The Man She Loves To Hate

He studied the mitts, studied her with his fathomless green gaze. ‘Got anything in men’s?’

‘No, but the waterproof covers are in here somewhere.’ She dug around for the covers, held them out too. ‘They might stretch.’

He took both. He did not let their fingers meet. The inners were far too small for him but he tugged them half on anyway. The man was either already beyond cold or pure survival sense had him looking to use whatever he could get when it came to keeping warm. The outers were a better fit. Jolie nodded her approval.

Cole smiled grimly. ‘What else you got?’

‘Biscuits.’ She held up the packet. ‘Chocolate.’ Up went Lady Godiva. Cole’s eyes narrowed. ‘Going away present,’ she said, improvising fast. ‘I think they’re out of date, though.’

‘Good to know.’ Probably just her imagination, the whisper of steel in that deliciously deep voice. ‘I do hope there’s Scotch. It might be out of date too.’

‘There’s no Scotch.’ She’d left it in the cabin, manly drink that it was. There was, however, champagne. Nice little two-hundred-dollar bottle of Dom. She put the biscuits down and held it up. Truly grim now, that beautiful face of his. No point offering any kind of excuse for why it had found its way into the box. Jolie knew full well when to move on fast. Down with the champagne and back out with the biscuits. She opened them, took a couple, and handed Cole Rees the rest. He took them without comment. Ate a handful of them without comment too, while she tried not to watch the way his mouth worked, and his face worked, and how his hair looked as if he’d just rolled out of someone’s bed …

Thinking about what Cole Rees might be capable of doing to someone in that bed was a very bad idea. Time to look away and tuck her arms around herself and pray they started moving again soon. Now would be good.

‘More?’ His voice was gruff. Jolie jumped and sent him a guarded glance. He was holding the biscuits out.

‘No, thanks.’

‘When did you last eat?’ he asked.

‘Lunchtime. When did you last eat?’ He’d gone through the biscuits fairly fast.

‘Yesterday.’

Great, a hungry, angry Cole Rees. ‘Eat,’ she said, and he snagged a couple more and then twisted the bag shut and came over to the other side of the box and dropped them back in it. He looked. Saw the bathroom products and the teas and the bits and pieces and he made no comment while all around them the wind howled and the gondola swayed and the cable groaned as if it were failing. ‘Are you cold?’ she asked.

‘A bit.’ He wiped the condensation from the window with his coat sleeve and looked out. ‘Are you?’

‘No.’ Probably because she had two of everything on. She could give him one of her hats—and might have to. But not yet. She dropped down to a sitting position on the floor, knees up and wide as befitting a boy, and checked her phone again, not for a signal but for the time. Five-eighteen.

Not dark. Not yet.

And then a muffled crack rent the air, the kind of sound no one on a mountainside ever wanted to hear. The kind that reverberated in people’s bones and set the world to quaking. ‘What was that?’ she asked raggedly, scrambling back to her feet with no dignity at all and wiping down her own bit of pane. ‘Can you see it?’ It being an avalanche of the dry-slab persuasion.

‘Not yet,’ he said, and moved to the top side of the gondola to look upslope.

‘Maybe it was just a tree split—’

And then the mountain groaned again and the gondola swung wildly and the box tipped over and tea scattered and the bottle of champagne rolled.

Cole cursed flatly as Jolie scrambled for the bottle and jammed it back in the box and worked the flaps shut. And then Cole grabbed her upper arm and hauled her up next to him to watch as a giant slab of mountain to their right began to move. ‘We’re not in its path,’ he murmured. ‘Look.’

He was right, they weren’t. But the fear just wouldn’t go away. Jolie closed her eyes and clung to the side rail that flanked the gondola door. She could sense Cole behind her, not touching, not quite. She wanted to step back and burrow in deep and cling to him, and not because she wanted to mess with his mind or jump his bones. She just wanted the contact.

‘Look,’ he said again, his voice a hushed and reverent murmur.

‘No, thank you.’

‘You’ll never see this again. Not from this angle.’

‘That better be a promise,’ she countered raggedly. But the gondola had steadied so Jolie looked, and caught her breath at the terrible beauty of the earth sliding below them, gathering momentum, cracking, churning.

Foaming.

Shaken, she looked back at Rees, and the fool man went and grinned at her, a crooked, beckoning thing that she didn’t want a piece of. Ever.

Time to go, only where could they go after that? The maintenance teams would be checking the mountain for days. Checking the gondola towers and the chairlift fixings and everything else, and that was only the first slide. What if there were more?

Jolie didn’t care now that she had to brush past Rees to get back to the box and the bottle of champagne. She slid to her knees and started in on the cork, all her considerable years of bar duty coming into play as she popped it, let it foam, and then set the champagne to her mouth.

‘Well, that’s one way of drinking it,’ said Rees dryly, before squatting down beside her and wrapping his big hand around the bottle the better to coax it away from her lips, which he did with ruthless efficiency. ‘There are others.’

‘This way works fine.’ At least, it had until he took the bottle away. ‘Do you mind?’ She gestured for the bottle. ‘You’re interrupting my panic.’

‘I know.’ And from the look in those stunning green eyes of his he was going to keep on interrupting it. He took his own pull from the bottle and Jolie watched mesmerised as his throat muscles went to work. He didn’t drink much, but by the time he was done Jolie was parched. ‘Alcohol and hypothermia don’t mix,’ he said with more gentleness than she would have given him credit for.

‘I’m not hypothermic,’ she muttered. ‘Yet. I’m in shock. Alcohol is good for shock.’

‘So it is.’ He held out the bottle for Jolie to take. ‘You argue like a girl. You also drink like a girl.’

Jolie stilled, caught between taking the bottle from him and confirming his suspicions, or not taking the bottle from him and confirming his suspicions. In the end she took the bottle and drank, and to hell with her disguise and his suspicions. Her priorities had changed. The prospect of imminent death did that.

‘Look, I’m not saying this is an ideal situation but we’re safe enough for now,’ he said soothingly, leaning in to take the bottle away from her again. ‘We have shelter. Food.’ He gestured with the bottle and flashed that devil’s smile at her again. ‘Champagne. And phones that’ll work just as soon as this blizzard passes. We’re not far from top station. They’ll come at us from there.’

Maybe they would. And maybe she and Cole Rees could hold out till then if they stayed calm and thought smart and shared body warmth and all those other things people were supposed to do when stranded in the cold.

‘Hey,’ he said gently.

Her goggles were fogging up, or maybe it was tears.

‘Girl,’ he said more gently still. ‘Because you are a girl, that much I have managed to figure out. Take it easy. Lose the panic. It’s going to be all right.’

Jolie appreciated the words, she really did.

And then the mountain moved again and this time the gondola moved to meet it.

Down, down, as if in slow motion, still connected to the cable. That coupling hadn’t failed them. Something else had.

Jolie’s body didn’t want to do what the gondola was doing. Her body wanted to stay up. Cole’s body wanted to stay up too. He moved forwards and his arms came around her, pressing her back against the floor, which wasn’t the floor any more as the ground rushed up to meet them, nothing slow about the ride now. They were probably going to start another avalanche, if they weren’t already riding one.

‘Hold on,’ he muttered and she did, wrapping her arms around him tight and setting her cheek to his chest. He smelled right. Even through the fear he smelled good.

Small consolation that when it came to his declaration that they were in no imminent danger he’d been dead wrong and she’d been right to panic.

Then the mountain smashed into them and the world went black and being right was no consolation at all.

Jolie woke to discomfort and pain, returning to consciousness slowly, remembering in snatches all that had gone before. The gondola ride. The avalanche. Cole Rees. Laid out on the ground beneath her, out cold but still breathing, and around them a shattered gondola shell half buried in loose snow.