In the Firelight (2 page)

Rhys nodded and smiled with a heavy sigh. “Fine… you know I’ll go anyway. I don’t know why you even bother to make it sound like a question. But I think I should get hazard pay for this one. Those Montana girls can be quite a handful, in more ways than one.”

McHugh laughed. “Rhys, my boy, you pull this off, and I’ll buy you a vacation on a nude beach in the Caribbean.”

“I’ll hold you to it,” Rhys grinned. “So, who is this squeaky wheel, anyway? If I’m going to have to butter her up, I’ll at least need to know her name.”

“Might help.” He smiled and opened a file, pulling out a slip of paper covered in text with a blurry, almost featureless picture up in the corner. He
handed it to Rhys. “Her name is Shea Madison.”

Chapter 1 ~ The Cabin

My God, it was fucking freezing!
  Rhys watched the snow pile up on the hood of his
little rental car, aggravated by the sheer quantity of it as the world slowly darkened around him. A faint cast of moonlight poured through the clouds from time to time, and the flashing indicator of his hazard lights was beginning to imprint on his brain.

He was stuck in a ton of snow. On the side of the road. For God only knows how long. In a fucking Prius that shouldn’t even be on this road in good weather. The car was the last vehicle at the rental place. He really should have just waited for something better. And, of course, back in the mountains like this, there was no signal whatsoever on his cell phone.
He felt like a complete ass.

It had been years since he’d driven in weather this bad, but it hadn’t even been snowing when he left the little town. The sign a while back had only said twelve miles to Lost Lake, but twelve miles on a mountain road could take forever. And then, as though higher powers were conspiring against him, the heavy, wet snow began to dump.
Why the fuck hadn’t he checked the weather reports?

He knew better. Storms could come and go so fast in the mountains. This one seemed to have come quickly and was now just hovering over him. As though it was simply trying to make his life harder. Visibility was shit, and the already covered dirt road began to become more treacherous as darkness quickly fell. Rhys had forgotten just how dark it could get, and how rapidly.

Already frustrated for having to be out in the middle of fucking no-man’s-land, Rhys had felt the right front tire catch in the shoulder of the road. Even at the snail’s pace he had been travelling, the deep snow covering the embankment had sucked him into the barrow ditch like a giant magnet. Pushing and pulling and digging the snow out from behind the tires was useless. He was pissed as hell.
And really fucking cold.

Shit!

It was no use. He’d never get the car out on his own. And he’d be a freakin’ idiot to try and walk anywhere, especially in the dark. He had no idea how far out he was. He remembered a house at the turn-off towards the mountains, but the dark and the freezing temperatures gave him pause. His best bet was to stay with the car.

After what seemed like forever, a flicker of light in the rearview mirror caught his eyes.
Holy shit! Headlights? Really? Who the fuck would be coming out here this time of night?

It looked to be a big truck, exactly what he had wanted from the rental agency, what he had argued for, practically pleaded for.

In a frigid daze, he watched the lights come closer, their glow filtered by the frosty windows, until they finally stopped on the road beside him. He scraped the icy layer off the window and looked through it to watch a short bundle of winter gear pile out of the big pickup and stumble through the deepening snow. The form drew closer, coming right up to the driver side window. Rhys scraped off a little more frost to clear the view of his savior. Deeply buried beneath a heavy knit hat and scarf and reflecting the dash lights of his car, he saw the most intriguing pair of hazel eyes peering down at him with concern.

He hit the button to roll down the window, but it didn’t move. It was frozen shut. He reached for the door handle, but the door opened before he touched it, and the hazel-eyed, bundled-up form began to speak in an angelically sweet tone.

“What the fuck are you doing out here?”

Hmmm… Maybe not so angelic after all.

Taken aback by her harsh tone, Rhys instantly felt defensive.
Keep it mellow, Rhys,
he coached himself.
Think before you talk.
“Well, it’s, uh… not like I really planned to sit here freezing my balls off.”

“Fucking tourists…” the heavyset little form muttered, “showing up for some God-damned winter wonderland and then don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.” She stomped to the back of the car, slipping a little on the steep embankment. “Jesus Christ, you’re high-centered and buried… I can’t even see your axles,” she grumbled as she climbed back up to the hill.

Standing back on the level surface of the road, her hands on her bulky hips, she stared at him for a moment. With a deep sigh, she huffed, “Well, come on. We’re a lot closer to my place than to town, and the roads are atrocious. I’ll take you there, and we can call Frankie for a tow. As bad as you’re buried and with the steep shoulder, I don’t want to be responsible for the damages if I pull your car out, and, trust me, it can do some damage.”

Rhys pulled himself from the car, a bit of a feat the way it was perched on the sharp embankment of the shoulder. “I’ll tell you what, sweetheart,” he sarcastically grumbled down at her short form. “I’d hate to be a burden, so why don’t you just slide your little ass into your truck, toodle yourself home, and call for a tow truck. I’ll wait here.”

“Are you fucking out of your mind? You’re going to freeze to death waiting. Either that, or you’ll become asphyxiated the way the snow is quickly burying your little car. I don’t want that shit on my conscience. So, you,” she poked at his chest with a thick-mittened hand, “get in the damn truck.”

With that, she turned on her heavy snow-booted heel and stomped to the driver side of her pickup. As she rounded the vehicle, she glanced back at him and stopped. Holding out her arms to her sides with frustration, she gave him a what-the-fuck-are-you-waiting-for look. “Well?” she grumbled.

Rhys reached down the incline behind him to grab the keys, shutting the car door behind him. When he turned back around, she was already in the truck, her heavily-clothed little form just a shadow in the dimly lit interior. Rhys slid and skated his way across the slippery road to the passenger door and opened it to see a huge, furry form with brown eyes staring at him suspiciously.

“Wolfie, get in back,” the woman said from the driver seat.

The dog didn’t move. He continued to assess Rhys skeptically.

Rhys murmured, “Um, maybe I should get in the backseat instead.”

The woman very nearly growled, and the primal sound of her voice sent a shiver of desire straight to his cock. “Wolfie…really… Get. In. Back.”

Wolfie gave one last
watch-it-buster
look to Rhys, then climbed obediently into the backseat of the quad-cab truck with a heavy sigh.

“Jesus, I think that’s the biggest fucking dog I’ve ever seen,” Rhys mumbled to himself as he climbed into the cab of the truck, a bit mystified by the effect her voice had on him. He was totally a manwhore, but he was, in the very least, a little selective. He needed to get laid…
badly
. It had been a few weeks. That had to be it. That had to be the reason this backwoods little thing with her deep hazel eyes and her husky, irritated voice affected him so strongly. “Wolfie, huh? Like a wolf? He does look wolfish… big wolfish, but wolfish, nonetheless.”

“He’s an Alaskan Shepard—Malamute and German Shepard cross. He’s a little big. Kinda bred to be. A tough son-of-a-bitch.” She smiled coolly from underneath her thick scarf. “He keeps away the bad guys.”
Was that some kind of a warning?
Rhys raised an eyebrow, and she responded with a nod before putting the truck in gear.

“Good to know…” Rhys mumbled. As an afterthought, he reached for the key fob and pushed the button to automatically lock the doors of his rental. The flash of lights and quick honk of the horn seemed to amuse the thick little form beside him.

“Really?” she chuckled under her breath. “Are you, um… afraid someone’s gonna steal it?”

Rhys could only shrug. “Better safe than sorry, right?”

Slowly, the truck began to climb up the hilly mountain road, its high frame and large, studded snow tires pushing the heavy vehicle through the deepening snow.

The faint light emanating from the dash gave Rhys a slightly better look at her features… well, at least the ones that weren’t covered. Her eyes looked ahead, but were fringed with thick, dark lashes. He did his best to
not
get caught looking over at her. She was already pissed at him for some reason, so the last thing he needed was her thinking he was perving all over her. She had pulled the scarf down slightly, revealing a pert nose and full, pursed lips, but that was all that he could really see. The thick scarf and heavy knit hat covered the rest of her head entirely, aside from a dark tendril of hair that had escaped its confines to brush across her eyes.

So intent on covertly watching her without her noticing, he barely registered when she turned her head and spoke.

“So, what
are
you doing out here?”

“I was just driving around to check things out. I had forgotten how quickly it gets dark in the mountains,” Rhys regretfully admitted. “It was still very light out when I left town.”

“You’d forgotten?” she asked suspiciously.

“I grew up in Montana, in the Bitterroot Valley. But it’s been a while since I’ve been here. And then this snow sort of came out of nowhere. Forgot how fast that can happen, too.”

The woman took a deep breath, seemingly tasting his words, rolling them around on her tongue to measure her response. She pursed her lips again and, after a moment, without saying another word, she turned her eyes back to him, assessing him thoughtfully for a moment before looking back at the road.

Her eyes were a very interesting shape, wide and deep. Intriguing, really. Smooth cheeks, as far as he could tell in the dim light of the pickup cab. As she faced him, her small tongue skimmed her lips, instantly making them look… kissable and rather tasty, actually.
She looked as though she might actually even be kind of pretty,
he thought to himself.

Instantly, Rhys thought back to why he was here. He had to behave himself, to focus on the end prize. Not to perv over this little paradox of femininity. He guessed her to be maybe mid-twenties, although it was hard to tell with the layers of winter gear. He wondered if she knew Shea Madison, if she could help smooth the way, and his mind began to consider different options to charm her.

The girl pulled into a driveway with a small cabin off to the side. It looked older, but well taken care of, appearing to have two stories with divided-light windows and a small front porch. It was nestled in a clearing just outside of the thick of the evergreen forest. Close by was another smaller cabin-like structure that had deeper eaves, with a wide-open doorway, and openings for windows that had never been filled. Just inside the doorway, Rhys could see a heavy ax and an enormous chopping block as the headlights passed over the building. The woman pulled the pickup into a small pole-barn type structure that had been built onto the side.

“Come on…” she said as she pulled up the scarf to again cover her mouth and nose. She threw a large tote bag over her shoulder and hopped out of the truck, holding the door open while Wolfie leapt over the seat and followed close on her heels. Stepping over to the open doorway of the woodshed, she grabbed a few smaller logs from the pile just inside. Rhys followed her lead, loading up a few logs of his own and trailed behind her up the steps. With a nimbleness that was a bit hard to imagine in a stocky little thing like her, she climbed up the snow-covered steps onto the porch, scraping snow off the stairs with her boots to clear the path.

“Be a little careful,” she warned. “These steps are going to be kind of icy. It was fairly warm when it started to snow which makes everything slick as hell.”

With an armful of firewood in one arm and her other hand on the doorknob, she opened the large, heavy door and Rhys followed Wolfie inside the warmth of the small log structure.

A dim lamp cast a faint glow from where it sat on an old-fashioned radio just inside the door. Taking a few more steps inside the room, Rhys looked around at the cabin’s cozy atmosphere. It was not a huge space in square footage, although it seemed larger thanks to the peaked roof and openness of the main room.

Along the far wall was a fireplace of natural rough stone, maybe granite, that was spotted with lichens. It climbed clear up to the ceiling and was encased on either side with windows that looked out into the dark night. The woman crossed over to an oval-shaped tin container off to the side and placed the firewood inside before turning to take the pieces from him as well.