Millionaires' Destinies: Isn't It Rich? / Priceless / Treasured

“You are so dead,” she said, bending down to make a soft snowball of her own.

“I doubt that,” Richard said, not even bothering to run.

“You don’t think I’ll throw this at you?”

“Oh, I think you’ll throw it,” he said, then grinned. “I just think you’ll miss.”

Even as he started moving, she hauled off and managed to hit him lightly on one cheek.

“Bad move, darlin’,” he said, coming back for her, even as she frantically scooped up more and more snow and threw it with dead-on accuracy. He had her off her feet and on her backside in a deep drift of snow before she realized what he intended.

Sputtering with indignation, she stared up at him and then started laughing. Only when he was laughing right along with her did she snag his ankle, give him a jerk and land him on his butt right beside her.

Richard didn’t waste time protesting her sneakiness. The snow was cold as the dickens. Only one way he could think of to counteract that. He rolled over and caught her, then captured her mouth under his. He’d hoped for a little heat, but he got a full-fledged blaze. Apparently she didn’t hold a grudge.

Of course, if she also stuck to her resolve about keeping sex out of the equation, at least for tonight, it was going to be a very long time till morning.

Chapter Five

Okay, maybe it was freezing cold out, but that was no reason for her to be playing with fire, Melanie thought, as she gazed into Richard’s turbulent eyes. They were filled with the kind of stormy emotions she hadn’t expected at all, not from a man reputed to have no heart.

She’d been counting on that reputation for being distant when she’d agreed to see him the very first time. She’d known from looking at his pictures that he’d appeal to her physically. She’d known from listening to Destiny that his tragic early years would pluck at her heartstrings. But she was not normally drawn to arrogance or to men who were emotionally shut down. She’d figured those two traits would keep her safe.

After their first meeting, when those traits had been evident in spades, she’d been comforted. Now this…

Forget his heart, she commanded. Where was her head? Had her brain cells frozen on the walk back to the cottage? Is that why she’d been tossing out taunting comments about kisses and sex and then rolling around in the snow with Richard? Those were definitely not in her business plan.

Before she made a mistake they would both regret, she leaped up and brushed herself off, then faced him as if nothing the least bit provocative had been going on, not in the restaurant, not now. “You surprise me,” she said lightly. “I would never have imagined you loosening up enough to play around in the snow like some kid.”

He rose, looking too blasted dignified, his expression completely sober. “Yes, well, I imagine despite all that research of yours, I still have a few surprises left.”

Melanie sighed at the return of his straitlaced demeanor. She was beginning to think it was nothing more than self-protective armor, and that made her weak-kneed all over again. “Richard, I’m sorry, but what just went on here?”

He shrugged. “I suppose, for a couple of minutes, both of us lost track of why we’re together.”

“In other words, we were behaving like a male and female who are attracted to each other, rather than prospective business associates,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault. I’m the one who’s sorry for crossing a line.”

“But I invited you to cross it.”

He scowled at her. “Quit being so damned reasonable,” he muttered. “There’s no way this weekend could have anything other than a bad ending.”

Melanie felt worse than ever. For a few minutes Richard had forgotten himself, pushed aside his responsibilities and found his long-lost inner child. He’d revealed his human side. Then she’d gone and ruined that by getting too uptight and serious. Of course, if she apologized one more time, he was liable to blow sky-high. He seemed to be operating on a very short fuse. It would have been a good time to get out of town, but unfortunately the local roads had yet to be cleared.

She held out her hand, determined to get them back on a safer footing. “Truce?”

He gave her a mocking look. “I hadn’t realized we were at war.”

“But we’re heading in that direction,” she said. “And it is my fault. I sent out all sorts of mixed messages.”

He gazed into her eyes, his expression forbidding. “Maybe it would be smarter to stay at odds,” he suggested. “We don’t seem to be able to handle anything else without getting offtrack.”

It was true, though Melanie couldn’t imagine why that was. Forget all the issues about working with him, he was far too intense—okay, far too stuffy—to be attractive to her, beyond his obvious physical appeal. And yet he was attractive, no question about that. Otherwise she wouldn’t have come so darn close to throwing herself at him without one second’s consideration of her deeply held principles about mixing business and pleasure.

She imagined that he found the whole attraction thing to be just as confusing. She was nothing at all like the rich, sophisticated, edgy women with whom he was normally seen around town. She’d seen him in black tie often enough on the society pages to recognize the glamorous type of woman he preferred.

Given that, there was only one thing to do. If they both accepted the notion of anything personal between them being insane, then perhaps the next few hours wouldn’t be too awful. In fact, perhaps by morning they’d be able to laugh about everything, shake hands and say goodbye with no lingering regrets. She’d write off any chance of landing this PR consulting contract and cut her losses. Anything else would be complete lunacy.

Even as she was coming to that conclusion, Richard reached into his jacket and pulled out a key. “Why don’t you go on back to the house?” he suggested, offering it to her.

“Where are you going?” she asked as she accepted the key and tucked it into her own jacket pocket.

“For a walk,” he said. “I’ll pick up one of those cameras for you.”

Melanie opened her mouth to offer to come with him, but he’d already turned on his heel and taken off. Clearly he was eager to escape her company. This was what she’d wanted not five seconds ago, but now she was having second thoughts.

She heaved a sigh as she watched him go, shoulders hunched against the wind that had kicked up off the river. He looked so alone. How was it possible that a man as rich, brilliant and sexy as Richard Carlton could be so completely alone?

She had answers to all sorts of questions about him stored away in her research files, but not to that one. Naturally that meant it was the one she found most intriguing, the one that opened a tiny little place in her heart to him.

And that, she concluded with complete candor, was the one that could prove to be her undoing.

Richard knew it was ridiculous to feel cranky and completely out of sorts because a woman had changed her mind—and the rules—on him. It happened all the time, and he’d never given two figs about it before. Women were unpredictable creatures, that was all. It wasn’t personal. He’d watched Destiny dispatch so many perfectly respectable suitors over the years, he’d come to accept the behavior as normal.

But he’d taken Melanie’s sudden change of heart damn personally, which meant that on some totally unexpected level she’d gotten to him. How the devil had that happened?

He wrestled with that unanswerable question all the way to the fast-mart, where he picked up a disposable camera, then had a sudden inspiration to buy a just-released video and some popcorn for that evening. If they were going to be stuck here together for another night, entertainment that didn’t require conversation seemed like a fine idea.

As he trudged back toward the cottage through the deep snow, he tried to recapture some of his earlier delight in the quiet, snow-shrouded landscape, but it wouldn’t come. Without Melanie, it was a bit as if that cardinal had flown away, taking all of the color with it.

He groaned at the thought. He did not want Melanie Hart adding color to his life. He didn’t want to start waxing poetic about her influence on him or his surroundings. He wanted to go back to that serene time earlier in the week before he’d ever met the annoying woman. Then the prospect of several uninterrupted hours in front of his computer or with his mountain of paperwork would have been the bright spot on his weekend agenda.

Unfortunately, recapturing that serenity was all but impossible when Melanie was going to be underfoot the second he crossed the threshold at the cottage. And she would be underfoot. She seemed to be the kind who liked to talk things out, make perfect sense of them, instead of accepting that they’d nearly made a dreadful mistake and moving on. He’d seen that let’s-talk-about-this look in her eyes right before he’d turned on his heel and left her a few blocks from the cottage. He hoped to hell she was over it by now.

He was half-frozen by the time he reached the cottage. He was grateful for the blazing fire she’d started, but as he waited for Melanie to appear, to start pestering him with comments or analysis or, God forbid, yet another apology, he grew increasingly perplexed by her absence. Had she taken off, even though the local roads were still all but impassable? Come to think of it, had he paid any attention to whether her car was still in the driveway? He couldn’t remember noticing.

Panicked that she might have done something so completely impulsive and dangerous because of him, he bounded upstairs and very nearly broke down the guest-room door with his pounding. He heard her sleepily mumbled “What?” just as he threw open the door.

Undisguised relief flooded through him at the sight of her in the bed, the comforter pulled up to her chin, her hair rumpled, her eyes dazed.

“Is something wrong?” she asked in that same husky, half-asleep tone.

The comforter drooped, revealing one bare shoulder and a tantalizing hint of breast. Heart pounding, Richard began backing away. “No, really. Sorry.”

“Richard?”

Even half-asleep, she was constitutionally incapable of letting anything go, he concluded grimly. He was going to have to explain himself, or at least come up with something plausible that wouldn’t give away how frantic he’d been when he’d imagined her risking her neck on the icy roads.