by Claire Adams
"Natalie, listen. I appreciate you coming here. I didn't know you'd be back."
"You didn't think I'd let you just die out here, did you? I told your dad I'd be there to help you out when you needed me. Leaving you out here through a storm with nothing wasn't going to work." I walked into the cabin, grateful for the warmth, and plopped the bag down on the floor in the kitchen. He followed me inside with one in each arm.
"To be fair, if I had thought I needed anything, I would have driven out myself and gotten it."
"Then why didn't you?" I asked, heading back outside for the last of the items.
"I know you're trying to help, but if I needed it, I would have asked, Natalie."
"No you wouldn't," I said, looking at him. "All you've done since the accident is retreat. You went as far as moving to a new house to the middle of nowhere. If you could get to the moon, you'd probably do it. By now, I would have hoped that you realized there are people who care about you, Cameron, who'd rather you didn't starve to death alone in the mountains."
"You're one of them?"
"I take it personally when people refuse my good advice."
"If you had taken mine, you wouldn't be stuck out here with me," he said matter-of-factly. I looked out at the snow, now covering my car along with everything else.
"If you had taken any, you would have stayed in Salt Lake City." He stared at me. I couldn't make out any emotion on his face, but knew he wasn't pleased with me. This had been a bad idea. I was sure of that now. I had made it up to the cabin, but clearly, Cameron had wanted a houseguest about as much as I wanted a pelvic exam. Oh well.
"Did you take long to get here?" he asked suddenly. I looked over my shoulder to where he was in the kitchen. He was rifling through the bags, looking at the different stuff I had gotten.
"Longer than the first time. The snow slowed me down." I stood and walked to the kitchen and started helping him, taking food out of the bags and setting it on the counter.
"I still don't know why you did it."
"A simple thank you would suffice," I said, looking at him.
He smirked, then laughed a little. "Alright. Thank you. I should have listened to you."
"You should have done a lot of things, but that's a good place to start." I paused, looking down at the counter. "I told your dad I would help you. I told Brett too. This wasn't the kind of help I expected to give you, but it was what you needed."
"Thanks," he said again. "I... it's been harder living out here than I expected." Finally, he admits it. The darkness losing his parents had given him was probably starting to lighten up a bit. If not, it had just taken a backseat to the more immediate issues he had living in the middle of nowhere, like not dying, for instance. I still didn’t think it had been a good move, but I couldn’t deny that he seemed somewhat better for it. I hadn’t known him well to begin with, so maybe that was giving him a lot, but he couldn’t have been prepared for the accident. I couldn’t say I would have reacted that much differently.
I maybe owed him some props for lasting the week that he did during winter. He was no mountain man yet, but a few more winters and he could be. He had always been clean shaven at the office, and the scruff he sported now wasn’t a bad look. He looked great in a suit, but anyone seeing him now for the first time wouldn’t imagine he belonged anywhere else.
"I thought that would be the case."
"You got a lot of stuff. I should pay you back for it."
"Don't. I'm stuck here too. I'll get as much use out of it as you do."
"No, I roped you into this," he insisted. I stopped arguing with him remembering how much the satellite phone had cost. We put away the rest of the food in companionable silence. He was connected to the electricity, so he'd be able to use the heater, and he hadn't eaten corned beef before but was willing to try something new.
"Are you hungry?" he asked when we were done. "I don't usually eat this early, but you must be hungry." I was. The last thing I had eaten had been breakfast with Kasey.
"Do you need help?" I asked.
"No. I'll take care of it. Just keep the fire going," he said. I went over to the fireplace, opened the stove carefully, and fed it another thick log. I loved the smell of wood burning fires, something I didn't get anymore but had defined a lot of my childhood. This situation was as similar to my childhood as it wasn't. The snow was the same. So was the fire and the isolation outside, but the beautiful man making dinner—that was new. Cameron and I had been forced into a hasty friendship over the past few weeks. The next few days would be...interesting.
Chapter Fifteen
Cameron
"So Brett had nothing to do with this?" I asked. We were on the couch. The coffee table was gone, and we had moved it up closer to the fire. Natalie was sitting with her legs crossed, facing me, holding her plate in one hand and twirling her pasta around on her fork with the other.
"Nope," she said.
"I don't believe you." She shrugged and ate a mouthful of pasta. I had halfway expected that she'd turn it down, say she didn't eat carbs or something. I had met some women like that, dated some too, and Natalie, no fault of hers, kind of fit the bill. No shame in taking care of yourself, but it had been a little unfair of me to make that assumption of her. If she had not wanted to pursue law, she could have made money on her looks. Modelling or marrying rich, or both.
"What? Don't believe I was concerned and thought that if I could do something to help that I should do it?"
"Nope," I said, smirking at her. She laughed. She had lost the jacket she had been wearing and was in a comfortable-looking woolen sweater. She had thought ahead before making the trip over here, getting some extra clothes on the way. She claimed that she had figured she might have to use a hotel after getting caught in the storm, but I disagreed. If there had been any chance of making her stay, I wouldn't have let her go to a hotel. While I cooked, she had gone back to her car to get the clothes and her purse. Her makeup was all washed off, and she had tied her hair up away from her face.
I never asked questions when it came to women and their makeup. All I knew was it went on their faces and could be surprisingly expensive. Natalie looked... Well I didn't know why she used the stuff at all. She was beautiful without it. Her eyes were bright, and I couldn't stop watching her lips as she talked to me. It wasn't like it was the first time, but clearly, things had escalated a little bit. She was spending the night; this night and probably a couple more if the snow didn't let up. We were about to have to get a lot more comfortable with each other, and I had no problem with that.
I couldn't believe it. Just when I had written it all off as bad luck and bad timing, here she was, right where I wanted, and neither of us could leave. "I think you were just looking for another reason to come up here."
"You didn't give me very many," she shot back.
"Yet here you are. And you brought gifts." She rolled her eyes and ate some more of the pasta. It was just regular pasta noodles and a tomato-based pasta sauce. We weren't in the kind of kitchen where I could try and impress her, but she hadn't complained.
"Were you really not going to go after what I told you yesterday?"
"I wasn't," I said honestly. "I would have been able to get by if I had been alone. Having you here complicates things, to say the least. Showing up with more food was the least you could have done."
"How has it been?"
"Good," I said lightly.
"Now I don't believe you."
"How do you like it so far?" I asked. She looked around the room like she was evaluating it.
"A little bare bones, but it's warm."
"Sorry I don't have a palace for you, princess."
She wrinkled her nose, scoffing. "Look who's talking," she said. "Which one of us has our name on a skyscraper?" Ouch, she had me there.
"Which one of us came to the mountains wearing heels and makeup?"
"I had places to be after coming here. This," she said, motioning at the cabin, "came totally
out of left field."
"How bad is the snow back home?"
"Nothing next to this. Not enough yet to make the BYU kids stay indoors."
"BYU? Wait, where do you live?"
"Provo."
"No way. Me too," I said, before remembering where we were, "I mean, not anymore, but I had a place there." I hadn't done anything with it yet, but I had been thinking about selling. I asked her where she had lived, and she told me—just ten minutes from where my house had been. Shit, I thought. She had really been right there. At work, every day, and a ten-minute drive from my home, and this was what it had taken to throw us together. Sounded like a pretty strong cosmic message, if you believed in that kind of thing, or the biggest coincidence possible. Coincidence or not, I was here and so was she.
I had had time now to think about all the ways things could have gone differently for us if we had gotten to know each other sooner or at the very least had a conversation because of something other than my parents dying. Timing still couldn't have been worse, but we were both here now, and ‘til the snow cleared, we were going to stay here. I couldn't stop what I thought about her. I mean two people snowed in for a number of days, all that time alone together was enough to encourage them into seeking more than just warmth with each other.
"I read that your parents lived in Holladay," she said. I told her it was true. Technically Salt Lake was my hometown, but I hadn't lived there for years. It hit me hearing myself talk that it was something I hardly did anymore. Speak. I mean, sometimes I had found myself speaking out loud alone, but it had been a good little while since I’d had someone to listen when I did. And that someone being a beautiful woman I should have spoken to a year ago when I had started seeing her around the office.
"What about you?" I asked.
"Montana," she said. "The rest of my family still live there."
"What brought you to Salt Lake?" I asked. Apparently, this had been the second stop for her after graduating from college in Portland. She had moved for work and had lived in Salt Lake for a while before moving to Provo in the last couple years.
"Why'd you move to Provo from Salt Lake?" I asked. I knew for me the quieter vibe of the smaller city was what I had needed, but she had worked in Salt Lake, even before coming to Porter Holdings. What about her? How much did we have in common? Now I was curious.
"It's stupid," she said.
"Why? What was it?" I asked. We had both finished eating and were just talking now. The crackling from the fireplace was the only other sound in the room. She sighed and looked down at her hands before looking back up at me.
"My boyfriend at the time lived in Provo, and he wanted us to move in together."
"He wanted it? Not you?"
"It had meant a longer commute to work, but in the end, I did it. Three months later, he took a job offer in Austin, Texas."
"You broke up."
"We tried to keep it up long distance for a while, but it didn't work out," she said with a shrug.
"And you're stuck in the house." She shrugged again. There. Right there was reason number one on the list of why you should never move in with a significant other. I couldn't blame her for taking the chance, especially if she and that guy had been serious, but I could be glad that she was single. I was in fact. The later it got, the more obvious it got that it was just us, and she wasn't leaving. It was going to be just us for the next few days at least.
It would be so easy, I thought. She would be right there, all I'd have to do was... No. Bad idea. An attractive woman was about to spend the next few days at my house with neither of us able to leave. What if I did say something; do something? On one hand, if it worked out, we were looking at nonstop sex ‘til the snow stopped. On the other, if it didn’t, painfully awkward interactions ‘til one of us was able to escape. Did she feel it too? The only way to find out would have been shooting my shot, but if it wasn't on target, living together these next few days would be unbearable.
"What time is it?" she asked, changing the subject. She didn't really want to talk about her ex. Good, I didn't really want to hear about him. I knew all I needed to know anyway, which was he was out of the picture. I checked.
"Close to nine. Not that late," I said, standing. I asked her to hand me her plate, but she stood, taking it to the kitchen herself. She insisted she could do the dishes since I had cooked. While she did that, I opened the front door and looked outside to survey the damage. The snow was coming down hard, piling pretty high already on both our cars. The woodpile I had up on the porch was protected under a tarp, thank god, and since the porch was covered, not much snow was getting blown onto it.
"Is it bad?" Natalie asked from behind me. I moved and let her look outside. She came back in, and I locked the door.
"Doesn't look like it's about to let up anytime soon." She sighed, rubbing her hands over her arms like she was cold. She looked at me, and our eyes met. Some nights, the cabin had felt like it was too big. Too much space for me to fill on my own, but right then, it was suffocating. I could almost hear my own heart pounding, hear the snow hitting the ceiling and wood split in the fire. I could almost feel the heat from her body. All I could see was her. All I could think about was kissing her, running my fingers through her silky, golden hair. She looked away first, clearing her throat.
"You must be tired," I said hoarsely. "You can have the bed. I can set up down here on the couch."
"No, you can't do that. This is your house. I showed up unannounced."
"It's nothing," I said hastily, trying not to think of her in my bed or of me in that bed with her. "It's not like I gave you the option to call before you came. And I didn't listen to you when you told me to stock up. Besides," I said, "the couch is closer to the fire." She smiled weakly.
"Are you sure?" she asked. I told her that I was. I needed her to say yes. She'd be out the door if she knew some of the things I had thought about doing to her. I didn't know about her, but I wanted to make it out of the next few days alive. This situation was high stress for both of us, more for her since she hadn’t even asked to be up here. She was now, though, and what the hell kind of host would I be if I took this opportunity to make a move on her? She had driven hours to get to me up here; a little restraint wouldn't kill me. It would probably make the next few days go by a lot smoother.
I gave her a towel and let her use the shower first. I kept myself busy setting up the couch for the night, trying not to think about her being naked behind the door of the bathroom. She had actually brought some extra blankets with her, which had been pretty good thinking. Getting my head out of the gutter for a second, I was glad she was here. There weren't many people I would feel that way about. After my parents, it had been Brett. Natalie and I hadn't known each other long, but the snow would clear, and she would be leaving soon, and I could say pretty confidently that I wasn't looking forward to that happening. I was glad she was here.
What was the reason she had even asked to talk to me in the first place? Right, to talk work. She had been here twice now, and she hadn’t brought it up once. Unlike everyone who just wanted me to put my head down and accept what had been planned for me, she wasn’t pushing it. I had told her to give me time, and she actually was. If she wanted to, she could have talked my ear off about why I had to go back, but she hadn’t. Maybe it was too soon to say she wasn’t like the others, but I still appreciated it. It made me even sorrier we hadn’t talked earlier. She had to know from all that time she seemed to spend with Brett what a big deal my taking over Porter Holdings was supposed to be, but she wasn’t pushing it. She was one of the good ones. There were still some out there.
Chapter Sixteen
Natalie
The bed smelled like him. It was big, had to be a king. It took up most of the space up in the loft. It was layered against the cold and was deliciously warm. I had laid there, staring up at the vaulted ceiling for sleep to come, trying not to think about Cameron down on the couch.
It was a big bed. He
was taller than me anyway; him taking the bed would have just made sense practically. The couch was big, but he was too. He would have been a lot more comfortable on the bed. We could have shared it comfortably. I rolled onto my side, blinking as my eyes adjusted to the dark. I imagined his big, solid body inches away from mine. Having him close would have been nice, warm. I closed my eyes, trying again. I couldn't hear anything but the fire, but my body was alert, too wired for me to sleep. I wanted to catch any sound of him. Getting up to go to the bathroom or tossing and turning because he couldn’t get comfortable on the couch's limited space.
I turned again to my other side. I was tired, but my mind raced. It was almost too quiet out here. The stillness made me want to stand and pace. My racing thoughts made up for the silence. There had been dozens of nights when I had fallen asleep under the stars and watched the sunrise over a horizon undisturbed by man-made buildings. I had gotten so used to hearing vehicles at night, sirens, and conversation that the silence kept me awake.
This was what Cameron had wanted. The solitude: what he had literally fled from his life to have. I was past examining his reasons; there was no use anymore. He was here, and he was staying here until he felt like going back or didn't feel like going back. Could he do it? Day after day so cut off from his old life? I didn't know. Maybe I'd ask him. I fell asleep finally, hearing Cameron get up and adjust the fire.
He couldn't sleep either. The couch was too small, and he was unsettled after my arrival. The woman in his bed who had shown up unannounced conveniently as a snowstorm serious enough to snow them in had struck. Her plan exactly. She would never admit it, but it made sense. Why had she started paying so much attention to him lately? It was obvious what she wanted. She must have been up there in his bed, needy, touching herself because he wasn't.
He got up and made his way to the steps, climbing them quietly in case he was wrong, and she was fine, cocooned in his warm bed, asleep. In case it was just him who couldn't fight his draw to her. Would it be wrong to think that an attractive woman would appreciate the company of an attractive man? That wasn’t necessarily true in every case with every woman, but he had felt something from her. Noticed something in her eyes when he had caught her looking at him, almost felt the pull of her attraction to him. It was that strong, and he had a good feeling she had felt his too. Coming up the steps, he saw her. Her movements ceased, and she sat upright. He grinned slowly, knowing her cheeks must have been blushing red in the darkness. He had caught her.