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Jay Linur had removed his rather battered flying jacket too, but, unlike her, he had obviously made no concessions to sartorial elegance. His outfit was tough and practical. Faded jeans hugged his long, lean legs and he wore a warm dark sweater which softly clung to his torso. Firelight danced flames across the ruffled black hair, which was thick and slightly too long—giving him a buccaneer air which seemed to blend in well with the ancient fireplace.
He looked, she realised, completely at home as he lounged rather indolently along the rug, watching the progress of the fire—all rugged and arrogant confidence as he gazed into the flames, his thick lashes hooding his eyes. He turned his head to study her with lazy interest.
Keri put her mug down and winced as the ragged nail scratched against the palm of her hand.
‘Hurt yourself?’ he questioned softly.
‘Not really, but I’ve broken my nail—and I can’t even file it down—I left my make-up bag in the car!’
He gave a short laugh. ‘Outside it’s sub-zero, the snow is still coming down with no sign of a let-up, we’re stranded God knows where, and all you can worry about is your damned fingernail!’
Keri was stung into defence. ‘It isn’t just vanity, if that’s what you’re implying—my job happens to depend on the state of my hands, among other things, and I was supposed to be doing a magazine-shoot for nail varnish next week!’ It was, she realised, the first time in her life that she had ever felt the need to justify her job to anyone. So why—especially now, and to him of all people?
Jay took a mug of tea, sipped it and grimaced, wondering what type of world it was where a broken fingernail could mean anything at all other than just that. Not a world he could ever inhabit, that was for sure. Different strokes for different folks, he supposed.
He put the drink down in disgust. ‘What the hell did you put in this? Arsenic?’
‘Oh, please don’t tempt me! I just used what was available,’ she said crossly. ‘Which were teabags which looked like they belonged in the Dark Ages!’
‘Don’t believe they had teabags in the Dark Ages,’ he responded drily.
Keri almost laughed. Almost. Boundaries, she reminded herself. ‘Do you have an answer for everything, Mr Linur?’
He looked at her. Oh, yes. The answer was staring him right in the face right now. Her lips were parted, so soft and so gleaming that they were practically begging to be kissed. He didn’t have to approve of an icy beauty whose whole livelihood depended on the random paintbox of looks which nature had thrown together, but it didn’t stop him wanting her.
‘Try me,’ he murmured. ‘Ask me any question you like.’
There it was again—that tingy feeling, that sense of being out of control, as if she had drunk too much champagne too quickly. Keri swallowed. ‘Okay. How’s this for starters—just how are you proposing to get us out of here?’
CHAPTER THREE
JAY shrugged. ‘I’m not,’ he said flatly.
Keri raised her eyebrows. ‘You mean that we’re going to have to stay here for ever?’
He smiled at her sarcasm. Don’t worry, sweetheart, he thought acidly—the idea appalls me just as much as it clearly does you. ‘It’s an intriguing prospect, but no. There’s not a lot we can do, at least until the snow stops. Until then we’ll just have to sit it out.’
The thought of that was making her more than uneasy. ‘For how long?’
‘Who knows? Until the thaw starts, or until someone finds us.’
And who knew how long that would be? ‘You haven’t even tried telephoning for help!’ she accused.
‘That’s because there isn’t a phone. I checked.’
‘How can a place not have a telephone in this day and age?’
He shrugged his broad shoulders. It sounded like bliss to him. ‘For the same reason that there’s no television.’ He shifted his legs slightly. ‘I suspect that this is a holiday home and that the people who own it have deliberately decided to do away with all modern comforts.’
‘Why would they do something like that?’
‘The usual reasons. Televisions and telephones create stress, and some people don’t like that stress. It’s why they sail. Or climb mountains. Why they buy places like this—to escape.’
His voice had taken on a hard note, the tone of someone who was familiar with the word ‘escape’, and suddenly Keri longed for the safe and predictable. The sanctuary of her London flat—a clean and modernistic haven, as far removed from this big barn of a place as it was possible to imagine. Where heating was instantly produced by the touch of a button and cars and taxis moved comfortingly outside.
A world where men wore linen and silk and paid you clever compliments—not criticising you and then eyeing you with a kind of lazy watchfulness which had the ability to make you feel as flustered as a gauche young girl, and moving their legs as if to draw attention to their hard, muscular definition.
Quickly, she looked into the fire instead. ‘Ironic, really,’ she said, and thought how loud her voice sounded in the big, echoing room. ‘A house designed for people to escape to, and we can’t get out of it!’
‘It could be a lot worse,’ he said grimly. ‘At least we’re inside.’
Yes, they were. Alone. And Keri had been right—there were no rules in situation like this; they had to make them up as they went along. ‘So what are we going to do?’
He sat up. ‘Well, first we need to eat.’
‘Eat?’ she echoed blankly.
‘You do eat, I suppose?’ He watched her in the firelight. She was all bones, he thought—angles and shadows and long, slender legs, like a highly strung racehorse. The leather skirt clung to hips which were as narrow as a boy’s, and although she did have breasts, they were tiny, like a young girl’s. Jay liked his women curvy, with firm flesh that you could mould beneath the palms of your hands and soft hips that you could hold onto as you drove into them and catapulted them to pleasure. ‘Though not a lot, by the look of you.’
‘Oddly enough, the well-fed look isn’t in vogue at the moment,’ she said drily.
‘I’ve never really understood why.’
‘Because clothes look better on slender figures and that’s a fact.’
Jay gave a half-smile. ‘But nakedness looks better on a curvy figure, and that’s a fact!’
‘Well, thanks for bringing the conversation downmarket!’
He shrugged. She thought that nakedness was downmarket? ‘That wasn’t my intention.’
‘You’re saying you don’t like thin women?’
His eyes narrowed. ‘Careful, Keri,’ he said softly. ‘That sounds awfully like you’re fishing for a compliment, and I’d guess you get more than the average quota of those.’
Yes, she did. It was part of the whole package which came with the way she looked. Men liked to look at her and to be seen with her—from her teen years she had been familiar with the phrase ‘trophy girlfriend’. Yet beauty could be a double-edged sword. She had learned that, too. She earned her living through capitalising on her looks, then sometimes found herself wishing that people would see through to the person beneath—a person with all the insecurities of the next woman.
Defensively, she raked her hand back through her hair. ‘Not a lot of danger of that at the moment, I imagine. I must look like I’ve been dragged through several hedges backwards.’
Her hair had been rumpled by the beanie and she hadn’t brushed it, so it fell in ebony disarray over the pale silky sweater she wore. Her pale cheeks were tinged with roses, a combination of heat from the fire and the exertion of her walk through the snow. Yet she looked far more touchable and desirable than the ice princess in the diamonds and silver gown, who had pouted and swirled for the camera earlier.
‘If you must know, you look a little…wild,’ he said softly. ‘Like a wood nymph who has just been woken out of a long sleep.’
Keri had never in her life been called ‘wild’, neither had she been compared to a wood nymph, and the poetic imagery of his words was so seductively powerful that for a moment she felt a slow, pulsing glow of pleasure. Until she reminded herself that this was madness.
Complete and utter madness.
Models had notoriously fragile egos—inevitable in a job in which you were judged so critically on physical attributes alone—but surely hers wasn’t so bad that she needed praise from a house-breaking driver with a dark and dangerous air about him?
Suddenly she felt like a baby fish, swimming around in uncharted waters. ‘Didn’t you say something about food?’
‘Sure.’ He rose to his feet and wondered if she knew how cute she looked when she lost the frost princess look and let her lips soften like that. ‘How about a fair division of labour? I’ll go and see if I can find more fuel for the fire, and you can fix us a meal.’
‘You’ll be lucky!’
‘Oh?’
‘It’s just that I don’t cook. Can’t cook,’ she amended hurriedly as she saw him frown.
‘I’m not expecting you to spit-roast a pig to impress me,’ he bit back. ‘Just rustle up any old thing.’
Impress him? In your dreams. ‘There wasn’t,’ said Keri deliberately, ‘anything much in the way of food, save for a few old tins.’
‘Then get opening,’ said Jay, and threw another log on the fire.
But Keri quickly discovered that this was easier said than done, because the tin-opener looked as though it should have been in a museum.
Jay walked out into the kitchen to find her slamming a tin frustratedly onto the table. Great, he thought! Have a tantrum, why don’t you?
‘Having problems?’ he questioned laconically.
‘You try using it!’
He picked up the tin and read the label. His voice was cool. ‘Tinned peaches?’
‘Well, obviously there’s no fresh fruit—’
‘That wasn’t,’ he exploded, ‘what I meant!’
‘Well, there was nothing much else to choose from.’
‘If you think I’m existing on tinned peaches, then you are very much mistaken!’
‘Well, would you mind opening them for me?’
He dealt with the can quickly, and thrust it away as if it had been contaminated, then bent to examine the contents of the cupboard, rummaging around until he produced a sealed pack of dried spaghetti and a solitary tin of meat sauce, which he slammed down onto the worktop. ‘What’s wrong with these?’
She suspected that it was going to be a mistake to try to explain her dietary requirements, but she forged ahead anyway. ‘I don’t eat wheat,’ she said.
Jay shuddered. Bloody women and their food fads! Well, I do,’ he said coolly. ‘So would you mind heating these up?’ He saw her open her mouth to protest. ‘Unless you’d rather tend to the fire?’
She could see the mocking look of challenge in his eyes, as if he knew perfectly well that she had never ‘tended’ a fire in her life. Lots of people she knew hadn’t—so why was he trying to make her feel as though she was in some way inadequate? Just because he was the original cave-dweller, that didn’t mean the rest of the world had to follow suit. Very well, she would heat his revolting food for him. ‘I’ll cook.’
‘Good.’ And he turned and walked out of the kitchen without another word, thinking that she was undeniably beautiful but about as much use as an igloo in a heatwave. He cast an assessing eye over the fuel. There were a couple of cupboards he’d noticed upstairs; they might yield an armful of blankets which they would need to see the night through. The strain of spending a night closeted with her made a tiny muscle work at the side of his temple, and then he remembered the only room they hadn’t explored. Maybe the cellar might come up trumps. Something to ease the tension.
When he returned to the kitchen it was with a look of triumph on his face and a bottle of dusty wine in his hand. He put it carefully on the table.
‘Look at that! Would you believe it?’
Fractiously, Keri looked up from the steaming pot. Half the spaghetti had snapped on the way into it, and she had scalded her finger into the bargain. ‘It’s a bottle of wine—so what?’
‘It is not any old bottle of wine,’ he contradicted, running his thumb reverentially over the label, as if he was carressing a woman’s skin. ‘It just happens to be a bottle of St Julien du Beau Caillou.’
His voice had deepened with appreciation and his French accent was close to perfect. Keri couldn’t have been more amazed if he had suddenly leapt up onto the table and started tap dancing.
‘You know about wine, do you?’
Jay’s eyes glittered. The tone of her question said it all. ‘Surprising for a common-or-garden driver, is that what you mean?’ he drawled. ‘Thought I’d be a beer man, did you?’
‘I hadn’t given it much thought, actually.’
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