“Oh, please—”
“I was yelling at him to get help, and all Sean could do was wonder how it was going to go back under the skin. He insisted on coming with me to the hospital so he could find out. He went to Harvard and then spent time at the Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore indulging his fascination for difficult fractures, before switching to sports medicine. At the moment he’s working in Boston and when he isn’t wearing scrubs he dresses in smart suits, drinks fine wine and dates beautiful women.”
He’d done the same, he remembered. There was a time not so long ago when he’d worn smart suits, enjoyed fine wines in good restaurants and dated beautiful women.
Now he rarely wore a suit, and apart from a couple of friendly evenings out with Brenna, who had grown up on the farm nearby and followed them around when they were kids, he hadn’t dated anyone. For the past eighteen months his life had been about saving the business.
“So he’s not back in the family fold?”
“No, but he’ll be home for Christmas.” Following an impulse, Jackson pulled over and parked. “This is one of my favorite views of Snow Crystal. From here you can see the lake, the mountain and the forest. If you come here early in the morning and late at night in the summer you can sometimes see black bear and moose.”
“Thanks for the warning.”
He smiled. “It wasn’t a warning. The wildlife is important to the tourists. Have you ever seen a bear?”
“Never. And truthfully, I hope not to. I don’t think it would be my thing, although I do meet quite a few sharks in my job.” Her eyes gleamed. “Any other wildlife I should know about apart from bear and moose? Er—anything small and friendly and less likely to kill you? A cute rabbit perhaps?”
“The animals leave you alone if you leave them alone.”
“I’ll be leaving them alone. No doubt about that. So what else interests the tourists here?”
“The view.” He considered himself good at reading people but he was finding it hard to read her.
“I’ve already written that down. The view. See?” She turned the screen toward him. “It’s on the list, above ‘moose.’”
“Instead of writing it down, why don’t you try looking at it?”
“At a moose?”
“At the view. Get out of the car.”
“Get out—you mean actually go outside and stand in the snow?” She said it slowly, as if he’d asked her to strip naked and run in circles. “You’re the client, so if you think it’s necessary then of course I’ll—” Taking a deep breath she opened the car door and then gasped and slammed it shut again. “Crap, it’s freezing out there.”
The brief loss of control convinced him he preferred Kayla with her guard down. “If you wear the right gear, you won’t feel the cold.”
“I’m definitely wearing the wrong gear. I felt it right down to my bones.” She shivered. “All right, I can do this. It’s the whole Snow Crystal experience, frostbite and all.” Opening the door gingerly she slid out of the car, one limb at a time, as if bracing herself to enter a cold swimming pool.
> Jackson strolled around to her, his feet crunching on new snow. “Close your eyes.”
He could see her weighing up the risk of trusting him against the potential downside of arguing with a client.
She closed her eyes. “If the next thing I feel is a bear’s jaws closing on my arm, I resign the account. I really don’t want the whole Snow Crystal experience to include being a bear’s breakfast.”
He closed his hands over her arms. “No bears. Turn around.” Her hair brushed against his chin and the scent of it mingled with pine and freezing air. He decided that Kayla Green smelled as good as she looked. “Now open your eyes. Look through the trees.”
“What am I looking at?”
“The lake.”
She focused, her breath forming clouds in the air. “I— Oh. People are skating.”
“In Vermont the weather is the ultimate wild card, but the one thing we always have in winter is ice.
“You can skate on the lake?” Her tone was wistful. “That’s magical.”
“You want to try it?”
“It’s not that magical. I think I’m probably more of an indoor skater. But I can see others might find it charming,” she added hastily. “I’ll add it to the list underneath ‘view’ and ‘moose.’”