Except for her heart hammering against her ribs, she lay unmoving.
The mattress dipped when he placed his knee near her hip. Alarmed, she rolled onto her back and gasped when he planted his hands on either side of her shoulders, bridging her body, blocking her view of the rafters, that worrisome metal bar, everything except his face.
“When the weather clears, I swear to you that I’ll take you down the mountain. I’ll see to it that you’re safe. Until then, I won’t hurt you. Understand?”
Incapable of speech, she bobbed her head once.
“Do you believe me?”
With absolute honesty, she whispered, “I want to.”
“You can.”
“How can I, when you won’t answer the most basic questions?”
“Ask me a basic question.”
“What’s your name?”
“What’s it matter?”
“If it doesn’t matter, why won’t you tell me?”
“Trust me, Doc, you go meddling in my life, you won’t like what you find.”
“If you didn’t want me to meddle you shouldn’t have brought me here.”
He came as close to smiling as he ever did. “You’ve got me there.”
She analyzed his features, searching for clues into the terrible thing he’d done. It was a strong face, unrelievedly masculine, but evocative of mystery more than menace. “Why are you hiding from the authorities?”
“Why does anyone?”
“So they won’t get caught.”
“There you have it.”
“As a law-abiding citizen, I can’t simply—”
“Yes you can,” he said insistently. “You can simply leave it alone.”
Suddenly she was tired of his veiled threats and decided to challenge him. “Or what? What will you do? You’ve promised not to hurt me.”
Even had she not been able to see his eyes in the darkness, she would have felt them, taking in her mouth, throat, the open neck of the shirt. They moved as low as the vee of her thighs before coming back to hers.
She held her breath.
He whispered, “It wouldn’t hurt.”
Chapter 7
Emory let the curtain drop back over the window. “It’s hopeless out there.”
The weather had worsened overnight. It had begun to snow, and it was accumulating over a thick layer of sleet. Which, of course, was in his favor.
He was seated at the dining table, tinkering with the toaster that had failed to pop up the slices of bread at breakfast.
“How old is that thing?”
Her cross tone of voice brought his head up. “I don’t know. It came with the cabin.”
“Why don’t you just buy a new one?”
“This one can be fixed. Besides, I enjoy working on things.” He’d already glued the broken piece of stem back onto her sunglasses. He’d set them carefully on the table for the glue to dry.
“You’re a born handyman?”
“I manage.”
No doubt he was being modest and that he was, in fact, a good fix-it man. He would have to be to live the way he did, alone in an isolated area, relying on no one except himself.
Jeff wouldn’t know how to set the controls on a toaster, much less repair one. Although to think so uncharitably of him was unfair. He’d never been required to fix a household item and would have been surprised to know that she would find such an effort endearing even if he failed at it.
To her recollection she had never asked him to help her with something around the house. Perhaps she should have. If she hadn’t been so self-reliant, and had instead asked small favors of him, maybe they would be happier.
The rift between them had started a year ago when he had failed to make partner in the investment firm in which he was an associate. He had assumed an air of indifference, but she knew that being passed over had been an enormous disappointment to him and a blow to his ego.
Wanting to reassure him of her support, she’d made a concerted effort to call him throughout the day, sometimes for something silly, just to let him know that she was thinking about him. However, rather than buoying his spirits, the extra attention seemed only to irritate him. At one point, he’d even asked her, with chilly politeness, to please stop patronizing him.
In an effort to get them back on track, she had switched tactics, suggesting weekend getaways, pursuing things she thought he would enjoy. A wine-tasting weekend in Napa. An indie film festival in Los Angeles. A bed-and-breakfast in the French Quarter.
Her ideas were met with lukewarm responses or outright derision. Their sex life dwindled until he complained about the infrequency, while at the same time, he stopped initiating it. Her pride wouldn’t let her attempt to entice him. They reached a stalemate. The gap continued to widen. Months of increasing tension culminated in an argument over his indifference to the upcoming marathon. It was a charity fund-raiser that she had initiated and helped to organize. Beyond showing a lack of interest, he had developed a hostile attitude toward the event and what he called her “obsession” with it.
His rejection of something so important to her was symptomatic of his emotional withdrawal in general, and when she had cited that last Thursday evening during their stilted dinner conversation, the situation quickly became combustible.
What she hadn’t said, what she’d held back, was that she suspected him of having a lover. Customarily, when a man’s ego had been trampled, wasn’t more adventurous sex the restorative he sought?
But lacking evidence to support her suspicion, she’d kept it to herself. She’d left on Friday afternoon, angry but hopeful that spending a night away would realign her perspective and, if she was being honest, ignite a fighting spirit to keep their marriage intact.
She hadn’t counted on falling and getting a concussion and being “rescued” by a nameless man who, without even touching her, had aroused more sexual awareness last night than Jeff had aroused in more than a year.
“Are you cold?”
His question jerked her out of her reverie. “What?”
“You’re chafing your upper arms. Are you cold?”
“No.”
He left the eviscerated toaster and got up to go to the fireplace. When the logs he added began to flame, he replaced the screen and motioned her forward. “Move closer. Warm up.”
“Who supplies your firewood?”
“Nobody. I chop it myself.”
“You go into the woods and cut down trees?”
“People do, you know.”
No one she knew did. They bought firewood from someone who delivered it to their house and stacked it, or they picked up a small bundle at the supermarket along with their bread and milk.
Satisfied that the new logs were catching, he returned to the table, picked up her sunglasses, and passed them to her. “Glue dried. I think it’ll hold.”
She tested the strength of the repair. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Your hands seem too large to work on something so small and delicate. I wouldn’t think you could be that dexterous.”
“I can be dexterous when dexterity is called for.”
She could tell he was amused by the unwitting setup she’d given him and self-satisfied with his suggestive comeback. Turning away from him, she slipped the glasses into the shirt pocket. He sat down at the table and resumed fiddling with the toaster, seeming to be perfectly content. She felt like her skin had shrunk.
“Doesn’t it drive you crazy?”
“What?”
“The silence. The loneliness.”
“I have music on my laptop.”
“Can we play some music?”
“Nice try, but no soap, Doc.”
She paced the width of the room and back. “Doesn’t the boredom drive you to distraction?”
“I’m never bored.”
“How could you not be? What do you do all day? That is, when you’re not repairing small appliances.”
She had meant the remark as a putdown, but he took no offense. “Projects.”
“Like what?”