by Dani Collins
He paused and sent her a wicked grin in the mirror. “Too late. Best kind.”
Oh, she was enjoying this man. Along with possessing incredible stamina and attention to detail, he was funny. Sexy and strong and charmingly considerate when it came to the little things. He rinsed the sink after he rinsed his face and razor, for instance, delivering two-for-one value.
Every. Single. Time.
He dropped his towel with casual confidence and leaned over her, hands on either side of the tub.
Holding his intense, espresso-dark gaze, she reached for the fiercely hard—
*
Her father’s voice in the hall pulled Glory back to her surroundings like a smack upside the head.
She returned to the main room, trying to get her bearings while looking for a place to set her laptop, longing to write the love scene that had begun scripting itself in her head. Her drought with sex wasn’t just physical. She hadn’t conjured so much as a hint of intimacy between characters in ages.
She couldn’t risk someone walking in to read it, of course, but glanced with yearning at the battered desk beneath the two windows that formed the corner. Her angled computer desk back home would fit perfectly there. Almost as if it were made for the space.
Digging a serviette from her bag, she breathed heavily on the window, then gave it a vigorous scrub until she could peer through the hazy coating to the crystal clarity of the view. It was incredible, with the peaks bright and sharp over the skirts of trees draping into the valleys down to the pond. Majestic.
She was tempted to take a photo, so she would remember how idyllic this was, and be able to describe it as perfectly as she wanted to. Maybe it was the view from over Pandora’s kitchen sink.
As the voices in the hall came closer, she was reminded that this could be the view she looked at every time she lifted her gaze from her screen. Back in Seattle, she looked at a beige wall. She’d been doing a lot of that there—staring at the wall.
If her father moved here, what would she have in that city? Who would she see? No one. She would become even more of a shut-in than she already was. At least living with her father, she had human contact. She left the house to buy groceries, made him dinner, and helped with the yard work.
He was right that she wasn’t living her own life. There were reasons, some she hadn’t bothered fully explaining to him because it was a gray area that had been between her and her mother. She had a lot of decisions to make about that, though. She would continue to manage her mother’s backlist, setting up promotions and keeping the income as steady as she could, but without a new release in a year, the royalties had already plateaued.
She bit her thumbnail.
Being responsible for her father’s livelihood was stressful. She wished she could trust him to look after his own interests, but look what he’d come up with the minute her mother wasn’t here to yank him back from financial suicide.
Could he make a go of this place if she helped him put all the pieces into place? Surely in a few months, maybe a year, she could have a proper manager hired to keep him afloat? As long as the doors were open and the place was running, he would have a place to live and somewhere to eat. Right?
Was this how Pandora would feel, trying to make decisions for her unborn baby?
It wasn’t the same, obviously, but the weight of responsibility tugging against the longing for family ties were similar. There was a lot to explore there. Surely Pandora would have the same desire to do what was right and want to live up to her own expectations of herself?
Yet she was tempted by this man who had shooshed into her life at exactly the wrong time.
Glory could see Brock cutting a snaking path down the track that led to the far side of the pond and into the back parking lot of this lodge, the noise of his skis scraping the snow. He was a big guy with a simple black knit cap and cheekbones carved from marble, intent as he engraved his path into her heart.
Did he even want kids? Why or why not?
Pandora was trying to make up her mind about him, pinned between obligation to do what was right for her two-person family and longing for this man who was all wrong for her. The conflict wrung out her heart.
Would she meet his family? When would the baby come? At Christmas, obviously. Would Brock deliver the baby?
Glory’s heart pounded with excitement as the plot points began to unfold in her mind. The story wanted to be worked out in detail. Told.
By her.
As the fire of inspiration sputtered back to life within her, she barely dared blink. She fought against closing her eyes for even a second, fearing the porthole she had scraped into the encrusted window would close and she would lose sight of a story that was, for once, entirely hers.
She held her breath, vision losing focus as her mind turned inward, quieting and opening like a curtain going up on an empty stage, providing space for Brock and Pandora to appear and keep talking. They liked it here.
This was the writerly dream, she thought distantly. A remote location in beautiful surroundings where no one interrupted her stream of thought—
The door behind her opened.
She heard Stanley droning on in the hall about building permits, but she didn’t turn. She clenched her eyes tight, rehydrating them while she mentally jumped off the ledge into the deep end.
“If I can have this room, I’ll do it,” she told her father, tendrils of thought still clinging to Brock and Pandora.
Silence.
Her shoulders tingled and she knew. Oh shit.
Shoulders falling, she opened her eyes and turned, dreading what she knew she would see. Brock—double-shit. Rolf.
A fresh kick of energy shot through her, strong enough to burn her cheeks. It was surprise, she told herself. Confrontation, maybe, since it was so uncomfortable to meet his gaze.
But no. It was a guilty conscience. She had pictured him naked and the vision was still there. Him turning from the mirror and dropping his towel, cock hard as he climbed into the tub—
Stop.
She tried to look away and couldn’t. She stood there and burned under his half-lidded stare, reminding herself there was no way he could know what filthy pictures she painted in her head, but somehow, she feared he did.
Not that he betrayed any reaction. No, he was rugged and remote as those mountains out there and about as forgiving.
His gaze flickered away to take a quick inventory of the room, then came back to her. His lip curled. “Great.”
Chapter Four
Glory insisted on a cooling-off period, not that her father heeded her. A week after they’d returned to Seattle, he had listed the house and was showing her bids from architecture firms in Montana. Once he signed with one, dear God did they have a lot of questions about color schemes and materials.
Tip of the iceberg, she knew, but at least it kept him busy, freeing her up to try working on Brock and Pandora. No luck. The house felt oppressive and her energy kept directing itself to emptying linen closets and boxing up the last of her mother’s clothes. Fortunately, her mother had culled through most of her things before she died. It saved Glory from having to make hard decisions, but her father was even quicker to divest, which shocked her.
“We might need it,” had always been his mantra, but he’d bought a second-hand cargo trailer into which everything must fit. He was driving his wife’s barely used SUV and Glory had the hatchback she had been driving for years.
She concentrated on culling her own childhood mementos like participation ribbons and class photos. What had possessed her to think bangs would work with this kinky hair of hers? Braces and a shirt with a droopy bow in a forget-me-not print had completed her look of joyless adolescence. Grade nine had been a true horror show of a year.
Her stomach tightened in memory. Fucking Garrett Waters. On top of old humiliation sat adult outrage and a serious desire to kick the ass of a shit who would read a teenaged girl’s journal aloud. Mortified anguish still made her eyes
sting. Small wonder she’d had no friends. The snickering had continued until she graduated. She never told her parents, too embarrassed that she had even tried to write.
It had taken years for her to scribble a word of fiction again. She was better off running her mother’s business than writing anything of her own, she believed wholeheartedly. Even when she had finally begun writing again, it was editing. Rewriting her mother’s older books to add smart phones and fix other details that dated the stories and smacked of rampant sexism. She still snorted over some of the things her mother had gotten away with that wouldn’t fly these days. Spanking? Not the erotic kind? Mom.
“That’s really good,” her mother had said more than once about Glory’s work. “You should write something of your own.”
Glory had always shrugged it off. Imaginary people had played out stories in her head since she was a kid, but she didn’t have the nerve to write them down. It was enough, and far safer, to paint over her mother’s work. She liked earning her mother’s approval for a twist she’d added while leaving her mother’s name on the cover to take all the heat if someone didn’t like it.
Since her mother had died, she hadn’t accomplished even that much. Her fake friends had abandoned her. No one talked in her head, not her mother’s characters and certainly not her own.
Not until Brock and Pandora.
And they refused to show themselves here in Seattle. Pandora couldn’t pick a hair color. Blonde? Brunette? Was she tall? Sharp-tongued or warm-natured? Was she even pregnant? How? Had it been the night with Brock in the tub?
Nothing seemed to fit so Glory abandoned the idea of pursuing their story.
What did that leave her with, though? A father who was taking on a huge debt, spending what income his dead wife still made. If she didn’t keep up with managing that, he’d go broke.
She knew as sure as rain fell on Seattle’s holiday weekends that if she didn’t go to Montana and keep the purse strings firmly knotted, he would burn through her mother’s money that much faster. She added the condition that she would go, “For one year,” and made him promise she could approve all the purchases and contractor invoices.
He agreed and she accepted her fate.
Secretly, she was buying herself a year to figure out her own life. Talk about a late bloomer. At this rate, she was going to be thirty before she moved out and supported herself. It had been hard to strike out on her own, though, when her mother had needed her and their time together had been finite. She didn’t consider that time ‘lost,’ but she did see how stuck she was. Curse her father for being right about that much.
As for him, he disappeared a couple of times over the next weeks, visiting the lodge with an accredited design team. He came back with a scope and proposed budget that made her blanch.
“It has to be world-class, Glory.”
Barf. The outlay just to get this report, which detailed critical deadlines and deliverables, was more than Glory took as a yearly salary from her mother’s business. Promoting her mother’s backlist wasn’t going to keep them afloat. They needed a new release.
In desperation, she went dowsing for gold through her mother’s archived files on her oldest laptop, unearthing a very early, very thoroughly rejected manuscript that her mother hadn’t had the energy to rework. Glory hadn’t had the balls.
The premise was awfully weak. An arrogant rancher was offended by his dead brother’s fiancée because she was a model. Nothing personal, he just hated makeup. The heroine had disdain for nature and sweat, but was staying at the ranch when her fiancée was kicked by a horse and died. So romantic. She wasn’t broke. Her parents were rich Bostonians who sent her a ticket to come home, so why was she still on the ranch?
Glory did what any self-respecting author would do when faced with such a daunting revision. She hit ‘Save’ and walked away, spending the rest of the day driving boxes to Goodwill and posting furnishings for sale online.
Please let the muse still be in Montana when she got there. It was the only way they could get through what her father was doing.
*
Staffing problems began before they even left Seattle. Three weeks from moving day, the general contractor quit.
“He brought in the cleanup crew and said he would get the water and gas back on,” her father told her. “He can even get a satellite Wi-Fi hooked up, but with all the new activity coming to the area, he has people in Haven calling him. He doesn’t want a long commute out to the hill if he can stay in town and work.”
That didn’t bode well for finding someone else in the area willing to take on the project. Glory went online with the specs and scope. She received only a handful of bids, most of them with obscene surcharges tacked on for travel from bigger centers.
One, Devon Lewis of Roadside Renovations, showed the most interest and claimed to have, ‘a traveling band of dedicated people’ who specialized in remote locations. His website showed a nice portfolio with warm testimonials. They were stationed in Minnesota.
We only take the jobs we want, he wrote when she emailed to set up a phone interview. He offered to meet her in Haven to check out the lodge.
All Glory could think about was the old Tom Hanks movie, The Money Pit. Finding someone to even look at the place on short notice was a win.
On April Fool’s Day, she woke in a motel in Haven. She peeked one eye toward the clock. Ten past five. She rolled over and tried to get back to sleep, but the reality of where she was began to smother her like a lead blanket. She could hear someone through the wall between their rooms, snoring like a diesel engine.
Rolf, she thought with a snigger, wondering if he was here in Haven. Her father hadn’t talked about him and she hadn’t asked, but it hadn’t stopped her from thinking about him more often than she should.
They were practically sharing a bed, she thought dreamily. Brock, she corrected, but had to wonder how Rolf was in bed, being an athlete and all. Selfish? Energetic? Insatiable?
BLESSED WINTER – Prologue
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He was hot. Not just to look at, but to touch.
As he took off his shirt and she stroked her hands over the planes of his chest, molding the dip along his sternum and tracing the pathways between the squared muscles of his abdomen, his skin was so hot she thought he must be near scalding inside. The narrow line of hair descending from his navel ought to be glowing and hissing like a fuse.
This wasn’t her. She didn’t start peeling off her clothes with a stranger barely an hour after meeting him. Thirst for revenge might have had her bringing him home, half of it merely to prove she had something men wanted. She was not something so cheap and damaged that she had to settle for a guy who cheated.
Proving that to anyone, least of all herself, wouldn’t come from a one-night stand with someone else, however. That’s why she’d been this close to telling this guy she had changed her mind.
Then he had kissed her.
And now they were in her bedroom. He swept his hands down her body, briefly clasped her hips, then abruptly brought his hands up, taking her shirt over her head at the same time. When he drew her into his arms again, her naked skin brushed his. His body was so fiery, she flinched from the contact.
He locked his arms around her, forcing her to take that heat against her, to feel it burn and make her twist inside.
Her arms rose to twine around his neck and she kissed him again. Oh, he knew how to kiss. His mouth opened over hers with command, plundering deeply, tongue thrusting with such confidence and suggestiveness, she reacted with a gush of wetness between her thighs.
This was sheer madness. Lust. She wasn’t thinking about who they were, or where, or how. All she could think was that she wanted to be on her back with his weight upon her. His cock inside her.
She shaped him through his jeans and got her wish very quickly. With a gruff noise, he walked her backward until the mattress hit her behind the knees. As she sank onto it, he reached to pull her pants
down and off, throwing them aside as he straightened. Then he jerked his own pants open and down his hips, unabashedly revealing how aroused he was.
His thick, flushed cock popped free of his boxers and she rose on her elbows to admire his form, so perfectly crafted of toned muscle and golden skin, lovingly decorated with the right amount of hair. He didn’t show any self-consciousness as he took himself in hand and gave himself a few easy pumps, gaze eating her alive.
She swallowed and crooked her knee in invitation, revealing how easily her slippery lips parted, lubricated and longing for him to delve between.
He calmly rolled a condom on that thick length, all the way down to the dark base. His balls were pulled tight against his body and his nipples were hard. He set one hand on the mattress by her ribcage, pressed his other hand flat against her abdomen as he set his knee between hers, then slid his touch up to cradle her breast, brushed his thumb across her nipple, then drifted down to explore where she was wet and throbbing.
He took his time, thick fingertip easily sliding against her moist flesh, unerring in his quest to find her clit and incite her. He pushed a finger in deep, making her give a needy sob of pleasure. Then he cruelly withdrew.
She bit her lips, whimpering in agony.
He gave her two.
She let her head hang back as he fucked her like that, easy and slow, thumb flicking her clit so she grew wetter and hotter and spread her legs even wider.
When he slowly pulled his hand away, she clung to his fingers, head lifting in protest. He licked the back of his fingers before settling over her. Hard thighs pushed her knees further apart. He dropped his hips low between her legs and the domed head of his cock nudged for entry.
She was so slippery and molten she melted under the light pressure, parting and taking him in. He drew in a hot breath as he forged deeper, his thick length sliding into her in one determined thrust.
Somehow, she had expected more finesse. She had expected she required more finesse, but she loved the smoothly assertive way he drove in. He propped himself on his elbows, covered her mouth in another deep kiss, and began to thrust.