Christmas Passions. Catherine Spencer

was that her legs were snugly pinned by Leo’s, and his blue eyes were watching her with the shuttered expression of a man not about to reveal a hint of what he was thinking.

      But if the workings of his mind remained a mystery, she was left in little doubt about her own. Embarrassment and guilt swept over her in equal measure. How could she have allowed him to kiss her—to come disgracefully close to making love to her? And how would she ever again face Deenie without cringing?

      “No need to look so stricken, Ava,” Leo said. “Neither of us surrendered to our baser instincts in sleep. If anyone asks, you can truthfully say you upheld your scruples in the face of adversity.”

      “And what will you say, should anyone ask you?” she retorted, immeasurably ticked off that he sounded so unruffled when she was all of a-dither at finding his thigh flung over her hip and the lovely warm length of his torso pressed up against hers.

      “That you snore,” he said blandly.

      “I certainly do not!”

      “How do you know? Did you ask the last man you slept with?”

      “That’s none of your business,” she said, not about to admit that the closest she’d come to “sleeping” with anyone was in the back seat of her prom date’s car when she was eighteen—a disastrous, fumbling affair which had ended when he’d suffered the humiliation of premature ejaculation before he’d divested her of her bra—and a couple of semi-hot dates with an ambulance driver when she was in nursing school.

      “No,” Leo said. “I guess it’s not.” He lifted the blankets and let a gust of cold air sweep away the cosy warmth between their bodies. “And lying here speculating won’t get my vehicle out of the ditch.”

      He rolled cautiously to his feet, stretched guardedly, and reached for his sheepskin jacket. “You planning to spend the day down there, Ava?” he inquired, when she didn’t rush to join him.

      “No,” she said, eyeing her pantyhose which sprawled wantonly over a saddle rack. “I’m waiting for you to leave so that I can dress without an audience.”

      “Dress?” To her horror, he picked up her stockings and dangled them from one hand the way a husband might. With intimate familiarity. “If you’re talking about climbing into these, you might as well forget it. They’re still soaking wet. And your shoes,” he added, peering at the pitiful things which lay side by side on the floor like two drowned rats, “aren’t any better. You’ll have to throw yourself on the mercy of the lady of the house—always assuming she’s more charitably disposed toward us this morning than she was last night.”

      The lady of the house proved more than accommodating, as did her husband. She sent a pair of socks, boots a size too large, and an invitation to breakfast, while he hooked a tractor to Leo’s vehicle and hauled it out of the ditch. By ten o’clock, Ava and Leo were on their way, fortified with home-cured ham and farm fresh eggs, and with nothing to show for their overnight mishap but the faint whiff of horses clinging to their clothing.

      That, and a smothering air of disquiet.