Tears of relief stung her eyes as she trudged the last few feet to the back door and thumped with her dad’s big mitten.
No one answered.
They were there. A pickup was parked in the driveway, buried in snow. Lights lit up the whole downstairs. Come on, come on, Daisy thought desperately. I don’t really need a big hero. Just a little one. Just once, just once, just the least little break, and I swear I’ll be tough again tomorrow.
She thumped again. Louder. Harder.
Still, no one answered.
Impatiently she turned the knob, and was relieved to find the door unlocked. “Mrs. Cunningham? Mr. Cunningham?” One step inside and she immediately felt the gush of warm, wonderful heat. Nothing and no one could have forced her back out in the cold again. Swiftly she latched the door behind her, still calling out, “Yoo-hoo! It’s just me, Daisy Campbell. You know, Margaux and Colin’s daughter from across the road. Are you there?”
She heard something. A groan. A man’s groan. The sound was so unnerving and unexpected that she responded instinctively by running toward it. Someone sounded hurt. Badly hurt.
She’d been in the Cunninghams’ house before, but that was years ago. They had no children of their own, but she’d been there trick-or-treating, selling magazines for school projects, bringing a bushel of apples from her dad’s orchard, that kind of thing. She’d never seen the upstairs, but she knew the front hall led to a living room off to the right, then a dining area, then the big, old fashioned kitchen.
The man’s groan had seemed to come from the kitchen.
The last time she’d seen it, the room had avocado-green counters and wallpaper with big splashes of orange and green—circa the sixties or seventies—who knew? She’d been a kid, didn’t care. Now, though, the kitchen was obviously in the process of a major rehab. A sawhorse and power tools and impressive-looking cords dominated the middle of the room. There was sawdust all over the floor, new counters and cupboards in the process of being installed. Half were done. The ceiling was done, too, except for a light fixture hanging like a drunken sailor. And beneath that, tangled with an overturned ladder, was a man.
Daisy couldn’t take in much in that millisecond—just enough to register that he wasn’t one of the Cunninghams. The stranger was youngish, somewhere around thirty. She took in his appearance in a mental snap-shot—the dark hair, the lean, broad-shouldered build. He was dressed for work, in jeans and a long-sleeved tee, a tool belt slung around his hips. But God. None of that mattered.
He was lying on the dusty, littered floor, his eyes closed, flat on his back. One of his boots was still caught in the rung of a ladder. A pool of blood gleamed beneath his head, shining dark red under the bald light-bulb.
Teague Larson had never gone for angels. It wasn’t personal. He’d just always liked sex and sin and trouble too much to waste a lot of time on the saintly types.
On the other hand, he’d never planned on being dead before—and he figured he had to be dead. No one’s head could hurt this bad and still be alive. It seemed further proof of his unfortunate demise that the woman had miraculously appeared out of nowhere.
She was so damned gorgeous that he might even forgive her for being an angel. After his head stopped hurting. If his head ever stopped hurting.
It wasn’t helping that his personal, breathtakingly unforgettable angel was swearing loudly enough to wake all the rest of the dead.
“Damn it. Damn it. Damn it. Does it ever occur to anybody that sometime I’d like to be the one who gets rescued? No. Have I ever asked anything from anyone? No. Did I get my sisters married, get my parents retired, get everybody settled? But for Pete’s sake, I need a break today. The one thing I do not need is a problem like you. If you die, I swear, I’m going to kill you, and I’m not kidding! You don’t want to see me in a temper. Trust me. You are going to wake up and you’re going to be all right, or I swear, you’ll be sorry!”
Truth to tell, she wasn’t directly talking to him. She just seemed to be shrieking in a top-voice soprano as she flew around the place. He closed his eyes again, willing the room to stop spinning, willing his head to hurt less—at least enough that he could grasp what was going on.
Unfortunately his memory was slowly seeping back in Technicolor and surround sound. Blurry pictures filled his mind of the ladder tipping, then the noisy crash and scrambling fall. It was the worst kind of memory, because it mortifyingly illustrated one guy stubbornly trying to do the job of two. The story of his life. Too much pride. No ability to compromise. Hell, he’d never played well with others in the sandbox.
His personal angel suddenly pushed the ladder out of the way, which jarred his ankle. Until then, he hadn’t known his ankle hurt even worse than his head. He’d been better off when he thought he was dead. It’d been quiet around here then. Safer. Now that she’d forced him back to reality, there was no going back to that nice, warm, unconscious place. She’d ruined it.
On the other hand, there seemed to be compensations.
He watched her peel off a silly farmer’s hat, shimmy out of an oversize old barn coat, push off clodhopper boots. If he’d had the energy, he’d damn near have gasped at the transformation. He’d already seen she had a gorgeous face, but beneath all that clothing was some kind of guy’s favorite secret fantasy.
Deliberately, enticingly, she stroked the front of his pants, clearly trying to get into his pocket. He wasn’t in the mood, no, but pain or no pain, a guy could be forced to rise with enough motivation. She was gentle enough, but she was obviously in a rush, hurrying, hurrying, as if she couldn’t wait to get her hands on his you-know-what.
Okay, now he knew definitely that he wasn’t dead. The view alone inspired him to keep his eyes open, no matter how badly he was hurting. The way her head was bent over him, he saw a tumble of rich, dark hair. Beneath that crazy old farmer’s coat was a Christmas-red coat—the kind of thing women looked at in fashion magazines, not the kind of coat people wore in White Hills, Vermont. Didn’t matter, she shrugged out of the coat swiftly.
She was stripping for him. Teague told himself his mind was still jangled with pain, but she took off both her coats, hadn’t she? And she was still moving, still touching him, still in a big rush. Teague liked to think he’d ignited his share of passion—no lover he’d had ever complained—but he’d never provoked a complete stranger to immediate intimacy before. If he weren’t half-dead and more than half-goofy, he’d be loving it. He was loving it. He just had a sneaky feeling that he was temporarily a pickle short of a brain. On the other hand, who the hell needed reality?
When she leaned over him, her soft black sweater brushed his cheek. The sweater’s V-neck offered him a free look at firm, high breasts. Bountiful breasts. Bountiful, god’s-gift-to-a-man, turgid-nippled, plump breasts with the scent of exotic perfume deep in the shadow between them. When she shifted a little, he caught a glimpse of sleek, long legs encased in black pants. A pert little butt.
He liked the legs, but man, that little butt was the sexiest thing he’d seen in months. Maybe years.
He’d only caught a glance at her face before—enough to label her looks striking—but now she turned. Even fantasies weren’t this perfect. The skin was smoother than a baby’s. A slash of elegant cheekbones had been burned by the wind, the cherry color startling next to all that white skin. A high arch of eyebrows framed big, soft eyes, brown gold like cognac, and her mouth…oh, God, that kissable mouth…
But then he forgot her looks altogether, because her fingers dug really deep into his pocket. Instead of closing her hand around his best friend, though, her fingers emerged into the light, clasping his cell phone.
“Come on,” she muttered. “Come on, 911, come on…”
All right, so possibly he wasn’t as excited about her or life as he first thought. His eyelids drooped; he couldn’t keep them open. His mind felt as muzzy as steel-wool soup. He heard her voice on the phone, caught partial snatches of her side of a conversation, but he seemed