Snowbound with a Stranger Read online

  She swayed. Actually swayed in front of him. That slight shift, that loosening of her control, aroused him indescribably. “Do it.”

  She took off her clothes.

  Lee watched her, his eyes dark. In the midst of their too-quick encounter in the living room, he hadn’t been able to take in the full impact of her body. Its fullness and its heat.

  She was luscious. He wanted his mouth on her, to taste her all over. “Get up on the bed.”

  He pulled down the bedcovers.

  Dannie obeyed. Behind her was a brass headboard with vertical bars.

  “Put your hands over your head and hold on to the bars, Dannie. Don’t let go.”

  She did as he told her. With her arms extended upward, she was totally open to him. Stretched out. Her back arched.

  Her breasts rose and fell with each breath, the tips tight and hard. Lee lowered his mouth to one and licked her. Once. Twice. Quick, sucking licks.

  Her nipples against his tongue were burning hot. Soft and tight. He licked her, tasted her, and she began to move beneath him.

  “Easy now.” He kissed her mouth, his tongue gentle and insistent, exploring her. “Just getting started.”

  He ran his lips over the pulse point in her throat, breathing against her. Her bare thigh along the length of his covered cock was a desperate tease. She must have felt the thrust of him against her. She reached for him and he grabbed her wrist.

  He would not let her control this. “Hold the bars.”

  He purposely ground against her to torment her and took her nipple in his mouth again.

  Never in his life had Lee felt anything like this. He recognized that through the thick fog swirling around them. Dannie awakened something in him that had been sleeping for many long years and now, unleashed, it took over. Lee let it take over. Consciously, purposefully.

  He bit down on her nipple and she cried out. Loud. She arched her back, lifting her breast deeper into his mouth.

  He smiled, his mouth full of her. “That’s it.”

  He kissed the underside of her breast. Her rib cage. The soft swell of her belly. His hands slipped beneath her thighs and pushed upward, lifting her knees and calves over his shoulders. He bit the tender inside of her leg, licked the gentle curve where her thigh met the core of her body. He took her hips in both hands and thrust his tongue inside her.

  She screamed. Just as he’d said she would. She gripped the bars of the headboard and screamed again when he slid his tongue over her hot clit.

  He licked her quickly, then slowly, teasing, driving her. He hummed against her, and the vibration of his voice made her whole body rigid with burning tension.

  “Please. Lee.” Her skin glistened with heat and sweat. Her hips lifted toward his mouth. And still he licked her, slowing down just as she was on the verge of release, then quickening as soon as she settled, driving her upward and then down, again and again, until she was begging him.

  Like he’d said she would.

  “Please, Lee. Please.”

  He stopped. “Please what?”

  She moaned, and perversely, it made him laugh.

  He loved the desperation in her voice, the way her body trembled and tensed beneath him, the way she pleaded. It was fucked-up, maybe, how much he liked it. But he wasn’t about to question it at that moment.

  What he wanted was more.

  “Tell me.”

  “Please. Let me come.”

  Power rang through him, a dark and burning power. “Say it again.”

  “Make me come, Lee.”

  He groaned, almost a growl, deep in his throat. And then he kissed her.

  Fast and wet and relentless, until she was screaming his name, coming against his mouth. Trembling for him, crying.

  Only for him.

  The way she fell apart for him broke his heart.

  He wanted to stay where he was forever, sealed to that most intimate part of her body, feeling her tremors against his lips.

  At the same time, he wanted to drive himself so deep and hard inside her that everything she was would belong to him. He wanted to fuck her, and annihilate both of them.

  He found a condom in the bedside table drawer and rolled it on, and lifted her ass and shoved his cock deep into her heat.

  And if he thought he’d felt the limit of what he could feel before, he was wrong.

  He forgot where he was. He forgot who he was. Past, future: all gone. Everything gone but this moment, inside her.

  He kissed her open mouth and moved against her in long, slow strokes. He felt her building again, spiraling upward. Her tender thighs along the outside of his legs, her full breasts against his chest.

  She brought her mouth to his ear. Her voice was urgent, ragged. “Come for me, Lee. Come inside me.” She bit down hard on the soft skin of his earlobe.

  “Jesus, Dannie.” His arms, holding him up, nearly collapsed.

  She came again, tightening hard and wet around him, and dragged him over the edge.

  Chapter Seven

  In the bright morning light, Lee’s face with its coming-in beard, seemed to glow. He lay facing her, his arm slung over her waist, his breath against her disheveled hair. The warmth of his body seeped in to hers and started a slow rupture of feeling deep in her chest. She closed her eyes against it.

  The coals in the fireplace had long since turned to ash and the room was devilishly cold. Dannie couldn’t at first discern the reason for the strange silence that filled the room.

  She couldn’t hear the wind. That was it. The light filtering through the heavy curtains meant that the snow had stopped. The storm was finally over.

  Dannie’s heart sank.

  Despite her best intentions, something in her had opened up to Lee last night. She had begun to feel for him, and nothing in the world could outrival the stupidity of that.

  One day’s romp in the sack meant nothing to anyone. Storm or no storm.

  She rose, wrapped a thick blanket around herself and dressed quickly. The spare toothbrush in the bathroom made her silently thank Stevens, for the thousandth time, for the anal-retentive planning she sometimes detested at the hospital. Out here, it had made a dangerous situation bearable. Even, one had to admit, rather pleasant.

  In the kitchen the coffeepot stood waiting on the counter. She dumped a massive quantity of grounds into the filter. If there was one thing this day needed, it was a hell of a lot of caffeine.

  She rebuilt the fire with the last of the logs. There must be more stacked up outside, and anyway it was time she started finding her bearings. Sooner or later—likely in the next day or two—she’d have to get off this mountain and back to her everyday life.

  She’d almost forgotten it existed.

  In the kitchen the percolating coffee issued its final gurgling drips. The fire crackled before her. Dannie sat down on the floor and stared into the flames.

  Maybe it didn’t exist. That life. The hospital. Her pitiful one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment. Her failed marriage. Her barely-breathing social life.

  Maybe this was all there was. All there ever would be.

  The absurdity of that thought made her smile.

  From the bedroom came the lilt of Lee’s gentle snoring.

  The silence in this place made every small sound perfectly audible. The crack of a falling branch outside, the heavy plop of snow. In the city there was never a silence this profound. The noise crowded in from everywhere. Into her thoughts, into her brain. Into her heart.

  So that all she could do to survive it was shut down.

  All around Dannie there was pain. The visceral fear her patients faced every single day. Their discomfort and their agony, their unending loss. She’d stopped counting the deaths, the rages, the motherless children, the lonely grandfathers, the cancer-ridden teenagers. They followed her around anyway, like ghosts—the living and the dead—warning her. Nothing is sacred. Everything can be destroyed and you can never prepare for it. You can never protect yourself.

&n
bsp; She’d let her husband slip away. Because it was easier than letting herself care about him, or her marriage, or anything. It was why she invested so much in her patients, because they needed her, because she couldn’t deny them whatever compassion she had to give. But her relationships with them were short-lived.

  And maybe she liked it that way. Maybe she used them to justify her frozenness and also, paradoxically, to give her a brief, temporary relief from feeling frozen. She invested parceled-out parts of herself in their drama, and felt for them and with them, and shut out any drama from her own life. Any real feeling at all. Even for her husband who, although he was not perfect, had tried to love her.

  The shame of that, the guilt; it would never go away. She’d let her marriage die of attrition. She’d made it happen through inaction rather than risking being caught off guard and hurt.

  She was a coward.

  The fire began to die down. Dannie rose and went to the door. A sharp chill raced under the doorframe and up her bare ankles. Goose bumps rose all over her body. She put on her parka, covered her head with the hood and shoved her feet into her boots.

  The door creaked when she opened it and let in a gust of icy crystals. It was a relief, after the heat of the fire. Dannie stepped out into a hip-deep drift. Wind had bathed the whole porch in snow, despite the roof overhead.

  The trees surrounding the house—evergreens—were draped heavily in a thick white. Sunlight made the brightness almost unbearable after the relative dark of the cabin. There were no footprints anywhere. Everywhere was silence.

  For no reason at all—or possibly for every reason—Dannie started to cry. She stood there, scanning the woods, the total seclusion and simplicity of a log cabin lost in a buried forest. Tears fell wildly over her chin and down into the open neck of her jacket.

  On the far end of the porch, an upward drift suggested a woodpile. Dannie struggled across the slippery planks, grabbing at the icy railings to keep from falling. At the edge, she swiped at her tears with a wet sleeve and began brushing away the snow with her bare hands.

  Beneath the white lay the promised pile of wood underneath a heavy tarp. Its frozen edges pricked against her numb fingers. She wrestled with the plastic to get to the logs beneath. It was laden with wet snow and impossible to move. Yanking it back, she nearly dislocated her shoulder. The logs shifted with the movement and the topmost few fell with a hard clatter directly onto her boots. Cursing, she leaped back and immediately fell flat on her ass in the snow.

  “Goddamn it!” She punched the side of the cabin with her fist and the impact reverberated through every last one of her cold bones. If it weren’t for her steel-toed boots she’d have broken her foot. She buried her face in her hands and sobbed freely.

  The surprising thing was that it felt good. Actually, it felt really fucking good. Like her whole body had been a clenched fist and now, it was starting to open. That thought made her cry even harder. She wanted to feel it. She didn’t want to be closed down anymore.

  Beyond the porch railing, a rustle sounded against the still ground. A rustle, and then a shuffling, and a wet snort of air. The hair rose on the back of Dannie’s neck.

  She went absolutely still. Some primal part of her knew what the sound came from. Its presence was palpable, and undeniable. Slowly, Dannie rose.

  On the other side of the porch wall, six feet away, a massive black bear stood on its hind legs, looking over the railing.

  Dannie’s heart stopped entirely. One quick lunge would easily bring him over the side of the porch. She was defenseless.

  She blew out a long breath and forced herself to remain calm. There was a right way to handle this. She just had to figure out what it was. What had her wilderness book said about bear encounters? What the hell was she supposed to do?

  Frantically, she scrolled her memory.

  No sudden moves. That much she remembered. Above all, do not run or the bear will think you are prey and chase you.

  Not that she was planning to run anywhere. The only safe place was back in the house, and that’s where Dannie intended to go. Slowly.

  Hey. You wanted to feel something. How’s this?

  She took a step backward. The bear’s heavy growl seemed to fill the whole porch.

  You can do it. Just keep moving toward the door.

  Dannie did not want to die. Maybe she’d made some mistakes in her life, but she was not about to go out like this, in the teeth of a wild animal.

  Lee was right inside. If she could make it to him and close the door against the bear, she would be okay. If she could just get back inside the cabin. She took another careful step toward the door.

  The bear pawed the ground with its hind feet. A puff of steamy breath shot out of its mouth.

  Behind her, the door creaked open.

  * * *

  “Dannie?”

  Lee awoke to an empty room. He turned his face into the pillow where Dannie had slept, and smelled her there. The scent of her hair. It made him hurt inside.

  He was in one hell of a lot of trouble.

  What had it been? A day? It was patently ridiculous to feel this strongly about a woman he had known for one day.

  But the fact was that something like a primal urge was beginning to take over. An almost caveman urge to drag her to his lair, permanently, and make her belong to him. To take care of her.

  Goddamn it, he could take good care of her, if she’d let him. He was pretty sure he’d proven exactly that last night. The thought made him hard all over again.

  Dannie, in the bed, with her arms up over her head. Her teeth on his earlobe.

  For the love God.

  The thought of leaving the cabin and losing her to the stupidly mean streets of Brooklyn made him want to punch a hole in the wall.

  Where the hell was she anyway?

  He threw the blankets off and went in search of her.

  Outside in the living room, the cabin was eerily quiet. He called Dannie’s name.

  No answer.

  Then he heard a sound that made his blood run cold.

  A low growl. From the porch. Outside.

  “Dannie!”

  He ran to the door and flung it open.

  God knows what he was expecting to find. But it sure as hell wasn’t Dannie in pajamas and hiking boots, caught in the fog of a bear mama’s breath, about to get her whole damn head bitten off.

  She turned at the sound of the door, and the fear in her eyes made his heart drop clear out of his chest. The bear snarled, then roared, and Lee stopped thinking altogether. He grabbed Dannie hard around the waist and dragged her inside. He slammed the door shut, bolted it and yanked her deeper into the room.

  Her knees gave out and he caught her up in his arms.

  “Are you all right? Oh God. Dannie?”

  Her face stone-white, she nodded.

  Outside the bear clambered up onto the porch. They couldn’t see it, but its heavy movements were loud enough to hear six counties away. Its bulk slammed against the doorframe.

  “What’s he doing?” Dannie buried her face in Lee’s chest and swallowed a shriek.

  Lee’s hands shook, but he forced his voice to remain steady. “She, by the looks of it.”

  “She?” From outside came the sound of a rhythmic banging.

  “She’s pregnant.”

  “What?”

  “Last hurrah. Before hibernation.” The bear’s pink mouth appeared, snuffling wetly against the windowpane.

  “There’s no food out there.”

  “No. But she may have smelled something when you opened the door.”

  “Oh, God. I’m sorry.”

  “Hush.” He eased down her hood and ran his hand over her hair. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Can she get in?”

  “No.”

  Outside the window, the bear paced back and forth.

  “How do you know?”

  He searched for the words to reassure her. Above all he needed to conv
ince her they were not in danger.

  Even if they were.

  “The house is built strong. We’re safe.”

  “No!” Dannie punched him none-too-softly in the chest. “Don’t lie to me, Lee. We’re not safe! I’ve seen stories about bears breaking through the…through the glass, getting into people’s kitchens—”

  She was terrified beyond reasoning. He registered that. But he needed to persuade her somehow that she wouldn’t be hurt. That he wouldn’t let her get hurt. “That’s only in the suburbs, where they don’t prepare for—”

  “We’re not safe, Lee! Don’t you see her out there? She has babies she’ll need to feed. She’s getting ready to hibernate. It’s only a door, for God’s sake, between her and us!”

  “Honey.”

  Dannie fell down to her knees. “Don’t call me honey!” She was losing it and clearly couldn’t stop herself.

  Lee gathered her against his chest. He searched for the words to comfort her. If he could only find exactly the right words.

  “We’re not safe!”

  There was nothing he could say. Nothing at that moment that she’d be able to hear.

  The truth was, he was scared himself. Chances were the bear would satisfy her curiosity and, finding no food on the porch, shuffle away. But you never could be sure what a wild animal would do. It was late in the season for a pregnant female to be out wandering. She might be desperate.

  He wouldn’t let anything happen to Dannie. No matter what. He couldn’t. He’d throw a fucking refrigerator at the bear before he’d let Dannie come to harm.

  “I’ll protect you. Dannie—”

  She shook her head mutely against his chest.

  For endless long minutes the bear shuffled around the porch. The sound of her sniffing echoed into the cabin, along with the shrill crack of her claws against the glass windowpanes.

  Lee huddled on the floor, gripping Dannie’s hands. He was wearing shorts and, absurdly, he noted that he didn’t feel cold. The heat from Dannie’s body kept him warm. He closed his eyes and smelled her hair. If he was going to die, he considered, there were worse ways to go. That is except for the part about being torn limb from limb. That he probably wouldn’t enjoy so much.