“Me too,” she said softly, looking up to the sky as if she’d never seen snow before.
“Carry these?” I asked, handing her the bag with the skates.
She nodded, and I bent slightly, picking her up into a bridal carry. She laughed, and looped her arm around my neck while her other hand held onto the skate bag.
My arms tightened around her, holding her close to my body to keep her warm, even though logically I knew she was wearing a ski coat. I trudged across the small parking lot and managed to open the passenger door of my truck without dropping Pepper.
“You didn’t lock it?” She chided after I’d come around to get in the driver’s seat.
“Everyone knows it’s mine,” I told her as I started up the engine. “That’s the thing about small towns. Not as much to worry about.”
“Yeah, well how about you just get us home, because I’m plenty worried about the snow.”
“Yes ma’am.”
The drive took us twice as long as normal by the time we reached the farm, and I had no doubt the snow was halfway or more up my oversized tires. The wind had arrived by then, too, and visibility was a bitch. We slid coming around the corner, but I quickly got us under control.
“Good reflexes,” Pepper said with a nervous laugh.
“Yeah, I guess and kinda known for those.” I threw her a smile and pulled the truck up to the main house. “Wait there,” I said to her before climbing down from the truck.
Yeah, this shit was getting deep. It was going to take hours to plow us out.
I opened her door and held out my arms.
“I don’t mind walking,” she said with a smile.
“Only because the truck is blocking the wind, and besides I’m pretty sure the snow is taller than you are by now,” I teased.
“Hey, I’m not that short.”
“Nope, you’re pretty perfect. Now let me carry that pretty perfect ass of yours inside before we lose you in a snow drift.”
She gave in, sliding into my arms like she’d always been meant to be there.
I carried her up the wooden steps of my home and across the threshold, kicking the door shut behind me in a way that would’ve had my mom yelling.
Fuck my life. The power was out and the house was freezing.
“Give me a second and I’ll get a fire going in the wood stove,” I told Pepper.
“No rush,” she told me, pulling off her snow boots and putting them on the boot tray under the bench. “How do we open the pipes?”
God, she was drenched in snow, facing a blizzard, stuck in a freezing hundred-year-old farmhouse, and there was no complaint, just an offer to help. If I wasn’t already half obsessed with her, I would have been at that moment.
“We set them to drip at every faucet,” I told her. “That should keep the pipes from freezing over, especially the ones along the outside of the house.”
“No problem! I’ll start upstairs.” And just like that, she was off.
Ten minutes later, we had every pipe dripping, and I had coaxed a fire to life inside the wood stove with left installed in our living room for just this kind of emergency.
“Looks like the power is out all over town,” Pepper said, looking at her cell phone. “Update says they expect to have it up by morning.”
“Good thing dad sold off all the livestock a couple years ago.” At the time I hadn’t seen it for what it really was, the first step in the overall decline of the prosperity of the farm.
I called my parents and verified that they would be staying at Uncle John’s house. There was zero reason for them to be out in this kind of weather.
Which meant I only needed to worry about Pepper tonight. I ran upstairs and grabbed a stack of blankets and pillows before returning to the living room.
“There has to be another foot out there,” Pepper noted as she looked out the window, rubbing her hands up and down her arms. “It’s beautiful.”
“Didn’t you see a lot of snow at MIT?” I asked as I laid out a bed in front of the wooden stove.
“Yeah, but it never felt this peaceful. The snow makes everything look new again, possible, reborn a little, I guess. When you’re around so many other people all the time, it’s hard to get that feeling.” She turned and walked back to me.
“Until the power comes on, this will be the warmest room in the house. We have enough wood stacked to get us through, no problem.”
She swallowed, and my eyes tracked the movement of her throat. “So we need to sleep in here,” she asked glancing from me to her makeshift bed.
“We do,” I answered. “With temps dropping this fast I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s ice forming on the inside of the windows upstairs already.”
Her mouth flattened and her nose scrunched like it did when she was trying to make a choice, or calculate numbers and odds. Then she nodded. Decision made.
“Okay. Then I’ll run upstairs and grab my pajamas and meet you back here.” She disappeared up the stairs, and I got to work.
By the time she got back down, I had laid out a secondary bed for myself further from the fire, and brought in bottled water and snacks. I closed the old-school French doors to the living room as she walked in, hoping it would be enough to keep the room a few degrees warmer. I’d never forgive myself if she got frostbite because she spent Thanksgiving weekend with me.
She was covered from head to toe, a long-sleeved, soft shirt and plaid pajama pants all the way to her socks.
I had opted for a white undershirt and fleece pants.
Pepper glanced from the beds to me and back again, and I swore the temperature in the room rose a good five degrees. Or maybe that was just the temperature of my body skyrocketing.
“Two beds?” She asked as she pulled her hair into some kind of knot on the top of her head.
I cleared my throat, suddenly feeling like a sixteen-year-old boy. “I didn’t want to assume anything.”
A small shy smile spread across her face. “I guess I thought body heat was the best way to stay warm.”
Body. Heat. Those were the only words I heard out of that sentence, and they kept replaying over and over in my mind. Body heat, the kind that friction created, the kind that began with her arms open and ended with her eyes shut in ecstasy.
“Eric?”
“Yeah,” I said with a shake of my head. “It is, but like I said, I didn’t want to assume, since we are… Friends.”
Her eyes raked up my body in a way that was anything but friendly.
“Well, I’m a big girl —”
“That’s debatable,” I teased.
“— And you’re a big boy.
So I think we should be able to handle it. Besides survival comes first, right?” She tilted her head, and the light from the fire caught a sparkle in her eyes that let me know she was well aware this wasn’t a matter of life or death. This was a choice.
She slid between the covers of the first bed edging the side closer to the fire. Then she patted the blanket next to her. “I won’t bite.”
My fists opened and closed, my need to get my hands on her just as strong as my need to secure my family’s land.
I wasn’t a sixteen-year-old boy. I was a fully grown man. A professional NHL star, with years of experience on the ice and in the beds of women who didn’t even mean a fraction of what Pepper did to me. I could control myself.
“Friends can share a bed,” Pepper urged. “Besides, I know you can keep me way warmer than this fire.”
“Friends,” I verbally reminded myself.
“Think of it as your moral duty,” she teased with a shrug.
My moral duty was to take the second bed. My moral duty was to drive her ass to the nearest hotel with power and leave her there. Alone. Untouched.
But my morals meant nothing when Pepper was involved.
I sent a prayer up for strength, willpower, and impotence.
Then I climbed into bed next to the only woman I wanted more than my starting position.
Chapter 10
Eric
You can do this. You can do this. You can—
Fuck my life, the woman backed her ass up against my dick and sighed.
“Is it just me, or is it getting colder?” she asked, wiggling even closer.
“Uh. Yeah,” I muttered. Colder? My temp had to be up at least five degrees with her this close. It had been twenty minutes since I’d crawled in next to her. Twenty minutes of the most exquisite torture I’d ever been put through. How the hell was I supposed to keep my hands off her? It wasn’t just my body wanted her anymore, my heart had thrown its hat in the ring.