Billionaire Romance: Out of The Cold (Book One) (3 page)

“Hard to believe that that
not-in-my-backyard thing happens out where people’s backyards are
several acres,” Anna commented quietly as she poked at her green
beans. Her gaze rose back to the window, and she saw a few spatters
of icy rain hit the glass.

Henry had them pack up the
dirty dishes, since there was no hot water available for washing,
and they brought them out to the car before settling in for pie and
coffee. That’s when Toby, with a big gap-toothed grin on his face,
presented his brown paper package to Henry, who
chuckled.

“Another one,
huh?”

“Yep! Got one to add to
your collection.” He waved it slightly and Henry took it, tearing
it open. A cartoonish statue of a woodchuck, expertly carved and
softly polished with beeswax, sat on its haunches with a derpy look
on its face and a branch in its mouth.

Henry grinned and looked
the thing over. “Well damn, Toby, this one’s even better than last
year’s.” He had a display case in his office with the cartoonish
wooden animals, and now she knew where they all came from. “You
know I keep these at work for people to look at?”

“No kidding?” Toby
brightened.

“It’s true. He has a big
lit-up display case with a mirror behind it in the lobby.” Anne
couldn’t help but smile as Toby beamed.

“Well, that’s awesome.
I’ll have to tell the boys back home that my work’s on display in
New York City!”

“Now we just have to get
some more of it out there so I can sell it for you, and you can
finish fixing up your Mom’s house with the money.” Henry gave him a
pointed look, and Toby’s ears turned red.

“Oh, I can’t carve except
when I’m making it for a certain person,” he demurred.

Henry sighed. “So pretend
they’re all for me then?”

“Huh.” Toby wrinkled his
scarred brow, then nodded. “I could do that! And maybe try selling
some of the furniture. You think this table turned out all
right?”

“The table’s beautiful,
Toby.” Anna thought about Toby, living with his mom, his life a
regimen of medicines and doctor visits, and how the chance to make
more money made such a huge difference for him. For James, going
home alone to his trailer tonight. And, she realized, that bothered
her; should they have asked him to stay? If she wasn’t going to be
alone with Henry anyway, there had been no reason not to ask him.
But Henry had almost made a point of not doing so. Why?

Could he be jealous of
James flirting with me? No, no, that’s just not possible. The man
is out of my league. He probably doesn’t even see me as a woman, at
least not in that kind of way.

Toby excused himself soon
after, seeing the few raindrops start to become more than a few.
“Gotta hop on my bike and get out of here, Mom gets worried if I’m
too late and it’s starting to look messy out there.” He had Henry’s
gift of a new wallet in his pocket, along with some investment
certificates he didn’t know the value of and his mother would
explain to him later--and which would cover the repairs of their
house by themselves. Henry was like that: full of generous
surprises.

They lingered together
over more coffee, and chatter about the job went quiet soon after
Toby left. “I’m keeping you. You must have a big day tomorrow,” he
probed gently.

She looked up at him, then
smiled and shook her head.

His brow furrowed. “You
look sad.”

“I have nothing going on
tomorrow,” she replied. “I’m not in touch with my family, and I’m
not exactly a social butterfly around here. I...I can stay late, it
doesn’t really matter.”

His face fell. “Nobody?”
he asked, disbelieving. “I don’t get it. You’re so
sweet….”

She let out a soft little
laugh and looked out the window. “I have some people I volunteer
with at the SPCA. I have my brother, but he’s out in Los Angeles.
That’s kind of it in my life right now. My apartment won’t even
allow pets.”

A silence dragged between
them, his eyes flickering with something soft and sad and
unfathomable.

She looked down,
swallowing a lump in her throat. “I’m sorry, I’m being maudlin.
Point is, don’t worry about getting me back late.”

Henry didn’t answer. She
blinked and looked up and saw that he was staring past her at the
window. She turned her head and saw an almost solid curtain of
white flakes falling past the window. It was so thick that it
looked like someone was emptying a feather pillow off the
roof.

H
enry stood up and immediately ran to the door, pulling it
open. She hurried after him--and staggered back as a shockingly icy
breeze blew past him into the hallway. “Oh my God!” She came up
beside him...and saw that the Cherokee and the ground around it
were already blanketed in a foot of snow.

“What the hell! I only saw
the first few flakes a couple of minutes ago--!” He turned and
looked at her and then back at the insane tableau outside. “Okay,
we’re gonna freeze if I stand here like this.” He pushed the door
closed and turned around, dozens of flakes drying in his hair and
on his clothes. “What the hell is this?”

“I think it’s a blizzard,”
Anna whispered breathlessly.

Henry stood there,
expression baffled. He was used to making the right calls. If
anything, it had made him a bit overconfident. But here, he seemed
to realize too late that he was way out of his element, and should
have listened to those who weren’t. “Oh holy crap. James was
right.” He turned to her, shaking his head slowly, his eyes wide.
“I’m sorry. I had no idea.”

She looked out one of the
windows and saw that the back pond had vanished and that the snow
just kept piling up, almost as if someone had taped a snowfall and
was now playing it back at five times normal speed. “We’re trapped
here, aren’t we?” she asked in a tiny voice.

He swallowed and turned to
look out the window. “Even with the Cherokee I can’t get out in
this, not until the plow comes by. And that won’t happen until the
storm’s over and they can, well, dig the plow out.”

“Oh God.” She was
shivering from more than the sudden cold. The well-insulated walls
had given them a false sense of how things were outside; they
couldn’t hear the wind and a foot-and-a-half of stone and the wood
stove had masked the drop in temperature. And now, it looked like
they might be stuck. In a house with very little food, no hot
water, and only enough firewood to fill the indoor hopper.
And the propane.
But a
twenty-pound container of propane was only good for about seventeen
to twenty hours of burn time. Still, it was something.

Her mind focused on these
calculations automatically, taking care of business so fear didn’t
take over in the face of something they had been warned
about--twice--but not listened to.
No
wait. I was listening, but didn’t say anything. Henry didn’t
listen.
She pushed aside a stab of
disappointment in him and just shuddered and hugged herself, her
eyes blurring a little. Being stuck somewhere with him as company
would be welcome if it wasn’t potentially dangerous. As it was, she
had no idea what to say or do except to mumble, “Maybe a day and a
half of heat, two days of food, no hot water. The windmill will
give us electricity but we’ll be running on house batteries a lot
of the time, so they’ll run out after about six to eight hours if
we keep everything on.”
Oh God, we’re
going to be trapped here. Oh God, I’m scared.

He stopped to listen to
her, and then heard the shake in her voice and took a step in her
direction. Tears brimmed over in her eyes and she looked down,
embarrassed by her blubbering.

“
Hey,” said Henry
worriedly. “Hey, are you okay?”

She drew a breath to tell
him sure, she was fine, they were caught in a freezing snowstorm
without much in the way of resources aside from what James and the
stagers had left and their leftovers from dinner, and she was
terrified, and why hadn’t he listened, damn it, but she was
fine
. But her breath
drew in with a low, sobbing sound, and his eyes flew open in
worry--and then he had hold of her and was pulling her against his
chest.

She froze, the tears and
terror startled out of her by the sudden contact. Something in the
back of her mind still kept going on about
two days, we have two days and then we’re in trouble.
Another part wanted to yell
why didn’t you listen to James
and
shove at his chest, but the rest of her was suddenly preoccupied
with the warm, solid length of his body against hers. With his arms
around her, gently but snugly, and his soft hand on her
shoulder.

She shuddered and then
slipped her arms around him as far as they would go. Her fingers
caught in the fabric of his sweater, and she gasped, tucking her
head against him and nuzzling her face into his throat.

A shiver went through him.
It was probably from the cold. But his grip on her tightened a
little, and she felt his heartbeat pick up against her cheek. She
closed her eyes. He was so warm, and so big, and his hands on her
were so tender.
Don’t let go.

She hung onto him and
gasped for air. He must have thought she was panicking, but what
she felt was more a desperate hunger for more closeness to him. He
didn’t let go, she relaxed against him, and for just a little
while, her loneliness was gone.

“Okay. So let’s go over
this again.” They let each other go reluctantly--though she still
wondered if she imagined that he had been reluctant--and now sat at
Toby’s beautiful table, under the one light they kept on,
calculating their resources. Henry bent over the list they had
made, speaking as calmly and authoritatively as he could manage
under the circumstances.

“We have no communication
in or out thanks to the cell tower not being up yet. No Internet.
We have a landline but no connection thanks to the service not
being ordered yet. So, no calling for help.

“We have enough food and
supplies to last us two days, three if we stretch it. The propane
stove isn’t the best heat source, but it can last us about a day
off and on. That leaves us with about half a day of wood. Now the
problem is, a wood stove has to be fed every few hours, and the fan
system that would push the warm air into the bedrooms eats too much
electricity to use. Same problem with the propane stove--it will
heat the kitchen, not the house. We’ll have to drag a mattress down
here to sleep comfortably.”

“That’s...what I’ve been
able to sort out going through everything, yes,” she said in a
small voice. Except for the bit about bringing down
mattresses.

Wait, he had said one
mattress. Singular.

She blinked.
Do I correct him?
There
were technically room for two queen sized mattresses on the living
room floor, but….

I think I’ll just let that
detail slide and hope he doesn’t notice until bed time.

He paused. “Your face is
very red. Are you alright?”

She looked down, biting
her lip. “You...said...one mattress.”
Oh
damn. Shut up, Anna!

He let out an embarrassed
scoff, and went quiet a moment. “Well, the stagers only put one
comforter apiece on the beds, and um...body heat is about the only
heat source we have an unlimited amount of.”

“O-oh,” she murmured, her
cheeks heating up even more.

It took more work than
they had anticipated to drag a mattress and a big pile of bedding
down that narrow staircase. He almost fell twice, and at one point
she almost tumbled down the stairs herself as the weight of the
huge king-size dragged her down. Fortunately, he set his shoulder
against it and stopped the slide. But they were both panting by the
time they dragged the mattress in front of the stove and plopped
the pile of bedding on top of it. She made the bed while he made
them cocoa--since one of the burners was on anyway.

“I’m sorry about this,” he
said suddenly as they sipped their cocoa. “I really should have
listened to James. He’s lived around here all his life. I
just...I’m usually not the rich guy who thinks he knows better than
people who aren’t as well off as he is. Except, I guess, sometimes
I am.”

It was big of him to admit
and took the edge off her urge to smack him. “James knows we were
up here pretty late, and Toby knows as well. Between the two of
them, someone will think to come looking for us.” She knew that she
was just stirring up hope where maybe there was none, but it was
better than spending the whole time in terror.

“If they don’t, and that
second day rolls around, I’m going to have to go looking for help.
The next house is about a quarter mile down the road. The storm
can’t last two days solid. I’ll wait for a clear spot and then
break a trail myself if I have to,” he promised quietly.

She looked up at him. “And
if the storm doesn’t stop?”

He didn’t have an answer
for that, and they finished their cocoa in silence.