Page 2 of Snowed in with the Mountain Man

She reached down in a move I assumed would be to roll down her window. But instead, the door burst open, nearly slamming into my crotch.

“Oof,” I said, stepping backward.

Was she trying to hit me with that? Oh yeah, that would make sense. If you wanted to disable a deranged lunatic, hit him where it hurts the most.

Luckily for me, the door had mostly hit me in the thighs. Luckily for her, I wasn’t a deranged lunatic.

“Oh my gosh, are you okay?” she asked.

I’d taken quite a few steps back and now stood a good ten feet away from her and that car door. It was a protective move, but I had more to protect than my family jewels. The woman who stepped out of that car wearing a hot pink zipped-up jacket andsnug-fitting leggings was the kind of beautiful that could tempt a man who’d vowed to stay celibate until the new year.

And her generous curves were only part of the temptation. Her big brown eyes had a sparkle to them and her prominent cheekbones framed those eyes in a way that made it impossible to look away. And then there were her lips. They were shiny—I assumed from some kind of lip gloss—but they were also full and pouty. The kind of lips a man wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about kissing.

Not me, though. No, I couldn’t be tempted by a beautiful woman. Not even the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Not even a woman who had now wrecked her car and would probably be stranded here.

I had to invite her in. It was the gentlemanly thing to do. And if we ended up discarding our clothes somewhere along the way, would that really be my fault? Who could blame me?

A man had to do what he had to do to stay warm.

2

CAITLYN

Icouldn’t decide if I was the unluckiest person in the world or the luckiest.

I always tried to be an optimist. It was almost a disease. But even I would be hard-pressed to find something good to say about sliding off the road in a snowstorm and slamming my brand-new SUV into a tree.

It wouldn’t start. I’d tried. Stubbornly so. I was determined to get back on the road and arrive at my grandmother’s house in time to watch the end of the parade with my sister, just as we’d done as kids. Then we’d make Thanksgiving dinner together while sipping wine and listening to Christmas music.

Tomorrow morning, we’d get up bright and early and head to the closest indoor mall for a full day of shopping. Maybe we’d even catch a movie before stopping by the town Christmas tree lot to pick out a tree for Grammy. I’d looked forward to our day out for weeks.

“Nobody’s coming out in this mess,” my super-hot rescuer, whose name was Jake, said as he came back into the cabin from the front porch.

He’d gone out there in the freezing cold to make some phone calls, probably thinking I couldn’t hear him. I’d stayed inside to text my sister, hoping it would go through. Luckily, it did. She’d already arrived at our grammy’s house, having come in yesterday. I’d waited until super early this morning to leave…which was why I was driving in this mess.

“Maybe I should go try it again,” I said, standing and slipping my phone into my coat pocket. “It’s had a little while to rest. Sometimes batteries get…overloaded, right?”

He stood in his doorway, removing his coat. As he looked over at me, his intense expression made my knees feel a little wobbly. God, he was gorgeous. The most gorgeous guy I’d ever seen. I’d been so stunned when I saw him on the other side of my window, I hadn’t been able to speak or move at first.

And then I’d slammed my door into him—something that would have incapacitated a weaker man. This guy was not a weak man.

“I think you have bigger problems than your battery,” he said. “Your hood’s pretty smashed up. I would have been surprised if it started. And even if you could get it started, it’s not safe for you to be on these roads.”

“I did fine until I got here,” I said, watching as he picked up the coffee mug on the table next to the door. “I’m really good at driving in snow. I live in Kentucky.”

I grew up in East Tennessee, though. I’d only lived in Kentucky the past five years. I’d gone to college there, and after graduation, my roommate and I had stuck around. I’d landed an accounting job that let me work from home most of the time, but I had to go into the office every week or two.

“This isn’t driving in the snow,” he said. “This is driving up a mountain in the snow.”

Yeah, he had a point there. I’d been slipping and sliding almost since the second the road started its incline. The fact thatI’d managed to stay on the road as long as I had was amazing in itself.

“I’m spending Thanksgiving with my grandmother,” I said. “We never get snow this early in the year.”

“Yeah, I was going to leave for my sister’s house after coffee, but the weather had other ideas.”

My head snapped back to him. “Was this in the forecast? I didn’t even look.”

I fell back down onto the couch with a sigh. It was my fault. I should have pulled up the weather app on my phone and checked out the forecast for my destination. There was no snow in the forecast for Kentucky, so I wouldn’t have imagined it would be a problem in the area where I’d grown up—an area that maybe got one snow a year that melted off in a couple of days.

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