And it felt damp and warm between her thighs.
“I’ll go and get the heater,” she heard him say gruffly.
She flipped over while he was gone, turning her back to his sleeping bag. Her cheeks flamed hot and her heart thudded erratically in her ears as she recalled what had just occurred.
How humiliating. What had she been thinking, letting Mitchell’s son put his hands on her that way…letting him stroke and caress her.
Excite her.
She’d never had this profound of a physical reaction to a man in her life. She certainly had never responded this way to Alex’s father.
Her breathing came choppily when she sensed Alex returning with the heater. She held it until it burned in her lungs as she listened to him moving about in the fire-lit room. Her eyelids cracked open warily when she heard his jeans sliding against the slick outer fabric of his sleeping bag. He was just feet away from her. The back of her neck tingled with awareness.
She saw something fall in the space between the bottoms
of their sleeping bags and realized it was the flannel shirt Alex had been wearing. The memory of how he’d looked, naked to the waist, flared in her mind’s eye. All those lean, defined muscles covered by smooth skin. So powerful.
So beautiful.
Her pussy tingled. She clamped her thighs tighter, trying to alleviate the pressure that grew there.
What in God’s name was wrong with her?
She clenched her eyelids shut again, but she couldn’t block out his low, rough voice.
“Are you warm enough?”
“Yes,” she replied stiffly.
She wondered if his gaze was on her in the tense silence that followed. It certainly seemed like she felt the weight of it. He must have given up that she’d say anything else, because she heard him exhale and then the sounds of him settling in the sleeping bag.
She prayed for sleep to come. But she remained hyper-alert…hyper-aware of the man behind her. The fire crackled cozily and she felt warmer than she had since she’d entered this house. Yet she was even more rigid and tense than she’d been as she slowly froze in that back bedroom earlier.
She jumped slightly when, after several moments, he spoke.
“Tomorrow is Christmas Eve.”
For a few cowardly seconds, Angeline considered pretending she was asleep. But Alex was nothing if he wasn’t honest. She found she had no interest in playing games with him.
“Yeah,” she murmured, unmoving.
“I don’t have a Christmas tree here. There’s a big one up at Heavenly View.”
Angeline opened her eyes and stared as snowflakes danced around the dark window, their frantic movement calling to mind her rapidly skipping heart.
“A real one?”
“Yeah. A fifteen-foot Douglass Fir. I cut it down myself. Put it up in the Great Room of the Lodge. Macy—she’s the manager of the hotel—complained that she found a couple birds’ nests in it when she was decorating.”
Angeline imagined his shapely lips, set off to perfection by the short, dark goatee, tilting into a small smile. She recalled how she’d wondered if he could keep an employee, his manner was so surly.
But he sounded like he was fond of Macy the Manager. Maybe it was just Angeline who brought out the worst in him? Wasn’t that all the more reason for her to enjoy a casual conversation with him?
Only it wasn’t casual. Nothing about her interaction with Alex Carradine had been casual since he’d first barked at her while she sat in the SUV. Angeline knew all that, but she couldn’t stop herself from trying to make a connection with him, no matter how tenuous that connection was.
“My mom and dad put a real one up every year. They smell so good. I went with my dad every year to cut it down until I went to college,” she said in a hushed voice.
“What about your place in the city?”