In an effort to block the icy wind blowing in all directions that sent the quicker-falling snow swirling around her, she turned and ended up facing the large living room window. Ian stood on the other side, his feet planted hip-width apart and his arms crossed over his muscular chest, glaring straight at her. Again. What was with this guy? He rushes to pluck her out of the snow and carries her back to the house like something straight out of a movie but then gets sulky the moment she says her arm isn’t about to fall off? Did he want to play hero or watch her writhe in pain? Falling back on the skills she learned as an angry, disaffected teenager, she itched her nose with her middle finger while scowling right back at him. Mature? Nope. Satisfying? Yes.
“If we kill each other, I’m going to come back as a ghost just to haunt you,” Shelby said into her phone as she turned away from the man who totally discombobulated her. “Call back and send help, please.”
Sending up a prayer that the message wouldn’t be totally garbled, she squared her shoulders and walked back into the cabin. The heat from the now-crackling-to-life fire hit her as soon as she walked in the door, a welcome blast of comfort after the frigid ice fingers of the wind reaching through her sweater. It was like getting out of the shower and wrapping a fresh-from-the-dryer towel around herself.
Closing her eyes, she let out a long, satisfied sigh. When she opened them again, Ian was staring straight at her, and she would have sworn she’d caught a glimpse of something softer for a whole half a second before his body tensed and he went back to his usual lump-of-stone posture.
Okay, then.
“I left a message for Lucy,” she said, taking off her boots and heading straight toward the fireplace, hands tingling in anticipation of the heat. “The connection wasn’t the greatest, but hopefully enough of it got through.”
He nodded and did that growly grunt of his again before stepping away from the fireplace as she approached it, his moves hurried. His heel caught on the corner of the rug. His eyes went wide with surprise and he flung his arms out for balance as he started to tip over. Shelby didn’t think, she just reacted, calling up on that adrenaline-spiked quick reflexes and reached out, catching his hand and pulling him forward, helping to hold him steady as he fought to stay upright in a long, drawn-out moment that was probably all of half a breath long. Then he was stable, looking down at her, the muscle in his jaw working overtime as the air crackled around them.
“Thanks,” he said, a tinge of pink hitting his cheeks. They were so close, the heat from his body rivaling what the fireplace was kicking out. “You’re stronger than you look.”
“Have you ever met a woman before?” she asked, mentally warning herself not to notice the flecks of green in his brown eyes or the tiny scar across the bridge of his nose or the way her pulse was kicking it up a notch or four thousand. “Of course we are. We have to be.”
He ran his thumb over the back of her knuckles—soft and tentative, as if he didn’t understand why he was doing it. Then he exhaled a harsh breath, lifted his thumb, and scowled at her. “You can let go now.”
Shelby flinched and dropped her hand. She’d been trying to help. It wasn’t like she wanted to hold his hand, or touch him, or—
I should have just let him fall on his ass. Way to go, Past Me.
“We need to shut off the other rooms and keep this fire going,” he said, closing the door that led from the open-concept living/kitchen space to the hall that led to the back of the house and then heading for the stairs. “Since there aren’t fireplaces upstairs and there’s no way we’ll get power all the way up here until after the storm’s gone, we gotta shut this room off as much as possible.”
Wait. What? No. That wasn’t right.
“Heat rises,” she said. “I’ll just stay in my room upstairs under some blankets. It’ll be fine.”
Okay, that sounded lame even to her ears. The more open space the heat had to fill, the less there would be.
“Shelby, we don’t know how long it’s going to be until either help arrives or we can drive back down the mountain,” Ian said as he climbed the stairs. “This is us for the next few days. Believe me, I hate it, too.”
And there it was, the shit sandwich of a situation. She was trapped with Ian Petrov in a cabin without power while the snow picked up speed outside and the wind howled. Yeah, when this was all over, she was most definitely going to come back as a ghost and haunt Lucy for getting her into this mess.
Chapter Four
Why was it that the thing a person was looking for was always in the last spot they checked? Ian grabbed the cast-iron skillet from the weird half-size cabinets above the built-in microwave and brought it over to the fireplace. The sun had dipped below the mountains and he’d augmented the light from the fire with about a dozen candles he’d found in the hall closet. No one was going to mistake it for high noon, but there was definitely enough light to cook dinner without worry of slicing a finger open instead of the fat steak he’d taken from the fridge.
“What’s all this?” Shelby asked as she walked down the stairs, looking like an extra from a postapocalyptic movie about badass women surviving in a new Ice Age.
She wore
