Fueling Her Fire (3 page)

And the worst part? Because Dylan’s dad had paid her for her
time to tutor him and she’d screwed him instead, the nasty gossip turned her
into a prostitute. In a small town where nothing much happened, this rumor was
a goldmine and the word was that Kip would provide tutoring and sex—for the
right price. She’d been completely humiliated and, worse, he’d broken her
heart.

She drove by the road the high school was on, turning her
head to look as she passed. The school wasn’t visible from the road and she
could see only the distant fence that bordered the grounds. Dylan had caught up
with her at that fence that day after school as she was hurrying home and tried
to talk to her, but she’d cut him off and told him she never,
never
wanted to speak to him again and she never had.

She’d graduated as valedictorian amid the scandal and that
unknown girl had called her a whore during her speech. Small towns can be
unforgiving places with long memories. She’d gone off to college and tried to
forget her unhappy past, but every time she stepped foot in Dalton Run, which
only happened once a year at Christmas, she was that eighteen-year-old girl
again. The feelings and memories came back as if no time had passed.

No.

Flipping her hair over her shoulder, she set her jaw. She
was going to have a good Christmas if it killed her. So it wouldn’t be perfect.
So what? She was
not
a love-struck eighteen-year-old kid anymore. She
was successful—a lawyer at a big firm in Chicago, her own apartment in the
city. She was no longer the skinny, self-conscious teenager she was then,
hoping a boy might notice her, kiss her. Now she was a grown woman with all the
curves and experience to prove it.

Yet here she was, back in Dalton Run. She’d second-guessed
the idea ever since she’d gotten on the highway and started heading toward the
mountains of West Virginia. When Kip had lived there, she and her mom had lived
in a house in town with her grandmother, who also owned the cabin near the top
of the mountain. When Kip’s grandmother had died, her mom had retired to
Florida and sold the house, but they’d kept the cabin and spent every Christmas
there together ever since. Except this one.

Kip turned up the windshield wipers. The snow was really
getting deep the higher up she got, and by the time she made the last turn out
of the town proper, she thought there must have been a true snow emergency
underway. She breathed a sigh of relief that she’d stopped at the last
decent-sized town to buy groceries and supplies. She had cocoa, coffee and
creamer, a few bottles of wine, bread, ham and cheese for sandwiches, all the
fixings to make chili, and eggs and bacon for breakfast. It was too much food
considering it was just her, but she was aiming for comfort.

Picking up her phone, she checked the bars—no reception now.
She tossed it back into her purse, regretting that her chance to hear back from
her mom had passed. Kip wouldn’t be getting any emails now. But her mom kept
the phone turned on at the cabin, and since Kip had already sent her a message
saying she’d be there, she wondered if her mom might find a way to call the
cabin to reach her. That is, if her mom had service in Capri or wherever she
was in the world. Kip suddenly felt very alone.

She wasn’t supposed to be alone this Christmas. She was
supposed to be with William. Not Bill or Will…William.

I should have known.
She laughed dryly.

They’d been together over a year and Kip was pretty certain
she was getting a ring this Christmas. What she’d gotten instead was a phone
call yesterday from the pissed-off “other woman”. Apparently she’d suspected
Kip was getting a ring too.

After the high-pitched lady provided enough indisputable
evidence regarding her own relationship with William, Kip had hung up the phone
and kicked his cheating ass out of her apartment, with him sniveling about
loving her even as she threw all of his belongings into the common hallway.

She made the final turn onto Clay Ridge Road, which climbed
further out of town and up the mountain to the cabin. The trees were heavy with
the weight of the snow and Kip wondered if the tall pines would be able to
handle it, since the snow didn’t appear to be slowing.

She finally pulled into the clearing in front of the cabin
at just after three o’clock. Her grandmother’s cabin looked tucked-in for the
evening under a blanket of snow and Kip was anxious for the comfort she hoped
being at the cabin would bring. She got out of the car in the silence that only
a landscape with a heavy layer of snow can create and stretched, looking around
the clearing.

The dark lines of the cabin hunkered sturdy and familiar
against the frozen backdrop, the wide, covered porch promising shelter. The
structure had begun as a simple hunting cabin of her grandfather’s—almost
nothing more than a shack—but as the years passed, her family had fixed it up
and added on to it. It wasn’t fancy, but it was clean and comfortable and to
Kip it was heaven on earth.

The cabin stood in a meadow in the woods, painstakingly
cleared of rocks and trees by her grandfather. The backyard sloped steeply down
the mountain and a wraparound porch provided a panoramic view of the whole town
below on a clear day. There was no Christmas as good as being snowed in at the
cabin, drinking hot chocolate and stringing popcorn for the tree while a fire
blazed in the wood stove. It was rustic, but it was glorious.

Kip took a moment to savor the silence, all of the natural
sounds muffled by the white drifts. She never experienced silence like that in
the city. The hush of the forest under a cloak of thick snow steadied her
somehow and made her glad that she’d had the chance to know such a thing in her
life. She missed her Gran.

But she had to move quickly to prepare the cabin. It
wouldn’t do to be fumbling around in the dark on a night like this one was
promising to be. After carrying in her groceries, bedding and overnight bag,
the first order of business was heat.

She built a fire in the wood stove—the sole source of heat
in the cabin—using the logs piled next to it. When she had a vigorous fire
rolling a steady flow of warmth into the cabin’s main room, she paused. Sitting
on the well-worn floorboards in front of the stove, she pulled her legs against
her chest, wrapping her arms around them. She let her head rest on her knees,
listening to the fire crackle and pop and thinking about how her Christmas was
turning out.

She was sad, but it was a sadness caused by being lonely at
a time when most people were with loved ones. It had nothing to do with
not
being
with William. And because of that, she realized she was profoundly grateful to
the lady with whom he’d been cheating, because her well-timed phone call had
saved Kip from making a terrible mistake. William had been a comfortable habit,
but she deserved better than “comfortable”. She needed a man who made her gasp
with desire.

Sighing, she reluctantly stood up to leave the warm embrace
of the stove and go back outside to retrieve her Christmas tree. She knew it
had been stupid to get an eight-foot Christmas tree when it was just her, but
in a sudden fit of determination to uphold tradition no matter what, she’d
pulled off the road when she’d seen the lot where she and her mom bought their
tree every year.

She untied the tree and rolled it off the top of the SUV.
Her struggle to get the tree into the cabin and standing in the flimsy
tree-stand was so epic that by the time she’d finished she felt like an ancient
warrior dragging her kill home from war and presenting it to the gods. She had
to laugh at the absurdity of the situation. What had she been thinking? But it
was there now and by god, she was going to decorate the damned thing.

Standing back, she surveyed her work. The living room looked
as if a glacier had moved through it, leaving a trail of melted ice and debris behind.
Growling, she cleaned it all up, even shaking the branches of the tree off and
wiping the floor underneath. When she finished, she poured herself a glass of
wine and stared at the tree with a sense of satisfaction. It was somewhat crooked,
but she was damn proud of it. She’d put up a fresh-cut Christmas tree all by
herself. She raised her glass in a toast to herself. She could have a good
Christmas, even if she
was
alone.

She made up the bed in the loft and then reluctantly put her
boots back on to bring more firewood into the cabin from the stack on the front
porch. Crawling out of a warm bed at three in the morning during a snowstorm to
retrieve wood from the front porch would completely suck.

Stepping out the front door she turned to the wood pile, but
all she found was a stained area on the porch where the wood pile normally
stood, wood chips and splinters strewn about.

Oh no.

Shit! Shit, shit, shit!
A sinking feeling hit her
full-force. She didn’t normally make the arrangements for the cabin, her mom
did. Kip just showed up. She’d simply assumed the wood would be there because
it always had been. Her mom would have filled her in on these things if Kip had
told her she was going to the cabin alone, but her mom hadn’t known she’d be there.
She plopped down heavily on the front stairs, not caring about the snow that
was melting into her pants.

What was she going to do?
It was Christmas Eve! She
looked at her watch—three-thirty in the afternoon. Everyone would be getting
ready for dinner, setting the table and adding the finishing touches before
their guests arrived. How was she going to get someone to leave all that and
deliver a load of firewood up the mountain? But she couldn’t stay at the cabin
without it—she didn’t have enough wood to make it through the night.

Oh god.
Thoughts of driving back to Nettleton and
spending Christmas morning in a crappy hotel room flashed through her head and
she felt the depression seeping back into her.

That was
not
going to happen.

Chapter Three

Kip could fix this. She had money and she was willing to use
it to try to salvage her Christmas. She made a six-figure salary—she could
afford to pay someone an exorbitant amount to bring firewood up the mountain
and stack it on her front porch on Christmas Eve.

Standing up, she brushed the snow off her pants and trudged
back into the house, determined to make her plan happen. With a little digging
she produced the thin phonebook for Dalton Run. Leafing through to find
“firewood” in the yellow pages, she saw there were two listings—Al’s Wood and
Dalton Run Reclamation Company. That one didn’t even sound like they sold
firewood. She called Al’s.

“Hallo?” a gruff voice answered. Al, she presumed.

“Yes, hello!” her voice was bright, trying to sound so nice
that Al wouldn’t think of turning down her request. “I’m in a bit of trouble
here. I came to my family’s cabin for Christmas, but I didn’t realize there was
no firewood.”

“No firewood? Hope you got a heater, honey! It’s going to be
a cold one tonight!” Al answered, seemingly full of Christmas cheer.

“No, see that’s the problem. I need firewood. Tonight.” Al
snorted in disbelief and then noises clattered over the line as if he’d dropped
the phone. “Um, hello? Al?”

Al’s voice sounded sympathetic. “I’m sorry. I’m not comin’
out tonight, honey. I’m getting ready to sit down to Christmas Eve dinner with
my family and then we’re watchin’ Christmas movies and drinking cocoa—same
thing we do every year. I’m not missing that. Call the other guy, he might do
it. He ain’t married and I don’t think he has family around here.”

Kip smiled. Small towns, everybody knows your business. “You
mean Dalton Run Reclamation?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. Call him. Otherwise you’re going to
need to find somewhere else to stay tonight, I’m afraid.”

Thanking him, she reluctantly hung up the phone. Although
she guessed there was some dollar amount that would be enough to drag Al away
from his cocoa and Christmas movies, she wasn’t going to try to find out what
it was. It sounded like the reclamation guy might be a little more “available”
around family holidays. She dialed that number.

“Merry Christmas,” answered a deep, male voice, without much
Christmas cheer behind it.
Doesn’t anyone answer their business phone like a
business around here?
She felt like she was calling people’s houses, but
then realized she probably was. Firewood sales were most likely a side business
for anyone involved.

“Merry Christmas!” she answered, again trying to sound
lovely and desperate at the same time. She launched into her story.

“You do realize it’s Christmas Eve, right?”

She closed her eyes, her hopes sinking. “I do.”

“And you know what time it is?”

“Yes. I’m so sorry to ask you, but it really was an
oversight on my part and now I’m in a real bind. I’ll pay you whatever ‘holiday
rate’ you think is appropriate for your trouble.” She bit her lip and rose up
on her tiptoes in anticipation, praying he’d say yes, willing him to.

“It was an
oversight
on your part? Oh, well in that
case…” He laughed warmly and deeply and she couldn’t help but appreciate the
manly sound of it. She considered herself a rather independent woman, but there
was something about a strong, hard-working man coming to her rescue when she
was alone and in need. She couldn’t help it—it made her feel better. She
decided she liked the wood guy.

“You must be from out of town,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, thinking it was strange that he could tell.
She wondered if it was because she’d forgotten to ensure she had a proper
firewood supply during a snowstorm on Christmas Eve, or because she’d used the
word “oversight” in a sentence.

But she sensed his good humor meant he was warming up to the
idea. She implored further, adding a flirtatious quality to her voice. “So will
you come and help me? Please? I’ll make it worth your time!”