He nodded. Then he turned, opened the door, and stepped out into the night.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE moon had risen. It sailed the dark sky like a ghost ship playing hide-and-seek with the clouds.
The wind had died down, leaving the snow in fanciful drifts. The mountain lay cocooned in silent, white radiance.
It was a beautiful scene but a dangerous one. And that, Nick figured, was just as well. It was a lot better to devote his attention to making it down the driveway to the road than to think about whatever it was that had happened back in the cabin. The way he’d felt, seeing Holly. The hunger in the kiss they’d shared, and the question he’d asked her, before he could stop himself from asking it.
He really didn’t want to think about any of it. Not tonight.
The snow was deep. Eighteen inches, at least. But the Explorer had four-wheel drive and, by some minor miracle, the wind had almost scoured the driveway clean. Still, it was slow going.
At last, he reached the end of the narrow gravel drive. Ahead, he could see the road that would take him down North Mountain.
The hair rose on the back of his neck.
‘Bloody damn,’ he whispered.
The road, tortuous on a nice day, was a treacherous white ribbon now. One wrong move, and he’d end up in the yawning blackness of the valley.
Nick cursed and eased to a gentle stop.
What was the matter with him, thinking he could get down this mountain tonight?
He wasn’t thinking, dammit. That was the problem. Seeing Holly again must have fried his brain.
He glowered out of his windshield. He’d come looking for closure, not for the opportunity to become a statistic.
‘Damn,’ he whispered, and then he blew out his breath, folded his arms over the steering wheel and laid his forehead against them.
He was behaving like a fool, doing things that made no sense, and all because of an unexpected encounter with a woman who’d ceased to mean anything to him a lifetime ago. It was late. The temperature was probably someplace around zero, there were snowdrifts the size of igloos all around, and what had he been doing?
Heading for a joy ride down Suicide Mountain, for Pete’s sake. And Holly had been so glad to get rid of him that she’d never even considered that it might be the last ride he ever took. Nick sat up straight, shifted into reverse, backed to a handkerchief-sized space that constituted a wide spot on the roller-coaster of a road, made a careful U-turn and headed back the way he’d come.
The cabin was his. Even if there’d been a screw-up, even if it had been at his end, what did it matter? Not even Scrooge would send Tiny Tim out on a night like this.
His grip tightened on the steering wheel.
On the other hand, Scrooge had never been faced with spending the night in a cabin built for two with his ex. His gorgeous, sexy, desirable ex. The tension between them, those last couple of minutes, the way Holly had looked at him…
If he’d gone to her then, taken her in his arms, they’d have ended up in bed.
Nick squirmed uncomfortably in the leather seat. Well, so what? All that proved was that the old physical thing was still there, the same as when they were kids. She’d been eighteen, he’d been twenty. They’d met at a shopping mall. Not ‘met’, really; they’d bumped into each other, and almost the second they’d looked into each other’s eyes the attraction had been…
Attraction? Nick snorted. They’d been hot for each other’s bodies, that was what they’d been, so hot that nothing else had mattered, and because they’d been young and naïve, they’d ended up convincing themselves it was love.
But it hadn’t been. Holly had come to her senses, just as her old man had said she would. She’d realized that sex wasn’t, couldn’t ever be, love, which was fine with Nick because he’d realized that only a spoiled little rich girl could think that a run-down apartment and second-hand furniture and a mountain of unpaid bills added up to domestic bliss. Twelve months later, they’d done the civilized thing and agreed to a divorce.
End of story.
He’d kissed her tonight. Well, so what? He’d been so damn surprised to see her and yeah, she was still a good-looking woman.
A beautiful woman. But the world, as he’d spent the past years discovering, was filled with beautiful women. Holly was hardly unique. Yes, the old appeal was still there, but they were both adults. They’d have no trouble sharing the cabin for the night. Then, tomorrow, after the sun came up and the snowplow did its job, he’d do the gentlemanly thing and split. And it would be easy to do. He’d come for closure, and now he had it. In spades.
Nick frowned. There was just one thing.
Why had Holly come to the mountain?