weekend could have anything other than a bad ending.”
Melanie felt worse than ever. For a few minutes Richard had forgotten himself, pushed aside his responsibilities and found his long-lost inner child. He’d revealed his human side. Then she’d gone and ruined that by getting too uptight and serious. Of course, if she apologized one more time, he was liable to blow sky-high. He seemed to be operating on a very short fuse. It would have been a good time to get out of town, but unfortunately the local roads had yet to be cleared.
She held out her hand, determined to get them back on a safer footing. “Truce?”
He gave her a mocking look. “I hadn’t realized we were at war.”
“But we’re heading in that direction,” she said. “And it is my fault. I sent out all sorts of mixed messages.”
He gazed into her eyes, his expression forbidding. “Maybe it would be smarter to stay at odds,” he suggested. “We don’t seem to be able to handle anything else without getting offtrack.”
It was true, though Melanie couldn’t imagine why that was. Forget all the issues about working with him, he was far too intense—okay, far too stuffy—to be attractive to her, beyond his obvious physical appeal. And yet he was attractive, no question about that. Otherwise she wouldn’t have come so darn close to throwing herself at him without one second’s consideration of her deeply held principles about mixing business and pleasure.
She imagined that he found the whole attraction thing to be just as confusing. She was nothing at all like the rich, sophisticated, edgy women with whom he was normally seen around town. She’d seen him in black tie often enough on the society pages to recognize the glamorous type of woman he preferred.
Given that, there was only one thing to do. If they both accepted the notion of anything personal between them being insane, then perhaps the next few hours wouldn’t be too awful. In fact, perhaps by morning they’d be able to laugh about everything, shake hands and say goodbye with no lingering regrets. She’d write off any chance of landing this PR consulting contract and cut her losses. Anything else would be complete lunacy.
Even as she was coming to that conclusion, Richard reached into his jacket and pulled out a key. “Why don’t you go on back to the house?” he suggested, offering it to her.
“Where are you going?” she asked as she accepted the key and tucked it into her own jacket pocket.
“For a walk,” he said. “I’ll pick up one of those cameras for you.”
Melanie opened her mouth to offer to come with him, but he’d already turned on his heel and taken off. Clearly he was eager to escape her company. This was what she’d wanted not five seconds ago, but now she was having second thoughts.
She heaved a sigh as she watched him go, shoulders hunched against the wind that had kicked up off the river. He looked so alone. How was it possible that a man as rich, brilliant and sexy as Richard Carlton could be so completely alone?
She had answers to all sorts of questions about him stored away in her research files, but not to that one. Naturally that meant it was the one she found most intriguing, the one that opened a tiny little place in her heart to him.
And that, she concluded with complete candor, was the one that could prove to be her undoing.
Richard knew it was ridiculous to feel cranky and completely out of sorts because a woman had changed her mind—and the rules—on him. It happened all the time, and he’d never given two figs about it before. Women were unpredictable creatures, that was all. It wasn’t personal. He’d watched Destiny dispatch so many perfectly respectable suitors over the years, he’d come to accept the behavior as normal.
But he’d taken Melanie’s sudden change of heart damn personally, which meant that on some totally unexpected level she’d gotten to him. How the devil had that happened?
He wrestled with that unanswerable question all the way to the fast-mart, where he picked up a disposable camera, then had a sudden inspiration to buy a just-released video and some popcorn for that evening. If they were going to be stuck here together for another night, entertainment that didn’t require conversation seemed like a fine idea.
As he trudged back toward the cottage through the deep snow, he tried to recapture some of his earlier delight in the quiet, snow-shrouded landscape, but it wouldn’t come. Without Melanie, it was a bit as if that cardinal had flown away, taking all of the color with it.
He groaned at the thought. He did not want Melanie Hart adding color to his life. He didn’t want to start waxing poetic about her influence on him or his surroundings. He wanted to go back to that serene time earlier in the week before he’d ever met the annoying woman. Then the prospect of several uninterrupted hours in front of his computer or with his mountain of paperwork would have been the bright spot on his weekend agenda.
Unfortunately, recapturing that serenity was all but impossible when Melanie was going to be underfoot the second he crossed the threshold at the cottage. And she would be underfoot. She seemed to be the kind who liked to talk things out, make perfect sense of them, instead of accepting that they’d nearly made a dreadful mistake and moving on. He’d seen that let’s-talk-about-this look in her eyes right before he’d turned on his heel and left her a few blocks from the cottage. He hoped to hell she was over it by now.
He was half-frozen by the time he reached the cottage. He was grateful for the blazing fire she’d started, but as he waited for Melanie to appear, to start pestering him with comments or analysis or, God forbid, yet another apology, he grew increasingly perplexed by her absence. Had she taken off, even though the local roads were still all but impassable? Come to think of it, had he paid any attention to whether her car was still in the driveway? He couldn’t remember noticing.
Panicked that she might have done something so completely impulsive and dangerous because of him, he bounded upstairs and very nearly broke down the guest-room door with his pounding. He heard her sleepily mumbled “What?” just as he threw open the door.
Undisguised relief flooded through him at the sight of her in the bed, the comforter pulled up to her chin, her hair rumpled, her eyes dazed.
“Is something wrong?” she asked in that same husky, half-asleep tone.
The comforter drooped, revealing one bare shoulder and a tantalizing hint of breast. Heart pounding, Richard began backing away. “No, really. Sorry.”
“Richard?”
Even half-asleep, she was constitutionally incapable of letting anything go, he concluded grimly. He was going to have to explain himself, or at least come up with something plausible that wouldn’t give away how frantic he’d been when he’d imagined her risking her neck on the icy roads.
“Um, the front door was open,” he said, improvising quickly. “I thought someone might have broken in. I just wanted to be sure you were okay.”
Her gaze narrowed. “The front door was open?”
“Just a crack,” he said, guessing that she was about to worry that piece of information to death.
“But I closed it. I know I did. I didn’t lock it, because I wasn’t sure if you had another key with you and I wasn’t sure if I’d hear you if I fell asleep and you knocked, but I’m sure it was securely shut.”
“No big deal,” he said. “As long as you’re okay. Go back to sleep. Sorry I disturbed you.”
She smiled and stretched, allowing another tiny slip of the comforter. She seemed to be oblivious to the sexy picture she presented.
“I’m awake now. I might as well get up.”
Because she seemed about to do exactly that without regard for her lack of attire—or what his vivid imagination believed to be her lack of attire—Richard bolted. He wasn’t sure his heart could take the image of a totally unclad Melanie being burned in his mind forever.
He