Snowy Mountain Nights

by Lindsay Evans

  “Yeah, what’s that about?” Marceline muttered. “I know plenty of girls who would love to land a married man. If he had on a wedding ring, it’d be like catnip.”

  “Maybe they don’t realize exactly what they’re trolling for,” Bridget said. “Territorial women can be vicious.”

  Louisa gestured with her cup. “That’s not the only thing they have to watch out for. Some of these hot-ass married men have diseases they’re ready to pass on to anyone, including their wives.”

  A chorus of agreement went around the table.

  While the women got distracted from Garrison with the talk of cheating married men, Reyna watched him from the corner of her eye. So she noticed that he sat at the empty seat closest to the fire, his booted feet nearly nudging the grate. And she also noticed when he started watching her.

  He took a sip of his drink and looked at her over the edge of his cup. She ducked her head, but not before his penetrating gaze managed to scatter her senses.

  She came in on the tail end of her friends’ conversation about cheating. “I don’t know why anyone would want to have an affair with a married man. Seems like a recipe for heartache to me. And not just for the actual wife whose husband is doing the messing around.” She knew from experience how awful that was. “These girls might get attached and then fool themselves into thinking their lovers are going to leave their wives.” Ian had been cheating on her, but as far as she knew, he never married or lived with any of the women he’d cheated with.

  “Some women just like to gamble.” Louisa shrugged.

  “Pardon my intrusion, ladies.”

  They all looked up. Reyna’s fingers twitched around her cup of cider, and she had to clutch it tighter to stop from accidentally spilling it.

  Garrison stood near their table. He seemed perfectly at ease in his thick gray sweater and jeans. And by at ease, Reyna’s mind supplied, she meant sexy as hell. He stood with a hand in his pocket, his gaze trained firmly on her.

  “I’m Garrison Richards.” He looked at all the women before bringing his eyes back to Reyna. “I want to apologize to Ms. Barbieri—”

  “I don’t go by that name anymore,” Reyna interrupted. “It’s Allen now.”

  “My apologies.” He dipped his head. A spark of something flared in his eyes, but his face remained cool. “But please allow me to apologize again when I didn’t recognize you earlier.”

  “No apologies necessary,” she said. “It’s been five years, and we only met a couple of times.”

  “You are quite unforgettable,” he said.

  His hawkish gaze tightened something low in her belly. She swallowed and tried to ignore it.

  “I’m frankly surprised,” Reyna said. “You must have been through hundreds of women like me.”

  She felt the shocked gazes of her friends. They knew it wasn’t like her to be so rude.

  But Garrison wasn’t fazed. “I doubt there’s anyone like you.” A small, unamused smile touched his mouth. “I’d like to invite you to dinner one night this weekend, if I may?” He pulled a card from his wallet and held it out to Reyna. A calling card, she noticed, one without his business information.

  When she didn’t take it, he put it on the table in front of her. “You don’t have to give me your answer now, but be sure to call me when you decide to accept.” After another nod at Reyna and her friends, he turned and headed back to his table.

  Marceline and Bridget stared at her with their mouths hanging open. Louisa only smiled. Like the Cheshire Cat, she sipped from her glass of cider and waited for what Reyna had to say.

  “You have to tell us where you know that fine-ass guy from!” Bridget aimed a far from subtle gaze at Garrison’s table. “Oh, my God! I bet he’s tasty.”

  The sadness in Marceline’s face receded with her curiosity. “Yes, fess up. Our not-so-little Reyna has been keeping secrets.”

  She tried not to wince at the reference to her height, something she had always been self-conscious about. Instead, she shrugged.

  “He is someone I met—”

  A ripple went through the lodge just then.

  “It’s Ahmed!”

  Her friends all turned toward the door. Ahmed Clark had walked into the room and given Reyna a temporary reprieve. She wasn’t ready yet to tell her friends how she met Garrison.

  It was not that she was ashamed of it. But that was a time in her life filled with such pain and betrayal that she’d rather not revisit it. They all knew the pertinent details of the divorce and what happened afterward. They had been there for her when she found out Ian had been sleeping around, when she confronted him, when he demanded a divorce, telling her she wasn’t the kind of wife a TV star like him should have.

  It seemed so ridiculous at the time. So surreal. The boy she had known in high school, pimply faced and gangly. The one whom no other girl had paid the slightest bit of attention to, but had been her friend, then lover, then husband. They had blossomed from their teenaged awkwardness together, Ian becoming more beautiful than anyone had ever imagined, the swan in his duckling family.

  He’d never seriously considered acting, but when an uncle in the business suggested that he try out for a TV role, Ian dived in and never looked back.

  Dismissing the past, Reyna turned with her friends to watch Ahmed Clark stroll into the restaurant with a tall beauty at his side. He was pretty enough to be a movie star himself. So was the woman with him.

  “Damn, he’s fine!” Bridget made a show of licking her lips and moaning his name. “Give me five minutes, Ahmed, and I’ll make you forget all about that skinny red bone on your hip.”

  Reyna chuckled. She didn’t doubt that her friend’s boast could come true. Bridget was beautiful and determined enough. Across the table from her, Louisa picked up Garrison’s card and tucked it into her pocket. Her smile was pure mischief.

  *

  After another round of hot cider, Reyna and the girls left the lodge and took the ski lift to the top of the mountain. In the glass-and-steel lift, Reyna marveled at the lush spread of the Adirondacks beneath and around them. New York City was incredible, and Reyna couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. But she loved the wildness of the mountains, its fierce beauty, the evergreens drooping with the cold, white weight of the snow.

  Once at the top of the mountain, her friends hit the slopes on their skis and left Reyna to her own devices. Around her, children played with snowballs and with each other, giggling and rolling down the abbreviated slope. Couples and groups hiked up the hill, the sound of their conversations floating back down to Reyna as she watched her friends, one after the other, disappear down the ski slope.

  “See you at the bottom!” Bridget flashed a brilliant white smile and took off after the others.

  Boots planted firmly in the snow, Reyna waved her off.

  She didn’t ski. After a disastrous lesson a few years ago that ended with a broken wrist, she gave up trying to learn. But that didn’t mean she enjoyed their annual ski retreat any less. She just got her pleasure a different way.

  She climbed carefully through the snow and over the craggy rocks toward an even better view of the slopes and Halcyon’s lodge and cabins at the bottom of the mountain. As she climbed, she left more and more people behind. Her footsteps dragged through the thick snow, and her every breath misted the air.

  Reyna was breathing hard when she finally found the perfect place to sit—a jutting dark rock she brushed the snow from to settle into the dip made perfectly for her butt. She was slightly breathless and warm under her clothes. Even her daily trek through New York streets had not prepared her for the impromptu hike.

  From her perch out in the open, she watched the anonymous bodies whipping down the slopes and through the snowy fields far below. Their whoops of joy broke into the air like the sound of champagne, happy and celebratory. The sun reflected brightly off the field of white and into her eyes shielded by dark glasses. It was a gorgeous day.

  Reyna took off her hat t
o better feel the bright sun on her head. She took a sketchbook and pencil from her backpack and pulled off her right glove. The air was cold, but bearable on her fingers as she began to sketch. Soon, she lost herself in the movement of her pencil across the page, the sweeping and scratching rhythm of it as she captured the mountain on paper. A blurred shape flew past her, whipping the nearby snow-laden spruce in its breeze. She lifted her head.

  A snowboarder. Tall and graceful, dressed in head-to-toe gray. He whipped past her, a contained storm. And it had to be a he, with his very masculine silhouette and the aggressive way he took the mountain. Flecks of snow flew up under his board. Reyna watched as he soared off the mountain and hung in the air for a moment, one hand gripping the side of the board, the other outstretched. He was a dark outline in the bright landscape, a wild and beautiful thing, before landing once again among the white then disappearing around a bend in the mountain and from her sight.

  A few more lightning-quick shapes whipped past her, each in brightly colored clothes that made them stand out against the snow, but it was the man in gray who caught and held her attention. The other snowboarders zipped down the mountain, as exuberant as children, calling out to each other, shouting in masculine camaraderie.

  Distracted from her sketches, she searched for the man in gray. Ah, there he is. She followed his somber presence down the mountain, the way he sliced across the snow, beautiful and untouchable.

  Before she was aware of what she was doing, Reyna began to sketch him, the sharp grace of him racing down the mountain, knees bent, arms outstretched as if he was flying, his entire face covered up. She lost herself in the rhythm of sketching, the world as she saw it coming to life under her fingers. Long minutes passed.

  “Aren’t your fingers cold?”

  Reyna stiffened at the sound of the shouted question. It was Garrison Richards. Again.

  “No,” she said. “They’re fine.”

  But she put down her pencil—her hand was actually damn near frozen—and curled it in her lap. Only a few feet away, Garrison was slowly skimming down the hill toward her…on a snowboard? Her mouth fell open.

  If she wasn’t seeing him with her own eyes, she would have thought a sport like snowboarding completely unlike him. He seemed best suited for cold and emotionless things like chess, polo or even rowing. Not this howling and graceful sport that was all adrenaline, physical power and falling down in the snow. She couldn’t even see him falling, being messy and human enough to tumble and get up and try something again. She imagined that he always did everything right the first time.

  Garrison had pulled his gray ski mask from over his mouth, revealing full lips and that unexpected dimple in his chin. His goggles reflected twin images of her sitting on the dark rock with her mouth open.

  She snapped her teeth together with a sharp click.

  Garrison turned skillfully on the board and stopped near her. He was dressed completely in gray. Gray? She did a double-take and glanced down the hill toward the man she had been sketching. He wasn’t there. She had a sinking feeling that he was the one at her side. He must have taken the lift back up and circled around.

  Garrison clicked his feet from the latches on the snowboard. He was slightly out of breath, his lips parted to blow trailing heat into the air.

  “I feel cold just looking at you.” He started to pull off his gloves. “Take these. Your friends would be very disappointed if you came back to the ski lodge with some fingers missing from frostbite.”

  She shook her head and picked up the thick pair of snow gloves next to her. “I already have some.” She pulled on the gloves, wincing as her fingers burned from the cold.

  Garrison resituated his gloves on his hands. He watched her, his face expressionless. No smile, merely his eyes hungrily moving over her, like a visual devouring. It left her with a strange feeling, that voracious gaze. Not unpleasant…but not exactly warm and fuzzy, either.

  She stared back at him, refusing to look away.

  They were hardly alone. Occasional skiers and snowboarders blew past them, whipping up snow and stirring up the cold in the air. But it felt as if they were isolated together on the mountain with only the sky and sun to look down on them. She didn’t want to feel that with him. Reyna deliberately turned away from Garrison. “What do you want?”

  “You didn’t use my business card yet.”

  “I’m not going to.”

  Snow crunched, and the air moved as he came closer to her. Over the crispness of the pine trees and the cool bite of the snow, she smelled him. Sweat and a faintly woodsy cologne. The tang of sunblock. His gray jacket brushed her bright yellow one when he sat next to her. Although she knew it was impossible, it felt as if their skin touched.

  “So, be honest.” There was amusement in his voice, although his face did not change. “Do you plan on hating me forever, Ms. Allen?”

  “I don’t hate you.”

  She sat with him, unable to get even that simple fact out of her mind. She was sitting with Garrison Richards. The man who she perhaps may not have hated, but had strong and poisonous feelings for. On that first day in his office, receiving the brunt of his cool and arrogant stare meant to unnerve her and make her give up everything else she had, she’d wanted nothing more than to rush from the conference room and out into the sun, letting it burn away the ice-cold bath that had been his gaze.

  And now he was here with her in the snow. Under the burning sun, asking her about hating him forever. The world was a strange place.

  “Isn’t there some sort of ethical problem with you being here with me?” she asked.

  “You are the wife of a former client. Ian Barbieri doesn’t have me on retainer, and he and I have no business dealings. I see no conflict of interest here. But I can check if that makes you feel any better.” She heard the smile in his voice again. Bastard.

  The only real conflict was probably in her. She remembered the past much too vividly and irrationally blamed him for what happened to her during the divorce. More so than even her ex-husband.

  Reyna squirmed at that uncomfortable realization.

  She wanted to get back to her sketching, but her hand hurt too much from the cold. She must have made some motion toward her sketch pad because Garrison looked over at it. Too late, she remembered that she had been working on a sketch of the snowboarder—of him!—just before he sat down. She didn’t justify his curiosity by trying to hide her work.

  He took off his thick gloves, revealing thin black leather that clung to his fingers like a second skin. His hands were big, she noticed, but graceful.

  “May I?”

  She clenched her teeth against refusing him. Maybe the sooner he saw what she was doing, the sooner he would leave. His fascination with her was…distracting. She ignored the rational part of her that chimed in about her own unwanted fascination with the ruthless lawyer.

  “Sure,” she said in response to his question. “Just don’t get my stuff wet.” Reyna froze and almost bit her tongue off at what she just said.

  He arched a dark, slashing eyebrow. “I think that’s the first time I’ve ever had a woman say that to me.”

  She stared at him in shock. But he was reaching for her sketch pad, and his austere grace seemed even more so beneath the brilliance of the early-afternoon sunlight. Except for the reflective goggles crowning his head, he could have been in any boardroom in the world. Removed and critical. His powerful hands carefully handled her sketchbook, flipping through its pages, pausing at one or two before moving on. Yes, definitely critical.

  “These sketches are wonderful.” He flipped another page of the book, going from the images of the snowboarder she’d captured more thoroughly, to her earlier on-the-fly doodles of the mountain, the snow, the dots of people winding below her toward the lodges. “You’re very talented.”

  “Thank you.” She hid her surprise at his unexpected compliment, not quite knowing what else to say in response. If this was part of his campaign to satisfy his st
range curiosity about her, he was choosing the wrong way to go about it. She didn’t respond well to insincerity.

  But a brief look from his hawkish eyes made her realize that this wasn’t a man who said something he didn’t mean. An unwelcome warmth began to unfurl in her belly. Reyna hissed quietly and braced her gloved hands against the rock, glad for the dull pain that distracted her from his compliments, his nearness.

  This was Garrison Richards, she reminded herself. Again.

  “My mother draws, too,” he continued in his low and compelling voice. “And don’t tell her I said this, but your work is much more interesting, more fluid.” He flipped back to the sketch of the snowboarder. Of himself. “I admire the way you capture the image in a personal way. You’re there with the subject instead of just watching. The intimacy is very seductive.”

  Was he playing with her? Didn’t he know he was talking about himself? But he turned to the sketches of the mountain that she’d begun to fill in with long strokes of the pencil. Craggy slopes, white snow, a feathering of trees. The wide and low-hanging sky that kissed the mountaintop just so. “It’s like you’re a nature sprite sitting in the cloud here.” He tapped the page at a cloud she had half drawn. “Watching this world that you love.”

  Heat touched her cheeks at his suggestive and unexpected comments. She didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything.

  She looked away from the sketchbook in Garrison’s hands, the white paper held between fingers that were an odd mix of rugged and refined. They were almost a working man’s hands, but the way he handled her work, even through the thin leather gloves, was like a curator touching something delicate and easily damaged. A contradiction she didn’t want to notice but was helpless not to. It made him even more interesting than she had first thought. Now he was more than his dangerously sexy looks, more than the unpleasant history between them. She forced her gaze away from his hands.