Who could blame any woman for being caught up in the magic of the evening? With a glamorous makeover, a new hairstyle, the designer clothes, she had felt like someone else. A stranger alluring enough to catch the interest of one of Portland’s most wanted bachelors.
The champagne she had overindulged in hadn’t helped any. She hadn’t been thinking with a clear head but she did know she hadn’t wanted the night to end. She also knew that the moment Peter found out her last name that flattering desire in his eyes would have changed to contempt and coldness faster than she could blink.
Okay, so she had perpetuated a tiny deception on the man by keeping her identity concealed. Was that really such a hideous crime that someone felt the need to take her calm, organized world and shake the dickens out of it as if she was stuck in some nightmarish live snow globe?
She thought things were bleak before when she was just pregnant and alone. Now she had the delightful added bonus of facing the reality that she was pregnant and alone and heartily despised by her baby’s father.
The real hell of it was, seeing him again like this only served to remind her vividly of the heat and astonishing wonder of that night. Of kissing his hard mouth and touching those muscles underneath his clothes and burning only for him.
He hated her, she knew he did, but still she couldn’t control the way her insides trembled and sighed just seeing the firelight wash across those gorgeous, masculine features.
“Looks like we’re in for a long night,” he said abruptly and rose to his feet. “While you round up a flashlight and some candles, I’ll go bring in some extra firewood.”
Of course he would take charge, she thought. As Logan Corporation CEO, he was no doubt used to giving orders and having his minions obey without question. She should have been offended by his whole master-and-commander routine but she had to admit a tiny part of her wanted to let him throw his weight around a little, to let someone else carry the burdens of her worries for a while.
She sternly squashed the tempting impulse, ashamed of her weakness for even entertaining it for a second. “You don’t need to do that. Clint loaded several days worth of wood on the back porch for me before he left. There’s also a gas-fired generator out back that will juice up the appliances until the power kicks back on.”
“You act as if you’ve been through this before.”
“A few times. The power can be unreliable at best out here, especially during winter storms. I’ve had enough experience with outages that I should be perfectly fine. Believe me, you can head into town for the night with a completely clear conscience.”
She might as well have been talking to the river rocks on the fireplace. His only answer was a raised eyebrow and a challenging stare.
Katie sighed. It was worth a try. The idea of spending even one night in such close quarters with Peter Logan was enough to send her into major panic mode.
He was staying, though, and she realized grimly that no amount of arguing would change his mind. The same man who had the kindness as an eighteen-year-old college student to rescue a fat, awkward adolescent from the ugliness of her peers more than a decade earlier would never leave a woman alone out here in the middle of a blizzard.
“I don’t suppose you know anything about generators, do you?” she asked. “I’ve seen Clint start it but never done it myself.”
“Between the two of us, we should be able to figure it out, don’t you think?”
Relieved that he seemed willing to put aside his animosity, even temporarily, she nodded. “Sure.”
He cocked his head. “Are you sure you’re up to it? You’re still looking a little green around the edges. Maybe you should just take it easy and lie down here by the fire. I’m sure I can handle starting up a generator on my own.”
She refused to let him see how very much she would like to do exactly that, just curl up on this couch and let him handle everything. Trying her best to conceal the greasy nausea writhing around in her stomach, she mustered a small smile.
“Don’t worry about me.” Using the fire’s glow for illumination, she crossed the vast room to the hall storage closet. On the shelf near the door, just where she expected it, she found a large battery-powered lantern Clint and Margie kept available for exactly these kinds of emergencies. Wouldn’t she love it if the engineers on her R & D team were half as efficient as the Sweetwater caretakers? she thought.
“This should help,” she said to Peter. She led the way toward the utility porch off the kitchen. It seemed as if in just the few moments since the power had gone out, the temperature in the rooms away from the fireplace had dropped significantly. The Mexican tile floor in the kitchen was freezing, even through her thick wool socks.
All she could see outside the greenhouse window above the sink was thick blackness, but she could hear snow hurling against the logs and the wind moaning under the eaves.
It sounded lonely, mournful, and she shivered despite the sweater Ivy had sent her for Christmas from her new husband’s country of Lantanya, where Max was king.
The lantern gave off enough light that Peter must have seen her reaction. “Everything okay? Do you need to sit down?”
She knew the concern in his voice was just the courtesy he would show anyone but she couldn’t help being warmed by it. She had a feeling he wouldn’t be so solicitous if he knew the secret she carried under that sweater, though.
“No. The cold just took me by surprise, that’s all. The generator is this way.”
With the lantern held out in front of her, she carefully navigated through the mudroom to the utility porch that housed the home’s utilities—the furnace, water heater and the backup generator. The large room was vented with outside air for safety reasons and Katie found it even colder here than in the kitchen, so cold she could see her breath in the dim light she held in her hand.
“Any idea where to start?” Peter asked.
“Clint told me he left instructions.” She held the lantern up higher and scanned the room.
“This what you were looking for?” Peter asked, plucking a clipboard from a nail near the generator. He handed it to her and she saw several laminated cards secured neatly to it.
“I’ll say this for the man—he doesn’t have much to say but he’s an absolute genius at organization.” Katie leafed through the cards until she found guidelines for the gas-fired generator, beneath a page detailing how to relight the pilot on the furnace and one for checking the heating oil level on the outside tank.
“Here we go.” She studied the instructions, smiling a little at Clint’s meticulousness. “This doesn’t look bad.”
She reached to replace the clipboard on the nail but misjudged the distance in the dim light and stumbled a little against the wall. The back of her hand scraped across the nail, hard enough to break the skin, and Katie couldn’t contain a quick intake of breath.
“What’s wrong?”
It was silly, she knew, but she suddenly didn’t want Peter to know she was the world’s biggest klutz. She might have been blessed with brains by some genetic quirk, but she had definitely been passed over when it came to grace and poise.
She had always been the most accident-prone of her siblings. If there was one thing worse than being fat and ugly in a family of beautiful people, it was being fat and ugly and clumsy.
Peter already thought she had some deadly disease. He didn’t need to know about this.
“Um, nothing,” she murmured, tucking her hand against her side. “I’m fine.”
“You’re lying.” He sounded more resigned than angry, as if he expected nothing else. “You might as well tell me what happened.”
Her hand throbbed wickedly and she could feel blood beginning to drip from it. She wouldn’t be able to hide it from him for long and she suddenly felt foolish for trying. “Just a scratch. It’s nothing.”
“Let me see.”
She recognized the CEO in his voice, that unmistakable note of command. Her father had it and now Trent sha
red it in spades. She had spent her entire life surrounded by powerful men, she suddenly realized. With all that experience, why wasn’t she better at dealing with them?
With a weary sigh, she thrust out her hand. Peter took the lantern from her and set it on top of the furnace, then gripped her hand and tugged it under the circle of light.
“It doesn’t look very deep,” he decided after studying it for a few moments.
“I told you it was just a scratch.”
“Still, you’ll need to put something on it.”
“Can it wait until we’re finished here, Dr. Logan?”
“I hope your tetanus shot is up to date. That nail looked a little rusty.”
Someone with her inherent klutziness would be foolish not to keep current with her shots. Her last tetanus booster had been the previous summer after an unfortunate encounter with a conch shell on her brother Danny’s Hawaii retreat.
“Don’t worry, you’re not going to be trapped in the middle of a blizzard with someone suffering from lockjaw.”
“Well, at least I’ve got that much going for me. I guess things really could be worse.”
His dry tone surprised a laugh from her. Not much of one, she had to admit, but a laugh nonetheless.
He smiled in automatic response, his teeth gleaming in the artificial light. They stood close together under the pool of light spilling from the lantern. He still held her hand, and his fingers were warm and hard on her skin.
His gaze met hers for a moment and suddenly she could think of nothing except their night together, how they had laughed at nothing and kissed and laughed some more.
Everything inside her seemed to clench at the memory, a long, slow tightening of muscle and nerves. She saw something kindle in his eyes, something hot and wild and dangerous.
Before she realized it, she swayed a little toward him, then caught herself just in time. Horrified at her response, she wrenched her hand out of his grasp and stepped back so quickly she nearly stumbled again.
“We’d better get this thing fired up.”
For a moment, he only stared at her with an odd look in his dark eyes—a combination of awareness and a baffled sort of anger. “Right,” he finally muttered. “The wind sounds like it’s kicking up a notch.”
To her vast relief, he turned his attention to the generator. It was a little trickier than Clint’s instructions had led her to believe, but soon they had it going and switched the power current over to the generator.
Despite the tension simmering through the room and the pain still throbbing from her finger, she felt like Benjamin Franklin with his kite and his key when the lights flickered back on.
She grinned. “Bingo.”
He gazed at her for a charged moment, that strange expression in his eyes again. She waited for him to say something but he continued to watch her, as if he couldn’t quite figure her out.
She cleared her throat. “Would you like something to eat? Margie left a pot of beef stew on the stove for me that’s probably still hot and she made fresh rolls this morning. It’s probably not what you’re used to, but she’s a wonderful cook.”
“Let’s take care of that cut of yours first.”
She absolutely did not want him touching her again, not when she couldn’t stop remembering how his body had felt inside her, how his mouth had explored her skin.
“I’ve got it. You could add another log to the fire, though, and turn off any lights and nonessential electronics throughout the house. We’ll need to conserve what generator power we have. Here, take the lantern. I’ve got another one in my bedroom.”
He nodded and held out his hand. Their fingers brushed as they exchanged the light, and tiny sparks jumped between them. Just static electricity, she told herself.
They returned to the kitchen together, then split up as she headed for her bedroom suite. She left the overhead light on long enough to locate another battery-powered emergency lantern in her closet, switched it off and carried the lantern to the bathroom to get first-aid supplies.
While she rummaged through the medicine cabinet for a bandage and antibiotic ointment and washed the blood off her hand, she caught sight of her reflection in the mirror above the sink. She looked horrendous. Her hair was spiky and windblown from her time outside earlier and she hadn’t bothered with makeup. Her eyes looked unnaturally huge in her pale face and her mouth had a pinched, sickly look to it.
No wonder Peter looked at her like he couldn’t quite believe Katie Crosby and the glamorous Celeste could be the same person.
She could scarcely believe it herself. She had been playing a part that night, a thrilling masquerade. Stuck alone here with her, Peter would see the real her. The boring, sensible Kate who wore long underwear and read dry technical manuals and who would never dream of going home with a handsome man and making love all night long.
Well, okay, she dreamed about it, she admitted to herself with a long, honest look in the mirror. She dreamed about it every night and remembered in exquisitely painful detail how she had come alive for the first time in her life that night.
Perhaps it was best that he see her for the person she really was. Not glamorous, not glitzy. Just Katie. That night she had been Cinderella at the ball, dressed up in borrowed finery. It had been wonderful and magical dancing the night away with Prince Charming, but midnight had come and gone. There would be no glass slipper for her—but she had been left with a magical, wondrous gift.
She touched her abdomen. Could she keep the baby a secret from him in such close quarters? It was only for one night and then he would be gone again. She was only thirteen weeks along and wasn’t really showing unless someone knew her well enough to recognize that the tiny swelling at her stomach hadn’t been there a few weeks ago.
She would just have to make sure she stayed in baggy clothes so he wouldn’t have that close a look.
The pesky morning sickness could be explained away by a lingering stomach bug, she hoped.
It would be a little tricky to pull it off, but what other choice did she have? She couldn’t tell him. This was her baby. He might have unwittingly donated the sperm but that didn’t make him a father. Bad enough that she deceived him by not telling him her name—she couldn’t bind him forever to a Crosby because of a quirk of fate.
Besides, Peter Logan was not the father she wanted for her baby. He was far too much like her own father—completely consumed by his work. She knew what it was like to wait in vain for a few crumbs her busy, important father might scatter her way. She wouldn’t do that to her own child. Better for her baby never to know a father than to suffer from inattention and indifference.
She could carry off the deception for one night, then they would go their separate ways and Peter would never have to know about the baby. She would invent an imaginary lover for the inevitable questions from her family and friends about her child’s paternity—a man she had fallen hard for but who had been unattainable.
Not so very far from the truth, she thought grimly. In fact, too close for her own comfort.
With a weary sigh, she quickly brushed her hair and debated touching up her face with some of the makeup tricks Carrie Summers had shown her. In the end she decided against doing anything more than a quick brush of lipstick and a little blush on her cheeks so she didn’t look so ghastly pale.
She returned to the gathering room to find that Peter had pulled a small table and two chairs near the fireplace and had set out two place settings. She nibbled her lip, fighting the urge to turn back around and hide out in her room for the rest of the night.
Dinner for two in a dimly lit room in front of a crackling fire looked entirely too romantic, too intimate.
He stood by one of the chairs waiting for her with a challenging kind of look in his eyes and she knew she couldn’t be cowardly enough to run away. She squared her shoulders and sat down.
“I hope you don’t mind me moving the furniture around a little,” he said. “I figured this would be more comf
ortable than eating in a cold dining room.”
“The dining room is rarely used anyway. When I stay here, I usually eat in the kitchen with the Taylors.”
“Those are the caretakers?”
She nodded. “Their daughter is having her first baby. They’ve gone for moral support.”
“I hope they made it through the storm.”
“I’m sure they’ll be fine. Clint’s used to driving in this weather.”
She returned to stirring her stew and the Herculean effort of swallowing the occasional bite.
“This is quite a place you’ve got here,” Peter said. “Somehow I never would have figured the Crosbys to go for rustic and isolated.”
The faint note of derision in his voice raised her hackles. She wasn’t sure if it was aimed at her family or at the ranch, both of which she loved dearly. Either way she didn’t like it. A sharp retort formed in her throat but she squashed it. In the interest of peace, she should probably do her best to avoid needless bickering.
“My father bought it as a retreat several years ago when it seemed like everybody was moving west.”
Like many of Jack Crosby’s actions, Sweetwater had been purchased to please one of his many girlfriends, then had been forgotten as soon as her father moved on to more nubile pastures. But she decided that was old family business she didn’t particularly need to share with Peter Logan.
“Does your family spend much time here together?” he asked.
She tried to remember when the Crosbys had last done anything together.
“We all came out for Christmas once right after Jack bought it,” she remembered. “Trent and Ivy have been out to ski occasionally. Sweetwater is only about an hour from the Jackson Hole ski resorts.”
He broke a roll in half and liberally spread some of Margie’s strawberry preserves on it. “Is that why you’re here? To ski?”
She wasn’t sure quite how to answer that. She certainly couldn’t tell him she had escaped to Sweetwater first because she’d been ill and then because she had been desperately in need of a safe haven, a sanctuary where she could come to terms with her pregnancy and figure out how she was going to map out the rest of her life after this unexpected detour.
Snowbound in Sweetwater Ranch Page 3