish?” The question blasted toward her on a cloud of frosty air.

Unvarnished disapproval laced the husky baritone of his voice, leaving her in no doubt that she was alone with a stranger who looked and sounded very much as if he’d like to take her neck between his powerful hands and wring it.

But she wasn’t earning accolades as the youngest headmistress ever appointed to Springhill Island’s Private School for Girls by cowering in the face of incipient trouble. “Certainly not,” she said, as calmly as her thudding heart would allow. “But I imagine you must, if the way you were driving is any indication. You practically ran me off the road.”

For a moment she thought she’d managed to silence him. His jaw almost dropped and he appeared to be at a loss for words. He shook his head, as though unsure that he’d heard her correctly, then recovered enough to say, “Lady, do you have the foggiest idea what’s just happened?”

“Of course.” She gripped the steering wheel more firmly. It was easier to keep her hands from shaking that way. “There has been a bit of a snow slide.”

“There has been a bloody avalanche,” he informed her with a rudeness she would not for a moment have tolerated in her students. “And if you’d had your way we’d both be buried under a load of snow—always assuming, of course, that we hadn’t been swept clear down the mountain.”

Embarrassingly, her teeth started to chatter with shock then, and short of stuffing both gloved hands in her mouth, there was little she could do to disguise the fact except blurt out, “That must be why it’s so cold in here.”