Snowy Mountain Nights

by Lindsay Evans

  “It’s just a hobby,” she said finally, training her eyes on the vast mountain view spread out before her. The thick clouds tumbling through the skies promised another bout of snow.

  “Somehow I doubt that. Talent like this has to be more than a hobby.” He nodded toward the sketch pad. “Do you do this for a living?”

  She flinched when Garrison carefully replaced the sketch pad on the rock next to her. Reyna smelled him as he leaned behind her, the tang of his aftershave, sweat and sunscreen overwhelming her senses. She closed her eyes briefly to savor the scent of him, then snapped them open when she realized what she was doing.

  What did he just ask her? She drew a steadying breath. “I’m a tattoo artist, so I guess I do. People occasionally ask me to do original sketches and portraits for their body art.”

  “Really?” He glanced over her body as if he could see under her clothes to any ink she may or may not have beneath them. “Tattoos?”

  “Yes. Tattoos.” Reyna stiffened, preparing for another of Garrison’s judgmental looks.

  She rarely told people what she did for a living. Unless they came into the studio where she worked, people never assumed Reyna was any more than she appeared: a slightly boring, nice girl. Not that being a tattoo artist exempted her from being boring. Once people found out her job, men in particular, they only wanted to know one thing. Or maybe two. And they always assumed she had some hidden pain kink or was a bad girl looking for a bad boy.

  “How unique,” Garrison said. “I’m sure your work is some of the most beautiful in the city.”

  She warmed again at his compliment. And at his unexpected reaction to her job. It was such a very different reaction from the one she’d gotten from her ex-husband, someone who had known her for most of her adult life. With Garrison’s thoughtful silence, she drifted into the past to the one and only time she’d been in the same place with Ian after the divorce.

  One night, he had wandered into her tattoo studio from off the busy nighttime street. Reyna was in her zone, the buzz of the needle vibrating between her fingers as she sat on a chair working on the large trail of red poppies a pale-skinned client wanted down her spine.

  The bell above the door rang, announcing that someone had walked in, but she didn’t pay much attention since she was already occupied. A hum of excitement began in the shop. Then she heard Ian’s voice and couldn’t stop herself from freezing up in automatic rejection of him being in her space.

  He walked in like a big TV star, attracting the attention of everyone in the shop, signing autographs and pretending not to see her. But eventually, he hadn’t been able to help himself and walked over to her sectioned-off area.

  Ian jerked his chin in her direction. “I bet you’re into bondage and all kinds of sick garbage now. You want a man to tie you up and make you bleed?”

  Reyna continued her work, even when she felt her client’s body tense with interest at Ian’s proximity. She’d had months of practice keeping herself centered and calm. He drifted into her field of vision, but she acted as if he wasn’t there.

  Among other things, he called her a pain slut, ready for torture and blood at the hands of a lover. She focused on the tattoo gun in her hand, the red poppies taking shape beneath the needle.

  Her nonresponsiveness worked perfectly. He never came by the studio again.

  Reyna returned from her reverie to find Garrison watching her closely with his usual unreadable expression.

  “Tattooing is not my passion,” she said for want of some sort of barrier between them. “But it’s an amazing thing to walk around the city sometimes and see a client with my work on their body.”

  “I can only imagine how satisfying that would be.” Garrison looked down the mountain, and Reyna followed his gaze.

  Snow and fresh powder, nothing but cold white for miles. His hobby, or passion. Another surprise between them.

  “You should go,” she said. “Don’t waste this. It won’t last long.”

  She didn’t know if she was talking about the snow or the weekend or life.

  “You’re right,” Garrison said. “Nothing really lasts, does it?” His intent eyes settled on her again. “All the more reason to enjoy it while you can instead of looking ahead to its end.”

  Her mouth curled into a smile. “You can think of it that way, yes.”

  He nodded as if he’d decided something. “I’ll be seeing you again, Ms. Allen.”

  She watched him click back onto his snowboard, pull on his thick gloves and mask and lower his goggles. He seemed alien and untouchable against the landscape that was all sunlight, the cheerful dip of the evergreens, a clear blue sky. All around she heard the joyful shouts of people enjoying themselves in the snow.

  “Until then.” She dipped her head in his direction.

  He scudded down the mountain, kicking up snow in his wake, the movement of his dark shape on the bright snow pulling an aching cord in her belly. She drew in a breath at the warm feeling. No. She did not want this.

  It was one thing to find him attractive. It was another entirely to find herself actually attracted to him. The subtle humor in his long-lashed eyes. His masculine scent. The fact that he wasn’t as boring and arrogant as she expected. Reyna swallowed thickly, and she watched him fly away from her. She had a feeling she was about to get herself in trouble.

  *

  Reyna spent another couple of hours sketching and enjoying her semi-isolation before her friends came back and dragged her from her mountain perch for sledding and impromptu drinks with some men they’d met on the slopes. Ahmed Clark was not among these eligible bachelors, but Bridget was happy enough.

  Later on, in the cabin and under the influence of the hot toddies Louisa made, her friends tried to go back to the subject of Garrison Richards. But Reyna steered them toward something else. Louisa smirked, her look telling Reyna that she couldn’t avoid her feelings for the lawyer, or her discussion of them, for too much longer. But whatever respite she had, Reyna would gladly take. Garrison made her feel too uneasy, overheated and uncomfortable for her to talk about him just yet. Even to her closest friends.

  They stayed up until late, talking about life and love and everything in between. At a little past three in the morning, the women all pled exhaustion, even Bridget. Reyna, however, was still wide awake. She didn’t need much sleep, and working at the tattoo studio, which was open until 4:00 a.m. some Saturdays, she was used to going to bed as late as six in the morning.

  After her friends went to bed, she couldn’t slow down her mind. She couldn’t stop thinking about Garrison and his snow-flecked flight down the mountain. She couldn’t stop thinking about his smell. Spicy and masculine, like a long and back-bending night in a warm bed.

  It was as if he was still next to her, body crowding her on the couch, inflaming her late-night imagination with thoughts of what it would be like to kiss him. Wondering what harm there would be to allow him this chase at the resort, allow him to catch her and be with her away from real life in the city.

  The more her body marinated in thoughts of having him, the more her brain shouted at her to stop being so stupid. He wasn’t a good person. He was just as bad as Ian, maybe worse.

  Her thoughts grew clamorous, too loud and too shameful to be cooped up in the cabin with so many sleeping souls. She got up from the couch and dampened the fire, pulled on her snow gear and stepped out into the cold.

  Chapter 4

  Garrison sat in the armchair by the fire, shirtless and wearing jeans. His sock-covered feet were stretched out toward the fireplace. The heat from the flames flickered over his bare chest, warming and sweet.

  At four in the morning, the snow was coming down outside, whirling in pale flurries against the dark sky. The fire burned hot and high behind the grate. The heater was on. It was nearly eighty degrees in the cabin, just how he liked it. The book he had started to read lay turned down on his thigh, but his mind was far from immersed in its chapters. Instead, his thoughts were fu
ll of Reyna.

  Garrison had been surprised to see her on the trail earlier that day. It was as if he had been given a gift when he saw her sitting on that rock, removed from the chaos and rabble around her, a queen surveying her lands. He saw her as he came down the mountain then whipped past her on his board. A bubble of exquisite feeling popped to life inside him. It had overtaken the euphoria and freedom he usually felt from being on the mountain with the board under his feet. And he had damn near broken his neck to quickly get down the mountain then back up again to reintroduce himself.

  And now, more than twelve hours later, he was still thinking about her. Reyna Allen. The artist. The woman.

  Although he wasn’t one for commitments—his career as a divorce attorney forced him to see the futility of those sorts of arrangements—there was something about Reyna that made him want her. Want her badly.

  On the mountain, he had only just restrained himself from kissing her. Her lips, glistening and red from the ChapStick or lipstick or whatever she’d applied, distracted and tangled his thoughts. In her presence, all clarity disappeared. All he wanted to do was kiss her and sink his fingers into her hair and make her sigh his name. Even now, the thought of her mouth made the muscles in his belly tighten.

  Garrison had never had a vacation hookup before, but the fire in Reyna’s eyes made him want to try something new. A flicker of movement outside the window drew him from his thoughts. The brief flash of a woman’s face under a yellow hooded jacket. Reyna.

  Without giving himself a chance to think, Garrison quickly pulled on his cold-weather clothes and rushed out the door after her. His heart raced as the primitive side of him, long buried by an exacting and regimented life, rose up to follow Reyna as if she were his female, scented temptingly on the wind.

  The door clicked shut behind him, and snow crunched under his boots. Pale flurries swirled around him in the brisk breeze, melting against his face. The cold night groaned with its particular noises.

  Reyna walked slowly up ahead, hands in the pockets of her yellow jacket while the furred hood obscured most of her face and covered her head. He didn’t try to be quiet. But he didn’t call out to her, either. He quickly caught up with her, using his slightly longer legs to his advantage.

  “Ms. Allen.”

  She turned, startled, her large black eyes widening even more. Dark curls tumbled into her face, and she took a step back.

  “Are you following me?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked surprised again. Then turned away from him to continue walking. Garrison took that as an invitation to fall in step with her. Reyna glanced at him.

  “I don’t want you following or stalking me,” she said. “I had enough ruin from you to last a lifetime.”

  “Ruin?” He frowned. This wasn’t the almost welcoming woman he’d talked with on the slopes earlier that afternoon. Reyna was acting as if that conversation between them never happened.

  “Yes. Ruin.” Her face grew harder, a beautiful mahogany mask under the falling snow. “Ian was not smart enough to think of all those conditions in the divorce papers by himself. It had to be you.” Reyna’s black eyes crackled with anger. There seemed to be some sort of fever burning inside her. She walked faster. “You helped him to leave me on the edge of desperation. After the divorce I had to start over completely.”

  Garrison nodded silently, feeling again the weight of the blame for how the Barbieri divorce had been settled. In hindsight, he should have never allowed Ian Barbieri to do the things he’d done to the woman he’d supposedly loved since high school. Reyna hadn’t known what she was getting into. She hadn’t even retained a lawyer of her own, for heaven’s sake! But despite his attraction to her then, Garrison had been too caught up in his job, in the pure facts of the case, to do what was right.

  “The divorce left me vulnerable and more alone than I’d ever been.” She slowed her steps, and her harsh breaths steamed the air. Then she looked annoyed with herself that she’d told him that much.

  Because of Reyna and her divorce, he’d become more human, more aware of the larger picture where both parties in the separation were concerned. Garrison was almost ashamed to admit that it had been because of his attraction to her that he’d even begun to second-guess the methods that had worked so well for him in the past. Shallow, but true. After Reyna, it was no longer about simply allowing his client to escape a previous romantic entanglement with the most money possible. It was about being fair.

  “It wasn’t my finest hour,” he said finally. Inadequately. “And although it means nothing now, please allow me to apologize.”

  He’d spent untold weeks and months torturing himself with what he could have done to be fair to her five years ago. Then he dreamed about being the man to come to her rescue and save her from her marriage. Now he simply wanted to be the man in her bed.

  He swallowed and fisted a gloved hand in his jacket pocket. The fierceness of his desire for her was almost frightening. Before he saw her on the train that morning, she had existed at the back of his mind as a sort of angel, inspiring him to be a better man. Now he wanted to pull her down in the dirt with him and kiss the innocence from her lips.

  Reyna walked quietly by his side, thankfully oblivious to his yearning. She pushed the hood back from her face, and the snow fell on her hair, the white settling in her beautiful black curls. She tilted her face briefly up at the sky. Garrison watched a lucky snowflake melting against her lips. He watched, burning in his thirst, as those lips parted, and her tongue licked away the wet.

  “Why apologize now?” she asked. “It’s been five years.”

  “Because I didn’t mean to hurt you then, and I don’t want you to hold the past against me now.” He paused. “And I want you to know that I’m not that man anymore.”

  “Why do you care what I think?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? I want to…woo you.”

  She made a disbelieving noise, the corner of her mouth tilting up. “Is that what they’re calling it these days?”

  Embarrassed heat rushed through him. Was it possible that she knew his thoughts? Did she know how badly he wanted to pull her down into the snow with him and beneath him? Beyond the pounding of his lustful heart, he could almost hear the sounds she would make, her sighs and moans and gasps of pleasure, while he lost himself in the heated clasp of her.

  Garrison cleared his throat. “Yes, that’s what I’d like to call it for now. Wooing is not such a bad word, is it?”

  She looked at him again, and it was as if she could see into him, through him. “Wooing? Really?”

  “Yes. Definitely,” he said. “At least at first.” Garrison allowed the humor to surface in his voice. And a hint of his desire.

  Reyna made that same noise again but said nothing. She only kept walking while the snow fell in its silence around them, the quiet broken only by the sound of their footsteps in the white powder, the whisper of their breaths. Vapor streamed from her parted lips.

  He looked away from her mouth, deliberately distracting himself from thoughts of how good it would feel wrapped… He clenched his fist hard enough to stretch the thin leather gloves beneath his thicker snow gauntlets. Desperately, he thought of other things.

  At four in the morning, there was no one around but the two of them. Garrison could hear the far-off rumble of conversation perhaps near one of the outdoor hot tubs with a view of the mountains. From what his friend Wolfe had told him, people often used the cover of night to go skinny-dipping in the hot tubs, sit with the bubbling water up to their throats while the snow fell around them. That had little appeal for him.

  He barely tolerated the snow as it was. A born and bred Floridian, he’d only come to New York for college, then stayed after law school because he got a lucrative offer from a downtown firm. Fifteen years later, he was still in the city, but that didn’t make him hate the snow and the cold any less.

  At his side, Reyna held her face up to the sky. It was as if she’d forgotten
he was there. She caught errant snowflakes on her tongue, her face a study in contentment while her lips glistened red with some sort of lip gloss. He wondered if she would taste sweet or spicy. Like strawberries or cinnamon.

  He forced his mind back to where it belonged.

  “I don’t know how you can stand this weather,” he said.

  She glanced briefly at him. “Then you should go back to your cabin.”

  “Oh, no. I’m enjoying myself too much for that.”

  “I take it you’re not the type of man who takes no for an answer, then?” She arched an eyebrow at him under the snow.

  “Not in business. But I always listen when I hear it from a lady.”

  A doubting smile touched her red lips. “Do you?”

  “Absolutely. I am thoroughly enjoying your company. But if you tell me to leave you alone, then I will.”

  She opened her mouth, perhaps to tell him just that, but then closed it without saying anything. Garrison walked with her for a few minutes in silence. He tracked her graceful steps, admiring the length of her legs even in the jeans that obviously had another layer underneath.

  “Why are you up here anyway?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you be in the city ruining some other woman’s life?”

  He winced. “It doesn’t quite work that way. And I have many women as clients.”

  “Then you’re ruining some men’s lives, too. Very equal opportunity of you.”

  Her words stung him more than he wanted to admit. Not just because they alluded to how much the divorce agreement had hurt her, but also because she clearly thought he hadn’t changed.

  “Contrary to what you think, ruining lives is not the business I’m in.”

  “I’ll believe that when I see it.”

  They broke through the thick forest of trees and arrived at the edge of the mountain and the waist-high fence protecting them from the steep drop. Just then, the snowfall dwindled to almost nothing.