Snowbound with a Stranger Read online

  Snowbound with a Stranger

  By Rebecca Rogers Maher

  Dannie Marino is hiking with colleagues when a sudden blizzard separates her from her group. She’s rescued by Lee, a dangerously sexy stranger who leads her to a remote cabin to weather the storm.

  When the night inevitably ends in an intense erotic encounter, Dannie is both shocked and liberated by her response. But being intimate means letting herself be vulnerable, which isn’t her style. Lee tries to reach out to her, but she avoids any emotional entanglement by pushing him away.

  Snowed in and unable to hide from each other, Dannie and Lee must both face up to their most closely guarded emotions. When the storm abates, will they be able to stop running from the past and live fully in the future?

  24,000 words

  Dear Reader,

  I love May. In my part of the world, May is the beginning of two things: beach season and festival season. Granted, beach season is just barely starting in May, but it’s still starting. And with the unseasonably warm winter we’re having, perhaps it won’t be too cold for the beach, even in early May. As for the festivals, well, in my area we’re spoiled for choice. From April to October we have everything from BBQ and beach festivals, to apple, strawberry and watermelon festivals—even a river festival. It seems like every week there’s something new to look forward to!

  But if festivals don’t interest you it doesn’t mean you can’t have something to look forward to as well. Each week in May we showcase a variety of new Carina Press titles.

  This month we’re proud to present debut author Cynthia Justlin’s compelling novel Edge of Light. A true spine-tingling and thrilling romantic suspense, this is one that will have you on the edge of your seat and wondering where this author has been! Get ready for a fantastic read.

  Kicking off May, we have Brook Street: Rogues by Ava March, which finishes up her fantastic male/male historical novella trilogy. Releasing along with Ava is paranormal romantic suspense author Alexia Reed and her novel Hunting the Shadows.

  Later in May are three historical romances joining the Carina Press lineup. From Jennifer Bray-Weber comes a swashbuckling pirate adventure, The Siren’s Song. Alyssa Everett gives us a charming and passionate Regency romance in Ruined by Rumor. The White Swan Affair by Elyse Mady is the third of our historical romance offerings this month.

  Not quite historical romance but in the historical period comes Christine Bell’s new steampunk romance The Bewitching Tale of Stormy Gale. Join Christine as she takes you on a romantic adventure through time.

  Two erotic romance books are sure to satisfy those craving a slightly naughtier story. Check out Let Me In by Callie Croix, a hot BDSM novella, and Daire St. Denis’s erotic ménage romance Party of Three.

  Rounding out the month of May are releases from two returning Carina Press authors. Guarding Jess by Shannon Curtis is the next novel in her McCormack Security Agency series and the follow-up to her debut title, Viper’s Kiss. Rebecca Rogers Maher offers up a satisfying and emotional, yet sexy, read in her contemporary romance novella Snowbound with a Stranger.

  I hope you enjoy this month’s new releases as much as we’ve enjoyed bringing them to you.

  We love to hear from readers, and you can email us your thoughts, comments and questions to [email protected]. You can also interact with Carina Press staff and authors on our blog, Twitter stream and Facebook fan page.

  Happy reading!

  ~Angela James

  Executive Editor, Carina Press

  www.carinapress.com

  www.twitter.com/carinapress

  www.facebook.com/carinapress

  Dedication

  To Anne

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to the entire Carina Press team and especially to Melissa Johnson, an editor who routinely makes me laugh and continues to teach me how to be a stronger writer. Thank you to Lisa Hinshaw and Anne Kadet, early readers of this manuscript, steadfast friends and all-around beautiful people. Thank you to Kevin Maher, my sexy, talented and compassionate husband. And thank you to every nurse, social worker, teacher, firefighter, doctor, police officer, physical therapist and other community worker who puts his or her life and sanity at stake every day for the benefit of our collective health and happiness. I am grateful for your dedication and service.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  She noticed him right away. That wasn’t a good sign.

  It was his chest, really. How broad and strong he looked. The way the sun caught the gold stubble of his buzz-cut hair as he stepped off the parking lot. The fact that he wore enough layers of wool and polypropylene to insulate a small army. The way he shouldered his thick pack as though it weighed nothing.

  She looked away before he saw her.

  The sky was overcast and the air punishingly cold. Dannie breathed in gratefully. The world out here was blissfully simple in its total indifference to her. And she was sick to death of complicated things. Here in the mountains there was one goal only: try not to die. She tightened the laces of her boots and joined the group.

  “Everybody ready?”

  Dr. Stevens gathered the hikers in a loose semicircle. As the head of her department, he’d been leading monthly mountain hikes for staff and friends for as long as she could remember. Dannie joined in on the occasional free Saturday.

  Not that she was the typical joining type or particularly social. Other hikers rarely attempted to strike up a conversation with her. And if they did, she’d offer only marginally polite monosyllables in response to their chipper small talk. Eventually they gave up and talked to someone else.

  She couldn’t abide chitchat on the mountain. There was enough noise in her regular life. Up here she preferred silence.

  Parking Lot Guy quietly joined the group. The hair rose on the back of Dannie’s neck. She didn’t recognize him from the hospital, and he’d never been on any of the hikes before. She wondered who he was, and then shoved the thought away, irritated with herself.

  She wasn’t here to meet a man. She was here to get the hell out of the city. To see some damn nature and relax. To hike until she was too exhausted to think.

  “It’s a pretty straightforward hike to the cabin.” Dr. Stevens stared at each of them in turn, the corners of his eyes crinkling. “I hope you appreciate the fact that I’m allowing you cretins to enter my little getaway. Don’t tell the others or they’ll all be banging down the door. Lee, you got the map?”

  Behind Dannie a deep voice answered, “Yep. Got it.”

  She turned as he looked up and caught the full force of his green eyes.

  Jesus.

  Briefly he nodded in her direction. He held her gaze a little too long, and when he smiled, she looked quickly away.

  “Good. Lee here’s a fine man to have around on the mountain.” Dr. Stevens checked his watch. “Should take two, maybe three hours to get up there. We stop, have lunch and then head on back before the storm moves in. Stick together. No cell reception up here and the trail’s not marked. If you get separated from the group, you’re in trouble. Lee, bring up the rear, all right? I’ll lead.”

  “Sure.”

  Dannie hastened to the front of the line.

  There were six of them this time, including the doctor. At their Brooklyn hospital they called him
Dr. Waldo. His uncanny resemblance to a certain perpetually missing cartoon character was a source of unending amusement to all the staff. The name lent a certain extra charm to the nature hikes he led. The cloud of red frizz on top of his head shined out like a beacon, even when clamped under a hat. Dannie kept her eyes on that frizz and set out on the trail.

  In the mountains it usually took a full hour for her head to clear. Two hours before she could even begin to appreciate the scenery around her. A full day, sometimes, before the constant echo of hospital beeping would flush itself out of her system. For these first few minutes all she could do was walk and breathe. And let the cacophonous thoughts in her head swirl out one by one.

  She’d had a patient last week—a woman she’d come to know well over the past several months—who was sick with complications from lupus. Two young kids at home. An immune system like a fucking sieve. Sick all the time with every virus that passed through her children’s school. Yet she never complained. Not once. Every last awful treatment, she took it. Flirted with the doctors. Put makeup on every morning, no matter how bad she felt.

  For some reason it got to Dannie. Worse than the sicker patients, the more demonstrably suffering ones. That woman’s iron will agitated her. She found herself avoiding the lady’s room, looking for excuses to let someone else check in on her. What kind of nurse did that make Dannie? What kind of person?

  Without meaning to she’d fallen to the back of the line of hikers. Parking Lot Guy was there, chatting with one of the college-student volunteers from the hospital.

  Actually he wasn’t doing much talking. Zoe was young—a skinny, outgoing blonde with big doe eyes—and she was regaling poor P.L.G. with stories of her high school field hockey team.

  Dannie almost felt sorry for him. Except that he probably wasn’t listening. He probably was too busy thinking about peeling off her parka, like most men would be. And the girl was clearly interested in letting him.

  Dannie’s thoughts wandered. Behind her a low voice murmured the occasional “Really?” and “Oh, yeah?” while the volunteer chirped on. Eventually their talk turned to the hospital, to Zoe’s early impressions of medical life.

  “I don’t know.” Zoe grew quiet. “I have to admit it’s harder than I expected. Not the hours. I can handle that. Just the—I don’t know—the endlessness of it. Like an assembly line. They just keep coming, you know what I mean? It never stops.” She paused. “That sounds stupid.”

  “No. Not at all. It’s overwhelming. Especially at first.”

  “Right? I mean I knew it would be. But I guess you can’t really prepare yourself.”

  “No. You can’t.”

  “At this point, I don’t know how people do it, seriously, for like, ten, twenty years. Do you have to, like, shut down or something, just to keep going?”

  Parking Lot Guy—Lee—was silent for a while. Without thinking Dannie turned. For some reason she wanted to see his face.

  He met her gaze immediately. His eyes were dark, intent.

  “Some do. Yeah. And some find a way not to.”

  Quickly Dannie turned and faced forward.

  Their footsteps sounded on the quiet dirt path. Around them snow was beginning to fall: huge, thick flakes that appeared out of nowhere and suddenly filled the air and sky. She kept walking.

  Dannie loved her job. She always had. She was made to be a nurse. From her preschool days of wrapping stuffed animals in toilet-paper bandages, through high school and nursing school, she had known what her path would be. She had followed it unerringly. One foot in front of the other. She loved her job and she was good at it. Patients told her so. Doctors told her so. Family after family thanked her, often in tears, for the work that she did, for her compassion and her expertise and her unwavering calm.

  But what if lately she was only going through the motions? What if, like Zoe said, she had simply shut down?

  Well, so what? It was natural. You couldn’t be connected to every act all the time. After years of performing the same duties over and over, sometimes the feelings got lost. Sometimes you just had to fake your way through it and hope that those feelings came back.

  She gave a short laugh.

  And how’s that working out for you, Dannie?

  Thirty-eight years old. Childless. Divorced.

  Despite the undoubtedly flawless ostrich approach, the feelings she had lost for her husband had not come back. Nor his for her. And yet on they’d gone, for years, before either of them found the courage to get out.

  Actually she never had found the courage. He was the one to leave.

  Her pack was feeling heavier now as they approached the incline, but Dannie soldiered onward. She’d hiked another part of this mountain once before, months ago, when the weather was warm, so she knew the terrain moderately well.

  No one could call her an experienced woodsman, but she’d certainly done her homework online before hauling herself out here. She knew how to dress for the weather. She knew what to carry and what to leave home. Thanks to a merciless twice-a-week spin class, she was in reasonably good shape.

  So although she was tired and snow was beginning to fall, no warning signals flashed in her brain. Not then, at least.

  Not until two hours later. When she found herself stranded in a whiteout on the side of the mountain.

  Alone.

  Chapter Two

  Somehow the jokes about Dr. Stevens didn’t seem funny at that moment. Where’s Waldo? was a slightly less charming game when you were camped on a fallen log in a sea of white in the middle of nowhere.

  She’d walked in circles for an hour, calling out to the other hikers, blowing the useless whistle around her neck until she’d practically popped an artery. The right trail was nowhere to be found.

  They’d been on the verge of heading back early. The storm was closing in faster than predicted and for safety’s sake, they needed to get off the mountain. A few moments earlier, Lee had headed up to join Dr. Stevens. The two were conferring at the front of the line as they hiked, and it was obvious that they’d soon decide to turn around.

  Unfortunately they were a two-hour hike away from their cars and Dannie had to pee. She tapped Zoe, who was walking beside her.

  “Catch up with you guys in a minute, okay? I’m just gonna—” Dannie jerked her head toward the woods and smiled.

  “You sure?” Zoe looked uncertainly at the group up ahead. Dr. Stevens and Lee paused on the trail, consulting the map. “What if you get separated?”

  Dannie waved the thought away. “Don’t worry. I’ll only be a minute. You go on.” Then she’d struck out into the bushes with her shovel.

  Why she couldn’t use the metaphorical john in the near presence of others she would never understand. She just couldn’t go unless under full cover, and to achieve that she’d had to cut through a few hundred yards of undergrowth.

  By the time she found a likely spot and finished up, the snow was coming down harder. She adjusted her gear and headed back to the trail.

  It was easy enough to find. Snow had covered the tracks of the hikers ahead of her, but she knew the direction of the parking lot and trudged toward it. There was no sound anywhere but the hush of falling white and the occasional crunch of a twig under her boot. It was lovely actually. She looked up at the sky and smiled.

  And that’s when she came to the fork in the trail. She didn’t remember a fork. She remembered a straight shot from point A to point B that supposedly, farther up the mountain, led to point C: the doctor’s cabin. Very simple. A nice hike to a rustic lunch in a secluded house in the woods, and then everyone goes home.

  Back to their hectic, ridiculous city lives. To their work. To the endless sickness and the stressed-out families and the people dying alone every day.

  Dannie sighed. Simple? Nothing was simple.

  She thought they’d come from the path on the right, but it wasn’t as though she could place a call on her cell phone or walkie-talkie to check. No footprints remained in th
e snow to guide the way. She had to just guess and hope she was correct.

  That was the first time she’d blown her whistle. No answer but the echo. She turned right and began walking.

  * * *

  Thirty minutes later it was clear she’d made the wrong choice. At her quickened pace, she would have caught up to the group by now if she’d picked the true path. Along the way more trail divisions had forced her to make route decisions. She’d turned off one trail and on to another at least three times since then. Retracing her steps at this point would be difficult even under normal conditions, but the fact was, the snowstorm was now becoming an actual blizzard and she could barely see in front of her.

  She took stock of the situation. Someone would have to come find her. But it would put the whole group in jeopardy to make everyone wait for her on the mountain. The most likely scenario would be that one person would stay behind—an experienced hiker. That meant either Dr. Stevens or Lee, who appeared to be a camping buddy from way back.

  Lee, whose gaze she could barely meet. Lee, whose mere presence had sent her dashing to the opposite end of the line. She covered her face with her hands, blushing even though no one was there to see.

  Where was the rest of the group now? Had they found their way to safety? And if someone had stayed behind to look for her, was he in danger too? How many lives, exactly, had she placed at risk today?

  She cursed herself for putting any of them into this predicament. All because she was too modest to pee next to the damn trail or to ask the group to wait for her.

  In any case, to support her own rescue, she’d need to stop acting like a moving target. A log by the side of the trail offered as good a seat as any. She brushed off the snow and sat down.

  Her pack was well stocked. Enough food and water for one day. Weatherproof matches. Not that she’d know how to build a fire in this wet mess. Mylar blanket. Hand-crank flashlight. It was probably noon at this point, so she had plenty of hours of daylight, but the torch was nevertheless a comfort.

  By two o’clock, if no one had come for her, she’d have to start thinking about shelter.