Читать книгу Snow Baby - Бренда Новак - Страница 9

I’M NEVER GOINGto make it.

Chantel Miller hunched forward, trying to see beyond the snow and mud being kicked up onto her windshield by the semi next to her. She could barely make out the taillights of the Toyota Landcruiser she’d been following for miles, and she longed to pull over and give her jangled nerves a rest. But the narrow two-lane highway climbing Donner’s Summit was cut into the side of a cliff, and she didn’t dare stop. Not in a storm like this.

In the back of her mind she heard her father, who’d been dead for nearly five years now, telling her to slow down, keep calm. He’d taught her to drive and had offered all the usual parental advice—never let your gas tank get below half, keep your doors and windows locked, never pull over in the middle of a storm.

God, she missed him. How could so much have happened in the past ten years? At twenty-nine, she already felt battle-weary, ancient.

She shrugged off the memories to avoid the regret they inspired, and focused on her driving. Her sister, Stacy, was waiting for her in Tahoe, only an hour away. She’d be able to make it that far as long as she could get past the big rig that was churning up the mountain beside her, nearly burying her car with sludge.

She gave her red Jaguar—her only concession to the life she’d left behind—some gas and shot around the semi, then eased down on the brake. The road was covered with black ice. Her stomach clenched as the Jaguar fishtailed, but then its tires grabbed the asphalt and the taillights that had been her beacon appeared in front of her again.

“Hello, Mr. Landcruiser,” she breathed in relief, and crept closer, determined to stay in the vehicle’s wake. The plows were long overdue. Snow was beginning to blanket the shiny road.

Stretching her neck, Chantel tried to release some of the tension in her shoulders, then cranked up the defrost. A pop station played on the radio, but she barely heard the familiar lyrics as she listened to the wind howl outside. Ice crystals shimmered in the beam of her headlights, then flew at her face, clicking against the windshield.

She shouldn’t have left Walnut Creek so late. If it hadn’t been her first week at her new job, she would have insisted on heading home when everyone else had, at five o’clock. But she not only had a new job, she had a new profession, back in her home state of California, clear across the country from where she’d lived before.

Changing careers was probably the most difficult thing she’d ever done, but Chantel was determined to overcome her insecurities and be successful at a job that required a brain—if for no other reason than to prove she had one.

Overhead a yellow sign blinked Chains required over summit. To the right, several cars waited, engines running, as their owners struggled in the cold and wet to get chains on their tires. A couple of men wearing orange safety vests worked as installers for those willing to pay for help.

Chantel was studying the shoulder, looking for a place to pull over, when brake lights flashed in front of her. She screamed and slammed on her brakes, but the car didn’t stop. It slid out of control. With a bone-jarring crunch, her Jag collided with the Landcruiser ahead of her.

Pain exploded in Chantel’s head as her face hit the steering wheel. She sat, breathing hard, staring at the black snowy night and the back end of the white Landcruiser, which was now smashed. Then someone knocked on her window.

Dazed, she rolled her head to the side and saw a tall dark-haired man looming above her. “Are you all right? Unlock the doors!” he shouted.

Immediately her father’s warnings echoed back: Always keep your doors and windows locked….

When she didn’t respond, he scowled at her through the glass and tapped again. “Did you hear me? Open the door!”

She let her eye-lids close and put her hand to her aching head as her senses began to return. She’d just been in a car accident. This was probably the other driver. She had to give him her driver’s license and insurance information, right? Of course.

With trembling fingers, she sought the automatic door lock and heard it thunk just before the man flung her door open and leaned inside.

A freezing wind whipped around him and flooded her car, carrying the smell of his aftershave with it—a clean masculine scent, far different from the trendy fragrances used by the male models she’d worked with not so long ago. Then a firm hand gripped her chin and tilted her face up. “Your lip’s bleeding, but not badly. Any other injuries?”

She struggled to rearrange her jumbled thoughts. Stacy, accident, aftershave, blood…“Just a lump on my head, I think.”

“Good.” He stood and jammed his hands into the pockets of his red ski parka, frowning at the crushed metal in front of them, and it suddenly dawned on Chantel that he was angry. Really angry. The signs were all there—the terse voice, the taut muscles, the furrowed brow. “Is something wrong?” she asked.

He looked at her as if she had two heads. “You mean other than what you just did to my SUV?”

She winced. “I’m sorry. I’m worried about my car, too. I haven’t owned it more than a year. But you stopped right in front of me. There was nothing I could—”

“What?” He whirled on her, the furrow in his brow deepening. Ice crystals lodged in the dark stubble of his jaw gave his face a rugged appearance, but the long thick lashes fringing his eyes looked almost feminine. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No, I’m not.” Chantel’s tongue sought the cut in her lip. She reached across the console to the glove box and retrieved a napkin to wipe the blood from her mouth. “How could you expect anyone to stop so fast in this kind of storm?”

He stiffened. “I managed to miss the car ahead of me. And you want to know why? Because I wasn’t tailgating him for the past thirty miles!”

“I wasn’t tailgating you,” she said, but a memory of her struggle to keep up with his taillights raced through her mind and made her wonder if she’d been following too closely, after all. She’d hardly been able to see anything—except his lights.

“Regardless,” he said abruptly, “we have to move off to the side. We’re stopping traffic. Are you okay to drive?”

She nodded, shivering despite her navy wool coat. “I think so.”

“Just pull over there.” He indicated a couple of spots other cars had just vacated. It seemed to Chantel that his initial anger had softened to mere irritation.

Feeling jittery, she slowly eased the Jaguar over so the traffic behind them could get through. A couple of motorists paused to see what had happened and a chain installer jogged over and hollered something at the guy she’d hit, but the weather was too bad for anyone to linger. No ambulance, no fire trucks. The accident wasn’t nearly as interesting as it could have been.

Thank God!

Chantel watched the man from the Landcruiser stride toward her and wished she was safe in her new condominium in Walnut Creek, curled up in front of the television. She was exhausted and cold and rattled. But she had to make it to Tahoe. After all the years she and her sister hadn’t spoken, Stacy was finally ready to give her another chance.

I won’t blow it, Stace. I’ve changed, grown up. You’ll see.

She lowered her window as the Landcruiser’s owner gave her car a skeptical frown. “You look like you belong on the streets of Beverly Hills,” he said. “I bet you’ve never driven in snow.”

“Listen, I come from New York. You’ve never seen snow until you’ve spent a winter back East.” She didn’t add that she hadn’t owned a car for most of the ten years she’d lived in the Big Apple. Taxis, public transit or, more often, limousines had always carried her where she’d wanted to go, but she wasn’t about to volunteer that information. He didn’t need to know how precisely his accusation had hit its target.

“Excuse me,” she said to get him to step back. “I want to see the damage.” She buttoned up her coat and scrambled out of the car, wincing as her white tennis shoes sank deep in the cold slush. Her vision swam for a moment, but she kept one hand on the door for support and soon the world righted itself.

Like most people, the Landcruiser’s owner did a double take when he saw her at her full height. His gaze started at where the snow buried her feet, then climbed her thin frame until it met the withering glare she reserved for gawkers.

She raised a hand before he could make any comment. “I know, I hear it all the time. I’m almost six feet, so you don’t have to ask.” She gave him a glacial smile to cover the way her body shook with reaction to the blizzard and the accident. “That doesn’t make me a freak, but it does intimidate some men.”

He grunted. “Short men, maybe.”

Chantel had to admit he didn’t look like a man who could be easily intimidated. Similar to her in age, he had shoulders twice the width of her own and was taller by at least four inches. But she’d always hated her height, even when she stood next to bigger people. She’d grown up to taunts of “Daddy Long Legs” and “Miller High Life” and couldn’t see herself as anything but gangly and awkward, despite a successful modeling career.

She shut her door and leaned into the wind, fighting the weakness of her legs as she trudged over to check out the damage. “Ouch,” she said, sheltering her face from the snow so she could view the Jag’s crumpled front bumper and broken headlight. The Landcruiser sported a smashed right rear panel. “Well, my car certainly got the worst of it, don’t you think?”

He cocked an eyebrow at her, but didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to; she could guess what he was thinking.

“It was your fault, too,” she said, irritated by his smug attitude, which reminded her too much of Wade, even though this stranger looked nothing like her ex-boyfriend. “You slammed on your brakes for no apparent reason.”

He gave an incredulous laugh. “The car in front of me stopped. What did you want me to do? Drive off the cliff?”

Is it too late to consider that option? Chantel bit her tongue, knowing her hostility was spurred by the memory of Wade and not this stranger. Not really.

Glancing at her car’s smashed front end a final time, she hurried back into the driver’s seat. The accident had caused some expensive damage, but it was still pretty much a fender bender. She wanted to swap information and be on her way, or Stacy would think she wasn’t coming.

She hoped this guy wouldn’t insist on waiting for the Highway Patrol.

“Why don’t you grab your driver’s license and insurance card and come get in my truck?” he called after her. “It’ll be drier and warmer than trying to do it out here.”

Never get in a car with a stranger, her father’s voice admonished.

Especially such a powerful-looking stranger, Chantel added on her own.

“I’ll just write it all down and bring it to you. You’re not planning to wait for the police to arrive, are you? There’s really no need. In a collision like this, the rear ender’s always on the hook.”

He smiled, transforming his expression from a Terminator-style intensity to the guilelessness of an All-American boy. “There’s a good reason for that, you know.”

“Okay, so I might have been following a little closely, but in a storm like this, calling the cops could hold us up for hours. Can’t you just file a report in the morning or something?”

“No problem. I want to get out of here, too.”

“Great.” She gave him a relieved smile—a semblance of the smile that had made her a living for the past ten years—and hurried back to her car. After scribbling down her policy number, insurance agent’s name and phone number, license-plate number and driver’s license number, she walked toward his truck.

He rolled down his window and glanced at the slip of paper she handed to him. “What about your name and telephone number?”

“My agent will handle everything.”

“No way. You’re not leaving here until I have your name, your number and your address. Just in case.”

Chantel fought the wind that kept blowing her long blond hair across her face. “In case of what?”

“In case I need to contact you.”

“I don’t think my husband would like me giving out that information,” she hedged, blinking the snow out of her eyelashes.

He scowled. “I’m sorry, but you just rear-ended my truck. I want to know I can get hold of you. And I don’t care whether your husband likes it or not.”

This could be a dangerous world, and she was completely alone in it. But what were the chances she’d just rear-ended another Ted Bundy? With a sigh, Chantel gave him the information he’d requested, hoping he’d fallen for the imaginary-husband routine.

He passed her a card. “I wrote my cell phone number on the back. You can reach me on it anytime.”

“Fine.” She glanced down and read, “Dillon Broderick, Architect,” before shoving the card into the back pocket of her jeans to keep it from getting wet.

“Are you sure you’re okay to drive?”

She was still a little rattled but determined to fulfill her promise to Stacy, despite the storm, despite the accident, despite everything.

“Yeah. You?”

“I’ll have a stiff neck tomorrow, but I’ll live. Take it easy,” he said, and pulled away before Chantel made it back to her car.

DILLON BRODERICK put his Landcruiser into four-wheel drive and merged into the traffic heading up the hill, cursing under his breath.

As if his week hadn’t gone badly enough. Now he had the bother of getting his truck fixed—the estimates from body shops, the insurance claims, the rental car—and beyond all that, the maddening knowledge that his new Landcruiser would never be the same.

“‘I wasn’t tailgating you,’” he mimicked. She’d dogged him since Auburn, when it had started to snow. He’d flashed his brake lights several times, trying to get her to back off. But she’d come right up again and again, nearly riding on his bumper. If a man had done that, he’d probably have broken his nose for risking both their lives, but what could he do with a tall, beautiful woman?

Grin and bear it, just the way he did with his ex-wife.

He glanced at the paper where Chantel Miller had written her name and address. She lived in Walnut Creek, not far from his own house in Lafayette. At least they were both local. That should make things easier.

He shook his head at the thought of the damage the accident had done to her Jaguar XJ-6. What a sweet car! Her husband wouldn’t be pleased when she got home.

If she got home.

The thought of Chantel Miller heading up the mountain with only one headlight caused Dillon a moment of guilt. It was difficult enough to see the road with two working lights. He probably should have waited to make sure she had chains and could get them on. But he was already late. His friends had been expecting him for hours.

He flipped open his time-planner and turned to the page where he’d jotted down the information about their rental cabin. He punched in the number, and a cheerful voice greeted him on the other end. “Hello?”

“This is Dillon. Is—”

“Hey, guy! It’s Veronica. We were afraid you’d gotten into an accident or something.”

“Actually I did, but no one was hurt.”

“Omigosh! What happened?”

“I’ll tell you when I get there. I just wanted to let everyone know I’m still a half hour away. Traffic’s been moving pretty slow in this mess.”

“Don’t worry, the drive’ll be worth it. The ski resorts are getting something like sixteen inches of snow.”

He smiled. He needed a rigorous physical vacation to steal his thoughts away from his ex-wife and all the dirty custody tricks Amanda was playing on him with their two little girls. “That sounds great.”

“We’ll see you when you get here.”

He was just about to hit the “end” button when his call waiting beeped. He looked at the digital readout on his caller ID, wondering who’d be phoning him this late, but didn’t recognize the number. He switched over. “Hello?”

“Mr. Broderick?”

“Yes?”

“This is Chantel Miller. You know, the woman who just…well, we were in an accident a little while ago.”

How could he forget? He pictured her almond-shaped eyes gazing up at him, the high cheekbones, the small cut on one pouty lip, and refused to acknowledge how incredibly beautiful she was. Only, she sounded different now, almost…frightened. “Is everything okay?”

“Well, um, I really hate to bother you. I mean, you don’t even know me and I can’t have made the best impression—” she gave a weak laugh “—but, well, it looks like I’m lost and—”

“Lost! How could you be lost? I left you not more than fifteen minutes ago. Aren’t you on Highway 80?”

What was this woman? Some kind of trouble magnet?

“No. Actually I turned off about ten minutes ago. I’ve got directions to a cabin where my sister is staying, but it’s so difficult to see through the snow. I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere.”

“Can’t you call your sister and find out?”

“The cabin’s just a rental. I don’t have the number. I was in such a hurry to get going tonight and the directions seemed so clear. I never dreamed the weather would be this bad. It’s been nothing but sunny at home.”

It was March. Who would have expected a storm like this when it was nearly spring? He hadn’t checked the weather himself, but then, he had a four-wheel drive and probably wouldn’t have checked it even in the dead of winter. “Do you have your chains on?”

‘Yeah, I paid one of the installers to put them on just after you left, but they’re not doing any good.”

“What do you mean?”

“My car’s stuck.”

“It’s what?”

“Stuck. There hasn’t been a plow through here for a long time, and the drifts are pretty deep—”

“And you drove into that?”

Silence. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have bothered you,” she said softly, and with a click she was gone.

“Dammit!” Dillon tossed his phone across the seat. How stupid could this woman be? Anyone who drove a wrecked sports car onto an unfamiliar side street in the middle of a storm like this had to be a few cards short of a deck.

“Let her call the Highway Patrol,” he grumbled, and tried to forget her, but another mile down the road, he saw the dim shadow of an exit sign. He’d left Chantel Miller not more than fifteen miles back. She couldn’t be far. It might cost him another hour, but he could probably find her more easily than anyone else. More quickly, too.

Veering to the right, he headed down the off-ramp. All roads, except the freeway, were virtually deserted and lay buried beneath several inches of snow.

He stopped and flipped on his dome light to study the sheet of paper with Chantel’s personal information.

She hadn’t included a cell-phone number. He tried her home, hoping he could at least get hold of her husband. Someone should know she was in trouble, just in case she didn’t have sense enough to call the Highway Patrol or tried to walk back to the freeway or something. A person could easily freeze to death in this weather.

After five rings, a recorder picked up, and Dillon recognized Chantel’s voice telling him to leave his name and number. He hung on, waiting to leave a message for her husband, and was surprised to hear her continue, “Or, if you’d rather try me on my car phone, just call—”

Bingo! He scrounged for a piece of paper and a pencil and jotted down the number, then dialed it.

Chantel answered, a measure of relief in her voice. “Hello?”

“It’s me, Dillon Broderick. I’m coming back for you. Tell me where you are.”

She paused. “It’s all right, Mr. Broderick—”

“Dillon.”

“Dillon. Maybe I need a tow truck. I’m thinking about calling the police.”

He thought of her sitting in her wrecked Jag, the cold seeping into the car, the storm howling around her, and for some reason, remembered her smile. This woman had just smashed the back end of his truck, but for a moment that didn’t matter. She was alone and probably frightened. “Well, maybe you should do that, but I’m coming back, anyway, just to see that you’re okay.”

“Are you sure? I feel really bad. I mean, for all I know, your wife and kids are waiting for you, worried…”

“No wife and kids, at least not worried ones.” Just the rest and relaxation he’d been craving. He thought of his friends sitting around the fireplace, drinking wine, laughing and talking, listening to Janis Joplin or Patsy Cline, and turned around, anyway.

“Now,” he said, “how did you get where you are?”