“You Want To Be Reckless And Irresponsible?”

“Yeah, totally yeah,” Teague whispered.

Something warmed inside Daisy even more than all that hot, combustible sex. It was just…she hadn’t planned on liking a man, really liking one, for at least another millennium. In fact, she liked him so much at that instant that she had to hesitate. “You don’t think you’re going to regret this? That we’re moving too fast?”

“Of course we’re going to regret this. Of course we’re moving too fast.” He was still aiming for another kiss, and his voice was thicker than honey. “You know damn well it never works out to have sex too soon. It takes over everything.”

“I know. And I know better.” She found herself staring at his mouth.

“So do I. Believe me, this is your call. Totally. You want to send up a stop sign, we quit, all’s fair.”

“What on earth made you think I was going to put up a stop sign?”

Dear Reader,

Welcome to another stellar month of smart, sensual reads. Our bestselling series DYNASTIES: THE DANFORTHS comes to a compelling conclusion with Leanne Banks’s Shocking the Senator as honest Abe Danforth finally gets his story. Be sure to look for the start of our next family dynasty story when Eileen Wilks launches DYNASTIES: THE ASHTONS next month and brings you all the romance and intrigue you could ever desire…all set in the fabulous Napa Valley.

Award-winning author Jennifer Greene is back this month to conclude THE SCENT OF LAVENDER series with the astounding Wild in the Moment. And just as the year brings some things to a close, new excitement blossoms as Alexandra Sellers gives us the next installment of her SONS OF THE DESERT series with The Ice Maiden’s Sheikh. The always-enjoyable Emilie Rose will wow you with her tale of Forbidden Passion—let’s just say the book starts with a sexy tryst on a staircase. We’ll let you imagine the rest. Brenda Jackson is also back this month with her unforgettable hero Storm Westmoreland, in Riding the Storm. (A title that should make you go hmmm.) And rounding things out is up-and-coming author Michelle Celmer’s second book, The Seduction Request.

I would love to hear what you think about Silhouette Desire, so please feel free to drop me a line c/o Silhouette Books, 233 Broadway, Suite 1001, New York, NY 10279. Let me know what miniseries you are enjoying, your favorite authors and things you would like to see in the future.

With thanks,

Melissa Jeglinski

Senior Editor

Silhouette Desire

Wild in the Moment
Jennifer Greene

MILLS & BOON

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JENNIFER GREENE

lives near Lake Michigan with her husband and has two children. She has written more than fifty category romances, for which she has won numerous awards, including three RITA® Awards from the Romance Writers of America in the Best Short Contemporary Books category, and a Career Achievement Award from Romantic Times magazine.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Epilogue

One

When Daisy Campbell hit the first patch of black ice, she was tempted to let loose a glass-shattering scream.

She didn’t, of course. If she’d learned one thing in the past eleven years, it was to shut up and be careful instead of impulsive—but deep down, she sure wanted to scream.

January in Vermont was no new story for her. The wild winds and blizzard snows and bleak-naked trees and mirror-slick roads were as familiar as a tedious TV rerun. It was for reasons like this that she’d left White Hills, Vermont, and never planned to come back.

However, now, in the middle of a life-threatening spin, really didn’t seem an ideal time to digress.

The cheap compact she’d rented at the airport was a mighty contrast to the red Ferrari she’d driven on the Riviera, but when push came to shove, a car was a car. The compact spun a complete 360, skidded into the oncoming traffic lane, and then careened toward the crest of the hill. Below was an unpleasant drop. Very unpleasant. In fact, unpleasant enough to likely kill her if she couldn’t get the tires to bite—damn soon. Damn, damn, damn soon.

But the tires did bite. For a few hairy moments, the compact faced oncoming traffic, but Daisy battled for traction and eventually turned the son of a seadog around. Since no other vehicles were in sight—thanks to the blizzard—she wasn’t hit or harmed. Nothing was endangered at all, beyond her pulse thumping at sonic-boom levels, but that was no special event. Her ex-husband had regularly raised her blood pressure beyond stroke level easier and faster than any old Vermont blizzard.

It could be that she was getting a tiny bit tired, though.

The past two months on the Riviera had been a nightmare rather than a vacation. The past two days of solid traveling and negotiating airports had been nonstop grueling. And the past two hours, she’d been driving in escalating ghastly conditions.

The car clock claimed it was three in the afternoon, but it might as well have been midnight. Black-cheeked clouds kept rolling in low. The wipers could barely keep up with the slashing, bashing snow. Drifts were forming fast, making big, fat white pillows on fence posts and roofs—but where the wind swept the roads clean, the surface was slick ice.

Exhausted or not, she simply couldn’t relax. Not yet.

Ten minutes from home—even though Daisy hadn’t considered the Campbell homestead to be her real home for more than a decade—her body seemed to sense the ordeal was almost over. She couldn’t see Firefly Hollow, where every teenager in the county traditionally made out on Saturday night, but she knew it was there. She couldn’t see Old Man Swisher’s pond, either, but growing up, she’d spent so many hours in the neighbor’s swimming hole that she knew where it was from the curve in the road. A huge, lioness of a yawn escaped her lungs. Less than a half mile, she’d be home free and safe.

Only, right then, a hundred yards from the driveway, the compact found another diamond slide of ice. It was like trying to control a bullet. She did all the things she was supposed to do, but the little rental car went with the spin, then dove, nose first, into a ditch.

The back tires were still spinning when Daisy let out a long, furious blood-curdling scream.

There were times for impulse control—and times when a woman was justifiably fed-up, ticked-off, had-it, and every other multiple-guess choice there could possibly be.

She turned off the damn car, grabbed her damn purse and overnight bag, and then wrenched open the damn door. Her elegant Italian boots promptly sank into two-foot-deep snow. Naturally she fell. Abandoning all pride, she clawed and crawled her way up from the damn ditch to the damn road.

In that brief period of time, her toes and nose froze solid. Her red cashmere coat and fuzzy hat were designer French; her bags and gloves were Swiss. She’d have traded all of it—including her Manolo Blahnik boots—for a practical L.L. Bean jacket. The kind she grew up in. The kind she swore she’d never wear again as long as she lived.

Eyes squinting against the battering, blustering snow, she trudged toward home. She was exasperated beyond belief, she told herself. Not scared. Daisy Campbell-Rochard-now-Campbell-again simply didn’t do scared. There was a world of difference between being gutless and being careful. She knew exactly how serious a Vermont blizzard could be. There were snowstorms…and then there were snowstorms—the kind that shut down the community for days. The kind where, if you fell in a drift, no one would likely find you for a good week. The kind where, if you had a brain, you wouldn’t be outside at all, much less if you weren’t dressed for serious weather.

But then—in spite of the shrieking wind and the fistfuls of snow—she recognized the rail fence. Then the toboggan hill. Then the big old maple tree.

And finally, there it was. Home. The base structure was as old as the first Campbell who came over from Scotland—right after the Mayflower, her dad always claimed. Rooms had been added on, but the house was still basically the same sturdy, serious house with white trim and a shake roof. For a moment, fierce, wonderful memories flooded her of coming home other times—smoke puffing from the chimney, lights warming every window, Colin and Margaux flying out the front door to greet their oldest daughter, Violet and Camille laughing and gossiping.

Just that quickly, though, Daisy’s heart sank. It didn’t seem like home when there were no lights, no sign of life. The place looked cold and hauntingly lonely. No one had plowed the road in weeks.

She told herself it was totally stupid to feel at such a loss. Obviously, there couldn’t be a welcoming committee when no one knew she was coming home—and she’d known ahead of time that the house was empty.

In fact, when it came down to it, Daisy took a ton of credit for everyone being so happy and busy these days. Her mom and dad were retired and basking in the Arizona sunshine, thanks to her researching their ideal retirement home.

Camille, the baby of the family, had stopped home for a few months last summer, needing to recover from a god-awful personal tragedy—but Daisy had stepped in there, too, got the family together and organized some subtle matchmaking. Camille and her groom—and his kids and critters and dad—were hanging out in Australia for the next six months.

Violet, their middle sister, had holed up in the farm house for a longer stretch—at least two or three years after getting divorced from the Creep of the Universe. She’d been scaring off men, and likely still would be—if Daisy hadn’t stepped in and sent home a man who was brave enough to take her on. Now Vi was married, too, and not as big as a blimp yet, but due in a couple more months. She was living with her new husband somewhere in upstate New York.

Daisy was outstanding at fixing everyone else’s lives, if she said so herself. It just never seemed that easy to fix her own—although, to give herself credit, she did learn from her mistakes. If the Adonis of the Universe crossed her path, she wouldn’t go out with him for a million dollars.

Five million, even.

But where men were an easy problem to solve—by giving them up, permanently—her current predicament was a little more challenging. Right now she desperately needed to get out of the violent wind and blistering cold before it got any darker, any colder, the snow any deeper. Too fast, scary fast, she was losing feeling in her hands, her feet, her chin. Her fuzzy hat had flown off somewhere, and her hair was wildly whipping around her face.

She battled to get to the back door and then fumbled for the house key in her purse. Her fingers just couldn’t seem to function well enough to unsnap the purse, hold the key, aim the key in the lock, turn it.

Finally her fumbling paid off and the door pushed open. Relief surged through her. It was all she needed, all she wanted—home, a place to hole up and hide out for a while. Inside, that awful screaming wind was immediately silenced. The temperature was still freezing, of course, but all she had to do was flick on the furnace, get some hot tea going, get warmed up. Everything was going to be okay.

She dropped her bag and purse, yanked off her snow-crusted gloves, and took her chattering teeth and shaking hands over to the thermostat. She flicked the dial, expecting to hear the gentle woomph of the furnace starting up.

But there was no woomph. No sound at all.

Frowning, she reached for the light switch, thinking that she’d misread the dial in the gloom.

No light turned on. She tried the light over the sink. No light there, either. She flew for the telephone then, but obviously she should have guessed there’d be no functional phone with no one living in the house right now, and she hadn’t been home from France long enough to get a cell phone. For a moment she stared blankly around the kitchen, thinking it had been blue and white the last time she’d been home. Now everything was red—red tiles, chintz curtains and rocker cushions. Violet must have done it. The Live Well, Love Much, Laugh Often sign, the girl stuff and country-corny doodads all looked like Violet, too. Daisy didn’t care if it wasn’t her decorating taste. The drumbeat in her pulse just kept reassuringly thumping home home home.

Only she couldn’t stay here. If there was no power, no furnace, there was no way to get warm. No way to cook. She couldn’t go out in subzero temperatures in the middle of this storm and chop wood. Frantically she jimmied the thermostat dial again, pushing it back and forth, praying for the sound of the furnace. But there was nothing.

Okay, she told herself, okay, thinking that if she could just calm down and not panic, she could think up a plan.

No plan emerged. She needed heat. Serious heat. The blizzard could go on for days. She needed heat, food and shelter now, before she was any colder, any more exhausted, before the day turned any darker.

For just a second the traitorous thought seeped in her mind that once, just once in her life, she’d like a hero. Someone to take care of her for a change. Someone she could depend on. But that thought was so silly that she readily abandoned it.

Daisy had never had a problem attracting men—but they were always the wrong men. The ones she took care of. The ones who were never there when the chips went down. She knew better than to expect anything else, so there was no point in whining—or panicking.

She mentally kicked herself in the fanny and moved. Quickly. All her stuff was being shipped from Europe, but she had the small overnight case. The back hall closet still had some of Dad’s old coats, her mom’s old boots. There were always spare gloves and hats under the back hall bench. Most of it was older than the hills and worn, but who cared?

She simply had to be covered enough, protected enough, to get to a neighbor. This was White Hills. No matter what reputation she’d had years ago, there wasn’t a soul who wouldn’t help a Campbell—or who she wouldn’t help, for that matter. The MacDougals were gone, because Camille had married into them. But across the sideroad to the west was the Cunningham Farm. The Cunninghams were old, seventies at least by now. But she knew they’d take her in, and undoubtedly try to feed her. Mr. Cunningham would know something about furnaces. Or he’d have ideas.

She plunked down in the rocker and leaned over to tug off her wonderful—and now ruined—boots. They didn’t want to come off. They were frozen to her feet, stiff enough to make tears sting her eyes to get them loose. Beneath, her feet and toes were red as bricks, and stung.

Not good, not good, not good.

Fear was sneaking up, biting at the edges, threatening to overwhelm her if she let it. She wanted to let it. She put on thick old wool socks, her dad’s old farm boots, a barn jacket right over her beautiful red cashmere coat. A little warmth started to penetrate, but she wanted to go back in that god-awful screaming wind like she wanted a bullet. It wasn’t safe out there, and she knew it.

Still, she swathed her face and neck in a long wool scarf, pulled on double mittens, grabbed her stuff. Don’t think, she told herself, just do it. When she opened the door, the wind and snow slapped her like a bully, trying to scare her again, but she forced herself back down the drive. She’d be okay if she didn’t lose her head. It might have been years, but she knew exactly where the Cunningham house was.

God knew how long it took to walk a quarter mile down the road—an hour? Longer? But finally she saw lights. The lights not only reassured her that the Cunninghams were home, but that they had power, so they must have a generator. A generator meant heat, light, food. 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 to be uncontrollably fading in and out.

“Sheriff, this is Daisy Campbell…yeah, Margaux and Colin’s oldest daughter…. George Webster? You’re the sheriff now? Well, that’s great, but listen, I…”

She pushed a red-nailed hand through her wild mane of hair. “Yes, I’m back from the south of France. And yes, it’s beautiful there. But listen, I…”

She jerked to her feet and spun around, talking faster, appearing more and more agitated. “Yes, I changed my last name back to Campbell. You’re right, marriage wasn’t for me. Everyone always said that, didn’t they? That I’d never settle down…” She seemed to try to interrupt him several more times, and then finally spit out, “Sheriff! Would you listen? I’m at the Cunningham place. They’re not here—”

Again, the person on the other end must have talked some more, because she cut in again. “Well, that’s nice to know, that they’re vacationing in Pittsburgh, but the point is that there’s a strange man here…. Teague Larson, you say? Yes. Yes. It does look as if he’s a carpenter or electrician or something, but the point is that he’s hurt. Bad hurt. And no, I can’t very well calm down and take it easy. I know there’s a blizzard but…”

Fade out. Teague tried to catch more, but beneath his eyelids all he could see was a canvas of pea green. Dizzying swirls of pea green. A stomach-churning paisley pattern of swirling pea green.

At some point—who knew how long—he felt her hands on him again. She pulled off his tool belt, which felt a million times better. Smooth, chilled fingers pressed the inside of his wrist, then the carotid artery in his neck. After that, she laid her cheek right on top of his chest, with all that vibrant dark hair tickling his nostrils. Moments passed before she spoke into the cell phone again.

“I can’t do a pulse. I’m not a nurse, for Pete’s sake. Yes, it seems as if his heart’s beating strong, but I have nothing to compare it— What the Sam Hill do you mean days! I know we’re in the middle of a blizzard. I don’t care. I want an ambulance here right now!”

Okay. If she was going to do the shrieking thing, he was going back to the unconscious thing. Angel or no angel, the pain just wasn’t worth it. If she patted him down again, he’d rethink it, maybe wake up again, but until then there just wasn’t a lot of motivation to stay with it.

“Damn it, I’m telling you he could be hurt badly! He could have broken bones. And there’s blood beneath his head. Okay, okay, I’ll…”

More colorful swirls filled his mind. Not pea green this time. More like the blend of colors from stirring whipped cream into coffee. At first the swirling sensation was as fast as a whirlpool, but then everything seemed to slow down, soften, dance to a far quieter tune.

When he heard her voice again, she seemed calmer. At least a little calmer. She’d quit swearing a blue streak at the sheriff, anyway.

“Yeah, I did that. Yeah, okay. I can do that, too. And yes, I can plug in his cell phone somewhere, as long as there’s power here. But you have to promise to pick him up as soon as you can. I can keep calling with a report every few hours, but the very second you can get an ambulance or Medi-Vac here, I want…”

Teague remembered nothing else for a while. When he woke the next time, shadows had darkened. The wind outside was still howling like a lonely wolf, but the kitchen was completely silent. The naked light fixture over the sink glared straight in his eyes—but not for long.

Huge, gorgeous dark eyes suddenly blocked that sharp, bright light. It was her again. She was real, after all. Who’d ever believe it?

And then there was her voice, not screaming at all now, but low, low as a sexy blues singer, low as sexual promises in the dead of night, whispering an ardent, “Merde!”

Two

Daisy had notoriously bad judgment—and bad luck—with men, but this was ridiculous.

“Even Jean-Luc never put me through this,” she muttered. “If I never take care of another man as long as I live, it’ll be too soon. I’m not only going to be celibate. I’m going to buy a chastity belt with a lock and no key. I’m going to take antiestrogen pills. Maybe I could try to turn gay. Maybe I could try hypnotism, see if there’s a way I could get an automatic flight response near an attractive guy….”

Temporarily she forgot that train of thought, enticing though it was.

Man, she was tired. Her eyes were stinging. Her feet ached. Her heart hurt. She had no battery of energy left, hadn’t for the last hour, but it’s not as if she had a choice to keep moving.

Crouching down by the fireplace in the Cunningham living room, she touched a match to kindling, and while waiting to make sure the fire took, mentally ran through a checklist of what still had to be done.

She’d scooped up a box of candles from the Cunninghams’ pantry, collected matches, three flashlights, then found a metal tray to put it all in. She located the generator in the basement, which was great, because who knew how long the house would have power? But power, of course, was just the tip of the iceberg.

No one grew up in Vermont without blizzard training. She’d brought in four loads of cut wood from the garage. Stacked it in the living room by the fireplace, then checked the flue and stacked the first branches and kindling. Before starting the fire, though, she’d raided the downstairs closets and cupboards for coats, pillows and blankets. She pulled the curtains and closed all doors to the living room, rolling towels at window and door bases so drafts couldn’t get in.

The living room had been updated since the kitchen, judging from the furnishings—which were heavy on the neutrals, and colored up with afghans and pictures and keepsakes. Cluttered or not, Daisy judged it to be potentially the warmest room in the house, which was why she’d set up everything here. It was basic winter storm thinking. Conserve energy. Conserve resources. Not to mention, she didn’t want to intrude on the Cunninghams’ house or stuff any more than she had to.

All that seemed pretty solid planning—only, she’d been running on fumes for hours now. At least she wasn’t still cold, but she was darn close to falling asleep standing up—and there were still three chores she absolutely had to do.

One was fill the bathtubs, for an emergency water source. The second was food. Soup would do, but she simply had to get something in her stomach soon.

And then there was the other chore.

The kindling took. She watched the little flames lick around the branches, then catch on a small log, and knew her baby fire was going to make it. So she dusted her hands on her fanny and stood up. With a frown deeper than a crater, she aimed for the kitchen.

He was her other chore.

Somehow he had to be moved—but how on earth was she supposed to move a man almost twice as big as she was?

Hands on hips, she edged closer. Long before she’d started the house preparations, she’d tackled what she could for the stranger. Feeling guiltier than a prowler, she’d opened cupboards and drawers until she’d located the Cunninghams’ first-aid supplies. As quickly as she could, then, she’d put a clean towel under his head and tried to cleanse the head wound. After that, she tugged off his boots. He’d groaned so roughly when she touched his right foot that she’d gingerly explored, pulling off his sock—and found one ankle swollen like a puff ball.

Great. Another injury. She’d wrapped the ankle with some tape—God knew that might be the wrong thing if he had a broken bone. But doing nothing seemed the worse choice, so she kept moving, packed the ankle in some ice, then covered him with a light blanket for shock. For quite a while she just stayed there with him, hunkered down, worried sick he was going to die on her—until she realized she was acting like a scared goose.

She wasn’t helping him, staying there and tucking the blanket around him another dozen times. The only thing she could do was get her butt in gear and do some survival preparation stuff. So she’d done all that, but now…

Damn. She couldn’t just leave him on the hard kitchen floor. It was drafty, cold, dirty. The couch or carpet in the living room was warmer, safer, more protected.

But how to move him, without moving his right ankle or his head? How to move his weight at all?

She thought, then trekked upstairs, thinking Mrs. Cunningham had to have a linen closet somewhere. She found it and pulled a sheet from the bottom shelf, hoping it wasn’t a good one. The plan was to somehow wrestle him onto the sheet, with the hope that she’d be able to pull him across the floor that way.

If that didn’t work… But she amended that thought. It had to work. She had no other ideas.

Crouching down, she gently pushed and prodded until she’d maneuvered the sheet under his weight. It took a while, partly because she was so worried about injuring him further, and partly because she kept glancing at his face.

He took her breath away; she had to admit it. He just had the kind of looks that really rang her chimes. Rugged jaw, dusted with whiskers. The kind of thick, rough hair that never stayed brushed, not too short, not too styled, just…himself. Shoulders that wouldn’t be subdued in an ordinary shirt. Jeans worn soft, the kind that said he didn’t give a damn what they looked like.

Physical, she thought dispassionately. One look, and she could immediately picture him hot and sweaty, throwing a woman on the bed and diving in after her. The kind of guy who was lusty about sex, lusty about life, lusty about everything he did. Bullheaded. Those kinds of guys always were. The thicker the neck, the more stubborn the brain. And the bigger the feet, the bigger… Well, it wasn’t as if she cared how big he was under that zipper.

She was immune. She could look, she could enjoy—as long as he stayed alive for her, anyway. But she already knew he was totally wrong for her. She didn’t know why at that precise moment. Maybe he was married. Or maybe he couldn’t define faithful with a big-print dictionary. Or maybe he’d found some creative, new way to break a woman’s heart.

The details didn’t matter.

The reality was that she had never—ever—fallen for a good guy. The flaw was in her, not them. She had some kind of chemistry surge near bad boys. The difference between when she was seventeen and now, though, was that she faced her problems. No more ducking or denial.

Which meant that when and if she liked the looks of a guy, that was it—she shut the barn door and padlocked it.

Right now, though, she couldn’t be worried less about falling for Mr. Adorable. She was focused on one goal and one goal only—which was to pull the big guy into the living room before she collapsed from 1) a broken back, 2) exhaustion, 3) starvation, or 4) all of the above. My God, he was heavy. Sweat prickled the back of her neck. She pulled with all her might, groaning to give herself extra strength, and still only managed to drag him a few more inches.

Jean-Luc, her ex, had less character than a boa constrictor. But at least he’d been relatively light. Even when he’d been three sheets to the wind—or high—he’d usually been able to at least help her move him around. This guy…

When she glanced down at him again, the guy in question not only seemed to be conscious, but was staring with fascination at her face. “Not that I mind being carried…but wouldn’t it be easier for me to get up and walk?” he asked.

She couldn’t kill him. No matter how mad she was, you just couldn’t murder a man who was already hurt. But an hour later she was still ticked off.

That was also the soonest she could find time to close the door on the kitchen and call the sheriff to make another report.

“I hear you, George,” she said into the receiver. “And I admit it. He’s alive. I even admit that it doesn’t look as if he’s going back into a coma anytime soon. But I still have no way to know how badly hurt he is. I need an ambulance. Or a helicopter. Or a snowmobile—”

While she listened, she also ground a little fresh pepper onto the potato soup. The stove and refrigerator were still functioning in the torn-up kitchen, but that was about it. There was no sink or running water. All the pots and pans and dishes had been moved elsewhere, ditto for silverware, food and spices.

Daisy considered herself outstanding at making something out of nothing—not because she’d ever wanted that talent, but God knows, because being married to Jean-Luc had required some inventive scrambling to just survive. She’d always been her mom’s daughter in the kitchen, besides. So she started out with a bald can of potato soup she found in a basement pantry, then found kitchen tools and the spices in boxes in the dining room, then raided the depths of the fridge, finally came through with some bacon crumbs and a beautiful hunk of cheddar.

The chives and pepper weren’t as fresh as she’d like, but a decent soup was still coming together. If she could just get rid of her unwanted invalid, she might even be able to relax.

“Yes, George, I hear that wind outside. And I can’t even see for the snow. But that’s why you guys have snow machines, isn’t it? To be able to rescue people in all conditions? No, I’m not exaggerating! At the very least, he needs some X-rays. And some antibiotics or medicine like that—oh, for Pete’s sake.” She stared in disbelief at the cell phone. “No, I won’t go out with you when this is all over, you…you cretinous canard! Des clous!”

The French insults didn’t even dent his attitude. George just laughed. The sheriff! The one person in town who was supposed to rescue you no matter what the problem!

When it came down to it, the law had never done her a lick of good.

The soup was finally ready. She wrapped a spoon in a napkin, flicked off the kitchen light and carried her steaming bowl into the living room. The fire was popping-hot now. She’d have to wake up in the night to make sure it was fed—otherwise it’d go out, and suck all their warmth out the chimney. But for now, the cherry and apple logs smelled as soothing as an old-fashioned Christmas.

She ignored the shrieking wind, as easily as she ignored the long, blanket-covered lump on the couch. Darn it, she’d earned this meal. And she was actually getting woozy-headed from exhaustion and jet lag and too many hours without something in her stomach. Quickly she settled in the giant recliner—obviously Mr. Cunningham’s favorite chair, judging from the hunting magazines stacked next to it—and reached for the spoon.

A sexy voice—a pitiful, weak, vulnerable but nevertheless sexy voice—piped up from the deep shadows of the couch. “Could I have just a little of that?”

“No.”

A moment passed, and then the voice piped up again, this time adding a desperate, ingratiating tone on top of the weak and pitiful. “It smells really good. In fact, it smells fantastic.”

“Tough. You’re not getting any food.”

When he responded with silence again this time, she had to relent. “Look. I’m not eating in front of you to be mean. There’s nowhere to sit in the kitchen and I’m beat and this is the only other room that’s really warm. Honestly, though, it’s just not a good idea for you to have food after a head bump. You could throw up.”

Like any other guy who’d made it to first base, he immediately tried for second. “I won’t. I promise I won’t.”

“So you say. But the sheriff said I was to make sure you stayed awake, check your pupils every couple of hours and not give you any food until tomorrow morning.” She scooped up more soup, still not looking at him. She still remembered the ka-boom of her heartbeat when she half carried the big lug into the living room. Then she’d had to suffer through a whole bunch more intimate body contact in the process of settling him on the couch and tucked him in again.

That was her whole problem with men. They looked at her a certain way, she caved. He was one of them, she could sense it, smell it, taste it. For right now at least he was hurt. How much damage could a guy do when he was hurt? Particularly when she refused to look at him. She wasn’t volunteering for any more of those ka-booms.

“Please,” he begged charmingly.

She plunked down her soup, growled a four letter word in total disgust, then marched into the kitchen to spoon out another bowl. A small bowl. She brought it back with a scowl. “You get two spoonfuls. No more.”

“Okay.”

“You keep that down, then we’ll talk. But I don’t want to hear any whining or bribes.”

“No whining. No bribes. Got it,” he promised her.

Yeah. That big baritone promising not to whine was like a bear promising not to roar, but she slid the ottoman over and sat down with the bowl. “Don’t try sitting. Just lean up a little bit.”

“I think there’s a slim chance I could feed myself.”

“I think there’s a big chance you’ll eat the whole bowl. That’s the point. I’m controlling this.”

“Ah. A bossy, controlling woman, are you?”

“No. A scared woman. If you die or get hurt any worse, I’m going to be stuck with you until this blizzard is over.” She lifted the spoonful, and he obediently opened his mouth, his eyes on hers. Again she told herself he was hurt, for Pete’s sake. But how the hell could an injured guy have so much devilment in those eyes?

“Are we going to sleep together in here?”

She sighed, then plugged his mouth with another spoonful. “When I’m hurt,” she said pointedly, “I usually make an extra point of being nice to the people who are stuck taking care of me.”

“Well, if you won’t sleep with me, would you consider taking a shower with me? Because I’ve got sawdust itches from my neck to my toes. My hands are full of grit. I just want to clean up.”

“No showers. No baths. What if you fell?” But when she fed him another spoonful, she had to consider the thought. “It could be a good idea to make sure there isn’t any dust or debris near that head wound, though.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. And I couldn’t fall if you took the shower with me. Maybe if we got around to formally introducing ourselves? I’m Teague Larson—”

“I know. The sheriff told me. And I’m Daisy Campbell. You can either call me Daisy—or Battle-Ax—but either way, no shower. I’ll try to cook up some way to get your hands clean. If we still have water and power tomorrow, maybe we can talk about a shower for you then. But tonight we’re doing what the sheriff said for a concussion.”

“I don’t have a concussion.”

“You knocked yourself out. You could very well have a concussion,” she corrected him.

“I knocked myself out because I was an idiot, took a chance I shouldn’t have taken. But my head’s too hard to dent, trust me, or ask anyone who knows me. In the meantime, I don’t suppose there’s any more soup? Or any real food somewhere?”

“The kitchen’s a complete disaster—which you should know, since you’re the one who tore it up. I was lucky to find the soup and a pot to put it in. You’re not getting any meat or heavy foods, anyway, so don’t waste your breath looking at me like that.”

“Like what?”

She fed him one more spoonful of soup, then ignored those soulful eyes and carted the dishes into the downstairs bathroom. Without running water in the kitchen, she was stuck doing dishes in the bitsy bathroom sink—but that was the end of the chores. She could still do a dozen more things to prepare for a loss of power, but they just weren’t going to happen. She was two seconds away from caving.

When she returned to the living room, she brought the invalid a fresh glass of water and a warm washcloth to wipe his hands, then knelt at the hearth. Once the fire was tended, she fully intended to sink into a nightlong coma. The blaze was going strong, but she needed to poke the fattest logs, tidying up the bed of ashes, add on two more slow-burning logs.

“The way you talked to the sheriff, you seemed to know him.” Teague, darn him, sounded wide awake.

“George Webster? I went to school with him.” She hung up the poker and turned around. “He followed me around my whole senior year with his tongue hanging out.”

There, she’d won a grin. His eyes tracked her as she pushed off her shoes and shook out a blanket. “I’ll bet a lot of boys followed you with their tongues hanging out,” he said wryly.

“A few,” she admitted. “What kills me now is realizing how immature I was. I wanted the guys to like me. I wanted a reputation for being wild and fun. And whether that was dumb or not, I had two younger sisters, both of whom looked up to me. I should have been thinking about being a role model for them, and instead…”

“Instead what?”

“Instead…” She curled up in the overstuffed recliner and wrapped the blanket around her. God knew why she was talking. Probably because she was too darn tired to think straight. “Instead there was only one thing in my head in high school. Getting out. I couldn’t wait to grow up and leave White Hills and do something exciting. I was never in real trouble—not like trouble with the police. But someone was always calling my mom on me. My skirt was too short. My makeup was too ‘artsy.’ I’d skip English to hang out in the Art Room. I never did anything big wrong, but I can see now it was all just symbolic little stuff to show how trapped I felt in a small town and how much I wanted to leave.”

“Yet now you’re back.”

“Only for a short time. I just need a few weeks to catch my breath before moving on again.” Even though her eyes were drooping, she could hear the ardent tone in her voice. She so definitely wasn’t staying. A few hours back in White Hills, and already she’d been caught up in a blizzard and a guy problem. It was a sign. She should never have tried coming home. Even for a month. Even knowing she’d been pretty darn desperate.

“If you don’t mind my asking, how did you come to be living in the south of France?”

Her eyes popped open—at least temporarily. Maybe tiredness had loosened her tongue, but she couldn’t fathom how he’d known she lived in France.

He explained, “Pretty hard not to know a little about you. You’re one of the exotic citizens of White Hills, after all. Daisy Campbell, the exotic, glamorous, adventurous girl…the one all the other girls wanted to be, who had the guts to leave the country and go play all over France with the rich crowd….”

“Oh, yeah, that’s sure me,” she said wryly, and washed a hand over her face. Sometimes it was funny, how you could say a fact, and it really was a fact—yet it didn’t have a lick of truth to it. She hadn’t been playing in a long time. Anywhere. With anyone. “Anyway…I ended up living in France because I fell in love with an artist. Met him at one of his first American shows, which happened to be in Boston. I can’t even remember why I was visiting there…but I remember falling in love in about two seconds flat. Took off and married him right after high school.”

“I take it he was French?”

“Yeah, he was French. And he wanted to live in Aix-en-Provence, where Cézanne had studied with Emile Zola. And then Remy-en-Provence, where Van Gogh hung out for a long time. And then the Côte d’Azur—because the light on the water is so pure there, or that’s what all the artists say, that there’s no place like the French Riviera.”

“Hmm…so you traveled around a lot. Sounds ritzy and exciting.”

“It was,” she said, because that’s what she always told everyone back home. They thought she was gloriously happy. They thought she was living a glamorous, always-exciting dream of a life. No one knew otherwise—except probably her mother, and that was only because Margaux had the embarrassing gift of being able to read her daughters’ minds.

“So…are you still married to this artist?”

“Nope. Pretty complicated getting a divorce for two people of different citizenships, but that’s finally done now. And I don’t know exactly what I’m doing after this, but you can take it to the bank, I’m never living anywhere but my own country again.” She opened her eyes. Somehow, even now, she seemed to feel obligated to say something decent about her ex-husband. “My ex really was and is a fine artist. That part was totally the real thing. He wasn’t one of those artists who have to die to make it. His work’s extraordinary, been recognized all over the world. Jean-Luc Rochard. You might have seen his paintings.”

“Not me. The only original artwork I’ve got are those paint-by-number-kit things. Oh. And a black-velvet rendition of Elvis.”

Darn it. He’d made her chuckle again. “Got a houseful of those, do you?”

“Maybe not a houseful.” She felt his gaze on her face in the firelight. “So…what happened?”

“What happened when?”

“What happened, that you got a divorce. You talk up the guy like he was the cat’s meow, a woman’s romantic dream. And you were living the high life in fantastic places. Yet something obviously had to go wrong, or you’d still be with him.”

“Oh, no. I’ve spilled all I’m going to spill for one night. Your turn next. And if this storm is going to be anywhere near as bad as I’m afraid of, we’ll be marooned here for another day or two—so we’ll have more time to talk than either of us probably wants. For the immediate future—do you need a trip to the library but are too embarrassed to tell me?”

“I’ll deal with a trek to the library after you go to sleep.”

“Well, that’s the problem, Mr. Teague Larson,” she said patiently. “I’m completely dead on my feet. Which means I’m going to conk out in this chair any second now. I’m supposed to call the sheriff every few hours, report how you are. And I’m supposed to wake you up every two hours and look in your eyes, check the size of your pupils. Only, I’m afraid that I’m not going to get either of those things done. I’m losing it, I can tell. So if you need some help getting into the bathroom, you need to tell me now.”

“I don’t need help.”

“Yeah, you do. But I’m not up for bullying you. I’m warning you, this is your last call for free help.” She yawned, as if to punctuate how tired she was. And that was the last thing she remembered.

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