Second Chance Christmas (The Colorado Cades)

by Michaels, Tanya

  “Is Kaylee still getting her nails done?” Elisabeth asked.

  Her sister frowned. “No. I haven’t seen her since lunch.”

  “What? I dialed your extension for her earlier, right before I had to deal with an accusation against housekeeping.” A man had said his was wallet was stolen, but it turned out that his wife had simply moved it. “I told Kaylee she could ask if you were ready for her and if not, she could keep coloring. When I got back to the office, she wasn’t there, so I assumed...”

  No one could enter the office without going behind the enclosed reception counter and the lodge was full of Kaylee’s extended and honorary family, so Elisabeth had felt safe leaving the little girl alone for a minute. Now she battled gruesome images of worst-case situations.

  “Breathe,” Justin reminded her softly as if he felt her rising panic. “We’ll find her.”

  Elisabeth wanted to believe him, but knew she wouldn’t feel calm again until she could see Kaylee with her own two eyes. “She didn’t talk to you?” she asked Lina.

  “We talked. She asked me about coming up like you instructed, but since no one can ski right now, our appointment book filled right up. I couldn’t squeeze her in yet.”

  So first Elisabeth had disappointed her by telling her she couldn’t see Justin, then Lina had reneged on the mani-pedi offer? Elisabeth tried to put herself in Kaylee’s shoes, thinking like a miffed kindergartener. “Maybe she slipped into the kitchen to visit Chef Bates.” The little girl would’ve wanted a sympathetic ear and some comfort food.

  Lina nodded. “She worships him.”

  Elisabeth lifted the receiver from the phone on her dad’s desk and punched the button for the restaurant. “Javier, have you seen Kaylee over there? Would you mind checking with the chef?” He put her on hold and as she waited, her palms grew clammy.

  She was probably overreacting because of the day’s earlier events—too much leftover adrenaline in her system looking for an outlet. Just because there was some superstitious saying about bad things happening in threes didn’t mean there was any truth to it.

  Breaking up with Steven, those kids on the closed trail, Kaylee...

  “Ella no está aquí.” Javier’s accent was thick with apprehension. “I am sorry, Senorita. The chef, he has not seen her since lunchtime.”

  Her fingers shook. “Thanks, Javier. I’m going to look around the first floor. If you see her, buzz my cell phone?” The back of her throat burned. So did her eyes. She raced toward the doorway. “Kaylee? Kaylee!”

  A few guests stopped what they were doing and glanced in her direction, but no Kaylee emerged from the game room or sat up from one of the comfy sofas in the lobby. Meanwhile, Lina rang the salon upstairs to see if Kaylee had decided to plead her case in person. “Maybe she was on the elevator going up at the same time I was taking the stairs down. For that matter, have we checked the elevators? You know she loves punching the buttons.”

  But no one had seen her on the third floor. Lina checked in the women’s restroom, and Justin talked to some guests exiting the elevator banks.

  Lina’s voice was beginning to quiver. “Should we check with Javier again?”

  “He knows to call me the second he sees her,” Elisabeth pointed out.

  “Right.” Lina nodded, her eyes unfocused. “I just really expected that she’d be with Chef. He’s her favorite person on the planet next to you.”

  Oh, God. “No. No, he isn’t—at least not for the past few days,” Elisabeth said, hoping against hope that she was wrong. She recalled Kaylee’s tearful declaration that she wanted to go live with Justin and the girl’s excitement when she’d thought he was here earlier.

  Justin flinched, his eyes darkening with realization. “It’s me, isn’t it? I’m the person you think she went to see.”

  “She was asking for you.” Elisabeth stared in horror out the window, where wind was whipping the snow against the glass. “And I told her you were out there.”

  * * *

  “YOU SHOULDN’T BE HERE.” Justin didn’t know why he wasted his breath on the words. They were nothing he hadn’t already said a dozen times. When he’d tried to warn Elisabeth about the biting winds and rapidly diminishing visibility, it had only redoubled her determination.

  “That is my daughter out there,” she’d told him. “You can go without me, but you can’t stop me from looking for her on my own, so what’s it gonna be?”

  As Justin and Elisabeth set out, he’d radioed Trey Grainger to see if he could bring a couple of more guys to help sweep the area surrounding the lodge. Back at the lodge, Lina and Patti were turning the place inside out in case Kaylee was holed up in some corner playing cards with one of the guests’ kids. Justin prayed she was. Part of the area surrounding the lodge was road, and visibility was already lethally low. The odds of a driver seeing a small child and being able to stop quickly in icy conditions—

  He flashed back to the day he’d learned his sister-in-law and young nephew had been killed. Justin was trained for rescue. He should be cool and detached out here, his actions dictated by hours of training and experience. Instead, he felt almost paralyzed with fear.

  Stop thinking about the car accident. Don’t think about the roads. On the positive side, not many people would brave driving in these conditions. On the negative? It was getting dark. His gut clenched as he imagine a six-year-old runaway with no gloves or flashlight out in this blizzard. Even he felt frozen through, and this was the office where he reported for work every day.

  He squinted through the fading light, studying a distant structure. “Remind me—what’s that cabin? Would it be unlocked?” If he were a scared kid out in the freezing cold, possibly too turned around to retrace the path to the lodge, wouldn’t the logical course of action be seeking any convenient shelter?

  “When my grandparents first opened the lodge, that was where they lived.” Elisabeth led the way. “We rent it out to families who are willing to pay extra for separate bedrooms and their own kitchen facilities, sometimes we use it for special events, but it’s empty right now. It should be locked, though. I have a key, but Kaylee wouldn’t be—” She sucked in her voice, then swore with feeling. “Damn it. Justin? I dropped the key ring.”

  He knelt beside her, both of them digging with their gloved hands. At first, they were too intent on their task to hear the muffled sound of the cell phone ringing inside her jacket.

  Elisabeth yanked off one of her gloves, letting it fall heedlessly into the snow while she put Lina on speaker phone. “What is it? Did you find her? Is she okay?”

  Justin’s heart stopped. If anything had happened to Kaylee, happened to her because of him—

  “You’re not going to believe this.” Lina’s voice was a strangled combination of laughter and tears. “She was asleep the whole time. In the Cupboard of Doom.”

  Cupboard of what?

  Elisabeth rocked back on her heels, looking dazed, as if she couldn’t process the good news. “That can’t be right. Small as she is, she still wouldn’t fit. And we would’ve noticed immediately if she’d opened that door. A landslide of stuff would’ve cascaded out.”

  “I was as surprised as you. Dad called to say he’s at the diner in town, waiting for the worst of the weather to pass. I told him about Kaylee disappearing from the office, and he suggested I check the cupboard. Turns out, he’s been coming in late at night and slowly clearing it out. Getting it organized after all these years was going to be his Christmas present to you. She’s fine. Want to talk to her?”

  It had obviously been a rhetorical question since Lina wasted no time handing over the phone. Then they both heard Kaylee’s small voice. “Elisabeth? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hide and scare you and make you leave.”

  Thank God. Justin didn’t think he’d truly accepted that the girl was okay until they heard her
. When they’d left the lodge, he’d been so afraid that he’d caused this. He’d been choking on the irony—that a kid with a chance at a stable home with two parents might risk her own safety over a loser like him. Listening with half an ear to Elisabeth and Kaylee, he continued pawing through the snow until he came up with the keychain.

  Holding it up for her to see, he cocked his head toward the cabin door. “How about we finish this conversation inside where it’s warm?”

  * * *

  ELISABETH STOOD BENEATH the steamy spray of water and evaluated the situation. She was snowbound for the night in a quaint cabin with the only man who’d ever broken her heart. It had been a very unsettling day. No, it had been a horrible day, the worst in memory since Kaylee had come to live with her.

  When she and Justin had stepped inside the cabin, he’d suggested they wait out the blizzard here instead of trying to track back to the lodge in the dark. Now that they knew Kaylee was safe, it seemed unnecessarily reckless to court pneumonia or frostbite. Here, they had electricity, food, plumbing and two beds. And luxurious hooded bathrobes with a velour finish and the lodge’s logo on the pocket.

  Her pulse had stuttered when Justin had assessed her from head to toe and declared, “We should get out of these clothes.”

  For safety reasons, she’d repeated to herself over and over. Not sexual ones. They’d both been wearing quality protective gear, of course, but the kind of wet, bitter cold they’d slogged through was pervasive. Besides, she couldn’t help feeling as though the clothes she’d worn all day were contaminated with fear and anguish and guilt over not paying better attention to Kaylee, or speaking to her too sharply.

  Luckily, there was a laundry room here. By the time Justin and Elisabeth set out tomorrow morning, their garments would be freshly cleaned and dried.

  Aware that Justin also deserved a hot shower, she turned off the water and quickly toweled off. The robe was thick and generous, completely covering her from her chin to her toes. Despite being swathed in soft fabric, being naked beneath it made her feel scandalously exposed. She ignored the irrational sensation and stepped out of the bathroom, the hem of her robe trailing on the hardwood floor.

  In the main room of the cabin, cedar-scented flames now crackled in the fireplace. “I see you’ve made yourself useful,” she said approvingly. “Shower’s all yours. While you’re in there, I’ll scavenge for dinner supplies.”

  “Sounds good. Back in a sec,” he told her.

  There weren’t any perishables in the kitchen, but there were a number of soups available. She pulled out a selection of them and lined up some options next to the electric can opener. When she reached into a cabinet of pots and pans, the excessive metallic clanking made her realize how badly her hands were shaking. The shower had helped bring her stress level down from stratospheric heights, but there was more progress to be made.

  She plugged in the portable CD player on the counter and dug through the rack next to it until she found some soothing instrumental music. Then she went to the back of the walk-in pantry, looking for the slim wine rack that hung on the wall. There weren’t many bottles, but one was a start.

  With a glass of cabernet in her hand and a jazzy piano solo filling the room, she started to feel a little lighter. When she hadn’t known where Kaylee was, she’d felt as if she were suffocating on her own fear, unable to breathe in oxygen past the dread. What would she have done if Lina’s call had been different? If Kaylee hadn’t been unharmed when she was found? Tears pricked the corners of her eyes. What if... Horrible possibilities played out in her mind, each worse than the last.

  “Hey! Hey, you okay?”

  Elisabeth jerked her head up, wondering how long Justin had been standing there in front of her, his rugged features pinched with concern. He was a welcome focal point, a distraction from her awful thoughts. Because of his height, the matching robe he wore didn’t cover quite as much of him as it did her. The material stopped around his knees, revealing his well-muscled calves and bare feet.

  “This is stupid, isn’t it?” She wiped furiously at her eyes, embarrassed to be caught in the middle of her meltdown. “I didn’t cry when we were looking for her, so what the hell is the point in crying now?”

  “Totally normal. I see it post-rescue all the time.” Taking her hand, he drew her toward the couch. “You were being brave earlier, holding it together, following my instructions. But now comes the aftershocks. The release of all that pent up emotion. The relief that’s too strong to contain.”

  They sat down, and he put his arm around her, pulling her close and letting her cry on his shoulder. He seemed big and safe and larger than life.

  Slowly, the tears ebbed and details began to penetrate her senses. The fire was heating the room nicely. Balmy lassitude seeped through her bones, driving out the last of the cold, and her muscles were relaxing under Justin’s touch. He’d started by patting her back in a steady, impersonal manner. It wasn’t much different than how she comforted Kaylee after some of her bad dreams. But at some point the patting had turned to something gentler, more intimate. He was rubbing slow circles that traversed from the small of her back all the way up to the bare skin of her neck.

  Meanwhile, the instrumental CD had progressed from meditative pieces to earthier music. Whatever song was playing now bore no resemblance to the previous innocuous track. This piece had started with a piano and violin, two solos that fused into a single haunting melody as the rhythm escalated in a beautifully relentless beat. She took a deep breath, hoping to clear her head, but the scent of Justin’s skin made her dizzy.

  “You smell good,” she murmured.

  Angling his head away slightly, he peered down at her. “Can’t take credit for that.” He grinned. “It’s from the quality bath products your family keeps stocked here.”

  “No. I wasn’t talking about the soap. Underneath it, you smell like...you.” Warm, familiar, alluring. She wanted to nuzzle his skin. That thought caused her to sit bolt upright. What was she doing?

  He raised his eyebrows at her abrupt departure. “Everything all right?”

  “F-fine.” Except that every cell in her body seemed to have just realized it had been over five months since she’d had sex and felt that was too long. She had no business snuggling up to her ex and commenting on how good he smelled. Although...if she was babbling compliments, at least she’d stopped shy of telling him he had magic hands. “I left my wineglass in the kitchen. I—”

  “On it,” he volunteered. He stood, pivoting his body toward the kitchen. Unfortunately, he hip-checked the lamp on the end table. The light fixture crashed to the ground. “Hell. Sorry about that. I’m not usually clumsy.”

  “I know.”

  Usually, he moved with mesmerizing, fluid grace. On the slopes, on the dance floor and in the bedroom. Not that Justin necessarily needed the convention of a bed.

  He bent down to pick up pieces of the lamp, but stopped, staring blankly at the floor. His voice had a raw, hollow quality to it. “You’re not the only one shaky after what happened.”

  That confession sliced through all her defenses. He’d been as scared as she had been. And she imagined that admitting it wasn’t easy on his male pride. She scooted to the end of the couch and wrapped her arms around his shoulders in a hug. It was her turn to comfort him.

  “She’s okay,” Elisabeth whispered, her words for both of them.

  “Yeah.” He touched her forehead to his, his relief palpable. “She’s okay.”

  They stayed like that, her leaning over the arm of the couch and him kneeling in the floor, and even though Elisabeth registered on an intellectual level that this proximity was too close to be wise, she couldn’t force herself to move. The CD must have reached its end, because the music had stopped. The only sounds were the snap and sizzle of wood in the fire and their breathing. Breathing that grew faster
and more ragged the longer they remained in place.

  If someone had asked Elisabeth later, she honestly couldn’t have said which one of them leaned in for the kiss, which one moved that final inch that separated them. All she knew was that Justin’s mouth was on hers, where it belonged. Need surged through her, shivering along her nerve endings and making her tremble. He rose slowly, until he was in place to gently tip her back on the couch.

  Once she was stretched across the sofa cushions, he joined her, his weight on top of her such a perfect fit that she almost whimpered at how good it felt. Earlier, when they’d been out in the blizzard, she’d felt as though she might never be warm again, but now heat pulsed in her veins. Hot, achy desire. The snow and fear were from a fading nightmare; only this was real. Only Justin.

  She kissed him deeply, threading her fingers through his hair and holding him close. Meanwhile, his fingers were busy with the sash on her robe. She hadn’t managed to untie his yet, but she’d pushed the fabric apart to give her better access to that chiseled chest.

  “You and knotted belts,” he whispered against the curve of her throat. “How do you make them so freaking sexy?”

  “I do?”

  “You have this trench coat dress...” With a soft growl, he nipped at her skin. Then he lifted his weight just enough that the material of her robe slipped away from her body, leaving her exposed to his hungry gaze. His expression was so intense it almost made her self-conscious, but before insecurity could take root, he lowered his head and captured the tip of her breast in his mouth. Any fleeting shyness she’d experienced was annihilated by the sharp pleasure that blasted through her.

  By the time he replaced his lips with his fingers, plucking at her pebbled nipple as he kissed his way down her body, she was nearly frantic. Her body clenched with need, her thighs had fallen open in wanton invitation. She needed him inside her.

  But he had other ideas. At the first brush of his tongue over her, she cried out his name. He wrung shouts and pleas from her as she writhed beneath his mouth. Thank God they were in an isolated cabin, their carnal activities drowned out by the howling wind.