The Black Sheep’s Baby

watched them, laughing, they were trying to demonstrate for her its marvelous possibilities.

Although, romping in snow was one thing, she discovered as she floundered her way down the hill on what she hoped was the driveway, taking her bearings from the tops of fence posts she could see sticking out of the drifts at the bottom. Walking was another. She’d fallen down several times by the time she reached what she assumed must be the road. In addition to making a clumsy spectacle of herself, snow had managed to find its way inside her boots, and her hands were red and aching, though she tried her best to keep them warm by tucking them deep in the pockets of her parka.

She halted at the bottom of the lane, hip-deep in snow, and turned first one way, then the other, sighting along the line of fence posts, a curving row of stark black dots against all that blinding white. She shook her head, then looked again. Panic flashed briefly through her mind, followed by bewilderment, and finally, pure stubborn, muleheaded disbelief.

Where in the hell was her car?

Eric, who had been following Devon’s erratic progress down the hill from a discreet distance, lifted his camera and snapped several quick pictures before moving on. He’d taken more than a few already-a fact he hadn’t decided, yet, whether to share with their principle subject. Based on what he knew of Devon so far, he wasn’t ready to trust her sense of humor-wouldn’t have given odds, in fact, that she had one.

“Waiting for a bus?” he inquired as he approached the bereft-looking figure half buried in snowdrifts.

She jerked toward him, blowing on her hands-bare, of course. When it came to weather, the woman obviously had no sense. Her face brightened, but only briefly. She made an annoyed grimace, lifted her arms and let them fall back to her well-padded sides. “I can’t find my car.” She sounded so astounded, Eric couldn’t help but smile. “It has to be here somewhere,” she insisted, glaring at him as if she thought he must have hidden it, somehow. “I couldn’t have walked that far in that damn blizzard.”

“Then it must be here.” Scratching his chin and making exaggerated “Hmm, let’s see…” noises, he looked up the road in the direction from which he knew she’d have come, studying the patterns the wind-driven snow had made along the fence. Resisting the urge to lift his camera one more time, he plowed his way around Devon and halted beside a drift larger and slightly more rounded than the others. He gave the side of the drift a kick, and was rewarded with a solid-sounding thunk.

“Oh, my God. It’s my car. It is. I don’t believe it.” Devon had wallowed her way to his side, and was already trying to brush away the blanket of snow that had completely buried what appeared to be a spanking new luxury car, navy-blue-ignoring the fact that her bare hands were cherry-red with cold.

“For God’s sake, here-put these on before you get frostbite,” he said as he roughly bumped her arm with the hand he’d pulled from the pocket of his parka.

She looked at him-first, in surprise, at his face; then uncomprehendingly at his hand. When she saw the pair of heavy, thermal-lined ski gloves, she jerked her eyes back to his, and he saw in them the beginnings of a glow that spread slowly over her whole face, a kind of lightening, not unlike a sunrise.

“Thanks…that was nice of you,” she said as she took the gloves from him and awkwardly put them on. She sounded breathless, but it might have been the cold.

“Don’t you know you lose most of your body heat through your hands and head?” he growled, holding up the blue-and-white knitted ski hat he’d pulled from his jacket’s other pocket. “Here, hold still.” He kept his expression pained as he turned her toward him and yanked her closer, so she wouldn’t know what he was thinking.

As he lifted the ski cap and pulled it roughly over her cold, damp hair, he was thinking what a shame it was to cover it up and how heartstoppingly beautiful those wild, flame-red curls were, part of the reason he’d felt compelled to focus his camera lens on her again and again on her ungainly trek down the lane, the one spot of color and warmth in a frozen black-and-white landscape.

As he tucked away an errant curl with a gloved finger and tugged the cap ungently over her ears, he was thinking how young and fresh and sweet she looked, with her nose and cheeks all rosy and her mouth blurred and trembling with the cold…and how fiercely, how intensely he wanted to kiss her.

Chapter 10

“W hat am I going to do?”

The question, asked in such a small voice, with stark appeal and unheralded meekness, startled him. It so closely echoed his own thoughts just then. Swallowing to dampen down the desire that coiled in his belly and lingered like the taste and smell of something delicious and forbidden at the back of his throat, he let his gloved hand drop away from her.

“I knew it was in the ditch-I knew it, I knew it. How am I ever going to get it out of there?” More upset than she’d ever thought she could be, Devon pressed a gloved hand to her forehead. What am I going to do? she thought. What was I just thinking?

She’d been thinking how it might feel to kiss him, thinking about his mouth. His lips would be cold and firm, warm inside. Thinking about it with such intensity, her whole body now felt bereft…cold. She shivered with the shock of it. Oh, God, what am I going to do?

“Don’t worry about it-I can pull it out with a tractor. No big deal.” He was moving away from her; she wanted so badly to call him back. To have him put his arms around her and hold her until she stopped this infernal shivering.

“And then what?” She flung out an arm, taking in the buried road.

Eric paused to glance back at her. “They’ll get it plowed-eventually.”

“When? New Year’s?” She was irrationally furious. Even the highway department, it seemed, was determined to keep her here against her will.

Against her will? But how could that be, when in her deepest buried heart what she really wanted to do was stay?

He paused, shrugged. “They usually do the interstate first, then the main roads, any emergency stuff-police, fire department, hospitals, things like that. Doubt if they’ll get out here until tomorrow, the earliest.”

“Tomorrow…that’s the 23rd, right?” She stared across the frozen landscape, eyes narrowed against the incredible glare as she did the calculations. “By the time we’d get to the airport, get a flight-if we’re lucky…” She shot Eric a look and her lips curved stiffly. “Your mom’s right-we’d be getting back to L.A. just in time for Christmas Eve.” It was hard to admit defeat. She took a deep breath and puffed it out in a cloud of vapor. “Looks like your family’s got an uninvited guest for Christmas.”

Eric’s smile was as sardonic as hers. “Mom’ll be happy.”

“And you’re not?” She asked it curiously as she came trudging up beside him, and felt him shrug.

“It’s a reprieve, not a pardon.”

“Look.” Devon halted and touched his arm so that he had to stop too, though she could see it was grudgingly. “Do you think we could…I don’t know, call a truce or something? Just until after the holiday? Even armies in the middle of fighting wars do that.” She took a breath and closed her eyes, fighting for the self-control that usually came naturally to her, then said, all in a rush, “I didn’t mean for this to happen. But I’m here, you’re here, and I just think we should make the best of it. For your mom’s sake, if nothing else.”

Eric said softly, without looking at her, “You sound as if you care.”

“Of course I do.” And Devon was mildly surprised to realize she meant it. She wondered when it had happened. When, exactly, had these Lanagans begun to be people that mattered, instead of simply adversaries?

Eric’s eyes swept over her with calm appraisal-and something else she couldn’t identify. Daringly, she forced herself to meet and hold his gaze. “Okay-truce, then,” he said, and held out a gloved hand.

“Until after Christmas,” she reminded him, extending hers.

His smile slipped sideways as he took her hand in a well-padded grip. Her heart gave a bump, and she was sorry when he released her hand and continued on up the lane toward the house. Too soon, her renegade heart protested. Stay with me…

“Aren’t you going to show me around?” Hands in her pockets, heart pounding harder, now, she watched him turn back to her.