by Sybil Bartel
I didn’t do relationships, but I also didn’t fuck casually.
I couldn’t.
Not with the shit I had going on.
“Were you scared?” she asked, pulling me the hell out of my head.
Navigating the turn that gave me problems last time, I watched the side mirrors. “Scared of what?”
“Going over the cliff.”
I snorted. “Woman, I’ve been shot, stabbed, fragged, blown up, and I survived two helicopter crashes. A short sleigh ride in a hundred-thousand-dollar armored Caddy isn’t gonna kill me.”
“That’s not what I asked,” she quietly admonished.
Fuck. Was I really going to say it? Screw it. “I wasn’t concerned for myself.”
She turned to face me. Then, like a goddamn truth ninja, she stared at me and waited.
I caved. “I was concerned about you making it to the cabin without fucking freezing to death.”
“You said I would be fine.”
I wracked my brain, going over our past conversations. “I didn’t say that.” Not when I told her to get up to the cabin on her own if she needed to.
“You implied it,” she argued.
The snow coming down harder, the wipers not keeping up, I strained to see the road ahead. “Your point?”
Her voice got quiet. “Would I have… you know, died out there, if I had to make my own way to the cabin?”
I spared her a glance. “No.” My gaze cut back to the road. “Not if you kept moving.” She probably would’ve had frostbite by the time she got to the cabin, and it would’ve hurt like hell, but she would’ve been alive.
She leaned back in her seat. “I almost died once.” She let out a small laugh that was nothing like the one she’d given me before. “Which seems really selfish to say to someone like you.”
“Why?”
“Because you served.”
“I chose to serve. Did you choose to almost die?” I wondered what the hell had happened to her, but asking would’ve given her the impression I cared. As a rule, I didn’t care about women, but goddamn, this one was getting under my skin.
“No. Well, maybe. I mean, I don’t know.” Shifting in her seat, she reached for the handle above the door but then dropped her arm. “I asked for it, I suppose. By my actions, I mean. The choices I made.”
Fuck it. “What happened?”
“I was shot at the Ultimate Music Festival.” She shrugged like it was nothing, but her voice had hitched.
Anger surged. “Vos and Knight didn’t tell me that part.” Not that I listened to any of the bullshit gossip about clients around the office on the rare occasion I was there, nor were either of those two fucks talkers, but both of them had dealt with her. I should’ve known if she’d been shot. Luna ran a tight ship. Clients at L&A didn’t usually take lead. “What the hell happened?”
She shrugged again. “My dealer thought he owned me. I disagreed. He tried to, I don’t know, contain me. He’d been acting like a dick all day. He dragged me to the festival with him and his stupid entourage. I decided to take off when he wasn’t looking. He sent his asshole runners after me, and they fired into the crowd. I got shot twice, but if I hadn’t accidentally run into Preston, it would’ve been a lot worse.”
The Escalade made the last sharp turn in the road before the cabin. “Where’d you get hit?”
“Lower back and my upper arm. But my arm was only grazed.” She glanced at the drop-off on her side of the road.
“Hurts like hell, doesn’t it?” Outside the military, I’d never met a woman who’d been shot.
“It burned too, but it really hurt when André’s friend Talon dug the bullet out.”
“Talerco, huh?” Goddamn. Was there any of Luna’s circle she hadn’t met?
“Yeah, I guess he was some sort of medic or something in the Marines.”
“I know who he is.” Fucking golden boy wonder. “I served with him.” Best damn SARC I’d ever met, but that fucker nicknamed everyone, and he was still on my shit list for what he’d called me after the last deployment I was on with him.
“Oh.” She flinched as two of the tires spun and the SUV drifted.
“We’re good,” I reassured as I kept my foot on the gas steady.
She glanced behind us. “We made it farther than last time.”
Thank fuck, because it was dumping snow now. “We’re close.”
“Good. I guess that means no one’s coming after us tonight. Not up here at least.”
Not unless they were out of their mind, and Antonio Vincenzo was exactly that. His psycho wife was a close second. The only thing I could ever count on when I worked for Vincenzo was that he was unpredictable. I had no idea what the hell would happen over the next few days. All I knew was, with every passing second I spent with a teenage trust fund brat, I regretted sticking my dick in my last conquest that much more.
I tipped my chin at the barely visible break in the trees. “Cabin’s up ahead.”
MY HEART POUNDING SO HARD I could hear it in my own ears, I kept pretending like I wasn’t freaking out and looked to where he said the cabin was. There was only snow and more snow.
I leaned forward. “Where?”
He slowly drove us up a short but steeper incline. “On the left.”
The road leveled out, then just ended with a thick of snow-covered trees in front of us. “The cliff side?” On the left was nothing but down.
“Roofline is there.” He pointed.
Oh my fucking God. “That’s the cabin? Is it hanging on the side of the cliff?” You could barely see it from the road.
“Half cut into the mountain face, half on stilts.”
Stilts? “Is that even safe?”
“You’ll be fine,” he reassured, turning the SUV to the right, where all of a sudden, we were facing a garage door half buried in snow. “Stay here.” He grabbed his gloves and opened his door.
“Wait!” I quickly shrugged off his jacket and handed it to him.
He took it without making eye contact. “Be right back.”
Getting out of the SUV, he put the jacket and gloves on, then trudged a couple yards to the garage door. Messing with what looked like a padlock on the side of the garage before digging in the snow at the foot of the door to reach a handle, he then shoved the whole thing up.
A cavernous garage came into view, complete with a drift of snow still standing in front as if the door had never been lifted. The headlight beams illuminated a swath of the concrete floor and wood walls, and I could see some hanging tools and a locked metal cabinet in back.
Shade kicked some of the snow away, then made his way back to the SUV and got behind the wheel. Without comment, he drove through the drift and into the confined space.
I’d never been so happy to be in a garage in my entire life.
“Wait here.” Shade threw the SUV into Park but left the engine running. “I’m going to clear a path.”
Hopping out before I could say anything, he quickly shut the door and grabbed a snow shovel from where it hung on a peg on the wall.
I turned in my seat to watch him.
He first walked in the tracks the tires made, then in shin-deep snow across the width of road we’d come in on, moving toward the steep-pitched roof that was practically eye level. When he got to what looked like the edge of the world, he paused and scanned his surroundings. Looking like he was about to go over the cliff and plummet to his death, but also looking like he was listening for something, he stood perfectly still as snow fell on his dark hair.
Then he shook his head and took a step forward.
I gasped, but he only went down a few feet.
Visible only from the waist up from my vantage point, he began to shovel snow.
I couldn’t see what he was clearing, but it didn’t matter. In the almost unnatural illumination of a snowstorm at night, I watched a man who looked unstoppable methodically scoop, lift and throw heavy shovelfuls of dense snow over his shoulder.
; His mouth not opening from the exertion he was putting out, his movements fast but not hurried, his arms didn’t falter once under the weight of his task.
I’d never seen anything sexier.
And it was over in minutes.
Swinging the shovel over his shoulder, his gaze alternating between the road we’d come up on and the snow-covered pine branches overhead, he strode back toward the garage as if walking in deep snow was nothing.
He put the shovel back in its place, then opened the driver door, but he didn’t get in. Taking off the jacket, he tossed it at me. “Put that on, princess.” No inflection in his tone and sounding distracted, he didn’t glance at me as he cut the engine and grabbed his keys.
I slid my arms into the warm jacket that smelled even more strongly of him now.
He shut the driver door and opened the door behind it to grab his bag. Before he closed it, he glanced at me. “Problem?”
I realized I was sitting there just staring at him.
I knew he was former military. I knew he could protect me. I knew he could disarm me with a crude comment as easily as he could with a compliment. He shot like a sniper. He went down a cliff in a vehicle like a stunt driver, and he kissed like a god.
But until this very moment, I didn’t know what it was about him that was so damn captivating.
He was simply unstoppable. Shamelessly so.
Everything about him was dominant, ruthless, and brutally honest. I didn’t think there was anything he couldn’t do if he set his mind to it.
I envied that.
I wanted to be that.
I wanted to be near someone like that.
My father wasn’t like that. He was conniving, and he used people, and if there was a way to cheat something or someone, he took advantage. My stepmother was the opposite. She walked without a footprint, she was so gentle. But Shade, if that was even his real name, he was just… genuine.
“Princess.”
I jumped. “Sorry. Coming.” I opened my door, and he closed his. It felt symbolic in a snowstorm at the top of the mountains.
He met me at the back of the SUV and opened the lift gate. “Grab only essentials. Leave the suitcases here.”
“Okay.” Already wearing the warmest things I had, I rummaged through one of my suitcases and grabbed a couple shirts and pants and underwear and socks. I reached for my sneakers. “How long are we going to be here?” The cold already seeping through his jacket, I started to shiver.
He took my sneakers out of my hand and tossed them back in the suitcase. “Those will be useless up here.” Reaching for my pair of Uggs that I wouldn’t have even considered wearing outside the house in Miami, he grabbed them and shoved them in his bag. “Come on, you’ve got enough. We need to move.” He took the rest of the clothes from me and unceremoniously dumped them in his bag.
I closed the suitcase, and he shut the lift gate.
It dangerously felt like we were a team.
Then he pulled the garage door closed, locked it, and took my hand.
Everything somersaulted—my heart, my stomach, my nerves.
Holding me tight as if he’d done it a thousand times before, he issued instructions. “Walk in the tire tracks, then in my footsteps.”
“Okay.” The tracks and his steps were already disappearing from the heavy snow that kept falling. Balancing on the toes of my boots, I started picking my way across the driveway.
“Kick it up a notch, princess.”
“I’m going as fast as I can.” Walking in heeled boots in the snow was shockingly more difficult than running in them on broken asphalt.
Apparently I wasn’t moving fast enough for him, because in the next instant I was scooped up into a bodyguard’s strong arms.
Air left my lungs in surprise and plumed in the cold air in front of us. I wrapped my arms around his neck and tried to pretend like I wasn’t secretly thrilled. “Let me guess. I wasn’t doing it fast enough for you?”
“That’s a whole lot of sexual innuendo for a small-as-fuck nineteen-year-old, princess.”
A secret thrill chased the already prevalent goose bumps covering my body even though he called me a teenager again. “You know, you kissed me back,” I half teased, half fished to see what he would say.
His arms stiffened, but he didn’t say anything.
Feeling daring, I pushed it. “I can’t mention it now?” Maybe kissing him again wouldn’t be the worst idea I’d ever had.
Trudging through the snow, not breaking pace, he looked down at me. “Woman, don’t test me.”
Even in the nighttime snowfall, I could see his eyes were a lighter brown circled by a darker brown. “I’m not trying to.” Was I? Because I didn’t think you could test a man like him. He didn’t seem like he would even allow it. He was all alpha and completely dominant, and I very much suspected you either committed one hundred percent to taking him on or you’d be left in his wake.
“Yes, you are.” He walked down a couple steps and set me on my feet under an overhang. Punching in a code on a keyless entry, he pushed open a heavy wood door. “In you go.”
I stepped inside and was struck by the view of the mountains in front of me from a two-story-tall wall of windows.
Tossing the bag he’d been carrying on his shoulder onto the floor of the entryway, he reached for a winter parka that was hanging on a peg just inside the door. “Close the door after me. I’ll be right back.” He put the heavy coat on and stepped outside.
Alarm hit. “Where are you going?”
His back to me as he walked off the way he came, he tossed his reply over his shoulder. “Firewood.”
A second later, he disappeared around the side of the cabin. “Be careful,” I called out into the night.
“Shut the door, woman. You’re letting all the heat out.”
His reply carried across the eerily quiet night, like the snow had blanketed all sounds except his footsteps and his voice. I listened for a moment, then closed the door.
Turning, I took everything in.
Small but modern kitchen, huge leather couches, bigger fireplace, area rugs over polished wood floors, wood walls, a staircase on the left going up in one direction, down in another, and the wall of windows.
Growing up, I’d been around the world.
From Sweden to the Caribbean, New York to LA, Mexico to Canada. I’d stayed in five-star hotels, Italian villas and even an ancient castle.
But I’d never seen anything quite like this place.
It was as if we were on top of the world.
Walking to the windows where a slider door led out to a narrow deck, I wondered what the view would look like in the summer. I couldn’t imagine the tall pine trees without snow on their limbs. Despite feeling so isolated and almost trapped, I didn’t know if I’d ever seen anything more picturesque.
Beautiful to me had always been the white sand and sparkling clear turquoise waters of Miami Beach. Beauty was the smooth trunks and feathery fronds of royal palms swaying in the ocean breeze. Home had always been the scent of ocean air and summer rain.
But up here, the mountain air that smelled like cold and faintly of pine was all at once unfamiliar and peaceful. I’d never been anywhere so quiet or smelled somewhere that was so pure. Maybe it was the snow or being so far away from civilization, but the place definitely fit Shade. The solitude alone seemed to match something soul deep in him. I could see how the mountain’s natural seclusion would appeal to him.
The front door opened, and with it came a rush of cold air.
I turned.
Shade stomped his boots off in the small entryway, then locked the door behind him as he held a pile of dry wood in one arm.
“I’m surprised it’s not wet.” I nodded at the wood.
“Again with the innuendos. Now you’re just fucking with me, princess.” He walked past me toward the fireplace and squatted.
Heat hit my cheeks. “I’m princess again?” Not that I completely hated it, it was growing o
n me, but I liked it better when he called me woman. I liked the tone his voice took on when he said it. His already deep cadence would dip, and he’d say it like he meant it only for me.
He tossed a couple logs in the fireplace. “You’re always princess, woman.”
Still wearing his leather jacket, I crossed my arms against the chill in the cabin. “I don’t know how I feel about that.”
He crumpled up a few sheets of newspaper from a pile on the hearth and shoved them under the logs. “Then change it.”
Something in the past few seconds had shifted without me. From his second mention of sexual innuendos to now, he’d become colder. Or maybe he hadn’t. Maybe it was me who had become warmer and I was only imagining what I wanted to see. “I’m not the one who nicknamed me that.”
Grabbing a few sticks from a pile next to the newspaper, he broke them over his knee and added them to the crumpled newspaper under the logs. “You know what I’m talking about.”
I couldn’t read the tone, or lack thereof in his voice. “I can’t change the fact that I’m Leo Amherst’s daughter.” Or that I had a trust fund I’d gain access to when I turned twenty, ensuring I’d never have to work a day in my life if I didn’t want to.
“Can’t or won’t?” he challenged.
Defensiveness hit, and I fired back with words that would never change the fact that I was who I was. “What’s that supposed to mean? Just walk away from everything my father has done for me?” Suddenly upset that we were talking about this, that the conversation had even turned in this direction, but even more upset that I was defending my father, I stupidly kept talking. “I’m not doing that.” I didn’t dare admit to him that I’d thought about it for years.
“I didn’t say to walk away from your trust fund.”
My back stiffened. “Who says I have a trust fund?”
He smirked. “You don’t?”
“That’s irrelevant,” I snapped.
“Sure, babe.” He let out a half laugh that was all at once condescending and judgmental. “You won’t have to ever bust a nine to five, but that’s not relevant.” He wadded up one more piece of newspaper and shoved it under the log with enough force to tell me he was as irritated with me as I was embarrassed.