Free Love at First Sight by B.J. Daniels Page A

She sighed with an odd sense of pleasure and excitement.
    “If it gets too cold for you, let me know,” Jack said as they zipped along the two-lane road leaving Missoula behind.
    It had been the new Karen’s idea to put the top down. Just the way it had been her idea to take Jack Adams up on his offer of dinner and a night away from Missoula.
    After the day she’d had, not even the old Karen seemed to care what her mother would think. She leaned back and closed her eyes. The wind whipped her hair and the cold night took her breath away. She couldn’t remember feeling so…free. Or safe.
    Safe with a man she’d just met! But she did feel safewith Jack and…free, as if by leaving Missoula’s glittering lights behind, she’d left everything behind, including her problems. At least for one night.
    The moon came up from behind the mountains, washing the landscape in silver. Jack turned onto a narrow gravel road and headed up the mountainside, the road snaking higher and higher.
    “I hope you’re hungry,” he said over the roar of the Jeep. They’d stopped at a grocery store on the way out of town and bought steaks and all the trimmings. Plus Jack had insisted on buying her some doughnuts for breakfast.
    “Starved,” she mouthed, realizing how true that was as she looked over at him. It was the man beside her who whetted an appetite in her that had nothing to do with food. She felt like a woman who’d just woken from a long sleep to find the world more wonderful than she remembered it.
    Not even the large manila envelope Jack picked up at his apartment could bring her down, although she’d seen the red stamped words on the outside just before he’d tossed it in the backseat with his gear. Confidential. Missoula Police Department Property.
    She didn’t want to know. Tomorrow. She felt like Scarlett O’Hara. Tomorrow she’d think about it.
    And tonight? Oh, yes, tonight.
    Jack slowed the Jeep as the winding high mountain road ended in front of a small picturesque stone-and-log ski lodge straight out of the 1950s.
    In the moonlight, she could see what looked like a ski chalet off to the right and halfway up the mountainside. An old-fashioned chairlift ran from the other side of the lodge up past the chalet to the peak of the mountain.
    “Jack, it’s…enchanting,” she said, realizing it was a word she doubted she’d ever used before, but that fit perfectly.
    “Yeah?” he said, sounding pleased. “But what do you think of the view?” He switched off the headlights and turned in his seat to look back.
    She turned then, too, and caught her breath. “Oh.” That was all she could say. The mountain dropped in a patchwork quilt of moonlight-bathed rock and pine, to smooth rolling foothills, finally falling away to the distant sparkle of Missoula’s city lights. “Oh.”
    He laughed. “I take it, you like the view?”
    “I love the view.”
    He climbed out of the Jeep and she followed him to the edge of the mountainside. She stood next to him, breathing in the cold pine-scented mountain air. That sense of freedom she’d felt earlier was magnified by this place. And this man.
    She shifted her gaze to Jack. He stood looking out at the view, his face a portrait of contentment. She felt drawn to him as if this was where she’d been headed all her life. Crazy.
    He turned to look at her, his eyes bright with an intensity that raced her heart and made her think maybe it wasn’t so crazy, after all. She shivered at the thought.
    “Cold?” he asked.
    She hugged herself. “Maybe a little.”
    “Let’s get you inside, then, and I’ll start a fire.” Onthe way past the Jeep, he grabbed the bag of groceries and led her toward the ski lodge.
    “Is this yours?” she asked as they climbed the steps.
    “It needs a lot of work, but it’s all mine.”
    She shook her head. “I didn’t know there were still places like this around.” She caught his expression and realized he’d taken it wrong. “It’s