Page 29 of Undoing His Innocent Enemy (Hot Winter Escapes)

He stood and watched as she dug through the snow with her gloved hands—frantic to get to the camera equipment he had left out here.

At last, she found the saddlebag. But the three pairs of gloves she had on made it impossible for her to open the bag and remove the camera equipment.

She pulled down her balaclava, to expose her mouth. Those full lips that had been wrapped around his...

He closed his eyes, trying to expel the memories, far too aware of the heat pooling in his groin.

‘Can you help me get this undone?’ she shouted.

Forcing himself to remember his plan—to check the camera and make sure she had not taken any pictures that might identify the location of his home—he took it from her. But after opening the bag and handing the camera back to her, he watched as she tried to get the equipment to start.

Five minutes later, they were forced to give up.

‘It is too cold,’ he said, aware that he would be forced to trust her, if he left her here without checking what was on it. ‘Better to try and start it once it is warm.’

She nodded. ‘How far is it to Saariselkä?’

‘I cannot take you there,’ he said, the old panic rising up his throat.

He could not step foot in the thriving tourist resort. It was too much to ask of him.

She seemed surprised, but then indicated the busted snowmobile. ‘Can you help me to get this working?’ she asked.

‘I am not a mechanic,’ he replied—which was not entirely true. He had learned how to service and maintain all the vehicles he kept on his property, including two motorised sledges and a snowmobile. He could usually fix most mechanical problems, so he would not have to seek outside help. It was one of the basic requirements of being self-sufficient in such a harsh environment. But, repairing the machine in this location, when the thermometer was scheduled to dip below minus twenty today, would be difficult, if not impossible.

Plus, he’d checked the machine two days ago, when he’d found her camera. It was a wreck. Who knew what she had paid for it? But she had taken her life into her hands riding it so far out into the wilderness.

His suspicions about her motives returned.

How could he let her go now, when he hadn’t been able to check the pictures on the camera? Surely he had every right to insist she return with him now to his home? Just to be sure.

But even as he tried to persuade himself his desire to ask her to come back was all about preserving the privacy he had maintained for so long, he knew that wasn’t the whole truth. Not even close. Because he could still recall the look of disappointment, even sadness, in her eyes last night, after they had made love.

A look that had triggered the yearning he had been trying to ignore all through the night.

The truth was, he wished to make love to her again... And again. To explore the longing, until it had run its course and he could return to the peace he had known before he had met her.

But what scared him more was the knowledge that his urge to keep her wasn’t just about the livewire physical connection that was even now pulsing in his groin.

He had lain awake last night until the early hours of the morning, long before dawn, after working himself into a virtual coma in his workshop and then in the gym, thinking about that look, and the words she had said.

‘Why can’t we...?’

And the words she hadn’t.

Explore it more.

Even though the request had made no sense, she had put the thought into his head. And now he could not dispel it. He had re-examined the tone and texture of her voice, recalled in exquisite detail the different tendrils of her scent as she stood so proud and belligerent in his bedroom, with that sheet barely covering her...

Until he’d finally fallen into a fitful sleep only a few hours before the sunrise.

When she had appeared in the kitchen, he had been struck all over again by the rush of adrenaline—the desperate yearning—that hadn’t gone away during the night.

The woman was a sorceress. Letting her stay would threaten everything that had made him whole for so long. But still the thought could do nothing to dispel the insistent desire not to let her go. Not yet.

‘So what do we do now?’ she asked.

We?Why had she said we? When they were not friends. And they never could be. He had never relied on anyone, not since his grandfather’s death when he was a boy of nineteen.

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