having to raise her voice over the cracking sound of the storm as the ice and sleet pummeled the trees and ground. “Not going up that hill in this.” She had her good hiking boots on, and they had great traction, but ice was ice. She’d have to look in the addendum section to see if there was a note about where she might find a bag of gravel or something to throw around, at least in the backyard.
Maybe Trevor knows, she thought. No. If she was lucky, he’d have already fixed a sandwich or something and gone to bed. Wherever that was. A vicious gust drove the ice pellets sideways, hitting her cheek as she tried to corral the dogs back toward the house. And even that didn’t stop her from picturing Trevor in bed. Getting ready to get in bed. Possibly taking a shower before going to bed.
“Come on,” she shouted to the dogs, perhaps a bit more loudly than absolutely necessary, then all but dragged them back inside. “My God, it’s nasty out there, isn’t it?” she said, talking to them as she took their jackets and leashes off and toweled them down. Poor Jack was trembling, not enjoying the rubdown nearly as much as he had last time. She crouched in front of him and worked the ice from his paws. “I’m sorry, little guy. It sucks to be a small dog in a big storm, I know.”
Martha was licking at the ice clumps in her paws, but otherwise didn’t seem to be all that adversely affected.
“Wow, check that out,” came a male voice almost directly overhead. “The storm’s really picked up.”
She prided herself in not even glancing up as Trevor’s jean-clad legs passed by her lower line of vision. A mere tip of the chin would have put her eyes right in line with his—“Sorry, fella,” she told Jack, forcing her attention to stay exclusively on finishing up with Jack’s ice-clumped feet. “I know it hurts.”
“Maybe it’s too late to get my car in, it’s probably encrusted by now. But I’d like to at least go check.”
She finished with Jack and had to stand to attend to Martha, who had already taken care of the worst of things with her big feet. Emma rubbed her head, neck, and legs down with a dry towel. “Suit yourself,” she said to Trevor, completely unconcerned. Completely unconcerned that they were going to be stuck in this house—together—for possibly longer than one night.
Right.
Just as soon as she stopped thinking about him naked in the shower, she’d be unconcerned.
“Here,” he said, reaching out to take the towel from her hands. “I can finish drying her off if you’ll—”
“Just because I was just out there does not mean I’m heading out to check on your car. You want it in the garage, I’ll be happy to—”
“Did I ask you to go out there? All I need you to do is open one of the garage doors.” He tugged the towel out of her grudging grip.
“Fine,” she said, knowing she sounded like a shrew, but he did things to her equilibrium she really didn’t appreciate. Too bad if he didn’t understand that. She wasn’t about to explain it to him. She left him with the dogs and headed down the passageway to the garage, then realized she’d forgotten the Hamilton bible with the garage code and turned around to head back. A second later two things happened almost simultaneously. The lights flickered out, casting her in immediate full darkness…and she ran chest first into Trevor Hamilton.
“Hold on there,” he said, finding her arms easily despite the complete lack of light.
“The lights,” she said. “What happened?”
“The storm, I’m guessing. Ice is heavy. It probably coated the power lines and took some of them down.”
“Generator?” Surely a house as massive as this one had a backup system, but she didn’t recall reading anything about one in the book.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never been up here when the power went out.”
She suddenly realized she was still standing deep inside his personal space, and that he still held her arms. “I—I need to get back to the kitchen, make sure the dogs and Cicero aren’t freaked out.”
“Yeah, I guess my car isn’t going to come inside out of the cold after all.”
“Do you need anything from it?”
There was a pause and she could have sworn it wasn’t a comfortable one, but given that she couldn’t see even a glimmer of his face, she couldn’t really tell.
“Nothing that can’t wait until morning.”
Whatever awkward pause Emma thought she’d detected was lost in the sudden intimacy of having a man talking about being there in the morning, his voice all deep and sexy, when they were—once again—all caught up inside each other’s personal space. Yeah. She really needed to stop that.
Clearing her throat, she stepped back, bumped into the passageway wall, stepped forward again, bumped into Trevor, who was reaching out to steady her. “Sorry,” she said, frustrated and, when he just chuckled, a little embarrassed. So much for getting outside the fog that seemed to envelop her every time he was near.
“Not to worry,” he said. He held on to one of her arms, then turned and pulled her hand to his waist. “Here, grab hold and we’ll feel our way back to the kitchen.” He pushed her hand so it slid down the rock-hard side of his torso to where his belt was looped through the waistband of his jeans. “Got me?”
If he only knew. Rubbing her hands all over him…not exactly helping her out at the moment. That he didn’t seem remotely aware of the personal nature of this kind of contact, or what it might be doing to her, didn’t make her feel much better, either. Apparently she was the only one who went into some kind of hormonal stupor when the two of them were close. Not all that surprising really, but still.
“Yeah,” she said, then cleared her throat when the word came out as a croak. “Go ahead. We need to check on the dogs.”
Her eyes had adjusted a little to the dark, but with almost no natural light filtering into the passageway, she couldn’t make out much more than his shadow in front of her.
She could feel his body heat through the fabric of his shirt, and how lean and hard his waist was as he moved in front of her. And how much she’d love to run her hands around to the front, to what was certainly to be his equally hard and flat stomach…then he’d pause, reach down and cover her hands, pull them more tightly around him, stop, and slide them around his waist, before tipping her chin up so he could dip his own down and—
“Watch your step,” he said, quite abruptly interrupting her little fantasy. “Kitchen straight ahead.”
She jerked her hand away. “I—I think I can take it from here. I have an emergency flashlight in my bag.”
“Handy. Why don’t you turn it on and we can root around for some candles or something, so you don’t burn your batteries out.”
“I’m just going to get Cicero settled, make sure the dogs are okay, then find my room.”
They bumped their way into the kitchen, where they were greeted by the cold noses and the enthusiastic whining of both dogs.
“Welcome!” Cicero called, sounding a bit panicky as he rustled in his cage.
“It’s okay,” Emma said, as she rubbed Martha’s body and crouched down to scratch Jack behind the ears. She stumbled her way to the counter and groped along, looking for her bag, but couldn’t find it. “I know I left it right here.”
“Left what?”
She jumped a little when she realized Trevor was right behind her. “My bag, with the flashlight.”
“Oh, you meant your shoulder bag? You—uh, I think you have it on your shoulder. At least you did when you walked out of the kitchen earlier.”
Even as he said it, she realized he was right. In all the commotion, she’d sort of managed to forget that little