Strange Bedfellows

Because he was uncomfortably close to being right, Cassandra took refuge behind her twenty-seven years of experience in saying what she should say instead of what she wanted to say. In other words, she took a deep breath, reluctantly beat down the inner voice that wanted to shout back, “Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah?” and proceeded to lie through her teeth.

“I haven’t the slightest idea as to what you’re implying, Mr. Frame,” she said tightly, “and can only wonder what sort of mind would think up such nonsense. I am not in the habit of picking up lone male strangers, no matter how dire their circumstances. Only after assuring myself that you were indeed who I thought you were, did I offer to assist you.”

There you go, Sean baby—now, stuff that in your nifty rainproof hat and smoke it!

“How very, um, prudent of you, Ms. Mercer, I’m sure. My apologies. However, I believe I can manage on my own,” Sean said, somehow managing to look intimidating, determined, successful and too damn gorgeous for Cassandra’s good—and at the same time beginning to look like he’d gone through a car wash while forgetting to bring his car.

Cassandra was tempted to take the proud, stubborn man at his word and leave him to walk the three miles to the bottom of the hill and the first service station that might still be open. Sorely tempted.

“Are you quite sure?” she asked before he could step away from the open window.

Don’t be an idiot, she meant.

“There was just a flash flood and mud slide warning on the radio,” she added, to drive home her point.

If they find you dead tomorrow, I’ll feel bad, she wanted to say. Not terribly bad, but bad. After all, I think Jason might miss you. Though I’d be hard-pressed not to do a dance of joy around my kitchen table with a rose stuck between my teeth. At least then maybe I’d stop dreaming about you!

“I’m wet and my boots are full of mud,” Sean said, spreading his arms as if inviting her to inspect his long, lean frame.

She didn’t think that was such a good idea. No, thanks. I’ll leave that image in my dreams, where it belongs.

“Besides, Ms. Mercer,” he added as she told her inner self to be helpful and just shut up, “I’ll ruin your upholstery.”

Cassandra pushed at her glasses, shoving them back up on her nose. Handsome or not, in her dreams or in her nightmares, this guy was really starting to get on her nerves.

“You can take off the boots and pay to have the upholstery cleaned,” she suggested reasonably, wondering if he noticed that she was now speaking through clenched teeth. “Or are you simply afraid to be in a car with a woman who, if I remember your words correctly, ‘mollycoddles students with her harebrained theories and lamentable lack of discipline’?”

Sean opened his mouth, probably to say something particularly cold and cutting. A brilliant flash of lightning was followed almost immediately by a crack of thunder that shook the Jeep. The instant increase in rain would have made a lesser man think Mother Nature had just yelled, “Hey, bozo, buy a clue, why don’t you—you can’t win against me!”

Cassandra hid a fairly triumphant smile as Sean closed his mouth, reached for the door handle and climbed inside the Jeep. With the door still open, he efficiently slid out of his boots and put them on the rubber mat behind the front seat, then shrugged out of his wet raincoat, revealing his expensive three-piece suit—which was still dry except for the pant legs, damn him.

She could smell his aftershave, and the tangy scent quickly traveled through her bloodstream and dissolved her kneecaps. Damn him, damn him, damn him!

“Are we going to sit here all night, Ms. Mercer, or had you planned to drive on anytime soon? And where were those mud slides you heard about on the radio?” he asked as Cassandra, who was now seriously considering having her head examined next chance she got, eased her foot back onto the gas and leaned toward the windshield, trying to see through the deluge outside.

“I don’t know,” she told him nervously as another streak of lightning split the sky. She realized she was grateful to have company for the ride down the mountain. Any company. Even Sean Frame’s most disturbing, infuriating company. “The radio cut out in the middle of the warning at the beginning of the seven o’clock newscast. I think the station went off the air. And I haven’t seen any lights on when I can get a glimpse of town through the trees, even though it’s getting dark, so I have a feeling the power is out all through the area. There’s a towel in the back seat you might want to use.”

“My cell phone wasn’t working, either,” Sean replied. “But it never does on this section of the highway. Building Burke up here farther from town where land is cheaper might have been good economically, but at times like these it’s a real headache the school board should have considered. Once we’re out of the hills and I get reception I’ll phone ahead and see what’s going on. Jason might be worried.”

Jason is probably hoping you’ll be marooned at the high school for the weekend. And is there anything the school board did before you were on it that meets with your approval? Like, how they signed me to an ironclad contract, which has really got to twist your tail? Cassandra thought those questions, but she only said, “That sounds like a good idea. I suppose.”

And then she said nothing at all, because simply driving the Jeep took all her attention—and she could only spare a small part of her brain to take in Sean’s closeness, the way his towel-dried hair made him look so boyish, so human.

Human? Oh, Cassandra, her inner self tweaked at her. Get a grip. Don’t let’s get carried away here….

And then it happened. Swiftly. Quietly. Without warning. The seemingly solid wall of rock and dirt to Cassandra’s left, the rock and dirt that made up the mountain drive, collapsed. Just fell.

Chapter Two

Boom, and the solid wall of mountain was gone. Like a sand castle undermined by an incoming tide.

One moment there had been a mountain wall safely straight and solid on the other side of the two-lane highway, and the next moment the Jeep was sliding sideways onto the wide gravel shoulder of the road, surrounded by a river of living mud and boulders, being swept along down the hillside as if the vehicle weighed no more than a feather.

The only thing that stopped the Jeep from moving as one with the mud and rock tumbling down the steep embankment was the strong guardrail at the side of the road, which caught and held the vehicle.

Many things happened in the first few seconds after the Jeep finally slid and bumped to a halt. For one, Cassandra realized that she was screaming, and she immediately stopped, slapping both hands over her mouth just to be certain a small, involuntary squeak couldn’t still escape.

Which was a pity, because she could have used one of those hands to prudently cover her wide-open eyes, so that she couldn’t look out the window and watch the whole mountain rushing past the Jeep’s headlights.

Then Sean took over, exchanging places at the wheel with a numb and clumsy but still pathetically willing-to-move Cassandra, and trying to use her four-wheel drive to extricate them from their precarious position before more of the mountainside gave way and they could be swept farther into disaster.

It didn’t take more than a few tense, gear-grinding, wheel-spinning minutes for Cassandra to be pretty certain that they were well and truly stuck. Hearing Sean Frame’s fairly eloquent if low-pitched string of profanity as he shoved the gear stick into park and turned off the ignition nailed it down for her. Still, when she could pry her hands from her mouth, it was to hear herself ask, “We’re stuck, aren’t we?”

“Yes, Ms. Mercer, we’re stuck,” Sean answered, running a hand through his hair, then exhaling his breath in an angry whoosh. “If it weren’t for the guardrail—but never mind that. Someone else from the meeting will be along soon enough, I’m sure.”

“I—I was the last one to leave the school,” Cassandra told him. “Smitty let me lock up.”

He sliced her a quick, angry look. “The janitor allowed you to lock the school? That’s not in your job description, is it, Ms. Mercer?”

Cassandra rolled her eyes, wondering if the man ever listened to himself speak. “No, Mr. Frame, it’s not. But there was no reason for Smitty to be late for his dinner because I wanted to get a few files from my office, now, was there?”

He lowered his head, reaching up to rub at the back of his neck. “No. No, I suppose not. I apologize. Sometimes I come on too strong, don’t I?”

Cassandra wanted to stick her little finger in her ear and give it a shake, just to clear the passageway. She couldn’t have heard the guy right. “You’re a businessman, Mr. Frame,” she said in reply, wondering how her parents had managed to instill such good manners in their only child, when that same only child was obviously harboring a second personality, one that wanted to say, “Strong, Sean baby? Do the words like a Mack truck mean anything to you?”

A clap of thunder equal to the decibel output of five Rolling Stones concerts playing at the same time shook the mountain.

Cassandra couldn’t help herself. She whimpered. “Oh, God,” she groaned, then pulled her feet onto the seat, wrapped her arms around her lower legs and buried her head against her knees. “Watch for the next lightning bolt, would you? Please,” she mumbled. “And then count one-one thousand, two-one thousand, until we hear the next boom, okay? I want to know how far away that lightning is.”

“How very scientific, Ms. Mercer,” Sean commented, then added, “or we could simply pretend that God is bowling, and the sound we hear is the pins going down? That’s the fairy tale they told us at the home.”

Cassandra turned her head slightly toward him and looked at him through the deepening dusk, forgetting about the storm raging outside. “The home? Are you an orphan, Mr. Frame?”

That would explain a lot. He was urbane and sophisticated, yes, but she hadn’t been able to help noticing that he had this edge to him. It was a slightly rough edge, as if he had one foot firmly anchored in the tough but civilized corporate world, and the other somewhere to the left of success, standing in a more human, fallible, even vulnerable place.

His smile revealed straight white teeth, with one top tooth just the slightest bit crooked, showing that he’d never had braces. “And here you were, Ms. Mercer, all this time believing I’d been hatched from an egg like the other reptiles. But, no, I wasn’t an orphan. Not in the ordinary sense.”

She frowned. “There’s an un-ordinary sense?”

“Actually, there is, and it’s becoming more frequent all the time. You see, my father abandoned us before I was born, and my mother had this habit of forgetting where she’d put me from time to time. Unfortunately, she wouldn’t give up custody so I could be adopted when I was still young and reasonably adorable.”

Cassandra didn’t hear the next clap of thunder, much less react to it. “That’s horrible!”

“It was all right, once I got used to it. I’d spend time with her, then in the home, and occasionally, in someone’s house as a foster child. It was an interesting childhood, and one I strove to overcome from the time I was old enough to know what I wanted. What I needed to do to get what I wanted. It was also a childhood I made certain Jason avoided. Three miles, Ms. Mercer.”

“Three—oh! The lightning is only three miles away? It might as well be on top of us!” Cassandra buried her head against her knees once more, then flinched as a tumbling boulder crashed into the side of the Jeep, mashing it more firmly against the guardrail.

To keep her mind occupied—to keep from screaming—she concentrated on the other things Sean Frame had said. She looked at him again, wishing it were darker so she couldn’t see his intelligent hazel eyes, his incongruously long, lush black lashes.