“Oh, it is so on!” he shouted. He used his shovel to fling a huge lump of snow at Bree. It sent her scattering off the porch, giving him time to make a few snowballs to defend himself. He took a defensive position behind her SUV. She hunkered down behind a tall drift by the porch.
They lobbed attacks back and forth. Bree got him in the head once, but he fired back and nailed her in the rear end when she bent over to make more snowballs. She squealed in mock rage, kicking off another round of assaults. Ian was getting frustrated, though. They could go like this for hours. It was time for some hand-to-hand combat to make things more interesting.
With a commando-like roar that would’ve made John Rambo proud, Ian charged through the snow and tackled Bree into a drift. With a cry, they sank a good foot into the snow. Once she recovered, Bree playfully fought beneath him. They rolled around, burying themselves in a dusting of white powder and making the most distorted snow angels ever conceived.
At one point, she was able to push Ian off of her and he fell backward into more snow. She started frantically burying him as though they were on the beach, until he rose up, ruining all her hard work and tackling her into fresh powder beside them.
Laughing and exhausted, they finally stopped fighting. Ian couldn’t help smiling as he looked down at Bree, pink-cheeked and grinning with the snow at her back. She looked so beautiful in that moment with her messy blond braid dusted in white powder. Not the perfectly airbrushed and digitally altered perfection of his former fiancée, but real beauty. Flawed and lovely.
He wanted to kiss her again. Last night had whet his appetite without giving him enough to feel satisfied. And he realized at that moment, he could. Without guilt. He wasn’t engaged. The mother of his “child” was nothing but a manipulative liar. Missy would probably keep the six-figure engagement ring he’d bought her, but it was a small price to pay for freedom. All the thoughts about Bree that he’d beaten himself up over in the past twenty-four hours were no longer off-limits.
Bree looked up at him, her bright blue eyes wide and inviting. Her lips were parted softly, her frozen breath escaping her lungs into the cold. He watched intently as her tongue snaked across them. She wanted him just as much as he wanted her. It could happen. He could have everything he’d fantasized about since she’d stepped out of her car yesterday. He just had to careful. He’d learned not to give anything more than his body to a woman. Because this was the woman who had taught him that lesson, he had to be doubly careful. He could make love to Bree while they were in the mountains as long as he remembered they would never work in the real world.
“I’m not engaged anymore,” he said, stating the obvious.
“I know,” she said, her voice breathy.
“Last night we had a million reasons why kissing was a bad idea. I hated to let you go, but I knew it was the right thing to do. Today, I can’t think of a single reason why I can’t kiss you again.”
This was her chance. If she didn’t want him—if she still believed he was just a thoughtless, self-destructive workaholic—she just needed to say no and he would respect that. But damn, he didn’t want her to say no. He wanted her to say that she wanted him despite the fact that he was a thoughtless, self-destructive workaholic. That she couldn’t focus on anything but how much she desired him. In the here and now, none of that other stuff mattered.
“Neither can I,” she said with a soft smile.
Barely a second after the words escaped her lips, his mouth was pressed against hers. Bree wrapped her arms around his neck, tugging him closer. He reacquainted himself with her, letting his tongue and his hands roam across the familiar yet different territory.
Bree made soft sounds, her fingertips gently pressing into him and urging him on. The noises she made were such a turn-on. They reminded him of heated nights on an uncomfortable twin dorm mattress. Of nights when school, his music, food...nothing was more important than making love to Bree. There was no day so stressful that losing himself in her couldn’t fix it.
He longed for that comfort again. Ian hadn’t had a day this bad in a long time. He wanted nothing more than to find relief from the worries in his mind by forgetting everything but how Bree liked to be touched.
His body stretched along the length of hers, every hard inch of his desire very obviously pressing into the soft curve of her belly. Her body undulated beneath him, the tight fabric of her jeans creating a delicious friction. An aching throb of need was growing more and more intense. If they didn’t go inside right now, he was going to make love to her in the snow.
He had no interest in getting frostbite on sensitive parts he might want to use again later.
Bree broke the kiss. “I’m getting cold,” she said, nearly reading his mind.
“That’s funny. I’m burning up.” And he was. Every inch of his skin felt as if it was doused in kerosene and set ablaze by the heat of her touch. Of course, he wasn’t the one lying against the snow.
Bree leaned up to kiss him again, a smile curling her lips. “Well, then take me inside so we can strip out of these wet clothes and you can warm me up.”
* * *
Bree had lied when she’d said she couldn’t think of a reason why Ian couldn’t kiss her. Well, at least physically there were no barriers to him doing whatever he liked, kissing included. It was more like reasons why he shouldn’t kiss her. There were plenty of those, starting with the most recent and obvious one—that he was emotionally rebounding—and ending with all the reasons they broke up in the first place.
Until this morning, she hadn’t had to give the idea of her and Ian much consideration. There was an attraction there—their chemistry had always been off the charts—but nothing would come of it. He was engaged and starting a family, and she was a professional photographer who didn’t intend on making a habit of sleeping with clients.
With his relationship with Missy imploding this morning, the major barrier to their physical impulses was gone. But that didn’t solve everything.
Handsome or not, Ian was still a workaholic. He still had his business to preoccupy his time. Being trapped here in the mountains had put his impulses on hold, but it wouldn’t last beyond the blizzard. None of this would. The minute they returned to Nashville, everything would fall apart. At best, she would get two, maybe three days with Ian. And she knew that.
But in that moment, when he looked at her with eyes blazing with desire, she didn’t care. None of those reasons mattered anymore. She would deal with the ending of their relationship when they got to the end. But she wasn’t going to let herself ruin the beginning worrying about it.
Not when she was standing in Ian’s bedroom, each of them slowly slipping out of their cold, wet snow gear. His dark green eyes never left hers as he tossed his gloves on the bathroom floor and shrugged out of his coat. Bree did the same, only Ian reached out to take her clothes from her.
They’d left their boots on the porch, so it was easy to take off her socks and then peel the wet jeans from her body. It was at that point that Ian froze in place, watching her undress. Despite how much she wanted out of those cold clothes, she was
going to take her time. She turned around, giving him a full view of her rear end as the denim peeled away and exposed the pink satin bikini-cut panties she wore beneath them.
Ian groaned aloud as she bent over and stepped out of the pants. She followed it with her long-sleeved shirt. When she turned back around wearing nothing but her bra and panties, Ian was standing exactly as she’d left him.