He answered before she could correct the assumption. “No. Only Kurt Banning, my second-in-command, knows the entire story. As far as everybody else is concerned, I’m taking some personal leave. That should set your mind at ease.”
“My mind is not at all unsettled.”
Not about her reputation, at any rate. She was afraid she had none in Moose Springs.
She could have an entire orgy of sexy law enforcement officers camping at her house and people would just shake their heads and ask what else could they expect of R.J.’s daughter?
“Is there a free plug for my cell phone somewhere?” Daniel asked. “I want to make sure I’ve got a full charge while I can in case the power goes out on us.”
“Yes. Of course. Good idea.” She showed him an open plug, then spent a few moments digging out her own cell phone to charge in case she was needed on a medical emergency.
What if they were both called out on a crisis at the same time? she wondered, then decided to set her mind at ease, at least on that score. It was certainly possible, but she had no doubts Daniel would have thought of every eventuality.
The wind lashed the windows as Lauren went to join Rosa in the living area. The girl was curled up on the couch with a blanket over her, watching a comedy on the Spanish language channel. Lauren could only pick out half the words and she was just reaching for her latest lousy attempt at knitting when Daniel joined them and settled in the recliner.
He watched TV with Rosa for ten minutes until the show ended, though she had the feeling he was only pretending to pay attention.
Was he as off balance as she was by that kiss? she wondered. Even a half hour later, she could still taste him on her mouth.
She was wondering if she had any DVDs with Spanish subtitles, for the sake of distraction if nothing else, when Daniel suddenly jumped up from the recliner.
“Let’s play a game or something.”
“Okay,” she said slowly. “What did you have in mind?”
“I don’t know. What have you got? You have a deck of cards?”
“I’m sure I do somewhere.”
“What about a card table?”
“In the garage against the north wall.”
While he went in search of it, she finally unearthed a deck in her kitchen junk drawer that was probably left over from medical school study breaks. While she was searching, Daniel had found the card table and had set it up near the fireplace.
“What did you have in mind?” she asked after the three of them settled into the chairs he brought in from the dining room and he shuffled the deck.
“I don’t know. I was trying to come up with some game that would transcend the language thing. What about Crazy Eights?”
She didn’t believe she had played that game since she was about ten years old in summer camp. But she was willing to try anything that might keep her mind off that stunning kiss.
For the next hour, they played Crazy Eights and War and SlapJack, and a new one to her called Burro Casti-gado, similar to draw poker. Daniel must have been inspired with the cards, Lauren thought. As they played, Rosa giggled and smiled and seemed much more like a girl than a young woman who had survived a horrendous ordeal.
After a while, she moved to the kitchen to make some popcorn and she could overhear Daniel and Rosa speaking in Spanish. Daniel’s low laugh drew her gaze.
She watched them together for a moment, a funny pang in her chest. He was so kind to the girl, just as he used to be to his own younger sister. She used to be filled with envy that Anna had three big, strong brothers to watch out for her. It had hardly seemed fair to Lauren, when she had none.
He turned suddenly and caught her watching him. Something flared in his dark eyes, something hot and intense. In her mind, she was in his arms again, savoring that strength around her and the flutter of nerves as her body seemed to awaken from a long, cold sleep.
Their gazes caught for a long moment, until the microwave dinged and yanked Lauren back to reality. She pulled the popcorn bag out and took her time shaking it into a bowl while she tried to force her pulse to slow again. She was never going to make it through the next few days if she didn’t get a grip over herself here.
At last she felt in control enough to return to the card table, and pasted on a bright smile.
They played for another half hour, until she caught Rosa trying to cover a yawn. It was nearly eleven, Lauren realized with some surprise.
“You need to sleep,” she said to the girl. “Come on, let’s get you settled for the night.”
Daniel had picked out a warm, roomy nightgown for her and Lauren showed her the toothpaste, washcloths and towels. Rosa bid her good-night with a smile that was growing more relaxed and comfortable.
When she returned to the other room, she found Daniel shrugging into his heavy coat once more.
She frowned. “I’m quite certain you brought in enough wood earlier to last for at least a week. There is no reason for you to go out into the storm again.”
“I figured I’d shovel your walk before I turn in.”
She was about to argue the sidewalk could wait until morning but some restless light in his eyes tangled the words in her throat. He looked like a man with energy to burn.
She could think of other ways to exhaust that energy, but she wasn’t about to suggest them to him.
“Thank you,” she said instead.
She picked up her pitiful knitting again while he was outside and tried to focus on the news, but it was a losing battle. All she could think about was the man out there braving the elements to shovel her sidewalk.
When he returned twenty minutes later, snowflakes were melting in the silky darkness of his hair and his cheeks were flush with cold, but he seemed far easier in his skin.
“It’s a b-witch out there,” he said, stomping snow off his boots and shaking it from his coat. “That wind chill coming from the north has got to be at least minus ten. I bet we get a foot or more.”
She nodded. “Nights like this make me grateful to be home in front of the fire instead of driving through the snow on my way to an emergency somewhere.”
“Makes me glad for insulated windows,” he said, shrugging out of his coat. “When I was a kid, we used to stick blankets over all the windows in our house. They were all single-paned. I imagine they probably let in more cold than they kept out.”
He laughed suddenly at a memory. “Ren used to put cups of water in front of them so we could measure how long it took for ice to form. He was always doing crazy things like that. First thing I did after I moved back was to replace them all with energy-efficient windows and blow better insulation into the walls. Made a hell of a mess and cost a fortune, but the house stayed about thirty degrees warmer in the winter.”
Lauren couldn’t help thinking of her own home, where her mother insisted on keeping the thermostat at seventy-three degrees and invariably had a fire going as well. R.J. used to complain about the heat bill, but never enough to make her mother turn down the thermostat.
Of course, her mother didn’t know R.J. was heating another house somewhere.
“Would you like something warm?” she asked. “I’ve got several kinds of cocoa.”
His raised eyebrow lifted even higher when she opened a cupboard to show the wide, varied selection inside. Orange chocolate, chocolate raspberry, chocolate mint, chocolate cinnamon, chocolate amaretto and plain old delicious milk chocolate. She had about every flavor of hot chocolate ever invented.
“I’m something of a cocoa junkie in the winter,” she admitted ruefully. “Even in the summer sometimes, if I’ve had a bad day. Nothing comforts quite like it.”
He watched her, a strange, unreadable light in his eyes. She didn’t know what it meant, she only knew it made those blasted stomach flutters start all over again. After a moment, he shook his head. “Maybe tomorrow night I’ll take you up on that.”
She let out a breath. However would she endure so much time trapped here in his compa
ny, especially when she couldn’t stop thinking about that kiss?
“I can help you pull out the couch in the office if you’d like.”
“I was just thinking I would stretch out over there, if that’s okay with you.”
She gazed at the short couch near the fire, then at his long, muscled body. The two things seemed a definite mismatch.
“Are you sure?” she asked. “It’s no problem at all to make the couch into a bed.”
“This is fine. That way I can be close to keep the fire going, just in case the storm knocks out the power in the night.”
“I’ll bring you some blankets and a pillow, then.”
She pulled them out of her small linen closet, certain as she returned to the living room that she shouldn’t find the idea of him watching over her and Rosa such a comfort.
She was a strong, independent woman. She certainly didn’t need a man to take care of her, to bring in her wood and shovel her walks and tend the fire through the night.
She didn’t need it, perhaps. But she couldn’t deny that she found it very appealing to share the everyday burdens of life with someone else once in a while.
When she returned with the linens, she found him sitting on the recliner, gazing into the fire. He looked up at her entrance, and again she was surprised at the odd, glittery expression in his eyes.
“Here you go. Good night, then. If you need anything else in the night, let me know,” she said.
“I’ll do that,” he murmured, and she could feel the heat of his gaze on her all the way through the kitchen and down the hall to her bedroom.
Chapter 9
Something woke him in the early morning hours.
He instantly sat up, alert and on edge. The house was quiet, the only sound the low murmur of the fire flickering low, reduced now to just a log burned almost all the way through and a few red embers glowing in the dark.
His instincts humming, he looked around, trying to figure out what had awakened him.
The house was too dark. Too quiet.
It only took a moment for him to figure out why. As he and Lauren had both feared, the power must have gone out in the storm. The fire provided the only light in the house and the usual subtle sounds of a juiced-up house were nowhere in evidence. No buzz of a refrigerator, no whirr of a furnace kicking on. Nothing.
The only thing he could hear now besides the fire was the wind hurling snow at the windows. He slid off the couch and threw another log from the pile onto the glowing embers. It crackled for a moment, but he had no doubt the coals were hot enough that it would soon catch.
Moving with slow caution, he eased to the window and peered out into the storm. He looked up and down her isolated road, but could see no other lights out there, not even the ambient glow from the concentrated lights of town he might have expected.
Though he knew from experience that any power outage was a major pain in the neck for law enforcement officials, the pitch-black set his mind at ease.
If the whole town had lost power, obviously Lauren’s house hadn’t been targeted specifically by someone cutting her juice for nefarious reasons.
He didn’t know what kind of threat might lurk out there for Rosa, but he wasn’t about to take any chances. Someone wanted her dead because of all that she knew. Melodramatic as it seemed, it wasn’t wholly out of the realm of possibility that someone might cut Lauren’s power to have better access to her house.
They had tried to kill Rosa in her own hospital bed. He had a feeling these bastards would certainly have no qualms about killing anybody else who got in their way.
He hated this whole damn situation. A pretty young girl like Rosa should be dreaming about her quinceañera, should be trying out makeup and giggling with her friends and discovering the vast world of possibilities awaiting her. Instead, she was battered and bruised and five months pregnant from a brutal gang rape, doing her best to stay alive.
And Lauren had put herself right in the middle of Rosa’s troubles by bringing the girl home to recover.
He sighed, his mind on the woman asleep in her room just a few yards away. What a mess this assignment was turning into. In the first eight hours after bringing Rosa here, he had hurt Lauren’s feelings, dredged up memories she didn’t want and kissed her until he managed to forget his own name.
He could only wonder, with a strange mix of dread and anticipation, what the morning would bring.
In the soft glow of the fire, he could read the face on his watch. It was 2:30 a.m., which meant he had probably slept a grand total of maybe an hour and a half all night. And though he had slept, he couldn’t say those had been the most restful ninety minutes he’d ever enjoyed.
He should have expected it. Lauren’s house wasn’t exactly conducive to a good night’s rest. How could it be, with her subtle scent of jasmine and vanilla surrounding him and the knowledge that she was only a few footsteps away burning in his gut?
He couldn’t stop thinking about that kiss, those incredible moments in the kitchen when she had been in his arms, all soft and warm and delicious. After all these years of wondering what it might be like to kiss her, to touch that skin and taste her soft mouth, he had to admit the reality had far surpassed any fantasy.
And reliving the moment over and over again sure as hell wasn’t going to help him get any sleep.
He reached for his cell phone and dialed his dispatcher. Tonight, Jay Welch was on duty and as Daniel greeted him, he pitched his voice low so he didn’t wake up Lauren or Rosa.
“Hey, Sheriff,” Jay said. “I thought you were taking a few nights off, squeezing in a little R and R.”
Rest and recreation. Right. There was absolutely nothing remotely restful about staying in Lauren’s house, having to fight like hell to keep his hands off her.
And the only recreation he could seem to wrap his brain around was exactly the activity he knew he wouldn’t be engaging in anytime soon.
“I’m still around,” he murmured. “Just checking on the situation there with the power out.”
“So far, so good. The backup generator kicked in right away. We’re starting to get a few anxious calls from people wondering what’s going on. The power company says a tree came down north of town and knocked out the power line. They expect to be back in business no later than an hour.”
Without electricity, most furnaces couldn’t turn on, even if they were natural gas-or oil-fueled. A house could get mighty cold during a January blizzard without heat for an hour. He thought of those single-paned windows in his childhood home and couldn’t help a shiver, despite the little fire now burning cheerfully in the grate.
Most people around here had secondary heat sources like fireplaces or wood or pellet stoves, but he didn’t want to take any chances with the health and safety of the people of his town. “I’ll check in with you in an hour for an update. If it’s not back up and running by the time the sun comes up, we’re going to want to start welfare checks on some of the senior citizens who live alone.”
“Okay.”
He hung up and sat on the couch gazing at the dancing flames and wondering what he was supposed to do with all this restlessness burning through him.
Suddenly, he heard a noise somewhere in the house. He reached for his 9mm, thumbed off the safety and rose, alert and ready. An instant later Lauren’s bedroom door opened.
She stood just outside the rim of light from the fireplace, but he didn’t need illumination to know the sound he heard was her.
He slid the safety on and tucked the gun back under his pillow on the couch. “I hope I didn’t wake you while I was on the phone,” he said.
“You didn’t. I think I woke when the power went out. That sounds silly, doesn’t it?”
“Not that silly. I did the same thing.”
They lapsed into silence and he wondered why she was out here instead of tucked into her warm bed.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
She stepped farther into the fire’s glow an
d he could see the rueful expression on her face. “I just realized that even after I went to all that trouble to round up secondary light sources for a possible outage, I forgot to take a flashlight into my room when I went to bed. I was lying in bed wondering how I could sneak out here in the dark and grab one without waking you, then I heard you on the phone.”
“I was just checking in with dispatch,” he said. “Jay Welch has already talked to the power company and we’re looking at about an hour before it’s back online.”
“It’s good you had the foresight to keep the fire going,” she said, grabbing a flashlight from the table where she had assembled them earlier in the night. “What about Rosa? I wondered if I should let her sleep or wake her to let her know the power is out. I wouldn’t want her to wake up in the middle of the night in the pitch-dark and be frightened.”
“I can listen for her. If I hear sounds of stirring, I’ll explain to her what’s going on. Those bedrooms are going to get mighty cold without the furnace if the power company’s estimate is wrong and it takes them longer than they figure to fix the problem. I’ll have to wake you both up so you can come out here and bunk by the fire where it’s warm.”
“You don’t have to stay up all night to watch over us, Daniel.”
“I don’t mind.”
She tilted her head and studied him and he wondered again what she saw when she looked at him. “I know you don’t. You watch over everyone, don’t you?”
Is that how she saw him? He shrugged, uncomfortable. “It’s my job to keep the people of Moose Springs safe. Go back to bed, try to get some sleep. I’ll wake you if the power doesn’t come back up in an hour or so.”
“I couldn’t sleep now anyway.”
He should keep his distance from her. One of them should have a little good sense here. If he were smart, he would insist that she march right back into her bedroom and stay away from him.
Too bad he didn’t feel very smart around the delectable Dr. Maxwell.
Shelter from the Storm Page 10