Christmas With A Stranger_Forbidden Read online

  “I don’t find you plain at all, Jessica. On the contrary, I find you quite irresistibly lovely.”

  About the Author

  Books by Catherine Spencer

  Title Page

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  EPILOGUE

  Copyright

  “I don’t find you plain at all, Jessica. On the contrary, I find you quite irresistibly lovely.”

  Just for a second everything in the room seemed to hang in frozen tension. The pretty Christmas tree ornaments stopped twirling, the lights ceased their tiny reflective flickerings. Even the flames in the hearth grew still. She held on to that moment as long as she could, then came straight out and asked him, “Are you married, Morgan?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “And do you find me intimidatingly sensible?”

  “I don’t intimidate that easily, Jessica.”

  “Then why haven’t you tried to make love to me?”

  CATHERINE SPENCER, once an English teacher, fell into writing through eavesdropping on a conversation about Harlequin Romance. Within two months she changed careers and sold her first book to Harlequin in 1984. She moved from England to Canada thirty years ago and has four grown children—two daughters and two sons—plus three dogs and a cat. In her spare time she plays the piano, collects antiques and grows tropical shrubs.

  Books by Catherine Spencer

  HARLEQUIN PRESENTS

  1406—THE LOVING TOUCH

  1587—NATURALLY LOVING

  1682—ELEGANT BARBARIAN

  1812—THAT MAN CALLAHAN

  1842—THREE TIMES A BRIDE

  1873—DOMINIC’S CHILD

  HARLEQUIN ROMANCE

  3138—WINTER ROSES

  3348—LADY BE MINE

  3365—SIMPLY THE BEST

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  Christmas with a Stranger

  CATHERINE SPENCER

  TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON

  AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG

  STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN

  MADRID • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

  PROLOGUE

  HE WAS on the outside again. On the run. Eventually, of course, they’d catch up with him, and when they did they’d put him away for an even longer stretch. But meanwhile time was on his side. Time in which to carry out the plan he’d spent nine years perfecting. Time to exact punishment for the injustice meted out to him.

  Oh, he’d been a model inmate! So clever, fooling all of them with the mealy-mouthed responses they’d wanted to hear. So eager to be rehabilitated, so willing to admit the error of his ways. Oozing humility and remorse enough to make a thinking man’s stomach revolt.

  But they weren’t thinking men, they were fools. Fools and tools of the system that had rejected him—except for the man who’d put him behind bars. He was an adversary worth taking on. Outwitting him would be a triumph, something in which to take delight when they caught up with him again.

  What else, after all, had he to nourish his soul? No wife, certainly, and a child who called some stranger “Father”. No home, no job. And no future. Model prisoner or not, his past would go with him wherever he went. For the rest of his life.

  It was the way things were done these days. Forget all that nonsense about a man having paid for his crimes. He never wrote off the debt because they plastered his face and name on community notice boards and labeled him a dangerous offender, even if he’d been judged guilty of only one crime—and that vindicated in the eyes of God-fearing people.

  Vermin, that was what he’d stamped out. A temptation of the devil’s making best wiped off the face of the earth. A cheap flirt dolled up to look like decent folk, preying on a man’s weakness when he was most vulnerable. Reaching across his desk in such a way that he was filled with the scent of her.

  It would have been different if he’d been allowed his conjugal rights, but Lynn had refused him ever since she’d almost lost the baby in her fifteenth week. That had left nearly six months during which he’d been denied his husbandly prerogative. Small wonder he’d fallen victim to the other woman’s wiles.

  He hadn’t meant to kill her. It had been an accident—a panic reaction. She’d made a scene when he’d told her he wouldn’t leave his wife for her, and threatened to phone his home, to tell Lynn what a louse she had for a husband, and for a few blind moments he’d lost control and it had just...happened.

  He might have been acquitted—at worst found guilty of nothing more heinous than aggravated assault resulting in death. The judge had seemed inclined to sympathy at times, and the jury might have found in his favor—if it hadn’t been for Morgan Kincaid.

  Kincaid was the one who’d taken everything away and left him with nothing to lose.

  Well, Merry Christmas, Mr. Crown Prosecutor!

  It was payback time.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE snow began in earnest just as darkness fell. Dense, feathery flakes whirling across the beam of her headlights to imprison her in a closed and isolated world.

  Jessica hadn’t been comfortable with the driving conditions from the start. She was used to a milder sort of winter on the island, one of west coast sea mist and wind-driven rain, not the breath-freezing cold of the high Canadian interior.

  She’d spent last night in a small town tucked between a lake and the highway, in a country inn built to resemble a Swiss chalet. There’d been logs blazing in the fireplace in the lobby and a twelve-foot Christmas tree that filled the air with the scent of pine, and French onion soup smothered in melted cheese for dinner. It had been a warm, safe place now some three hundred miles behind—much too far to merit her turning back.

  If she wanted shelter from the weather again tonight, her only option was to tackle the eighty miles of switchback mountain road that lay between her and her next stop on the way to Whistling Ridge.

  Smearing a gloved hand across the windshield, she squinted through the swirling snow, her heart lurching as the wheels of the car skidded suddenly to the right. Upright poles planted at intervals to measure the depth of the winter snowfall were all that stood between her and the swift, steep drop to the valley below.

  This was insanity and only the fact that Selena had been injured in a ski-lift accident could have induced her to abandon her original holiday plans and embark on such a journey. But then, wasn’t that how it had always been, ever since they were children? With Selena getting into trouble of one kind or another, and Jessica dropping everything to come to the rescue?

  Another forty-five-degree bend loomed up ahead. Cautiously, she steered into the turn. Halfway around, she saw the flicker of headlights below her as another driver navigated the road, but more quickly, with an assurance she sorely lacked.

  Once on the straight again, she increased her speed. She had little choice. The car behind was gaining rapidly, there was no room to pass and the snow was, if anything, falling more thickly. In great fat clumps the size of footballs, in fact, that rolled down the mountainside and bounced across the road.

  Headlights dazzled in her rear-view mirror. A horn blared, repeatedly, furiously. Panic choke
d her throat. Was the other driver mad? Trying to run her off the road?

  All at once, the open mouth of an avalanche shed yawned blackly a few yards in front, offering a brief haven of safety where she could let whoever was in such a hurry behind get past her.

  Clutching the steering wheel in a death grip, Jessica pressed down on the accelerator and shot into the shelter with the other vehicle practically nosing her bumper from behind.

  And then the air was filled with thunder and the earth seemed to rock beneath her. And the road, which was supposed to run all the way to Whistling Valley ski resort where Selena lay in a hospital bed, came to a sudden end at the far end of the avalanche shed.

  At first Jessica didn’t believe it and, pulling as far over to one side as possible to allow the other driver to get by, kept her car idling forward. Until she saw that there was no way out of the shed, that its exit truly was blocked by a wall of snow, and that, far from trying to pass her, her pursuer had drawn to a stop also, and was climbing out of his vehicle and coming toward her.

  Incongruously large and implicitly threatening in the light cast by his car’s headlamps, his shadow leaped ahead of him on the concrete wall of the shed. Reaching for the control panel on the console, Jessica snapped the doors locked and wished she could as easily subdue the tremor of apprehension racing through her.

  Approaching her window, he stooped and stared in at her. She had the impression of a man perhaps in his early forties; of dark displeasure, well-defined brows drawn together in a scowl, and a mouth paralleling the same vexation. Of wide shoulders made all the more imposing by the bulky jacket he wore, and of masculine power composed not just of sinew but of command, as though he was not inclined to tolerate having his authority thwarted by anyone.

  The way he rapped on her window and ordered, “Open it,” bore out the idea, especially when she found herself automatically obeying the directive and lowering the glass an inch.

  “Do you have a death wish?” The question blasted toward her on a cloud of frosty air.

  Unvarnished disapproval laced the husky baritone of his voice, leaving her in no doubt that she was alone with a stranger who looked and sounded very much as if he’d like to take her neck between his powerful hands and wring it.

  But she wasn’t earning accolades as the youngest headmistress ever appointed to Springhill Island’s Private School for Girls by cowering in the face of incipient trouble. “Certainly not,” she said, as calmly as her thudding heart would allow. “But I imagine you must, if the way you were driving is any indication. You practically ran me off the road.”

  For a moment she thought she’d managed to silence him. His jaw almost dropped and he appeared to be at a loss for words. He shook his head, as though unsure that he’d heard her correctly, then recovered enough to say, “Lady, do you have the foggiest idea what’s just happened?”

  “Of course.” She gripped the steering wheel more firmly. It was easier to keep her hands from shaking that way. “There has been a bit of a snow slide.”

  “There has been a bloody avalanche,” he informed her with a rudeness she would not for a moment have tolerated in her students. “And if you’d had your way we’d both be buried under a load of snow—always assuming, of course, that we hadn’t been swept clear down the mountain.”

  Embarrassingly, her teeth started to chatter with shock then, and short of stuffing both gloved hands in her mouth, there was little she could do to disguise the fact except blurt out, “That must be why it’s so cold in here.”

  At that, he straightened up and thumped a fist on the roof of her car, sending a clump of snow slithering down her windshield. “I don’t believe what I’m hearing,” he informed the shed at large, his words echoing eerily. “Is this her way of trying to be funny?”

  “Hardly,” she retorted, addressing the zippered front of his down jacket, which was all she could see of him. “I plan to spend tonight in Wintercreek and have quite a few miles still to cover before I get there. I’d just as soon not waste time keeping you entertained with witticisms.”

  He bent down to confront her again, squatting so that his face was on a level with hers. “Let me get this straight. You expect to reach Wintercreek tonight?”

  “Didn’t I just say as much?” She wished she could see his face more clearly. But everything about him was a little bit distorted in the flare of his car’s headlamps, with one side of his features thrown into dark relief and the other silhouetted in light. Like opposite sides of a coin—or good and evil all wrapped up in one package.

  She suppressed a shudder. This was not the time for such fanciful notions. It was a time for positive thought and action. “I have a hotel reservation—”

  “I heard you the first time and I hope your deposit’s refundable,” he interrupted curtly. “Because, as they say in the vernacular of these parts, ‘honey, you ain’t goin’ nowhere any time soon’.”

  “Are you telling me I’m stuck in here until someone comes to rescue me?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you.”

  Her confidence nosedived a little further. “And...um...how long do you think that will take?”

  He shrugged. “Hard to say. First light tomorrow, if we’re lucky.”

  “But that’s almost twelve hours away!”

  “I know.” He braced his hands against his knees and shoved himself upright again. “Better turn off the engine before you asphyxiate us, and resign yourself to sleeping in your back seat. Open the trunk and I’ll hand in your emergency supplies.”

  She hadn’t thought it possible for anything to make her heart sink any lower but, to her dismay, he managed it with his last remark. “Emergency supplies?”

  “Sleeping bag, candle, GORP.”

  “GORP?” she echoed faintly.

  “Good old raisins and peanuts. Trail mix, cereal bars, stuff to keep your stomach from folding in on itself—call it what you like; I don’t care. Let’s just get you settled before we both die of exposure.”

  “I don’t... I have only a suitcase. With clothes in it,” she added, as if that might mitigate things a little.

  It didn’t. Thumping a fist on the roof of her car yet again, he let out a long, irritable exhalation. “I might have known!”

  “Well, I didn’t,” Jessica said tartly. “They never mentioned an avalanche on the weather report. If they had, I’d have stayed off the road. And please stop bludgeoning my car like that. Things are quite bad enough without your making them any worse.”

  She thought he swore then. Certainly he muttered something unfit to be repeated in mixed company. Eventually, he composed himself enough to order, “Get out of the car.”

  “And go where? You already said no one’s likely to rescue us tonight.”

  “Get out of the car. Unless you were lying a moment ago and you really do harbor a death wish.”

  “I’d just as soon—”

  “Get out of the goddamned car!”

  It was Jessica’s strongly held belief that a teacher who wished to retain control of her classes should make clear her expectations at the outset. Insubordination ranked high on her list of priorities. Unless it was stamped out at the start, it flourished quickly and completely undermined a teacher’s authority. Related to that were the social graces which, in her opinion, were as important a part of the curriculum as any other subject. She felt it was incumbent on her and her staff to teach by example wherever possible.

  Which was why, when she replied to her companion’s incivility, she resisted the temptation to tell him to take a flying leap into the nearest snow bank and, instead, said firmly but politely, “I’ll do no such thing. Furthermore, I don’t like your tone.”

  “I don’t like anything about this situation,” he shot back, singularly uncowed. “Believe me, if finding myself stranded overnight was in the cards when I got out of bed this morning, I can think of a dozen people I’d rather keep company with than some ditsy woman who doesn’t have the brains to travel equipped f
or winter driving conditions.”

  “I’m not seeking your company,” Jessica snapped.

  “But you’re stuck with it,” he said, chafing his bare hands together to keep the circulation going and turning toward his own vehicle again. “So hop out of the car now, because it’s not big enough for two to stretch out in and I’d like to get some sleep.”

  Horrified, Jessica stared at him as the import of his words struck home. “You expect me to spend the night in your car...with you?”

  “It beats the alternative,” he said bluntly. “Life’s tough enough without my waking up tomorrow to find a frozen corpse on my hands”

  “But—!”

  He blew into his cupped palms and, with the first hint of humor he’d shown so far, slewed an alarming leer her way. “Listen, we can debate the propriety of the arrangement once we’re under the covers.”

  He was rude and he was outrageous—but, she was beginning to realize, he was right on one score at least. The cold was seeping through the open window to infiltrate her clothing most unpleasantly.

  Still, she wasn’t about to cave in to his suggestions without a murmur. “I think I should warn you that I have taken several courses in self-defense.”

  “Pity you didn’t start worrying about your safety before now,” he said, his expression at once resuming its former forbidding aspect. “As it happens, I’m harmless, but it would well serve you right if—Oh, what the hell!”

  He pushed himself away from her car and seemed to make a concerted effort to rein in the anger suddenly vibrating around him. “You’ve got five minutes to make up your mind. If you’re not out of this car and into mine by the time I’ve got my sleeping bag unfolded, better say your prayers and write out your last will and testament, because, lady...” he blew into his hands again to emphasize his point “...it’ll be the last thing you ever do.”