Free Snowbound with a Stranger by Rebecca Rogers Maher Page A

Marino.”
    “Okay! He knows my last name. Stevens must have been very thorough.”
    “He was. Anyway, when I feel like knocking people’s hats off, I go to the woods. Lately it’s almost every weekend.”
    “Every weekend? Really?”
    The softness in her face as she listened—it got to him. “I have to tell you something.”
    “Uh-oh.” Dannie leaned back.
    “Stevens told me about you before I came up here. He gave me your name and I looked you up.” More of the truth. If not all of it.
    “What?” Dannie sat up, her hair falling into her face.
    Lee stared at her and shook his head against the pillow. “For the love of God, woman, you are so fucking beautiful it takes my breath away.”
    “Stop.” She tucked her hair behind her ear and gazed across the room, out the window.
    Lee would never get sick of watching her blush.
    “What did you find out, before you came on the hike?”
    “I saw your picture on Facebook, that’s all, and read an article about you in the hospital newsletter.” And pored over about six years’ worth of status updates. And asked everyone he knew at the hospital about her.
    He hadn’t known why at the time. He still didn’t know why.
    “Why didn’t you tell me?”
    “I should have. I thought maybe you’d feel cornered, though.”
    Dannie let out a long breath. “I would have. It’s true.”
    “Not now?” Lee pulled her down next to him and drew the covers over her shoulders.
    “No.” She settled in against him. “I don’t know why.”
    Lee laid his palm against her cheek. “Let’s stay here. After the roads are cleared. We’ll quit our jobs. Stevens won’t mind. We’ll let him sleep on the couch when he visits.”
    Dannie turned in to his hand and smiled. “They can drop food off on our doorstep from helicopters.”
    “We’ll make our own clothes.”
    “Clothes?” Dannie shimmied closer and pressed her body against Lee’s. “Who needs clothes?”
    She kissed him, and a sweet hot liquid seemed to pour down his belly and into his legs. He pulled her close and held her tightly against himself, and kissed her back.
    It was a fantasy. He knew that. They were playing house here, like two children, pretending they had something it took normal people years to build. It was painfully unlikely their connection could survive the outside world.
    But he kissed her back anyway. He took off her clothes and joined his body to hers. He wiped her tears away and kissed her, and entered her, and gave her everything he could give.

Chapter Nine
    Dannie’s eyes opened the next morning to a thought so obvious she couldn’t believe it hadn’t yet occurred to her. Gently, she disentangled herself from Lee’s heavy limbs and ventured out to the kitchen.
    Lee’s backpack lay propped against the doorjamb. Dannie was still too scared to go near the door—she wasn’t ashamed to admit it—but she found enough courage to creep up to the pack and drag it across the floor to the center of the room.
    Mama bear had not come back in the night, thank God. Lee said they were more active after dark, that it had been strange to see her so early in the day. Dannie had been afraid to go to sleep and find herself awakened by the scratch of bear claws against the hardwood floor, but by the time night fell, she was so exhausted an injection of speed couldn’t have kept her awake.
    If there was a corner of this cabin that hadn’t seen some action in the last forty-eight hours, Dannie didn’t know where it was. They’d made love like the world was ending and sometimes, wrapped in the heat of Lee’s body, she’d felt as though it were. The world she had known anyway.
    She was sore all over, and smelled like Lee, and she’d never felt better in her whole damn life.
    The backpack was covered in bulging zippers and pouches and weighed at least a hundred pounds. It was the sort of pack a soldier or survivalist would carry: broken-in, worn-down and full of just about anything a person would need