He was referring to her tires!
“Not even all seasons,” he said, squinting past her at the front tire that rested on top of what had been, no doubt, a very expensive shrub. His tone was disapproving. “Summer tires. What were you thinking?”
It was terribly difficult to drag her attention away this unexpectedly delicious encounter with the Kiernan McAllister and focus on the question. She felt as if her voice was coming from under water when she answered.
“I’ve never put winter tires on my car,” she confessed. “And if I were going to, it would not occur to me to do it in October. It is the season of falling leaves and pumpkins, not this.”
“You could have asked for me to send a car,” he said sternly.
Stacy contemplated that. She could have asked the Kiernan McAllister to send a car? In what universe? Obviously—and sadly—he was expecting someone else.
Or, was there the possibility Caroline had done more than give her an address? Did she have some kind of in with him? Had she set something up for Stacy?
That was her imagination again, because it was not likely he would be so intent on giving an interview he would send a car!
“Were you not prepared at all for mountain driving?”
“Not at all,” she admitted. “I was born and raised in Vancouver. You know how often we get snow there.”
At his grunt of what she interpreted as disapproval, she felt compelled to rush on. “Though I’ve always dreamed of a winter holiday. Skating on a frozen pond, learning to ski. That kind of thing. Now, I’m not so sure about that. Winter seems quite a bit more pleasant in movies and pictures and snow globes. Maybe I should just fast-forward to the hot chocolate in front of the fire.”
Was she chattering? Oh, God, she was chattering nervously, and it wasn’t just her teeth! Shut up, she ordered herself, but she had to add, “Humph. Reality and imagination collide, again.”
Story of her life: imagining walking down the aisle, her gorgeous white dress flowing out behind her, toward a man who looked at her with such love and such longing...
She did not want to be having those kinds of treacherous thoughts around this man.
“I always liked this reality,” McAllister said, and he actually reached out his free hand and caught a snowflake with it. Then he yanked his hand back abruptly, and the line around his mouth tightened and Stacy saw something mercurial in his storm-gray eyes.
She realized he had recalled, after the words came out of his mouth, that it was this reality—in the form of an avalanche—that had caused the death of his brother-in-law.
Sympathy clawed at her throat, as did a sense of knowing he was holding something inside that was eating him like acid.
It was a lot to understand from a glimpse of something in his eyes, from the way his mouth had changed, but this was exactly what Caroline had meant about Stacy’s ability to get to the heart of a story.
For some reason—probably from the loss of her family when she was a child—she had a superhoned sense of intuition that had left her with an ability to see people with extraordinary clarity and tell their stories deeply and profoundly.
Not that McAllister looked as if he would be willing to have his story told at all, his secrets revealed, his feelings probed.
Stacy had a sudden sense if she did get to the heart of this man, as Caroline had wistfully suggested, she would find it broken.
McAllister’s face was closed now, as if he sensed he had let his guard down just for that instant and that it might have revealed too much to her.
“What did you do when you lost control?” he asked her.
Of her life? How on earth could he tell? Was he has intuitive as she herself was?
But, to her relief, his attention was focused, disapprovingly, on her tires. He was still keeping her upright on the slippery ground, his hand now firmly clamped on her elbow, but if he was feeling the same sensation of being singed that she was, it in no way showed in his face. He had the look of a man who was always composed and in control.
“What did I do? I closed my eyes, and held on for dear life, of course!”
“Imagining a good outcome?” he said drily.
She nodded sadly. The collision with reality was more than evident.
He sighed, with seeming long-suffering, though their acquaintance had been extremely brief!
“You might want to keep in mind, for next time, if you lose control on ice, to try and steer into the spin, rather than away from it.”
“That doesn’t seem right.”
“I know, it goes against everyone’s first instinct. But really, that’s what you do. You go with it, instead of fighting it.”
The sense of being singed increased when Stacy became suddenly and intensely aware that, despite the snow falling in large and chilly flakes all around them, despite the fact the driveway was pure ice, the question really should not have been what she had on for tires—or for clothes! That should not have been the question at all, given what he had on.
Which was next to nothing!
Maybe she had hit her head harder than she thought, and this whole thing was a dream. The scene was surreal after all.
How could it be possible McAllister was out here in his driveway, one hand gripping her firmly, glaring at her tires, when he was dressed in nothing more than a pair of shove-on sandals, a towel cinched around his waist?
The shock of it made her release the arm she clutched, and the wisps of her remaining sympathy were blown away as if before a strong wind. All that remained was awareness of him in a very different way.
She would have staggered back—and probably slipped again—but when she had let go, he had continued to hold on.
His warmth and his strength were like electricity, but not the benign kind that powered the toaster.
No, the furious, unpredictable kind. The lightning-bolt-that-could-tear-open-the-sky kind. The kind that could split apart trees and turn the world to fire.
Stacy realized the hammering of her heart during the slippery trip into the mountains, and after she had bounced over the curb into the fountain, had been but a pale prelude to the speeds her heart could attain!
KIERNAN MCALLISTER WATCHED the pulse in the woman’s throat. The accident had obviously affected her more than she wanted to let on. Her face was very pale and he considered the awful possibility she was going to keel over, either because she was close to fainting or because her shoes were so unsuited to this kind of ground.
As he watched, her hand, tiny and pale, fluttered to her own throat to keep tabs on the wildly beating tattoo of her pulse, and McAllister tightened his grip on her even more.
“Are you okay?” he asked again. He could feel his brow furrow as he looked in her face.
He had told his sister, Adele, not to send assistance. He had told her, in no uncertain terms, that he found it insulting that she thought he needed it. She seemed to have agreed, but he should have guessed she only pretended to acquiesce.
“I think I’m just shaken.”
The girl—no, she wasn’t a girl, despite her diminutive size—had a voice that was low and husky, a lovely softness to it, unconsciously sexy. She was, in fact, a lovely young woman. Dark curls sprang untamed around a delicate, pale, elfin face. Her eyes were green and huge, her nose a little button, her chin had a certain defiant set to it.
Kiernan’s annoyance at his sister grew.
If she had needed