Christmas With A Stranger

He sort of shifted his shoulders around and tugged his folded jacket into a more comfortable position beneath his head. “How so?”

“Well, here we are in bed together, and we don’t even know each other’s names.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m Jessica Simms.”

“Are you?” he said indifferently. “Well, goodnight, Jessica Simms.”

As snubs went, that rated a ten. “Goodnight,” she replied huffily, and went to turn her back on him. Except that, now that he was hogging most of the sleeping bag, there really wasn’t room for such maneuvering, a fact he was quick to point out.

“Quit fidgeting and nest up against me,” he said impatiently. “Every time you shuffle around like that, you let in cold air.”

“Nest?” she quavered, refusing to allow the import of “up against me” to take visual hold in her mind.

“Like two spoons, one around the other.”

And just in case she hadn’t understood he reached back one arm and yanked her close so that her breasts were flattened next to his spine and her pelvis cradled his buttocks. Truly a most compromising situation and one she could only be thankful none of her colleagues or students was likely to hear about.

“Thank you,” she said politely. “You’re very kind”

She felt his sigh, rife with exasperation and heartfelt enough that it lifted the sleeping bag and let out a little gust of warm air. “For crying out loud, go to sleep,” he said.

Of course, it was an order impossible to obey—for him as well as for her, at least to begin with. For the longest time, he lay next to her, long, strong and tense as steel. But gradually, as the night progressed, his muscles relaxed, and she must have dozed off herself because the next time she became aware of her surroundings he was sleeping on his stomach with his face turned toward her.

In the steady light of the candle, she saw that he was not as old as she’d first supposed and looked to be only in his late thirties. It was fatigue that etched his face, carving deep lines beside his mouth and between his eyes, and making him appear older.

Even as she watched, he seemed to sink further into sleep, so that the grooves relaxed, then faded away until she had nothing left to look at but his long, silky lashes touching softly against the lean austerity of his cheekbones.

How handsome he was, she thought.

What colour were his eyes?

Dreamy brown? No, he was not the dreamy type.

Icy green? Possibly. Despite the warmth generated by his body, she sensed that he was a cool, reserved man. Cold, even.

Her arm had grown numb from being cramped beneath her. She flexed her fingers and, with excruciating care, slid her wrist out and across her waist. But cautiously, without creating the least little draft, so that not even the candle flame wavered.

His eyes flew open anyway, alert and noticeably blue, and caught her staring.

Was the spark of sexual awareness that blazed briefly between him and her a figment of her imagination?

“What?” he muttered, the word laced with suspicion, and she decided that, yes, it must have been her imagination.

“Nothing. My arm—” She levered the rest of it free and waggled her fingers, wincing at the pins and needles trying to paralyze them. “It went to sleep.”

“Pity you didn’t.” he said, his head with its thick, dark hair lowering again to the makeshift pillow.

As suddenly as he’d woken, he fell asleep again. She shivered, less from the cold air lurking around them than from the stark lack of sympathy she sensed in him. She was inconveniencing him terribly, no doubt about it, and even less welcome in his sleeping bag than a bed bug.

Selena’s latest crisis couldn’t have come at a more inappropriate time, Jessica thought uncharitably. By now she should be lounging beneath a sun umbrella in balmy Cancun and trying to pretend she was more than a lonely, thirty-year-old woman most of whose dreams seemed unlikely to come true, not risking life and limb to be with a sister who had little use for her except when disaster arose.

But the avalanche wasn’t Selena’s fault; nor was it hers. And if her sleeping partner thought their present arrangement was inconvenient, how much worse would he have found it if she’d sped through the shed fast enough to wind up trapped under the snow at the other end? Or would he have left her to her fate and gone calmly about the business of making himself comfortable for the night without sparing her a thought?

Remembering how irritably he’d reacted to her lack of preparedness, she suspected he’d have left her to suffocate. It irked her enough to want to punish him, enough for her to make no attempt at stealth or silence when she struggled to her other side so that she was facing the deep perpendicular embrasures of the snow shed and no longer tempted to look at him.

He reacted with the same ill temper he’d displayed before. “For Pete’s sake settle down,” he grumbled. “You’re worse than a pair of puppies wrestling in a gunny sack.”

And again, just as before, he ensured her compliance by anchoring her in place, but this time so that he was snugly cushioned against her behind, and one of his long, strong legs pinned down hers, and she could feel his breath on the back of her neck.

It was an exceedingly...intimate situation.

Exceedingly!

Her watch showed ten minutes past eight when she awoke to find herself alone in the back of the Jeep. A fresh candle burned in the tin can under the dashboard and the start of another day seeped through the upper sections of the narrow vents on the downhill side of the shed to cast a pale, chill light along its length. Pushing herself into a sitting position and finger-combing loose strands of hair back from her face, Jessica saw him coming toward her from the far end of the tunnel.

Quickly, she shuffled free of the sleeping bag and pulled her clothing into place. By the time he hauled open the tailgate, she had her boots on and looked as respectable as could be expected, given the circumstances.

“Have they come to rescue us?” she asked, putting on her coat.

“No.” He reached under the dashboard on the passenger side of the Jeep and pulled out a small knapsack.

“Then what were you doing at the end of the shed?”

He handed her a foil-wrapped cereal bar and raised his dark, level brows wryly. “Same thing you’ll probably want to do before much longer,” he remarked pointedly.

To say that she blushed at that would have been the understatement of the century. She felt herself awash in a tide of pure scarlet. “Oh...yes—I...um...I...see what you mean.”

“Don’t let modesty get the better of you. The sun’s barely up and I don’t hold out much hope of us being dug out for at least another half hour. Too risky for the highway crew, when they can’t see what the conditions are like up the mountain. And that’s always assuming that there isn’t three feet of snow blocking the road between them and us.”

Jessica’s gaze swung to the nearest embrasure beyond which the narrow strip of sky now showed the palest tint of pink. “And if there is?” She could barely bring herself to voice the question. The thought of being imprisoned another day with him and with such a total lack of privacy didn’t bear contemplating.

“We might be here until mid-morning. Possibly even longer. It’d take a bulldozer to cut a path through anything that deep.” He hitched one hip on the tailgate and swung one long, blue-jeaned leg nonchalantly, as if picnic breakfasts in avalanche sheds were an entirely usual part of his weekly routine. “So, Jessica Simms, want to tell me what persuaded you to drive up here with nothing more reliable than a set of all-weather radials and a road map to get you where you’re going?”

“I’m on my way to visit my sister in Whistling Valley.”

“That’s another seven hours’ drive away. You’d better stop in Sentinel Pass and get yourself outfitted with a set of decent tire chains if you seriously want to get there in one piece.”

“Yes.” She squirmed under his scrutiny, aware that while he seemed to be learning quite a bit about her she knew next to nothing about him. “You haven’t told me your name yet.”

“Morgan. If you knew you were coming up here for Christmas, why the hell didn’t you plan ahead? BCAA or any travel agency could have warned you what sort of conditions to expect.” He took another bite of his breakfast bar, then added scathingly, “Maybe then you’d have chosen clothing more appropriate than that flimsy bit of a coat and those pitiful excuses for winter boots you’re currently wearing.”

He was worse than a pit bull, once he got his teeth into something. Clearly, he found her apparent incompetence morbidly fascinating. “I didn’t have time to plan ahead, Mr. Morgan. This trip came about very suddenly.”

“I see.” He crushed the wrapping from his breakfast into a ball, tossed it, backhanded, into the open knapsack and unearthed a bottle of mineral water.

She shook her head as he unscrewed the cap and offered her a drink. She wasn’t about to let a drop of liquid past her lips until she was assured of more civilized washroom facilities. It was all very well for a man to make do but for a woman....