Wild in the Moment

One

When Daisy Campbell hit the first patch of black ice, she was tempted to let loose a glass-shattering scream.

She didn’t, of course. If she’d learned one thing in the past eleven years, it was to shut up and be careful instead of impulsive-but deep down, she sure wanted to scream.

January in Vermont was no new story for her. The wild winds and blizzard snows and bleak-naked trees and mirror-slick roads were as familiar as a tedious TV rerun. It was for reasons like this that she’d left White Hills, Vermont, and never planned to come back.

However, now, in the middle of a life-threatening spin, really didn’t seem an ideal time to digress.

The cheap compact she’d rented at the airport was a mighty contrast to the red Ferrari she’d driven on the Riviera, but when push came to shove, a car was a car. The compact spun a complete 360, skidded into the oncoming traffic lane, and then careened toward the crest of the hill. Below was an unpleasant drop. Very unpleasant. In fact, unpleasant enough to likely kill her if she couldn’t get the tires to bite-damn soon. Damn, damn, damn soon.

But the tires did bite. For a few hairy moments, the compact faced oncoming traffic, but Daisy battled for traction and eventually turned the son of a seadog around. Since no other vehicles were in sight-thanks to the blizzard-she wasn’t hit or harmed. Nothing was endangered at all, beyond her pulse thumping at sonic-boom levels, but that was no special event. Her ex-husband had regularly raised her blood pressure beyond stroke level easier and faster than any old Vermont blizzard.

It could be that she was getting a tiny bit tired, though.

The past two months on the Riviera had been a nightmare rather than a vacation. The past two days of solid traveling and negotiating airports had been nonstop grueling. And the past two hours, she’d been driving in escalating ghastly conditions.

The car clock claimed it was three in the afternoon, but it might as well have been midnight. Black-cheeked clouds kept rolling in low. The wipers could barely keep up with the slashing, bashing snow. Drifts were forming fast, making big, fat white pillows on fence posts and roofs-but where the wind swept the roads clean, the surface was slick ice.

Exhausted or not, she simply couldn’t relax. Not yet.

Ten minutes from home-even though Daisy hadn’t considered the Campbell homestead to be her real home for more than a decade-her body seemed to sense the ordeal was almost over. She couldn’t see Firefly Hollow, where every teenager in the county traditionally made out on Saturday night, but she knew it was there. She couldn’t see Old Man Swisher’s pond, either, but growing up, she’d spent so many hours in the neighbor’s swimming hole that she knew where it was from the curve in the road. A huge, lioness of a yawn escaped her lungs. Less than a half mile, she’d be home free and safe.

Only, right then, a hundred yards from the driveway, the compact found another diamond slide of ice. It was like trying to control a bullet. She did all the things she was supposed to do, but the little rental car went with the spin, then dove, nose first, into a ditch.

The back tires were still spinning when Daisy let out a long, furious blood-curdling scream.

There were times for impulse control-and times when a woman was justifiably fed-up, ticked-off, had-it, and every other multiple-guess choice there could possibly be.

She turned off the damn car, grabbed her damn purse and overnight bag, and then wrenched open the damn door. Her elegant Italian boots promptly sank into two-foot-deep snow. Naturally she fell. Abandoning all pride, she clawed and crawled her way up from the damn ditch to the damn road.

In that brief period of time, her toes and nose froze solid. Her red cashmere coat and fuzzy hat were designer French; her bags and gloves were Swiss. She’d have traded all of it-including her Manolo Blahnik boots-for a practical L.L. Bean jacket. The kind she grew up in. The kind she swore she’d never wear again as long as she lived.

Eyes squinting against the battering, blustering snow, she trudged toward home. She was exasperated beyond belief, she told herself. Not scared. Daisy Campbell-Rochard-now-Campbell-again simply didn’t do scared. There was a world of difference between being gutless and being careful. She knew exactly how serious a Vermont blizzard could be. There were snowstorms…and then there were snowstorms-the kind that shut down the community for days. The kind where, if you fell in a drift, no one would likely find you for a good week. The kind where, if you had a brain, you wouldn’t be outside at all, much less if you weren’t dressed for serious weather.

But then-in spite of the shrieking wind and the fistfuls of snow-she recognized the rail fence. Then the toboggan hill. Then the big old maple tree.

And finally, there it was. Home. The base structure was as old as the first Campbell who came over from Scotland-right after the Mayflower, her dad always claimed. Rooms had been added on, but the house was still basically the same sturdy, serious house with white trim and a shake roof. For a moment, fierce, wonderful memories flooded her of coming home other times-smoke puffing from the chimney, lights warming every window, Colin and Margaux flying out the front door to greet their oldest daughter, Violet and Camille laughing and gossiping.

Just that quickly, though, Daisy’s heart sank. It didn’t seem like home when there were no lights, no sign of life. The place looked cold and hauntingly lonely. No one had plowed the road in weeks.

She told herself it was totally stupid to feel at such a loss. Obviously, there couldn’t be a welcoming committee when no one knew she was coming home-and she’d known ahead of time that the house was empty.

In fact, when it came down to it, Daisy took a ton of credit for everyone being so happy and busy these days. Her mom and dad were retired and basking in the Arizona sunshine, thanks to her researching their ideal retirement home.

Camille, the baby of the family, had stopped home for a few months last summer, needing to recover from a god-awful personal tragedy-but Daisy had stepped in there, too, got the family together and organized some subtle matchmaking. Camille and her groom-and his kids and critters and dad-were hanging out in Australia for the next six months.

Violet, their middle sister, had holed up in the farm house for a longer stretch-at least two or three years after getting divorced from the Creep of the Universe. She’d been scaring off men, and likely still would be-if Daisy hadn’t stepped in and sent home a man who was brave enough to take her on. Now Vi was married, too, and not as big as a blimp yet, but due in a couple more months. She was living with her new husband somewhere in upstate New York.

Daisy was outstanding at fixing everyone else’s lives, if she said so herself. It just never seemed that easy to fix her own-although, to give herself credit, she did learn from her mistakes. If the Adonis of the Universe crossed her path, she wouldn’t go out with him for a million dollars.

Five million, even.

But where men were an easy problem to solve-by giving them up, permanently-her current predicament was a little more challenging. Right now she desperately needed to get out of the violent wind and blistering cold before it got any darker, any colder, the snow any deeper. Too fast, scary fast, she was losing feeling in her hands, her feet, her chin. Her fuzzy hat had flown off somewhere, and her hair was wildly whipping around her face.

She battled to get to the back door and then fumbled for the house key in her purse. Her fingers just couldn’t seem to function well enough to unsnap the purse, hold the key, aim the key in the lock, turn it.

Finally her fumbling paid off and the door pushed open. Relief surged through her. It was all she needed, all she wanted-home, a place to hole up and hide out for a while. Inside, that awful screaming wind was immediately silenced. The temperature was still freezing, of course, but all she had to do was flick on the furnace, get some hot tea going, get warmed up. Everything was going to be okay.

She dropped her bag and purse, yanked off her snow-crusted gloves, and took her chattering teeth and shaking hands over to the thermostat. She flicked the dial, expecting to hear the gentle woomph of the furnace starting up.

But there was no woomph. No sound at all.

Frowning, she reached for the light switch, thinking that she’d misread the dial in the gloom.

No light turned on. She tried the light over the sink. No light there, either. She flew for the telephone then, but obviously she should have guessed there’d be no functional phone with no one living in the house right now, and she hadn’t been home from France long enough to get a cell phone. For a moment she stared blankly around the kitchen, thinking it had been blue and white the last time she’d been home. Now everything was red-red tiles, chintz curtains and rocker cushions. Violet must have done it. The Live Well, Love Much, Laugh Often sign, the girl stuff and country-corny doodads all looked like Violet, too. Daisy didn’t care if it wasn’t her decorating taste. The drumbeat in her pulse just kept reassuringly thumping home home home.

Only she couldn’t stay here. If there was no power, no furnace, there was no way to get warm. No way to cook. She couldn’t go out in subzero temperatures in the middle of this storm and chop wood. Frantically she jimmied the thermostat dial again, pushing it back and forth, praying for the sound of the furnace. But there was nothing.

Okay, she told herself, okay, thinking that if she could just calm down and not panic, she could think up a plan.

No plan emerged. She needed heat. Serious heat. The blizzard could go on for days. She needed heat, food and shelter now, before she was any colder, any more exhausted, before the day turned any darker.

For just a second the traitorous thought seeped in her mind that once, just once in her life, she’d like a hero. Someone to take care of her for a change. Someone she could depend on. But that thought was so silly that she readily abandoned it.

Daisy had never had a problem attracting men-but they were always the wrong men. The ones she took care of. The ones who were never there when the chips went down. She knew better than to expect anything else, so there was no point in whining-or panicking.

She mentally kicked herself in the fanny and moved. Quickly. All her stuff was being shipped from Europe, but she had the small overnight case. The back hall closet still had some of Dad’s old coats, her mom’s old boots. There were always spare gloves and hats under the back hall bench. Most of it was older than the hills and worn, but who cared?

She simply had to be covered enough, protected enough, to get to a neighbor. This was White Hills. No matter what reputation she’d had years ago, there wasn’t a soul who wouldn’t help a Campbell-or who she wouldn’t help, for that matter. The MacDougals were gone, because Camille had married into them. But across the sideroad to the west was the Cunningham Farm. The Cunninghams were old, seventies at least by now. But she knew they’d take her in, and undoubtedly try to feed her. Mr. Cunningham would know something about furnaces. Or he’d have ideas.

She plunked down in the rocker and leaned over to tug off her wonderful-and now ruined-boots. They didn’t want to come off. They were frozen to her feet, stiff enough to make tears sting her eyes to get them loose. Beneath, her feet and toes were red as bricks, and stung.

Not good, not good, not good.

Fear was sneaking up, biting at the edges, threatening to overwhelm her if she let it. She wanted to let it. She put on thick old wool socks, her dad’s old farm boots, a barn jacket right over her beautiful red cashmere coat. A little warmth started to penetrate, but she wanted to go back in that god-awful screaming wind like she wanted a bullet. It wasn’t safe out there, and she knew it.

Still, she swathed her face and neck in a long wool scarf, pulled on double mittens, grabbed her stuff. Don’t think, she told herself, just do it. When she opened the door, the wind and snow slapped her like a bully, trying to scare her again, but she forced herself back down the drive. She’d be okay if she didn’t lose her head. It might have been years, but she knew exactly where the Cunningham house was.

God knew how long it took to walk a quarter mile down the road-an hour? Longer? But finally she saw lights. The lights not only reassured her that the Cunninghams were home, but that they had power, so they must have a generator. A generator meant heat, light, food. Tears of relief stung her eyes as she trudged the last few feet to the back door and thumped with her dad’s big mitten.

No one answered.

They were there. A pickup was parked in the driveway, buried in snow. Lights lit up the whole downstairs. Come on, come on, Daisy thought desperately. I don’t really need a big hero. Just a little one. Just once, just once, just the least little break, and I swear I’ll be tough again tomorrow.

She thumped again. Louder. Harder.

Still, no one answered.

Impatiently she turned the knob, and was relieved to find the door unlocked. “Mrs. Cunningham? Mr. Cunningham?” One step inside and she immediately felt the gush of warm, wonderful heat. Nothing and no one could have forced her back out in the cold again. Swiftly she latched the door behind her, still calling out, “Yoo-hoo! It’s just me, Daisy Campbell. You know, Margaux and Colin’s daughter from across the road. Are you there?”

She heard something. A groan. A man’s groan. The sound was so unnerving and unexpected that she responded instinctively by running toward it. Someone sounded hurt. Badly hurt.

She’d been in the Cunninghams’ house before, but that was years ago. They had no children of their own, but she’d been there trick-or-treating, selling magazines for school projects, bringing a bushel of apples from her dad’s orchard, that kind of thing. She’d never seen the upstairs, but she knew the front hall led to a living room off to the right, then a dining area, then the big, old fashioned kitchen.

The man’s groan had seemed to come from the kitchen.

The last time she’d seen it, the room had avocado-green counters and wallpaper with big splashes of orange and green-circa the sixties or seventies-who knew? She’d been a kid, didn’t care. Now, though, the kitchen was obviously in the process of a major rehab. A sawhorse and power tools and impressive-looking cords dominated the middle of the room. There was sawdust all over the floor, new counters and cupboards in the process of being installed. Half were done. The ceiling was done, too, except for a light fixture hanging like a drunken sailor. And beneath that, tangled with an overturned ladder, was a man.

Daisy couldn’t take in much in that millisecond-just enough to register that he wasn’t one of the Cunninghams. The stranger was youngish, somewhere around thirty. She took in his appearance in a mental snap-shot-the dark hair, the lean, broad-shouldered build. He was dressed for work, in jeans and a long-sleeved tee, a tool belt slung around his hips. But God. None of that mattered.

He was lying on the dusty, littered floor, his eyes closed, flat on his back. One of his boots was still caught in the rung of a ladder. A pool of blood gleamed beneath his head, shining dark red under the bald light-bulb.

Teague Larson had never gone for angels. It wasn’t personal. He’d just always liked sex and sin and trouble too much to waste a lot of time on the saintly types.

On the other hand, he’d never planned on being dead before-and he figured he had to be dead. No one’s head could hurt this bad and still be alive. It seemed further proof of his unfortunate demise that the woman had miraculously appeared out of nowhere.

She was so damned gorgeous that he might even forgive her for being an angel. After his head stopped hurting. If his head ever stopped hurting.

It wasn’t helping that his personal, breathtakingly unforgettable angel was swearing loudly enough to wake all the rest of the dead.

“Damn it. Damn it. Damn it. Does it ever occur to anybody that sometime I’d like to be the one who gets rescued? No. Have I ever asked anything from anyone? No. Did I get my sisters married, get my parents retired, get everybody settled? But for Pete’s sake, I need a break today. The one thing I do not need is a problem like you. If you die, I swear, I’m going to kill you, and I’m not kidding! You don’t want to see me in a temper. Trust me. You are going to wake up and you’re going to be all right, or I swear, you’ll be sorry!”

Truth to tell, she wasn’t directly talking to him. She just seemed to be shrieking in a top-voice soprano as she flew around the place. He closed his eyes again, willing the room to stop spinning, willing his head to hurt less-at least enough that he could grasp what was going on.

Unfortunately his memory was slowly seeping back in Technicolor and surround sound. Blurry pictures filled his mind of the ladder tipping, then the noisy crash and scrambling fall. It was the worst kind of memory, because it mortifyingly illustrated one guy stubbornly trying to do the job of two. The story of his life. Too much pride. No ability to compromise. Hell, he’d never played well with others in the sandbox.

His personal angel suddenly pushed the ladder out of the way, which jarred his ankle. Until then, he hadn’t known his ankle hurt even worse than his head. He’d been better off when he thought he was dead. It’d been quiet around here then. Safer. Now that she’d forced him back to reality, there was no going back to that nice, warm, unconscious place. She’d ruined it.

On the other hand, there seemed to be compensations.

He watched her peel off a silly farmer’s hat, shimmy out of an oversize old barn coat, push off clodhopper boots. If he’d had the energy, he’d damn near have gasped at the transformation. He’d already seen she had a gorgeous face, but beneath all that clothing was some kind of guy’s favorite secret fantasy.

Deliberately, enticingly, she stroked the front of his pants, clearly trying to get into his pocket. He wasn’t in the mood, no, but pain or no pain, a guy could be forced to rise with enough motivation. She was gentle enough, but she was obviously in a rush, hurrying, hurrying, as if she couldn’t wait to get her hands on his you-know-what.

Okay, now he knew definitely that he wasn’t dead. The view alone inspired him to keep his eyes open, no matter how badly he was hurting. The way her head was bent over him, he saw a tumble of rich, dark hair. Beneath that crazy old farmer’s coat was a Christmas-red coat-the kind of thing women looked at in fashion magazines, not the kind of coat people wore in White Hills, Vermont. Didn’t matter, she shrugged out of the coat swiftly.

She was stripping for him. Teague told himself his mind was still jangled with pain, but she took off both her coats, hadn’t she? And she was still moving, still touching him, still in a big rush. Teague liked to think he’d ignited his share of passion-no lover he’d had ever complained-but he’d never provoked a complete stranger to immediate intimacy before. If he weren’t half-dead and more than half-goofy, he’d be loving it. He was loving it. He just had a sneaky feeling that he was temporarily a pickle short of a brain. On the other hand, who the hell needed reality?

When she leaned over him, her soft black sweater brushed his cheek. The sweater’s V-neck offered him a free look at firm, high breasts. Bountiful breasts. Bountiful, god’s-gift-to-a-man, turgid-nippled, plump breasts with the scent of exotic perfume deep in the shadow between them. When she shifted a little, he caught a glimpse of sleek, long legs encased in black pants. A pert little butt.

He liked the legs, but man, that little butt was the sexiest thing he’d seen in months. Maybe years.

He’d only caught a glance at her face before-enough to label her looks striking-but now she turned. Even fantasies weren’t this perfect. The skin was smoother than a baby’s. A slash of elegant cheekbones had been burned by the wind, the cherry color startling next to all that white skin. A high arch of eyebrows framed big, soft eyes, brown gold like cognac, and her mouth…oh, God, that kissable mouth…

But then he forgot her looks altogether, because her fingers dug really deep into his pocket. Instead of closing her hand around his best friend, though, her fingers emerged into the light, clasping his cell phone.

“Come on,” she muttered. “Come on, 911, come on…”

All right, so possibly he wasn’t as excited about her or life as he first thought. His eyelids drooped; he couldn’t keep them open. His mind felt as muzzy as steel-wool soup. He heard her voice on the phone, caught partial snatches of her side of a conversation, but he seemed to be uncontrollably fading in and out.

“Sheriff, this is Daisy Campbell…yeah, Margaux and Colin’s oldest daughter… George Webster? You’re the sheriff now? Well, that’s great, but listen, I…”

She pushed a red-nailed hand through her wild mane of hair. “Yes, I’m back from the south of France. And yes, it’s beautiful there. But listen, I…”

She jerked to her feet and spun around, talking faster, appearing more and more agitated. “Yes, I changed my last name back to Campbell. You’re right, marriage wasn’t for me. Everyone always said that, didn’t they? That I’d never settle down…” She seemed to try to interrupt him several more times, and then finally spit out, “Sheriff! Would you listen? I’m at the Cunningham place. They’re not here-”

Again, the person on the other end must have talked some more, because she cut in again. “Well, that’s nice to know, that they’re vacationing in Pittsburgh, but the point is that there’s a strange man here… Teague Larson, you say? Yes. Yes. It does look as if he’s a carpenter or electrician or something, but the point is that he’s hurt. Bad hurt. And no, I can’t very well calm down and take it easy. I know there’s a blizzard but…”

Fade out. Teague tried to catch more, but beneath his eyelids all he could see was a canvas of pea green. Dizzying swirls of pea green. A stomach-churning paisley pattern of swirling pea green.

At some point-who knew how long-he felt her hands on him again. She pulled off his tool belt, which felt a million times better. Smooth, chilled fingers pressed the inside of his wrist, then the carotid artery in his neck. After that, she laid her cheek right on top of his chest, with all that vibrant dark hair tickling his nostrils. Moments passed before she spoke into the cell phone again.

“I can’t do a pulse. I’m not a nurse, for Pete’s sake. Yes, it seems as if his heart’s beating strong, but I have nothing to compare it- What the Sam Hill do you mean days! I know we’re in the middle of a blizzard. I don’t care. I want an ambulance here right now!”

Okay. If she was going to do the shrieking thing, he was going back to the unconscious thing. Angel or no angel, the pain just wasn’t worth it. If she patted him down again, he’d rethink it, maybe wake up again, but until then there just wasn’t a lot of motivation to stay with it.

“Damn it, I’m telling you he could be hurt badly! He could have broken bones. And there’s blood beneath his head. Okay, okay, I’ll…”

More colorful swirls filled his mind. Not pea green this time. More like the blend of colors from stirring whipped cream into coffee. At first the swirling sensation was as fast as a whirlpool, but then everything seemed to slow down, soften, dance to a far quieter tune.

When he heard her voice again, she seemed calmer. At least a little calmer. She’d quit swearing a blue streak at the sheriff, anyway.

“Yeah, I did that. Yeah, okay. I can do that, too. And yes, I can plug in his cell phone somewhere, as long as there’s power here. But you have to promise to pick him up as soon as you can. I can keep calling with a report every few hours, but the very second you can get an ambulance or Medi-Vac here, I want…”

Teague remembered nothing else for a while. When he woke the next time, shadows had darkened. The wind outside was still howling like a lonely wolf, but the kitchen was completely silent. The naked light fixture over the sink glared straight in his eyes-but not for long.

Huge, gorgeous dark eyes suddenly blocked that sharp, bright light. It was her again. She was real, after all. Who’d ever believe it?

And then there was her voice, not screaming at all now, but low, low as a sexy blues singer, low as sexual promises in the dead of night, whispering an ardent, “Merde!”