In other words someone who coped, pragmatically, as a matter of course, with every eventuality. If he was going to picture that someone he would picture someone middle-aged, dowdy and stern enough to intimidate Ivan the Terrible into instant submission.
Now, he felt as if he had two people, other than himself, to be responsible for!
“You’re sure you are all right?” He cast a glance at her car. Maybe he could get it unstuck and convince her to disobey his sister’s orders, whatever they were, and leave him alone here.
Alone. That was what called to him these days, the seduction of silence, of not being around people. The cabin was perfect. Hard to access, no cell service, spotty internet.
His sister didn’t see his quest for solitude as a good thing. “You just go up there and mull over things that can’t be changed!” his sister had accused him.
And perhaps that was true. Certainly, the presence of his little nephew did not leave much time for mulling! And perhaps that had been Adele’s plan. His sister could be diabolical after all.
But the woman who had just arrived looked more like distraction than heaven-sent helper, so he was going to figure out how to get her unstuck and set her on her way no matter what Adele had to say about it.
For some reason, he did not want the curly-headed, green-eyed, red-shoed woman to make it past the first guard and into his house!
He regarded her thoughtfully, trying to figure out why he felt he did not want to let her in. And then he knew. Despite the fact the accident had left her shaken, she seemed determined to not let it affect her.
Look at the shoes! She was one of those positive, sunny, impractical people and he did not want her invading his space.
When had he come to like the dark of his own misery and loneliness so much?
“Yes, I’m fine,” she said, her voice, tremulous with bravery, piercing the darkness of his own thoughts. “More embarrassed than anything.”
“And well you should be.” The faint sympathy he had felt for her melted. “A person with a grain of sense and so little winter driving experience should not have tackled these roads today. I told her not to send you.”
She blinked at that. Opened her mouth, then closed it, looked down at her little red shoes and ineffectually tried to scrape the snow off them.
“I detest stubborn women,” he muttered. “Why would you travel today?”
“Perhaps it wasn’t my most sensible decision,” she said, and he watched the chin that had hinted at a stubborn nature tilt upward a touch, “but I can’t guarantee the result would not have been similar, even on the finest summer day.”
He lifted an eyebrow at her, intrigued despite himself.
“My second name is Murphy, for my maternal grandfather, and it is very suiting. I am like a poster child for Murphy’s Law.”
He had the feeling she was trying to keep things light in the face of the deliberate dark judgment in his own features, so he did not respond to the lightness of her tone, just raised his eyebrow even higher at her.
“Murphy’s Law?”
“You know,” she clarified, trying for a careless grin and missing by a mile. “Anything that can go wrong, will.”
He stared at her. For a moment, the crystal clear green of those eyes clouded, and he felt some thread of shared experience, of unspeakable sorrow, trying to bind them together.
His sense of needing to get rid of her strengthened. But then he saw the blood in her hair.
* * *
Stacy could have kicked herself! What on earth had made her say that to him? It was not at all in keeping with the new her: strong, composed, sophisticated. You didn’t blurt out things like that to a perfect stranger! She had intended it to sound light; instead, it sounded like a pathetic play for sympathy!
And, damn it, sometimes when you opened that door you did not know what was going to come through.
And what came through for her was a powerful vision of the worst moment of anything that can go wrong will in her entire life. She was standing outside her high school gym. She closed her eyes against it, but it came anyway.
Standing outside the high school waiting anxiously, just wanting to be anywhere but there. Waiting for the car that never came. A teacher finding her long after everyone else had gone home, wrapping her in her own sweater, because Stacy was shivering. She already knew there was only one reason that her father would not have come. Her whole world gone so terribly and completely wrong in an instant...left craving the one thing she could never have again.
Her family.
She had hit her head harder than she thought! That’s what was causing this. Or was it the look she had glimpsed ever so briefly in his own eyes? The look that had given her the sensation that he was a man bereft?
“You actually don’t look okay,” he decided.
She opened her eyes to see him studying her too intently. Just what every woman—even one newly devoted to independence—wanted to hear from Kiernan McAllister!
“I don’t?”
“You’re not going to faint, are you?”
“No!” Her denial was vehement, given the fact that she had been contemplating that very possibility—heart implosion—only seconds ago.
“You’ve gone quite pale.” He was looking at her too intensely.
“It’s my coloring,” she said. “I always look pale.”
This was, unfortunately, more than true. Though she had the dark brown hair of her father, she had not inherited his olive complexion. Her mother had been a redhead, and she had her ultrapale, sensitive skin and green eyes.
“You are an unusual combination of light and dark.” She squirmed under his gaze, until he tightened his hold.
“Remember Murphy’s Law,” he warned her. “It’s very slippery out here, and those shoes look more suited to a bowling alley than a fresh snowfall.”
A bowling alley? “They’re Kleinbacks,” she insisted on informing him, trying to shore up her quickly disintegrating self-esteem. The shoes, after all proclaimed arrival, not disaster.
“Well, you’ll be lyin’-on-your-backs if you aren’t careful in them. You don’t want to add to your injuries.”
“Injuries?”
Still holding her one arm firmly, he used his other—he seemed to have his cell phone in it—and whipped off the towel he had around his waist!
Still juggling the towel and the phone, he found a dry corner of it, and pressed it, with amazing gentleness, onto the top of her head. “I didn’t see it at first, amongst the chocolate curls—”
Chocolate curls? It was the nicest way her hair had ever been described! Did that mean he was noticing more about her than his sack-of-potatoes hold had indicated?
“—but there’s blood in your hair.”
His voice was perfection, a silk scarf caressing the sensitive area of her neck.
“There is?” She peeked at him around the edges of the towel.
He dabbed at her hair—again, she was taken with the tenderness of his touch, when he radiated such a powerful aura—and then he turned the towel to her, proof.
It looked like an extremely expensive towel, brilliant white, probably Egyptian cotton, and now it had little speckles of red from her blood. Though for some reason, maybe the knock on the head, the sight of all that blood was not nearly as alarming to her as he was.
Since he had removed the towel, Stacy forced herself not to let her gaze stray from his face. Water was sliding out