Dan Meeks had married an incredible woman.
Jesse unlocked his door and stepped into his cold, dark cabin. He didn’t have time for a shower, so he slipped into his warmest layers, put on his ski pants and parka, then made a lunch and headed to work, his mind full of Ellie. God, he could still smell her, her scent lingering on his skin, images of last night playing in his head. Ellie answering the door in that nightgown. Ellie lost in orgasm, pleasure dancing across her face. Ellie lying asleep beside him, eyelashes dark on her cheeks.
What the hell had he gotten himself into?
He didn’t know, but he liked it.
He was so caught up in thinking about her that he almost missed the turn-off to the ski resort.
Get it together, jackass.
By the time he parked in the staff lot, the snow was coming down hard, wind creating near-blizzard conditions.
Inside the chalet, Matt was on the radio with someone from management. “We’re looking at gusts of thirty to fifty miles an hour up here. Yeah. I don’t think we have a choice.”
Well, shit.
It took a hell of a lot of snow to shut a ski resort down, but wind was something else. Ski lifts couldn’t operate safely in high winds. People could get blown out. Chairs could derail and fall, or swing into the support poles and crush someone. And a ski resort without operational lifts was a ski resort without skiers.
But that didn’t mean it was going to be a slow day. Far from it.
At the morning huddle, Matt gave people their assignments, then added a word of caution. “We’re seeing temps of minus forty with wind chill up at the top. Watch yourselves. Hypothermia is a sneaky son of a bitch. I don’t want to lose anyone to the weather—not one of you and certainly not a guest.”
With no lifts to carry them up the mountain, patrollers rode up on snowcats and snowmobiles. Jesse rode up to Eagle Ridge with Kevin and Ben and a load of explosives, snow swirling in the snowmobile’s headlights, wind beating down on them. By the time they reached the top of the ridge, Jesse knew they were fucked.
He shouted to the others, wind biting into his face, the cold merciless. “We can’t toss bombs. The wind will catch them. We’ll blow ourselves up.”
Jesse could tell Kevin wasn’t happy.
*
Ellie awoke to the beeping of her alarm at five. She stretched in the darkness, smiled to herself, and reached to feel the indentation Jesse had left on the pillow. He’d left behind other signs of his presence, too—his scent on the sheets and on her body, the salt and musk of sex in the air, the soreness between her thighs.
She crawled out of bed and walked naked to the bathroom, feeling as if she were floating on air. She stepped into the shower, her hands retracing the path his hands and mouth had taken last night, the memory turning her on.
She was no stranger to great sex. She and Dan had had a crazy, wonderful love life, cocooning when he was home on leave, trying to make up for lost time, screwing until they could barely walk straight. But last night with Jesse had been …
Incredible was the only word that came to mind.
Jesse had been rough. He’d been tender. He’d overwhelmed her in the best possible way. How many times had she come? Four. No, five. It wasn’t her record for one night, but it was only off by one. And she and Jesse barely knew one another. What would it be like once they’d been together for a while?
Don’t lose your head over this.
She ignored that annoying voice. She wasn’t a teenager. Jesse had been upfront with her. He’d told her that he wasn’t good with relationships and had never planned to be a father. She’d heard him. If a week from now he ended it…
How will you feel then?
She would be fine. She would be better than fine. She knew something now that she hadn’t known two weeks ago. She could feel again.
She woke the kids, got them ready to go, and drove through wind and four inches of new snow to drop them off at her parents’ place.
Her mother answered the door. “There are my sleepy angels.”
Ellie set the kids down just inside the door. “How’s Claire?”
Her mother bent down to take off the kids’ hats and coats. “I haven’t heard anything since last night. She was in a fair amount of pain, but Cedar was taking good care of her. Haven’t you called her yourself?”
“I went to the fundraiser at Knockers last night and got home late.” Ellie omitted the fact that she’d spent the rest of the night having sex with her neighbor. “I’ll call her on my lunch break if I get one. I’m in the ER today.”
It was a slow day, slow enough that she was able to work on the SnowFest first-aid tent and spend a fair amount of time thinking about Jesse—his mouth between her thighs, his hands on her breasts, the expression on his face when he came.
“Don’t distract me. I’m busy.”
Good God!