of the most God-awful conditions known to man.
His windscreen wipers were flicking dementedly, but still it was like gazing into an icy abyss. The road dipped slightly, and he eased his foot back. A dip was good. Slopes ran down into hollows and hollows were where you found people, and they built houses which equalled shelter, and he suspected that they very soon they might need shelter… Except that this was pretty desolate countryside. Unspoiled, he guessed. Chosen for its beauty and its very isolation.
He flicked the light on briefly, to glance down at the map, and then squinted his eyes as the car passed the darkened bulk of a building. Some way after that, Jay realised that he no longer had a choice, and braked. Hard.
The jerk of the car woke her, and Keri opened her eyes, caught in that warm half-world between waking and sleeping. She yawned. ‘Where are we?’ she questioned sleepily.
‘In the middle of nowhere,’ he answered succinctly. ‘Take a look for yourself.’
The sound of the low, tough masculine voice shook her right out of her reverie, and for a moment it startled her, until she realised where she was. She looked out of the window, and then blinked. He wasn’t joking.
While she had been sleeping the snowy landscape had been transformed into one which was now unrecognisable. Night had closed in, and with it the snow. Everything was black and white, like a photographic negative, and it would have been beautiful if it didn’t look so…forbidding. And they were in the middle of it. Of nowhere, as he had said. ‘Why have you stopped?’ she asked.
Why do you think I’ve stopped? ‘Because the fall is heavy here.’
‘Well, how long is it going to take us to get back now?’
Jay shot another glance out, and then looked in the mirror at her beautiful perplexed face. It was clear from her question that she had no idea how bad it was, and he was going to have to break it to her. Gently.
‘If it carries on like this there’s no way we’re going to make it back at all, at least not tonight—we’ll be lucky if we make it as far as the nearest village.’
This was sounding like something out of a bad movie. ‘But I don’t want to go to a village!’ she exclaimed. ‘I want to go to home!’
I want. I want. He supposed a woman like that spent all her time getting exactly what it was she wanted. Well, not tonight. ‘You and me both, sweetheart,’ he said grimly. ‘But I’ll settle for what I can take.’
She let the sweetheart bit go. Now was not the time to get frosty because he was being over-familiar. ‘Can’t you just drive on?’
He pressed cautiously on the accelerator, then eased his foot off. ‘Nope. We’re stuck.’
Keri sat bolt upright. ‘What do you mean?’
What the hell do you think I mean? ‘Like I said, we’re stuck. There are drifts in the road. Snowdrifts. And they’re underpacked with ice. It’s a potentially lethal situation.’
Keri briefly shut her eyes. Please tell me this isn’t happening. She opened them again. ‘Couldn’t you have predicted this might happen and taken a different route?’
He might have let it go, but something in her accusation made his blood simmer. ‘There is no alternative route—not out of that God-forsaken field they chose for the shoot—and, if you recall, I asked you three times to hurry up. I said that I didn’t like the look of the sky. But you were too busy being fawned over by a load of luvvies to pay much attention to what I was saying.’
Was he criticising her? ‘I was just doing my job!’
‘And I’m trying to do mine,’ he said darkly. ‘Which is dealing with the situation as it is, not wasting time by casting around for recriminations!’
Keri stared at the back of his dark head, feeling like a tennis-player who had been wrong-footed. And the most annoying thing of all was that he was right. He might have an arrogant, almost insolent way of expressing himself, but she could see his logic. ‘So what do you suggest we do?’ she questioned coolly.
By we he guessed she meant him. ‘I guess we find some shelter.’
‘No.’ Keri shook her head. What did he think—that she was going to book into a hotel for the night? With him? ‘I don’t think you understand—I have to be back in London. Tonight.’ She eyed his muscular frame hopefully. ‘Can’t you dig us out?’
‘With a spare snow-plough?’ Jay smiled. ‘I don’t think you understand, sweetheart—even if I dug us out, it would only be a temporary measure. This road is impassable.’
She felt a momentary flare of panic, until reason reasserted itself. ‘You can’t know that!’
He wasn’t about to start explaining that he had seen snow and ice in pretty much all its guises. The empty bleached horizons of arctic wastes which made this particular snow scene look like a benign Christmas card. Or swimming beneath polar ice-caps and wondering if your blood had frozen solid in your veins, wetsuit or no wetsuit. Men trapped…lost…never to be heard of again.
A hard note entered his voice. ‘Oh, but I can—it’s my job to know.’ He turned off the ignition, and turned round and shrugged. ‘Sorry, but that’s the way it is.’
She opened her mouth to reply, but the words froze on her lips as she met his eyes for the first time—hard, glittering eyes which took her breath away, and it was a long time since a man had done that. It was the first time she had looked at him properly, but then you never really looked at a driver, did you? They were part of the fixtures and fittings, part of the car itself—or at least they were supposed to be. She sucked in a dry gulp of air, confused by the sudden pounding of her heart, as if it was trying to remind her that it still existed. Lord alive, what was a man like this doing driving a car for a living?
His face was chiselled—all hard and lean angles—which seemed at odds with the lush, sensual curve of his upper lip. In the low light she couldn’t make out the colour of his slanting eyes, but she could appreciate the feathery forest of lashes which gave them such an enigmatic look, and she had been modelling for long enough to know that cheekbones like that were rare.
He was, quite simply, gorgeous.
Jay noted the dilation of her eyes with something approaching wry amusement and then put it out of his mind. This was business, not pleasure—and even if it had been he wasn’t into spoiled, pretty girls who expected everyone to jump when they spoke.
‘So we could stay here all night,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Keep the engine running and wait until morning and hope it gets better.’
Spend the night in the car? ‘Are you serious?’
‘Completely.’ He would keep awake quite easily—he had had a lifetime’s experience of waiting for the first faint glow of a winter dawn.
There was something so unequivocal about that one clipped-out word that Keri began to realise that he meant it. But surely there was something they could do? This was England, for heaven’s sake—not the Rocky Mountains!
‘We must be able to phone for help.’ She began to fish around in her handbag. ‘I have a mobile here somewhere.’
His own was snug in his pocket—did she really think he hadn’t thought of that? ‘Sure, go ahead,’ he murmured. ‘Call the emergency services and tell them we’re in trouble.’
She knew just from the tone of his voice that there would be no signal, but stubborn pride made her jab at the buttons with frustration coupled with rising panic.
‘No luck?’ he questioned sardonically.
Her hand was shaking, but she put the phone back in her handbag with as much dignity as possible. ‘So we really are stuck,’ she said flatly.
‘Looks like it.’ Her eyes looked huge and dark, all wide and appealing in her pale, heart-shaped face—designed