Merry and Bright Read online

  One way or another . . .

  He was close. Close enough that she could have bumped his body with hers as she tipped her head up and looked past his lenses and into his eyes, which weren’t just a solid light brown, but had gold swirling in the mix and were as surprisingly warm as his hands.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” he said.

  “Are you?”

  There was a beat of silence, and in it, much of the good-natured humor drained from him, which she found oddly unsettling. He was more sincere than she’d given him credit for.

  And tougher.

  And something else, too, something that surprised her. He was kind of sexy with that intense, intellectual gaze behind those glasses.

  “You think I want you to fail,” he finally said with a hint of disbelief.

  “I think that would suit Edward, taking this place from me even though he could care less about it. He could probably sell the property in a blink, and, poof, make condos appear, or something else with lots of concrete.”

  Danny opened his mouth, then slowly shut it again. Hard to argue the truth, apparently. After a moment he shook his head and flashed her a rather grim smile, full of no amusement at all and maybe even some hurt. “The fact is, Hope, I’m here only because your brother wants to make sure the terms of the loan are going to be met, nothing personal. It’s just the job. It’s business,” he said with soft steel. “That’s it.”

  “The terms will be met,” she said with equal soft steel. “So you can go home and report just that.”

  “As I’m snowed in, we appear to be stuck with each other for now. And since we are, maybe I can help. If you showed me your financials—”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Nothing personal,” she said, sending his own words back at him. “But I don’t need your help.”

  He looked at her, and she’d have sworn she saw a brief flash of empathy, even respect. And also frustration with some caring mixed in.

  Which was impossible, she told herself, since he was a rat bastard, and rat bastards didn’t care.

  As always, Hope woke up at the crack of dawn. It was a lifelong habit. When she was little, her father died from a heart attack, and she’d get up early to make toast and tea for her stricken mother.

  Later, after her mother remarried and divorced two more times, Hope still got up early to work at a resort, where she’d cook from dawn until the start of high school since Edward had gone off to college without looking back. Mother had never really recovered from her losses.

  Hope had always kept up the early-morning habit because she liked getting things done during those hours when everyone else was snoozing away, but this morning, she suddenly wished she’d developed a different habit.

  Like flying south for the winter.

  Because this morning, lying in bed in the dark dawn, she kept thinking about the unwelcome guest she had upstairs.

  Danny Shaw. He was Clark Kent on the outside and sheer, determined Superman steel on the inside.

  And he didn’t think she could do this.

  Facing that fact made her feel better. Because facing it, she could fight it, do something about it.

  Kicking off her covers, she got out of bed and shivered. Holy smokes, it was a cold one. The thermometer on her window said five.

  As in five degrees.

  And it was still snowing like a mother. She needed to stack some more wood today. She also needed to clear snow and put up the rest of the decorations.

  But it wasn’t until she stood in her bathroom that she realized her biggest problem. She had her toothbrush in one hand and a mouthful of toothpaste as she stared into the bathroom sink; the handle cranked to full blast, no water coming through.

  The pipes were frozen.

  “Oh no, no, no, no . . .” Not today, not when she needed to make a great impression. Not when she needed Danny to think everything was perfect.

  Dammit.

  Obviously, the place wasn’t perfect. It was built in the 1940s by a wealthy mine owner as a vacation home, then renovated in the ’80s by the family of the original owner. Currently the place was in some fairly desperate need of more updates and renovations, which she was getting to on an as-needed basis.

  Like the plumbing problems.

  And unfortunately, there were other problems as well. Upstairs were the guest bedrooms, which needed paint. Downstairs were the kitchen, dining room, living room, and social area, and a small but quaint servants’ quarters off the kitchen where Hope lived.

  All of which also needed paint.

  And more.

  Lori and her new husband Ben, a local handyman, lived about a mile down the road in their own place. Hope could call Ben about the pipes. He’d snowmobile here in a heartbeat, but if she’d learned anything in her twenty-nine and three-quarters years of life, it was to do for herself whenever possible.

  Even when it seemed impossible.

  The bottom line was that the B&B was everything to her. She’d certainly put everything she had in it, and not just money, but her heart and soul. It was the first thing that had been entirely hers, and having people come and stay and enjoy the Colorado mountains—the hiking, biking, skiing, or whatever they’d come to the wilderness for—never failed to thrill.

  It was a world away from where she’d grown up in Los Angeles, in the heart of the city, and a world away from the rat race that had once threatened to consume her when she’d lived and worked there as a chef. Now, here, in the silent magnitude of the magnificent Rocky Mountains, she’d found tranquility and peace.

  And frozen pipes. She spit out her toothpaste and looked down at her thin, loose cotton pj bottoms and cami. She added on a pair of thick sweats, a scarf, a knit hat, her down jacket, and her imitation Ugg boots.

  She caught sight of herself in the mirror—the Pillsbury Dough Woman—and laughed. Good thing she didn’t have a man in her life, she thought as she grabbed her blow-dryer and headed into the kitchen, where she added an extension cord to her arsenal. She plugged the cord into an outlet on the counter, then carefully propped open the cellar door with a large can of beans because it had a tendency to shut and lock.

  The stairs made a heck of a racket, which oddly enough had always comforted her. She figured if the boogey man was ever going to climb the stairs to get to her, she’d at least hear him coming.

  In the cellar, she eyed the pipes, indeed frozen solid. “Please work,” she said, and stretched out on the ground underneath the pipes and turned the blow-dryer on high.

  Two minutes later the pipes were still frozen solid, but she was warming up nicely, and she blew her out-of-control bangs out of her face to see better. If she’d had a pair of scissors with her, she’d have cut them off right then and there.

  She heard someone come down the stairs, and then a set of shoes appeared at her shoulder.

  Nikes, brand-new. Size—at least twelve.

  “Your pipes are frozen,” the Nikes said.

  She didn’t look up. Maybe if she didn’t, Mr. Big City Know It All Rat Bastard would go away. Far away. “I’m on it.” She readjusted the heat coming from the blow-dryer and concentrated, picturing the pipes melting because, hey, you had to dream it to live it—

  Danny crouched at her side, his legs at least a damn mile long. She’d always thought of him as a little on the skinny side, but with his pants stretched taut against him, she could see that those legs actually had quite the definition of muscle to them. She glanced up the length of them.

  And up.

  Yep, those pants were expensive. Probably worth more than all the clothes in her closet. Which, as she tended to live in jeans and tees, wasn’t saying that much.

  “Need any help?” he asked.

  “I can handle it.” She made the mistake of turning her head and meeting his gaze. First of all, it was barely the crack of dawn and yet there he was, dressed as if he was going into the office, with a button-down shirt and pullover sweater in a deep royal blue that seemed so soft and yummy