The One Winter Collection. Rebecca Winters

emotion she was feeling for him.

      And now that he had dressed her hand so gently, with such skill, distracting her from the pain, she felt a terrible danger from the desire that was beating like a steady pulse at the core of her being.

      “You can’t possibly mean I can’t get out of here!” She knew she was saying it like it was his fault. She knew it wasn’t.

      His silence was answer.

      “But for how long?” she asked, her voice shrill with desperation.

      “It won’t be long,” he said in a tone one might use trying to divert a small child from having a temper tantrum. She was done with his diversions.

      “That isn’t a real answer.”

      “I don’t have a crystal ball. I don’t have a real answer.”

      “If you were going to guess?” she pressed him.

      He hesitated. “I’d say tomorrow. If it stops snowing in the next hour or so I can get the driveway plowed by then. I’ll put on the radio and get the weather forecast.”

      “I’m trapped,” she whispered.

      “Well, not limb-in-leg-hold-trap trapped, but not-going-anywhere-today trapped.” He sounded just a little tongue-in-cheek. He clearly did not understand the gravity of this situation!

      Her new life, her new plan for herself was being threatened by him. It was being threatened and she had been here less than twenty-four hours. She’d kissed a man she barely knew and wanted to do it again.

      What kind of mess would she be in forty-eight hours from now?

      Maybe she would be ripping off his clothes and chasing him around the kitchen. Not that she was that type.

      Good heavens, she had never been that type.

      But she was well aware that the “type” she had been—pleasing other people in the hope they would play their role in her fantasy of the perfect home and family—had not brought her one iota of happiness. Not one.

      That realization left her wide-open to being pulled down the road of temptation.

      “But there could be an emergency!” she said, knowing there had to be a way out of here if the stakes were high enough.

      “An emergency? What kind of emergency?”

      The thought that there might be an emergency of the magnitude that he could not handle seemed to take him totally by surprise.

      “Like a medical emergency. Not a little burn, either. What if something happens to Jamey? What if he gets sick and has a temperature of one hundred and three? What if he fell down the steps and broke his neck?”

      Ty rocked back on his heels and regarded her with just a trace of exasperation. He held out the white pills. “If you don’t take these, I think I might,” he said, his tone dry.

      “You have to think of the possibilities!”

      “No, I don’t. There are millions of possibilities. That is way more thinking than I care to do. The phone is working. The power is on. We have heat and food. We could probably get a helicopter in if a real emergency happened. It won’t.”

      “How can you know that?” She was slightly mollified that they could get a helicopter in, even as she was aware the real danger she needed to escape was something else entirely.

      He shrugged. “I just know.”

      And, despite herself, she believed him. He knew his world inside out and backward. He trusted himself in it and that made her, however reluctantly, trust him, too. She was the wild card in all this, not him. Imagine her, Amy Mitchell, being a wild card.

      Still, taking the pills seemed like it would threaten her control just a little too completely, so she pushed them aside just as the phone rang.

      He got up and got it. He listened for a moment, and then without a word, brought her the receiver. The line of his mouth was turned downward, and he raised an eyebrow at her.

      How could it be for her?

      Puzzled, she took it.

      “Amy, what is going on? Are you with a man?”

      Ah. The miracles of modern technology. Yesterday, when her cell phone had not worked, she had called from here. The number must have come up on her mother-in-law, Cynthia’s, caller ID unit.

      “Hello, Cynthia. Please calm down, everything is fine.”

      “What do you mean everything is fine! And do not tell me to calm down in that snotty tone of voice, young lady. You have my grandson and you are with a man. Who is that man?”

      Somehow, everything Amy was running from was in that strident tone. Judgment. Lack of trust. Disapproval.

      “He’s—” Amy glanced at him. The explanation seemed complicated. And would confirm every single thing Cynthia already thought. Amy really wasn’t ready to admit she had lost her way yet, especially not to her supercritical, always ready to pounce mother-in-law. If towels not folded correctly could bring that pinched look of pained forbearance, how much worse was this going to be?

      Amy took a deep breath and turned away from Ty so she didn’t have to see his reaction to what she was about to say. “I’m having trouble with the laundry. He’s the washer repairman.”

      “How come the washer repairman is answering the phone?” Cynthia asked, her voice shrill and full of suspicion.

      “Uh, how come he answered the phone? Uh—” And suddenly, Ty was standing in front of her. He held out his hand.

      It would be downright cowardly to give him the phone and let him handle her mother-in-law.

      She looked into his eyes, saw the man she was trusting with her life and the life of her baby, and surrendered the phone.

      He took it and winked at her. Winked!

      “This is the washer repairman,” he said, his voice solemn. “We are having an emergency. Brown blotches. It’s not a good time to talk.”

      And then he hung up the phone, crossed his arms and gazed at Amy.

      “She’s going to phone right back,” Amy warned him.

      The phone started to ring.

      Ty reached behind Amy’s back and pulled the plug from the wall.

      There was so much he could say. But he didn’t. And there was so much she could say, but she didn’t, either.

      She giggled. And then giggled again.

      He smiled, and then he laughed. His laughter was possibly the most beautiful sound she had ever heard. It was rich and clean and without any kind of mockery in it. No reprimand about lying. No advice about how to handle her pushy mother-in-law.

      The laughter flowed out of him, like water tumbling over rocks, and suddenly with absolutely no warning a sweet feeling of absolute freedom filled Amy.

      For the first time since she had married Edwin, Amy did not feel trapped at all. She savored the irony of that. She was trapped, really, by all the snow.

      “You know what, Amy?” Ty finally said, wiping at his eyes. “I think it’s time to have some fun.”

      “No offense,” she said, wiping at her eyes, too, “but you don’t look like you know that much about having fun.”

      His eyes went to her lips and locked there. That slow smile played across the sinfully sensuous line of his mouth.

      He moved very close to her. His lips were so close to her ear, she could feel the heat of his breath on her skin.

      “I guess,” he growled, “that would depend on how you defined fun.”