Baby It's Cold Outside

by Heidi Rice

  Copyright © 2012 by Amy Andrews. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

  Entangled Publishing, LLC

  2614 South Timberline Road

  Suite 109

  Fort Collins, CO 80525

  Visit our website at www.entangledpublishing.com.

  Edited by Heather Howland and Tahra Seplowin

  Cover design by

  ISBN

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition November 2012

  The author acknowledges the copyrighted or trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction: South Park; Popsicle; Cheetos; Tylenol; Greyhound; Jersey Shore; Pop-Tarts; Twinkies; Blue Hawaii; Pop Rocks; Calvin Klein; Scrabble; Technicolor.

  To Heidi, Kate, and Aimee. Thanks so much for the fun times while we worked on this anthology. I am so proud and lucky to be part of this project with such incredibly talented and incredibly generous women.

  Chapter One

  Fifteen hours ’til midnight

  Tamara was already three-quarters of the way through the pitcher of eggnog before she realized she was a little on the tipsy side.

  At nine o’clock in the morning.

  She sighed. She’d never been very good at holding her liquor. But at least the delicious, nutmeggy rum had managed to do what every piece of clothing she’d packed—plus the patchwork quilt off the bed—hadn’t. She was warm right down to her bones. Even if she did look like Kenny from South Park with the faux-fur lined hood of her parka pulled tight around her face.

  Her head flopped over the arm of the couch as the alcohol buzz bathed her in its glow, a stark contrast to the winter wonderland outside. So what if she was drunk at breakfast? There was no one here to judge her and, besides, it must be five o’clock somewhere in the world.

  Australia? It had to be well past five in Sydney. In fact, they’d probably already rung in the New Year by now. Did they have a ball that dropped somewhere? she wondered, and then smiled and shut her eyes as the room rocked from side to side.

  Gradually Tamara became aware of scraping and then thudding at the door, like something—or someone—very big was stamping its boots. Her head snapped up, and her pulse took off at a gallop. Unfortunately, the room took a few seconds to catch up.

  Who the hell could that be?

  Georgia had told her the place was hers. It was written on the note. The one she’d attached to the pitcher of New Year’s eggnog she’d so thoughtfully whipped up before making the long drive to New York City early this morning during a break in the awful weather.

  Something thumped against the door. Tamara leaped from the couch, quilt dropping to the floor. There’d been reports of looters around with all the unprecedented wild weather they’d been having along the Eastern Seaboard. Not in the deepest darkest corner of Vermont, sure, but maybe this looter had champagne tastes?

  The door handle rattled. Her pulse spiked as she wildly scanned the room for some kind of weapon with vision that seemed to turn everything double. She spotted a bag of golf clubs by the door and scrambled over to them.

  Something metallic scraped at the lock.

  She froze. Was he picking it?

  Didn’t they usually just throw something heavy through the window?

  She whipped out the closest golf club, her breath loud in her ears as she stood behind the door and watched it slowly open. A blast of cold wind and a flurry of snow preceded the tall, hooded intruder. A surge of adrenaline shot into her system, mixing with the rum. The door slammed shut and she brought the putter down in the direction of the intruder’s head, yelling, “Yaaaaaaa!”

  She wasn’t quite sure what happened next but there was a deep muffled curse, then somehow she was flat on her back, pinned to the floor by a hulking weight. Thankfully her parka and multiple layers of clothing cushioned the fall.

  For a moment, neither of them moved or spoke and she noticed two things at once. This man—she had no doubt he was male—didn’t feel like some skinny, looting teenager. And he smelled like soap, pine needles, and the wild blue yonder. Looters didn’t smell like that, did they?

  An errant part of her, possibly the part that hadn’t had a man on top of her for a very long time, or the part of her that was really feeling the effects of the rum, wanted to stay right where she was and just sniff him. Damn, she’d missed the way men smelled.

  But then he shifted and sense returned to her sluggish brain. “Get off me!” she demanded and began to struggle.

  Sergeant Luke Jackson had gone straight into combat mode at the sound of the blood-curdling banshee yell, and it took several seconds for the adrenaline spike to release him from its grip long enough to compute the fact that there was no danger. He had no idea who was beneath him, but the landing had been too soft to register it as a threat.

  Still holding firm to the attacker’s splayed wrists, his father’s old putter discarded and well out of reach, he looked down into stormy gray eyes. He may only have been able to see an oval cut-out of her face from the confines of the hood she had pulled tight around her head, but it was definitely a woman. No man owned such delicate bone structure and had a nose as cute as that.

  “What the hell?” he demanded back at the woman moving ineffectually underneath him. He’d just trudged two miles through a freaking blizzard from the bus depot to be greeted like this?

  “Get off me right now you...giant...ass!”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  The woman stopped struggling and glared at him. “Hey buddy, this is my house. I get to ask the questions and you”—she struggled some more—“are”—more interesting squirming, shoving, and pushing—“squashing me!”

  Luke pushed away immediately and stood towering over her. She looked like a felled Eskimo in full winter regalia. “Ma’am, I don’t know who you are, but I think you’ll find that this is my house.”

  She gave him an indignant look as she lay there waving her arms and legs like a stranded beetle. “While I appreciate your manners,” the beetle with the elfin nose and pixie cheekbones said, “I’ll have you know that this cabin belongs to the Jackson family.”

  Luke nodded. “Yes. Edward and Sophie. My parents. I’m Luke. Luke Jackson.”

  He offered her his hand to help her up, fearing that with all those clothes thwarting her attempts she would never make it unaided.

  The angry pixie’s eyebrows knitted together as she glared up at him, but reached her mittened hand for his anyway. “Nice try. Luke Jackson is in Afghanistan and I think impersonating a US soldier on active duty is”—she paused as Luke pulled her to her feet—“beneath contempt.”

  Luke didn’t bother to look at the portrait of him and Georgia that he knew hung on the wall to his right. He just jerked his thumb toward it and waited patiently for the penny to drop. The woman blinked at the picture as if she was having trouble seeing it. She peered at him, then back at the wall, then back at him, squinting and scrutinizing it carefully, as if she’d been asked to pick him out of a lineup.

  The picture had been taken a few years back on his return from his first tour to Afghanistan, but he hadn’t changed that much.

  Not anywhere that was visible, anyway.

  And then he heard her gasp and watched as her face fell. Yep. Now she was with the program.

  “Oh God,” she groaned as she lurched away, heading for the low table next to the couch, picking up a glass, and taking a hefty swig before facing him again. “I’m so, so sorry. I thought you were a looter...or a burglar...or at the very least up to no good. I didn’t know you were home. Georgia was so disappointed you were going to miss her thirtieth birthday party and if I had known, I would never have yelled and attacked you with a golf club. I teach kindergarten...we use our inside voices, we keep our hands to ourselves...”

  Luke folded his arms ac
ross his chest, amused at the horror on her face. She obviously wasn’t a violent person. Which only made her actions at defending his family cabin that much more endearing. “You’re Tamara, aren’t you?”

  The pixie raised her glass in salute. “That would be me.”

  “Pleased to meet, you ma’am,” he said.

  She nodded then stopped abruptly. “Wait.” She frowned. “How do you know about me? Georgia and I haven’t known each other that long.”

  He shrugged, noting the way her gaze traveled over the contours of his shoulders. Interesting. “Georgia writes a lot of newsy e-mails.”

  “Ah,” she said and swayed a little.

  Luke reached out a hand. “Ma’am?” he asked, looking at her a little closer. Pink cheeks. Red nose. Unsteady on her feet. A waft of …eggnog? “Are you...drunk?”

  She held up her index finger and thumb and tried to narrow the distance between them to indicate just a smidgeon. But, with those eggnog goggles firmly in place, she didn’t seem to have the ability to get them close enough without meeting. “Maybe just a little,” she eventually said, giving up her attempts at demonstration.

  He quirked an eyebrow. “Starting early?”

  She shook her head. “It’s the middle of the night in Australia.”

  “I suppose it is.” Luke rubbed at his jaw. He needed a shave. And a shower. He needed to sleep for a week. But suddenly he didn’t feel so tired. With the adrenaline now settled, something else permeated. He looked around and rubbed his hands. “It’s freezing in here!” He looked at the logs stacked up around the fireplace—there was enough wood for a week. “Why haven’t you started a fire?”

  “Can’t find the matches,” she said miserably. “I’ve looked everywhere.”

  He laughed. “So you were just going to sit here and freeze?”

  “No. Why else would I be dressed in every piece of clothing in my suitcase and be drinking eggnog for breakfast?”

  She looked indignant and cranky again. “So...bundling up and drinking was your plan?”

  “It was a temporary plan. Just until I thought of something better.”

  It was just as well he’d arrived when he did. In a few hours, she’d either be a Popsicle or have drunk every bottle of booze in the cabin. “Alrighty then. Step aside, ma’am, and I’ll get this sucker fired up.”

  Luke was conscious of Tamara curled up on the couch behind him, watching as he gathered wood and retrieved the matches from a small, carved wooden box that sat on the mantel. He had no idea what she looked like beneath all those layers, but she’d made him laugh and there’d been precious little of that these last few months. He’d planned on being alone but maybe some company wouldn’t be so bad.

  In no time he was crouching beside a roaring fire, its heat warming his cold face. He sensed rather than felt her being drawn to his side like some pixie Eskimo.

  “Ah,” she murmured, crouching beside him, her hands extended toward the flames. She smelled like nutmeg and Jamaican rum, reminding him of home and Christmas. It had been a long while since he’d smelled anything quite as sweet. “You have the gift of fire, oh wizard.”

  He laughed at her reverence. Fake and drunken as it was. “Yes, ma’am. Although I think my mother would put it down to borderline pyromania.”

  “Luke, do you think you could do me a favor?” she asked. He turned his head just in time to watch her fall back inelegantly on her ass.

  “Easy, ma’am.” He reached out his hand to steady her but she waved him away, drawing her knees up until she was sitting cross-legged, eyes shut, a little sigh of pleasure escaping her slightly parted mouth as the fire glowed warm and yellow across her delicate features.

  “A favor, ma’am?” he prompted with a smile when it looked like she may just have fallen asleep in her fire-worshipping position.

  She opened drowsy eyes and his breath hitched as two luminous gray pools sucked him into their sexy shimmer. He had a sudden urge to peel her hood back so he could see the rest of her face.

  “Do you think you could not call me ma’am? I know that thirty must seem ancient to someone like you, but I’m spending New Year’s Eve alone and thinking it’s perfectly okay to drink eggnog for breakfast for a reason, you know? Please don’t make me feel any older than I do.”

  Luke held her gaze. “I don’t think thirty is ancient.”

  She sighed again as she looked back at the fire. “Wait ’til you get here.”

  Chapter Two

  Fourteen hours, thirty minutes ’til midnight

  Ten minutes later the cabin was toasty warm. Not surprising, given it was the tiniest cabin Tamara had ever seen. There was a small living area with a compact kitchen attached, an elegant arched entrance to an alcove dominated by a massive feather bed, and a bathroom made for hobbits. It wasn’t exactly the family-sized cabin she’d been expecting. More honeymoon retreat or lover’s hideaway. But she was grateful to Georgia anyway for offering it as a place to hide from the frivolity and temptation of New Year’s Eve.

  “So what’s the reason?”

  Tamara opened her eyes when he nudged her shoulder. She looked up—all the way up—at temptation personified. No. She couldn’t think like that. She’d only known Georgia for six months, but they’d become quite close, which made Luke—her friend’s little brother—a no-go zone. Not that she would call the hot man standing in front of her little. But, the point was, he was off-limits.

  So what if he’d shed his hoodie to reveal a white T-shirt that clung to flat abs and nice pecs? So what if he had the most fascinating number one buzz cut in all of existence and a face that belonged on a Calvin Klein billboard? So what if his faded jeans clung to legs that could tempt a perfectly good girl to turn bad? So what if she was so horny every cell in her body was drowning in lust? It wasn’t terminal.

  The fire’s glow danced across his tanned biceps as he handed her another glass of eggnog. He smiled, displaying a very sexy cleft in his chin that made Tamara’s nipples scrunch into tight little balls. Luckily they’d been rendered almost extinct from the layers pressing down upon them.

  “What’s what reason?” she asked as she took the drink. She should probably refuse—she’d already had way too much and God knew her inhibitions had fled at the sight of all those muscles.

  He sat beside her again, their knees almost touching. She noticed he had a beer so she didn’t feel like she was one step away from a park bench so much. “Why aren’t you in Times Square watching the ball drop with Georgia?”

  Tamara stared at the nutmeg floating on top of her drink. She could have told him it was the weather. The roads were treacherous—she’d barely made it to the cabin this morning before the blizzard had landed. But it wasn’t the truth.

  She pressed the chilled glass to her flushed cheek. “There’ll be kissing,” she said.

  Luke laughed. “That’s bad?”

  Had there been one infinitesimal part of her where the heat from the fire and the burn from the rum had not reached, his laughter took care of it, licking warmth into every last cell. She set the glass down so she could strip off her gloves and push the hoodie and knit cap off her head. “It’s been so long, I may just get arrested for public indecency.”

  It wasn’t the real reason, although it had been a while, but she doubted a fine piece of man-flesh like Luke would understand how depressing New Year’s Eve could be with no one special to kiss.

  He laughed again and took a sip of his beer. Tamara was aware of the long tanned ridge of his throat and the press of his pulse as his head tipped back. He swallowed and his eyes twinkled—yes, twinkled!—at her. “I’ve got nine months, the length of my deployment. How long you got?”

  Tamara snorted. “Piece of cake, soldier boy. Try twelve.”

  He whistled. “Okay,” he conceded. “You win.”

  “Great,” she huffed into her drink, then took a sip. “I excel at abstinence. The nuns at my all-girls’ school would be so proud.”

  He frowned. “If
it’s been so long, wouldn’t New Year’s Eve in New York City be the perfect place to be?”

  Tamara knew twenty-something men did not understand the powerful dictates of biology. That traipsing from one relationship to another got very old very quickly and that at some stage, commitment stopped being a dirty word. That being with one person was more exciting than playing the field. That the yearning for a home and a family could hit you out of the blue.

  Twenty-something men had it easy.

  And with him looking at her like that, with a puzzled look and the confidence of a male in his prime, her temperature soared from hot to smoking and her hormones whispered him.

  So she stood to deliver herself from temptation. Another win for the nuns.

  The room spun a little as heat, alcohol, and sexual deprivation played havoc with her equilibrium.

  When it righted itself he was looking at her expectantly with that blue, blue gaze, looking fit and vital and so damn muscle-y and male she wanted to gnaw on his perfectly delineated, denim-clad quad. More heat flowed through her at the thought and she tried to remember what they’d been talking about but God, she was so freaking hot now she felt like her brain was boiling.

  She unzipped her parka. Where were they? Oh yes...

  “I made a resolution last New Year’s Eve”—she shrugged out of her puffy coat and slung it on the lounge—“after waking up with some guy who seemed so with it and together the night before...”

  His gaze dropped to her body and roved around for a bit and the heat inside her turned to flame, her clothes seemingly catching on fire. She started to pace as she pulled at the layers, trying to get them off.

  Luke couldn’t believe his eyes as the heavy woolen sweater hit the couch, revealing another sweater of a finer knit and weave.

  “...And this guy ran like there’d been some zombie apocalypse overnight and I’d been infected...”

  The next sweater also hit the couch as she paced back and forth. Luke’s mouth went dry and he took a quick swig of the beer. The peeling away of her layers down to some kind of dark gray turtleneck was slowly revealing the petite body that went with her cute pixie nose and her funky blond hairstyle. Granted, she was suffering badly from hat hair but somehow that just made her even more appealing.