Kiernan McAllister’s wet hair, the colour of just-brewed coffee, was curling at the tips. The stubble on his face accentuated the hard, masculine lines of his features.

The out-of-the-storm look of his hair and his being unshaven gave him a distinctly roguish look, and despite his state of undress he might have been a pirate, relishing his next conquest, or a highwayman about to draw his sword.

His eyes were a shade of silver that added to her sense that he could be dangerous in the most tantalizing of ways. In the pictures she had seen of him his eyes had intrigued, with a faint light at the back of them that she had interpreted as faintly mischievous—as if all his incredible successes in the business world was nothing more than a big game and it was a game that he was winning.

But of course that was before the accident where his brother-in-law had been killed.

There was the difference. Now Kiernan McAllister’s eyes had something in them as shattered as glass, cool, a barrier that he did not want penetrated by someone looking for a story.

In that moment, Stacy knew he would turn her down flat if she requested an interview.

Interview with a Tycoon

Cara Colter

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CARA COLTER lives in British Columbia with her partner, Rob, and eleven horses. She has three grown children and a grandson. She is a recent recipient of an RT Book Reviews Career Achievement Award in the Love and Laughter category. Cara loves to hear from readers, and you can contact her or learn more about her on her Facebook page through her website: www.cara-colter.com.

To all those readers

who come to visit me on Facebook, thank you!

Contents

Cover

Introduction

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

EPILOGUE

EXTRACT

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

STACY MURPHY WALKER’S heart was beating way too fast. She wondered, gripping the steering wheel of her compact car tighter, how long a heart could beat this fast before it finally calmed itself out of pure exhaustion.

Or exploded, her mind, with its tendency to be overly imaginative, filled in helpfully.

But, still, she was entirely aware the slipping of her tires on the icy mountain roads was not solely responsible for the too-fast beating of her heart.

No, it was the sheer audacity of what she was doing.

Bearding the lion in his den.

A bronze name plaque, McAllister—in other words, the lion—set in a high stone fence, tasteful and easy to miss, told her she had arrived. Now what? She turned into the driveway but stopped before tackling the steep upward incline.

What was she going to say? I need an interview with Kiernan McAllister to save my career as a business writer, so let me in?

She’d had two hours to think about this! No, more. It had been three days since a friend, Caroline, from her old job had called and told her, that amidst the rumors that his company was being sold, McAllister had slipped away to his Whistler retreat.

“This story is made for you, Stacy,” her friend had whispered. “Landing it will set you up as the most desired business freelancer in all of Vancouver! And you deserve it. What happened to you here was very unfair. This is a story that needs your ability to get to the heart of things.” There had been a pause, and then a sigh. “Imagine getting to the heart of that man.”

Stacy had taken the address Caroline had provided while contemplating, not the heart of that man, because she was done with men after all, but the humiliating fact that what had happened to her was obviously the going topic in the coffee room.

But Caroline was right. To scoop the news of the sale of the company would be a career coup for a newly set loose freelancer. To lace that scoop with insight into the increasingly enigmatic McAllister would be icing on the cake.

But more, Stacy felt landing such an important article could be the beginning of her return, not just to professional respect, but to personal self-respect!

What had she thought? That she was just going to waltz up to millionaire Kiernan McAllister’s Whistler cottage and knock at his door?

McAllister was the founder and CEO of the highly regarded and wildly successful Vancouver-based company McAllister Enterprises.

And what was her expectation? That he would open his door, personally? And why would he—who had once been the darling of the media and graced the cover of every magazine possible—grant an audience to her?

McAllister had not given a single interview since the death of his best friend and brother-in-law almost exactly a year ago in a skiing accident—in a place accessible only by helicopter—that had made worldwide headlines.

Now, Stacy hoped she could convince him that she was the best person to entrust his story to.

And here was the problem with imagination.

She could imagine the interview going so well, that at the end of it, she would tell him about her charity, and ask him...

She shook herself. “One thing at a time!”

It was a shot in the dark, after all. And speaking of dark, if she did not get her act together soon, she would be driving back down this road in the dark. The thought made her shudder. She had some vague awareness that ice got icier at night!

She inched forward. She was nearly there, and yet one obstacle remained. The driveway had not been plowed of snow, and the incline looked treacherous. It was in much worse shape than the public roads had been in, and those had been the worst roads Stacy had ever faced!

At the steepest part of the hill, just before it crested, her car hesitated. She was sure she heard it groan, or maybe that sound came from her own lips. For an alarming moment, with her car practically at a standstill, Stacy thought she was going to start sliding backward down the hill.

In a moment of pure panic, she pressed down, hard, on the gas pedal. The wheels spun, and in slow motion, her car twisted to one side. But then the tires found purchase, and as her car shot forward, she straightened the wheel. The car acted as if it had been launched from a canon and careened over that final crest of the hill.

“Oh, God,” she exclaimed. “Too fast!”

She practically catapulted into the courtyard. The most beautiful house she had ever seen loomed in front of her, and she was a breath away from crashing into it!

She hammered on the brakes and yanked on her steering wheel.

She’d been on a ride at the midway once that felt just like this: the car spun like a top across the icy driveway. She bumped violently over a curb, flattened some shrubs and came to a stop so sudden her head bounced forward and smashed into the steering wheel.

Dazed, she looked up. She had come to rest against a concrete fountain. It tipped dangerously. The snow it was filled with fell with a quiet thump on the hood of her car.

She sat there in shock, the silence embracing her like that white cloud of snow on her hood that was obliterating her view. It was tempting to just sit and mull over her bad luck, but no, that was not in keeping with the “new” Stacy Walker.

“There’s lots to be grateful for,” she told herself sternly. “I’m warm, for one! And relatively unhurt.”

Relatively, because her head ached where she had hit it.

Putting that aside, she shoved her car into Reverse, hoping no one had seen what had just transpired. She put her foot down—gently, this time—on the gas, and pressed, but aside from the wheels making an awful whining noise, nothing happened. When she applied more gas, the whining sound increased to a shriek, but the car did not move.

With an edge of franticness, she tried one more time, but her car was stuck fast and refused to budge.

With a sigh of defeat, she turned the car off, rested her aching head against the steering wheel and gave in to the temptation to mull over her bad luck.

No fiancé.

No job.

Those two events linked in a way that had become fodder for the office gossip mill. And possibly beyond. Maybe she was the laughingstock of the entire business community.

At least she still had her charity work. But the sad fact was, though the charity was so worthwhile, it limped along, desperately needing someone prominent—exactly like Kiernan McAllister—to thrust it to the next level.

So engrossed was she in her mulling that she shrieked with alarm when her car door was yanked open, spilling cold air into it, stealing the one thing she had been grateful for—warmth—instantly. She reared back from the steering wheel.

“Are you all right?”

The voice was deep and masculine and might have been reassuring. Except for the man it was attached to.

No. No. NO.

This was not how she had intended to meet Kiernan McAllister!

“I seem to be stuck,” Stacy said with all the dignity she could muster. After the initial glance, she grasped the steering wheel and looked straight ahead, as if she was planning on going somewhere.

She felt her attempt at dignity might have failed, because he said, his voice the calm, steady voice of someone who had found another standing at the precipice, “That’s all right. Let’s get you out of there, and see what the damage is.”

“Mostly to your garden, I’m afraid.”

“I’m not worried about my garden.” Again, that calm, talking-her-down-from-the-ledge tone of voice.

“Here. Take my hand.”

She needed to reclaim her dignity by insisting she was fine. But when she opened her mouth, not a single sound came out.

“Take my hand.”

This time, it was a command more than a request. Weakly, it felt like something of a relief to have choice taken away from her!

As if in a dream, Stacy put her hand in his. She felt it close around hers, warm and strong, and found herself pulled, with seemingly effortless might out of the car and straight into a wall of...man.

She should have felt the cold instantly. Instead, she felt like Charlie Chaplin doing a “slipping on a banana peel” routine. Her legs seemed to be shooting out in different directions.

She yanked free of his hands and threw herself against his chest, hugging tight.

And felt the warmth of it. And the shock. Bare skin? It was snowing out. How was it possible he was bare chested?

Who cares? a little voice whispered in accompaniment to the tingle moving up her spine. Given how humiliating her circumstances, she should not be so aware of the steely firmness of silky flesh and the sensation of being intimately close to pure power. She really should not be proclaiming the experience delicious.

“Whoa.” He unglued her from him and put her slightly away, his hands settled on her shoulders. “Neither you nor your car appear properly shod for this weather.”

He was right. Her feet were stylishly clad in a ballet slipper style shoe by a famous designer. She had bought the red slippers—à la Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz—when she had been more able to afford such whims.

The shoes had no grip on the sole. Stacy was no better prepared for snow than her car had been, and she was inordinately grateful for his steadying hands on her shoulders.

“What have you got on?” he asked, his tone incredulous.

The question really should have been what did he have on—since she was peripherally aware it was not much—but she glanced down at herself, anyway.

The shoes added a light Bohemian touch to an otherwise ultraconservative, just-above-the-knee gray skirt that she had paired with dark tights and a white blouse. At the last moment she had donned a darker gray sweater, which she was glad for now, as the snow fell around her. Nothing about her outfit—not even the shoes—commanded that incredulous tone.

Then, she dared glance fully at her rescuer and realized his question about what she had on was not in the context of her very stylish outfit at all. He was referring to her tires!

“Not even all seasons,” he said, squinting past her at the front tire that rested on top of what had been, no doubt, a very expensive shrub. His tone was disapproving. “Summer tires. What were you thinking?”

It was terribly difficult to drag her attention away this unexpectedly delicious encounter with the Kiernan McAllister and focus on the question. She felt as if her voice was coming from under water when she answered.

“I’ve never put winter tires on my car,” she confessed. “And if I were going to, it would not occur to me to do it in October. It is the season of falling leaves and pumpkins, not this.”

“You could have asked for me to send a car,” he said sternly.

Stacy contemplated that. She could have asked the Kiernan McAllister to send a car? In what universe? Obviously—and sadly—he was expecting someone else.

Or, was there the possibility Caroline had done more than give her an address? Did she have some kind of in with him? Had she set something up for Stacy?

That was her imagination again, because it was not likely he would be so intent on giving an interview he would send a car!

“Were you not prepared at all for mountain driving?”

“Not at all,” she admitted. “I was born and raised in Vancouver. You know how often we get snow there.”

At his grunt of what she interpreted as disapproval, she felt compelled to rush on. “Though I’ve always dreamed of a winter holiday. Skating on a frozen pond, learning to ski. That kind of thing. Now, I’m not so sure about that. Winter seems quite a bit more pleasant in movies and pictures and snow globes. Maybe I should just fast-forward to the hot chocolate in front of the fire.”

Was she chattering? Oh, God, she was chattering nervously, and it wasn’t just her teeth! Shut up, she ordered herself, but she had to add, “Humph. Reality and imagination collide, again.”

Story of her life: imagining walking down the aisle, her gorgeous white dress flowing out behind her, toward a man who looked at her with such love and such longing...

She did not want to be having those kinds of treacherous thoughts around this man.

“I always liked this reality,” McAllister said, and he actually reached out his free hand and caught a snowflake with it. Then he yanked his hand back abruptly, and the line around his mouth tightened and Stacy saw something mercurial in his storm-gray eyes.

She realized he had recalled, after the words came out of his mouth, that it was this reality—in the form of an avalanche—that had caused the death of his brother-in-law.

Sympathy clawed at her throat, as did a sense of knowing he was holding something inside that was eating him like acid.

It was a lot to understand from a glimpse of something in his eyes, from the way his mouth had changed, but this was exactly what Caroline had meant about Stacy’s ability to get to the heart of a story.

For some reason—probably from the loss of her family when she was a child—she had a superhoned sense of intuition that had left her with an ability to see people with extraordinary clarity and tell their stories deeply and profoundly.

Not that McAllister looked as if he would be willing to have his story told at all, his secrets revealed, his feelings probed.

Stacy had a sudden sense if she did get to the heart of this man, as Caroline had wistfully suggested, she would find it broken.

McAllister’s face was closed now, as if he sensed he had let his guard down just for that instant and that it might have revealed too much to her.

“What did you do when you lost control?” he asked her.

Of her life? How on earth could he tell? Was he has intuitive as she herself was?

But, to her relief, his attention was focused, disapprovingly, on her tires. He was still keeping her upright on the slippery ground, his hand now firmly clamped on her elbow, but if he was feeling the same sensation of being singed that she was, it in no way showed in his face. He had the look of a man who was always composed and in control.

“What did I do? I closed my eyes, and held on for dear life, of course!”

“Imagining a good outcome?” he said drily.

She nodded sadly. The collision with reality was more than evident.

He sighed, with seeming long-suffering, though their acquaintance had been extremely brief!

“You might want to keep in mind, for next time, if you lose control on ice, to try and steer into the spin, rather than away from it.”

“That doesn’t seem right.”

“I know, it goes against everyone’s first instinct. But really, that’s what you do. You go with it, instead of fighting it.”

The sense of being singed increased when Stacy became suddenly and intensely aware that, despite the snow falling in large and chilly flakes all around them, despite the fact the driveway was pure ice, the question really should not have been what she had on for tires—or for clothes! That should not have been the question at all, given what he had on.

Which was next to nothing!

Maybe she had hit her head harder than she thought, and this whole thing was a dream. The scene was surreal after all.

How could it be possible McAllister was out here in his driveway, one hand gripping her firmly, glaring at her tires, when he was dressed in nothing more than a pair of shove-on sandals, a towel cinched around his waist?

The shock of it made her release the arm she clutched, and the wisps of her remaining sympathy were blown away as if before a strong wind. All that remained was awareness of him in a very different way.

She would have staggered back—and probably slipped again—but when she had let go, he had continued to hold on.

His warmth and his strength were like electricity, but not the benign kind that powered the toaster.

No, the furious, unpredictable kind. The lightning-bolt-that-could-tear-open-the-sky kind. The kind that could split apart trees and turn the world to fire.

Stacy realized the hammering of her heart during the slippery trip into the mountains, and after she had bounced over the curb into the fountain, had been but a pale prelude to the speeds her heart could attain!

CHAPTER TWO

KIERNAN MCALLISTER WATCHED the pulse in the woman’s throat. The accident had obviously affected her more than she wanted to let on. Her face was very pale and he considered the awful possibility she was going to keel over, either because she was close to fainting or because her shoes were so unsuited to this kind of ground.

As he watched, her hand, tiny and pale, fluttered to her own throat to keep tabs on the wildly beating tattoo of her pulse, and McAllister tightened his grip on her even more.

“Are you okay?” he asked again. He could feel his brow furrow as he looked in her face.

He had told his sister, Adele, not to send assistance. He had told her, in no uncertain terms, that he found it insulting that she thought he needed it. She seemed to have agreed, but he should have guessed she only pretended to acquiesce.

“I think I’m just shaken.”

The girl—no, she wasn’t a girl, despite her diminutive size—had a voice that was low and husky, a lovely softness to it, unconsciously sexy. She was, in fact, a lovely young woman. Dark curls sprang untamed around a delicate, pale, elfin face. Her eyes were green and huge, her nose a little button, her chin had a certain defiant set to it.

Kiernan’s annoyance at his sister grew.

If she had needed to send someone—and in her mind, apparently she had—he would have hoped for someone no-nonsense and practical. Someone who arrived in a car completely outfitted for winter and in sturdy shoes. 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 of the dark silk of his hair and down the utterly and devastatingly attractive lines of his features.

“You aren’t naked, are you?” she asked, her voice a squeak of pure dismay.

Something twitched around the sensual line of his mouth as McAllister contemplated Stacy’s question, but she couldn’t really tell if he was amused or annoyed by it.

His mouth opened, then closed, and then, his eyes never leaving her face, he said evenly, “No, I’m not.”

She dared to unglue her eyes from his face. They skittered over the very naked line of his broad shoulders, down the beautiful cut of chest muscles made more beautiful by the snowflakes that melted on them and sent beads of waters sliding down to the ridged muscle of washboard abs. Riding low on his hips...her eyes flew back to the relative safety of his face.

Only that wasn’t really safe, either.

“Underwear?” she squeaked.

He regarded her thoughtfully for a moment. She resisted an urge to squirm, again, under the firm hands at her elbow, and his stripping gaze.

“Kleinbacks,” he said, straight-faced.

She was pretty sure the designer company did not make men’s underwear, and that was confirmed when something very like a smile, however reluctant, played along the hard line of those lips. Stunned, Stacy realized she was being teased by Kiernan McAllister.

But the light that appeared for a moment in his eyes was gone almost instantly, making her aware he had caught himself lightening up, and not liked it. Not liked it one little bit.

“Swim trunks.” His voice was gravelly, amusement stripped from it.

“Oh!” She sagged with relief, then looked, just to make sure. They were really very nice swim trunks, not the scanty kind that triathletes wore. Still, there was quite a bit more of him uncovered than covered, and she felt herself turn scarlet as she watched a another snow drop melt and slide past the taut muscles of his stomach and into the waistband of his shorts.

“It doesn’t really seem like swimming weather,” she offered, her voice strangled.

“I was in the hot tub in the back of the house when I heard the commotion out here.”

“Oh! Of course.” She tried to sound as if she was well acquainted with the kind of people who spent snowy afternoons doing business from their hot tubs—he did have his phone with him, after all—but she was fairly certain she did not pull it off.

Knowing what she did about him, it occurred to her that perhaps, despite the presence of the phone, he wasn’t doing business. One thing she knew from her life interviewing high-powered execs? They were attached to those phones as though they were lifelines!

Kiernan McAllister might be entertaining someone in his hot tub.

“Alone,” he said, as if he had read her thoughts.

She didn’t like the idea that he might be able to read her thoughts. But there was also something about the way he said alone that made her think of icy, windswept mountain peaks and a soul gone cold.

Even though he was the one with no clothes on, in the middle of a snowstorm, it was Stacy who shivered. She tried to tell herself it was from snow melting off her neck and slithering down her back, but she knew that was not the entire truth.

It was pure awareness of the man who stood before her, his complexities both unsettling her and reluctantly intriguing her. His hands resting, warm and strong—dare she consider the thought, protectively—on her. How on earth could he be so completely unselfconscious? And why wasn’t he trembling with cold?

Obviously, his skin was heated from the hot tub, not that he was the kind of man who trembled! He was supremely comfortable with himself, radiating a kind of confidence that could not be manufactured.

Plus, Stacy’s mind filled in helpfully, he had quite a reputation. He would not be unaccustomed to being in some state of undress in front of a lady.

Impossibly, she could feel her cheeks turning even more crimson, and he showed no inclination to put her out of her misery. He regarding her appraisingly, snow melting on his heated skin, a cloud of steam rising around him.

Finally, he seemed to realize it was very cold out here!

“Let’s get in,” he suggested. She heard reluctance in his voice. He did not want her in his house!

She was not sure why, though it didn’t seem unreasonable. A stranger plows into your fountain. You hardly want to entertain them.

But he was expecting someone. He didn’t want to entertain that person, either?

“I’ll take a closer look at your head. There’s not a whole lot of blood, I’m almost certain it’s superficial. We’ll get you into Whistler if it’s not.”

It occurred to her he was a man who would do the right thing even if it was not what he particularly wanted to do.

And that he would not like people who did the wrong thing. She shivered at the thought. He misinterpreted the shiver as cold and strengthened his grip on her, as if he didn’t trust her not to keel over or slip badly on his driveway. He turned her away from her car and toward the warmth of his house.

Aside from her car in the garden, the driveway was empty. The household vehicles were no doubt parked in the five-car garage off to one side.

The house inspired awe. If this was a cottage, what on earth did McAllister’s main residence look like?

The house was timber framed, the lower portions of it faced in river rock. Gorgeous, golden logs, so large three people holding hands would barely form a circle around them, acted as pillars for the front entryway. The entry doors were hand carved and massive, the windows huge, plentiful and French-paned, the rooflines sweeping and complicated.

Through the softly falling flakes of snow, Stacy was certain she felt exactly how Cinderella must have felt the first time she saw the castle.

Or maybe, she thought, with a small shiver of pure apprehension, more like Beauty when she found Beast’s lair.

McAllister let go of her finally when he reached the front door and held it open for her. She was annoyed with herself that she missed the security of his touch instantly, and yet the house seemed to embrace her. The rush of warm air that greeted her was lovely, the house even lovelier.

Stacy’s breath caught in her throat as she gaped at her surroundings.

“It’s beautiful,” she breathed. “Like upscale hunting lodge—very upscale—meets five-star hotel.”

“It suits me,” he said, and then as an afterthought, “far more than my condo in Vancouver.”

Again, her intuition kicked in, and this time the reporter in her went on red alert. Was that a clue that he was going to leave his high-powered life behind him as rumors had been saying for months?

McAllister turned, stepped out of his sandals, expecting her to follow him. Stacy realized she couldn’t tromp through the house in her now very wet—and probably ruined—shoes. She scraped them off her feet, dropped her wet sweater beside them, and then she was left scrambling to catch up to his long strides, as it had never even occurred to him that she was not on his heels.

As McAllister led her through his magnificent home, Stacy was further distracted from the confession she should have been formulating about why she was really here, by not just the long length of his naked back but the unexpected beauty of his space and what it said about him.

The design style was breathtaking. Old blended with new seamlessly. Modern met antique. Rustic lines met sleek clean ones and merged.

There were hand-knotted Turkish rugs and bearskins, side by side, modern art and Western paintings, deer antler light fixtures and ones that looked to be by the famous crystal maker, Swarovski. There were ancient woven baskets beside contemporary vases.

The decor style was rugged meets sophisticated, and Stacy thought it reflected the man with startling accuracy.

“I’ve never seen floors like this,” she murmured.

“Tigerwood. It actually gets richer as it ages.”

“Like people,” she said softly.

“If they invest properly,” he agreed.

“That is not what I meant!”

He cast a look over his shoulder at her, and she saw he looked irritated.

“People,” she said firmly, “become richer because they accumulate wisdom and life experience.”

He snorted derisively. “Or,” he countered, “they become harder. This floor is a hundred and seventy percent harder than oak. I chose it because I wanted something hard.”

And she could see that that was also what he wanted for himself: a hard, impenetrable surface.

“This floor will last forever,” he said with satisfaction.

“Unlike people?” she challenged him.

“You said it, I didn’t.” She heard the cynicism and yet contemplated his desire for something lasting. He was an avowed bachelor and had been even before the accident. But had the death of his brother-in-law made him even more cynical about what lasted and what didn’t?

Clearly, it had.

They walked across exotic hardwood floors into a great room. The walls soared upward, at least sixteen feet high, the ceilings held up by massive timbers. A fireplace, floor to ceiling, constructed of the same river rock that was on the exterior of the house, anchored one end of the room.

A huge television was mounted above a solid old barn beam mantel. It was on, with no sound. A football game in process. A wall of glass—the kind that folded back in the summer to make indoor and outdoor space blend perfectly—led out to a vast redwood deck.

Through falling snow, Stacy could see a deep and quiet forest beyond the deck and past that, the silent, jagged walls of the mountains.

To one side of that deck, where it did not impede the sweeping views from the great room, steam escaped from the large hot tub that her arrival had pulled McAllister from.

The tub seemed as if it were made for entertaining large groups of people of the kind she had written about in her former life. She had never attended a gathering worthy of this kind of space. Or been invited to one, either. As reporter, she had been on the outside of that lifestyle looking in.

The room made Stacy uncomfortably and awkwardly aware she was way out of her league here.

What league? she asked herself, annoyed. She wasn’t here to marry the man! She just wanted to talk to him.

Besides, it seemed to her that a room like this cried for that thing called family. In fact, she could feel an ache in the back of her throat as she thought of that.

“Are you coming?”

She realized she had stopped and he had kept going. Now he glanced back at her, and she sensed his impatience. She was trying to savor this unexpected glimpse into a different world, and he wanted their enforced time together over!

Given that, it would be foolish to ask him the question that had popped into her mind the moment she had entered the grandeur of this room. But ask she did!

“Do you spend Christmas here?” She could hear the wistfulness in her own voice.

He stopped, those formidable brows lowered. “I don’t particularly like Christmas.”

“You don’t like Christmas?”

“No.” He had folded his arms across his chest, and his look did not invite any more questions.

But she could not help herself! “Is it recent? Your aversion to Christmas?” she asked, wondering if his antipathy had something to do with the death of his brother-in-law. From experience, she knew that, after a loss, special occasions could be unbearably hard.

“No,” he said flatly. “I have always hated Christmas.”

His look was warning her not to pursue it but for a reason she couldn’t quite fathom—maybe because this beautiful house begged for a beautiful Christmas, she did not leave it.

“A tree would look phenomenal over there,” she said stubbornly.

His eyes narrowed on her. She was pretty sure he was not accustomed to people offering him an opinion he had not asked for!

“We—” He paused at the we, and she saw that look in his eyes. Then, he seemed to force himself to go on, his tone stripped of emotion. “We always go away at Christmas, preferably someplace warm. We’ve never spent Christmas in this house.”

Her disappointment felt sharp. She ordered herself to silence, but her voice mutinied. “It’s never had a Christmas tree?”

He folded his arms more firmly over his chest, his body language clearly saying unmovable. She repeated the order for silence, but she could not seem to stop her voice.

“Think of the size of tree you could put there! And there’s room for kids to ride trikes across the floors, and grandparents to sit by the fire.”

He looked extremely annoyed.

She could picture it all. Generations of family sitting in the two huge distressed leather sofas faced each other over a priceless rug, teenagers running in wet from the hot tub, eggnog on the coffee table made out of burled wood. Toys littering the floor.

Over there, in that open-concept kitchen with its industrial-sized stainless-steel fridge, the massive granite-topped island could be full of snacks, the espresso machine pumping out coffee, or maybe you could make hot chocolate in them, she wasn’t certain.

“I guess in your line of work,” he said gruffly, “you’re allowed a certain amount of magical thinking.”

What kind of work did he think she did? And why couldn’t she just leave it at that?

“It’s not magical,” she said through clenched teeth. “It’s real. It can be real.”

He looked annoyed and unconvinced.

Why had she started this? She could feel something like tears stinging the back of her eyes.

“You have that about-to-faint look again,” he said, coming back to her. “I think you hit your head harder than we realize.”

“I think you’re right,” she said. She ordered herself to stop speaking. But she didn’t.

CHAPTER THREE

“IF I HAD a room like this? That is what I would want to fill it with,” the woman said. “The important things. The things that really last. The things that are real. Love. Family.”

Real. Kiernan could tell her a thing or two about the reality of love and family that would wipe that dreamy look off her face. But why? Let her have her illusions.

They were no threat to him.

Or maybe they were, because just for a flicker of a moment he felt a whisper of longing sneak along his spine.

He shook it off. He just wanted to have a look at the bump on her head and send her on her way. He did not want to hear about her sugarplum visions of a wonderful world!

“Nothing lasts,” he told her, his voice a growl.

Stacy went very still. For a moment she looked as if she might argue, but then his words seemed to hit her, like arrows let loose that had found her heart.

To his dismay, for a moment he glimpsed in her face a sorrow he thought matched his own. He was intrigued but had enough good sense not to follow up! Not to encourage her in any way to share her vision with him.

“Follow me,” he said. “I think I’ve got a first-aid kit in my bathroom.”

His bathroom? Didn’t he have a first-aid kit somewhere else? He did, but it was outside and around the back of the house, where the staging area for outdoor excursions was, where he stored the outdoor equipment.

No, it was sensible to take her to the closest first-aid kit, to keep her out of the cold, to not take her through more snow in those ridiculous shoes.

But through his bedroom? Into his bathroom? It occurred to him that he should have sat her down in the kitchen and brought the first-aid kit to her.

He was not thinking with his normal razor-sharp processes, which was understandable. He told himself it had nothing to do with the unexpected arrival of a beautiful woman in his fountain and everything to do with Ivan.

He hesitated at the double doors to his master suite and then flung them open and watched her closely as she preceded him. He saw the room through her eyes, which were wide and awed.

The ceiling soared upward, magnificent and timber framed. But here the floors, instead of being hardwood, were carpeted with a thick, plush pile that their feet sank into. There was a huge bed, the bedding and the abundance of pillows in a dozen shades of gray.

She was blushing as she looked at the bed, which he should have found amusing as all get-out. Instead, he found it reluctantly endearing.

Who blushed anymore?

Something that heightened color in her cheeks, the way she caught her plump lower lip between her teeth, made Kiernan’s mouth go dry, and so he led her hastily through to the bathroom. Again, he saw it through her eyes. A wall of windows opened to the deck and hot tub area.

There was a shower a dozen people could have gotten into, and her blush deepened when she looked at that.

He’d never shared this room with anyone, but let her think what she wanted. It might keep him safe from this niggling awareness of her that was bugging him the way a single gnat could spoil a perfect summer day on the hammock with a book.

She stared at the deep, stand-alone tub and swallowed hard. While the shower might hold dozens, it was more than evident the tub could only comfortably fit two! Her eyes flitted wildly around the room and then stopped and widened.

Her eyes, he noticed, annoyed with himself, were green as the moss that clung to the stones of the hot spring deep in the mountains behind this cottage.

“That is not a fireplace,” she whispered. “In your bathroom?”

“You want it on?” he asked innocently. “Are you cold?”

He was fairly sure it was evident to even her, with her aura of innocence, that a fireplace like that was not about cold but about romance.

And yet he did not like thinking about her in that light. It was evident to him, on a very brief acquaintance, she was not the type of woman who would share his vision of romance.

For him, it was a means to an end, the age-old game of seduction.

The remarks about his floors and the suitability of his room for a Christmas tree were little hints she was not his type. By her own admission, she was the kind of girl who believed in love and things lasting.

Romancing a girl like her would be hard work! He was willing to bet, despite her awe of the room, it would require something a little less superficial than a bathtub and a fireplace. Romancing a girl like her would require time and patience and a willingness to be a better person.

No, he would stick with his type. Because his type required nothing of him but a few baubles and some good times, no real emotional engagement.

He had always been like that, avoiding emotional attachment. He had been like that before his friend Danner had died. Kiernan had a sudden unwelcome memory of Christmas ornaments being smashed. He suspected the memory had erupted out of nowhere because Murphy here had seen Christmas in a room where it had never been. Kiernan’s early life had always been threaded through with the tension of unpredictability, Christmas worse than most times of year.

For a while, having survived the minefield of his childhood, Kiernan had enjoyed the illusion of complete control. He had a sense of making not just his world safe and predictable, but that of his sister, Adele, too.

Yup, he had felt like quite the hero. And then Danner had died. Plunging him into a dark place where his real power in the world seemed horribly limited, where hope and dreams seemed like the most dangerous of things.

And none of that fit with a girl like this, who, whether she knew it or not, wore dreams on her sleeves. Who, despite—if her eyes were any indicator—having gone a round or two with life, seemed to still have that inexplicable ability to believe...

“Sure,” she said after a moment, startling him out of his thoughts. “Put it on. The fireplace.” She giggled. “I may never pass this way again.”

“We can only hope,” he muttered, and saw her flinch, the smile die, the words striking her like arrows again.

Just a reminder of how she was soft and he was hard, a reason this was never going anywhere, except him standing on the stairs seeing her off as she drove away.

“Nothing personal,” he said. “It just wasn’t my idea for you to come. I don’t need you.”

Having done quite enough damage—he really should not be allowed around these sensitive types—Kiernan turned from her and flicked a switch so that the flames within the fireplace licked to life.

“I’ve changed my mind,” she said proudly. “I don’t care to have it on.”

See? In very short time his abrasive self was managing to hurt her. Not making any effort to hide his impatience, Kiernan flicked the fire back off and gestured at an upholstered chaise.

Once she was settled, he came back, towered over her and studied the top of her head. “I’m just going to clean it first. We’ll see what we’ve got. Ironic, isn’t it, that I’m rescuing you?”

“In what way?” she stammered.

“You’re supposed to be rescuing me.”

* * *

Stacy studied Kiernan and realized his tone was deeply sardonic. Despite the glimpses of shadows she had detected in his eyes, she was not sure she had ever seen a man who looked less like he would appreciate rescuing than Kiernan McAllister!

He was bigger in real life than photos had prepared her for, the breadth of his shoulders blocking out the view of the fireplace!

The bathroom was huge, but with him leaning over her, his real-life stature left her feeling shocked. Even though Kiernan McAllister had graced the covers of zillions of magazines, including, eight times, the one she no longer worked for, nothing could have prepared her for him in this kind of proximity.

Pictures, of course, did not have a scent clinging to them. His filled her nostrils: it was as if he had come, not from a hot tub, but from the forest around this amazing house. McAllister smelled richly of pine, as if he had absorbed the essence of the snow-laden trees through his pores!

He was considered not only Vancouver’s most successful businessman, but also its most eligible bachelor, and here in the bathroom with him, his scent filling her senses, his hands gentle on her injured head, it was easy to see why!

In each of those photos that Stacy had seen of him, McAllister was breathtakingly handsome and sure of himself. Behind that engaging smile, he had oozed the confidence and self-assurance of the very successful and very wealthy. His grooming had always been perfect: smooth shaven, every dark hair in place, his custom-made clothing hinting at but not showing a perfect male body.

In those pictures, he looked like a man who could handle anything the world tossed at him, smile and toss it right back.

And that’s what he had a track record for doing. From daring real estate deals to providing start-up funds for fledgling companies that no one else would take a risk on, McAllister had developed a reputation as being tough, fair and savvy. In the business world, his instincts were considered brilliant.

Not to mention that, with his amazing looks, McAllister was that most eligible bachelor that every unmarried woman dreamed—secretly or openly—of landing.

And McAllister had availed himself to every perk his considerable fortune allowed him. He had squired some of the most beautiful and famous women in the world on that arm that Stacy had just touched.

But, despite having it all, he seemed driven to more, and he had as casually sought danger as some men would sample a fine wine.

And it was that penchant for the adrenaline rush that had led from that McAllister to this one.

Being able to watch him while he tended her head, she could see his silver-gray eyes were mesmerizing and yet different in some fundamental way from how he appeared in pictures.

Her mind grappled to figure out what that difference was, but the distraction of his near nakedness, the luxury of the bathroom and his hands on her head were proving formidable.

“Ouch.”

“Sorry.”

She deliberately looked at the floor instead of up into his face to break the trance she was in. Instead, it felt oddly intimate and totally inappropriate that Stacy could see the naked length of his lower legs. His feet were totally bare.

And, she thought, entirely sexy.

But she didn’t find feet sexy. Did she?

Since his feet provided no more reprieve from the terrible war of sensation going on within her, Stacy dragged her gaze away from his toes and back up the length of him. Despite his disheveled appearance—his hair, always perfectly groomed for magazine shoots, was sticking up in a cowlick at the back of his head, and his cheeks and the jut of that formidable chin were shadowed in dark whiskers—when Stacy looked into his face, she had to swallow a gulp of pure intimidation.

Kiernan McAllister radiated a kind of power that could not be tarnished by arriving at the scene of an accident, dripping wet and with a towel around his waist. Even though her job at Icons of Business had entailed interviewing dozens of very successful businesspeople, Stacy was not sure she had ever encountered such a prime example of pure of presence before.

McAllister’s wet hair, the color of just-brewed coffee, was curling at the tips. The stubble on his face accentuated the hard, masculine lines of his features.

The out-of-the-storm look of his hair and being unshaven gave him a distinctly roguish look, and despite his state of undress, he could have been a pirate relishing his next conquest, like a highwayman about to draw his sword.

His eyes were a shade of silver that added to her sense that he could be dangerous in the most tantalizing of ways.

In the pictures she had seen of him, his eyes had intrigued, a faint light at the back of them that she had interpreted as mischievous, as if all his incredible successes in the business world were nothing more than a big game and it was a game that he was winning.

But, of course, that was before the accident where his brother-in-law had been killed.

There was the difference. Now McAllister’s eyes had something in them as shattered as glass, cool, a barrier that he did not want penetrated.

By someone looking for a story. In that moment, Stacy knew Caroline had not set up anything for her. And she also knew, without asking, he would turn her down flat if she requested an interview.

He stepped back from her, regarded his handiwork on her head. “I think we’re done here,” he said, evidently pleased with his first-aid skills.

He once again offered his hand. She took it and he pulled her from the chair. She relished the feeling of his hand, but he let her go as soon as she was standing. She faced herself in the mirror. It was much worse than she thought.

The top of her hair was almost completely covered with a tightly taped down piece of gauze.

Now she really did look and feel like the poster child for Murphy’s Law. Everything that could go wrong, had. Who wanted to look like this in the presence of such a devastatingly attractive man?

Even if he was sardonic. And didn’t believe in Christmas. Or love.

“That’s going to be murder to get off,” she said, when she saw he had caught her dismayed expression.

“Isn’t it?” he said, apparently pleased that his handiwork was going to be so hard to remove.

She sighed. It was definitely time to set him straight about who she really was and what she wanted. She took a deep breath.

The phone that he had set on the counter began to ring.

Only it was the oddest ring she had ever heard. It sounded exactly like a baby squawking! There was no way a man like McAllister picked a ringtone like that!

In a split second, Kiernan McAllister went from looking relaxed and at ease with himself to a warrior ready to do battle! Stacy watched his face grow cold, remote, underscoring that sense of a solider being ready for whatever came next.

“What on earth?” she whispered, taking in his stance and his hardened facial features. “What’s the matter?”

“It’s time,” he said, his tone terse. “He’s awake.”

“Who’s awake?”

McAllister said nothing, his gaze on the phone, his brow furrowed in consternation. If he were a general, she had the feeling he would be checking his weapons, strapping on his armor, calling out his instructions to his soldiers.

“That isn’t a cell phone, is it?” Stacy asked slowly. McAllister was staring at it as if he was a tourist in some exotic place who had discovered a snake under his bed.

The squawking sound escalated, and McAllister took a deep breath, squared his shoulders.

“A phone?” he asked, his voice impatient. “What kind of person has a phone in the hot tub?”

In her career she had met dozens of men who she did not doubt took their phones everywhere with them, including into their hot tubs! Now, she could see clearly he would not be one of them.

“Cell phones don’t work up here. The mountains block the signal. I think it’s part of what I like about the place.” He frowned as if realizing he had told her something about himself he didn’t want to.

That he needed a break from the demands of his business. He was no doubt the kind of driven individual who would see some kind of failure in that.

But before she could contemplate that too long, the phone made that squawking sound again, louder.

“What is it then, if it’s not your phone?”

“It’s the monitor,” he said.

“The monitor,” she repeated.

“The baby monitor,” he said, as if she had not already guessed it.

She stared at it with him, listened to the squawking noises emitting from it. The monitor was small and state-of-the-art, it looked almost exactly like a cell phone.

But if was definitely a monitor, and there was definitely a baby on the other end of it!

CHAPTER FOUR

BABY?

Stacy prided herself on the fact that she had arrived prepared! She knew everything there was to know about Kiernan McAllister.

And he did not have a baby!

McAllister folded his arms across the breadth of his naked chest and raised that dark slash of an eyebrow at her. “I told you, you were rescuing me, not the other way around.”

“Excuse me?” Stacy said, dazed by this turn of events.

“Your turn to ride to the rescue, though I must say, you haven’t exactly inspired confidence so far.” He reached out and turned down the volume on the monitor, inspecting her anew, like a general might inspect a newly enlisted person before sending them into battle.

His voice was hard-edged, and faintly amused as he regarded her, and she was struck again that, despite his words, he was the man least likely to need a rescue of any sort. Even if he did need one, he would never ask for it!

“I’m riding to your rescue?” Stacy asked, just to clarify.

It was a good thing he seemed to be being sarcastic, because it would be terrible to break it to him that she was the least likely person to count on for a rescue, her own life being ample evidence of that.

“Just like the cavalry,” he said, and cocked his head at her blank expression. “I’m stranded. The fort is under full attack. I have no bullets left. And in rides the cavalry.”

“Me?” she squeaked. “I’m the cavalry?”

He eyed her with doubt that appeared to mirror her own, then sighed again. “You are the nanny Adele insisted on sending, aren’t you?”

The nanny!

Stacy realized Caroline had not called and set something up for her. Far from it! A nanny. Kiernan McAllister was expecting a nanny! That’s who he would have sent a car through the snowy day for!

Fortunately, Stacy was saved from having to answer because he turned and held open the door of the bathroom for her.

“That way,” he said. “To the guest room. You can help me temporarily, until I get your car looked after.”

In a daze, she turned left and went down the hall ahead of McAllister.

His voice followed her, his tone mulling. “I thought he would sleep longer. He has barely slept since he got here. Who would have thought that one small baby could be so demanding? He doesn’t sleep. And he doesn’t want to eat. You know what he does?”

Again, he didn’t wait for an answer.

“He cries.” His voice was lowered, and she thought she detected the slightest admission he might be in over his head. “Not that I couldn’t handle it. But, if my sister thinks I need saving, who am I to argue?”

Stacy swallowed hard. What was it about the thought of saving a man like him that made her go almost weak with wanting? But, despite what his sister thought, the look on his face made it very apparent he did not agree!

That was the old her that would have liked him to need her, Stacy reminded herself sternly. The old her: naive and romantic, believing in the power of love and hoping for a family gathered in a big room around a Christmas tree.

Obviously, McAllister did not need saving. She had rarely seen a man so self-assured! What man could stand outside dripping wet and barely clothed and act as if nothing was out of the ordinary?

Still, there was that look in his eyes...defiant, daring her to see need in him! Foolishly it made her want to turn toward him, run her hand over the coarse stubble of that jaw and assure him that, yes, she was there to rescue him and that everything would be all right.

Instead, she kept moving forward until she came to an open door and peered inside. There was a playpen set up in the room, and in it was a nest of messy blankets and stuffed toys.

Holding himself up on the bumper, howling with indignation and jumping up and down, was the most beautiful baby she had ever seen. He looked like he was a little over a year, chubby, dark hair every which way, completely adorable in pale blue sleepers that had the snaps done up crooked.

Was he McAllister’s baby? While a secret baby would have been the story of the century, her thoughts drifted way too quickly from story potential to far more treacherous territory.

What on earth was Kiernan McAllister doing with a baby when that was what she had always wanted?

It caught her off guard and left her reeling even more than spinning her car into his front garden had!

We want such different things, her ex-boyfriend, Dylan, had said with a sad shake of his head, dismissing her dreams of reclaiming a traditional life like the one she had grown up in as a life sentence of dullness.

Their last night together, the extravagant dinner had made Stacey think he was going to offer her an engagement ring.

Instead, she had been devastated by his invitation to move in with him!

Really, his defection had been the last straw in a life where love had ripped her wide open once too often. To add to the sting of it all, they had worked in the same office, he her direct superior, and she had been let go after their breakup, which she—and everyone else at the office—knew was entirely unfair.

Still, in the wake of her life disasters, Stacy had made up her mind she would be wounded by love and life no more! But now the yearning inside her caused by seeing that Christmas-perfect great room, and now by thinking of this man before her with a baby, only made her realize how much work she had yet to do!

Though why, when she knew how much work she had to do, her eyes would go to McAllister’s lips, she could not be certain. McAllister’s lips were full and bold, the lower one in particular spine-tinglingly sensual.

Dangerous, she told herself. He was a dangerous kind of man. His lips should be declared the pillars of salt one should never look at for danger of being lost forever. She was stunned by both the peril and intensity of her thoughts.

She was not, after all, who he was expecting, and she was certainly not a qualified nanny.

But she felt as if she had to know the story of the baby.

And McAllister—despite the outward appearance of confidence—was obviously desperate for help in this particular situation.

And if she could give him that even temporarily, McAllister might be much more amenable to the real reason she had come!

Gratitude could go a long way, after all.

The baby was startled into silence by her appearance. He regarded her with deep suspicion.

As if he knew she was trying to pass herself off as something she was not.

He seemed to make up his mind about her and began to whimper again.

“Ivan, stop it!” McAllister ordered.

The baby, surprisingly, complied.

“Ivan,” she said, and walked over to the baby. “Hello, Ivan.”

The baby appeared to reconsider his initial assessment of her. He smiled tentatively and made a little gargling noise in his throat. Her heart was lost instantly and completely.

“You don’t know my nephew’s name?” McAllister asked, startled. “It’s Max.”

She glanced back at McAllister. His arms were folded over his chest, and he was regarding her with suspicion identical to the baby’s seconds earlier.

His nephew. The blanks were filling in, but all the same it was unraveling already. Stacy was going to find herself tossed unceremoniously out into a snowbank beside her car and, really, wasn’t that what she deserved?

“Aren’t you his nanny?” McAllister demanded. “That’s who I was expecting.”

“I’m Stacy,” she said, drawing in a deep breath. “Stacy Murphy Walker.” Now would be the perfect time to say who she really was and why she was here.

Tell him the rest of it. But her courage was failing her. So much easier to focus on the baby!

“Uppie? Pwweee?”

And it did feel as if this baby—and maybe Kiernan, too—really needed her. And it felt as if she needed to be in this house that cried for a Christmas tree and a family to encircle it.

She reached into the playpen. The baby wound his chubby arms around her neck, and she hoisted his surprisingly heavy weight. He nestled into her and put his thumb in his mouth, slurping contentedly.

“I’m not exactly your nephew’s regular nanny,” she heard herself saying, “but I’m sure I can help you out. I’m very good with children.”

She told herself it wasn’t precisely a lie, and it must have been a measure of McAllister’s desperation that he seemed willing to accept her words.

He regarded her and apparently decided she was a temp or a substitute for the regular nanny, which would also, conveniently, added to the bad roads, explain the delay in her arrival. After scrutinizing her for a moment, he rolled his broad shoulders, unfolded his arms from across his chest and looked at her with undisguised relief.

“I’m Kiernan McAllister.”

“Yes, I know. Of course! Very nice to meet you.” She managed to get one arm out from under the baby’s rump and extended it, not certain what the protocol would be for the house staff. Did you shake the master’s hand?

He crossed the room to her and took her extended hand without a second’s hesitation, but she still knew extending hers had been a mistake. She had felt his hand already as he helped her from the chaise in his bathroom.

Despite the fact that his hand was not the soft hand of an office worker or of her comrades in writing, but hard and powerful, taking it felt like a homecoming.

And if she thought the mere sight of his lips had posed a danger to her, she could see his touch was even more potent. A homecoming to some secret part of herself, because something about his hand in hers sizzled and made her aware of herself as smaller than him.

And feminine. Physically weaker. Vulnerable in some way that was not at all distressing, though it should have been to a woman newly declared to total independence and a hard-nosed career as a freelancer.

She yanked her hand out of his and felt desperate not to give him the smallest hint of her reaction to him. “And just to clarify, is your nephew Ivan or Max?”

“Max. I just like to call him Ivan.”

Stacy looked askance at him.

“As in Ivan the Terrible,” he muttered.

She could feel disapproval scrunch her forehead—a defense against the electric attraction she felt toward him—and something like amusement crossed McAllister’s features as he regarded her, as if he was not even a little fooled.

Annoyingly, the light of amusement in his eyes made him look, impossibly, even more attractive than before!

“But his name is really Max.” He cocked his head. “I guess that works, too, if you think about it. He’s Max everything. Max noisy. Max sleepless. Max filthy, at the moment. He’s just over a year. A horrible age, if there ever was one.”

“He’s adorable,” she declared.

“No. He’s not in the least.”

“Well, he is right now. Except, he might need changing—

“Never mind! If he needs that, you have arrived in the nick of time. And while you look after it I will do the manly thing, and go look after your car. You can change his nappy and then be on your way.”

Well, there was no need to tell him the truth if she was leaving that quickly!

He made the declaration of assigning them duties with such abject relief that Stacy tried to bite her lip to keep from laughing.

It didn’t work. It was probably, at least in part, a delayed reaction to her accident, but a little snort of laughter escaped past her clamped lips. And then another one.

McAllister glared, and more laughter slipped out of her. It seemed to her it was the first time since the disintegration of her relationship that she had had anything to laugh about.

The baby chortled, too, and it made her laugh harder.

“Sorry,” she said, trying to bite it back. “Really. Sorry.”

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