Cara Colter - Interview with a Tycoon

When had he come to like the dark of his own misery and loneliness so much?

“Yes, I’m fine,” she said, her voice, tremulous with bravery, piercing the darkness of his own thoughts. “More embarrassed than anything.”

“And well you should be.” The faint sympathy he had felt for her melted. “A person with a grain of sense and so little winter driving experience should not have tackled these roads today. I told her not to send you.”

She blinked at that. Opened her mouth, then closed it, looked down at her little red shoes and ineffectually tried to scrape the snow off them.

“I detest stubborn women,” he muttered. “Why would you travel today?”

“Perhaps it wasn’t my most sensible decision,” she said, and he watched the chin that had hinted at a stubborn nature tilt upward a touch, “but I can’t guarantee the result would not have been similar, even on the finest summer day.”

He lifted an eyebrow at her, intrigued despite himself.

“My second name is Murphy, for my maternal grandfather, and it is very suiting. I am like a poster child for Murphy’s Law.”

He had the feeling she was trying to keep things light in the face of the deliberate dark judgment in his own features, so he did not respond to the lightness of her tone, just raised his eyebrow even higher at her.

“Murphy’s Law?”

“You know,” she clarified, trying for a careless grin and missing by a mile. “Anything that can go wrong, will.”

He stared at her. For a moment, the crystal clear green of those eyes clouded, and he felt some thread of shared experience, of unspeakable sorrow, trying to bind them together.

His sense of needing to get rid of her strengthened. But then he saw the blood in her hair.

* * *

Stacy could have kicked herself! What on earth had made her say that to him? It was not at all in keeping with the new her: strong, composed, sophisticated. You didn’t blurt out things like that to a perfect stranger! She had intended it to sound light; instead, it sounded like a pathetic play for sympathy!

And, damn it, sometimes when you opened that door you did not know what was going to come through.

And what came through for her was a powerful vision of the worst moment of anything that can go wrong will in her entire life. She was standing outside her high school gym. She closed her eyes against it, but it came anyway.

Standing outside the high school waiting anxiously, just wanting to be anywhere but there. Waiting for the car that never came. A teacher finding her long after everyone else had gone home, wrapping her in her own sweater, because Stacy was shivering. She already knew there was only one reason that her father would not have come. Her whole world gone so terribly and completely wrong in an instant...left craving the one thing she could never have again.

Her family.

She had hit her head harder than she thought! That’s what was causing this. Or was it the look she had glimpsed ever so briefly in his own eyes? The look that had given her the sensation that he was a man bereft?

“You actually don’t look okay,” he decided.

She opened her eyes to see him studying her too intently. Just what every woman—even one newly devoted to independence—wanted to hear from Kiernan McAllister!

“I don’t?”

“You’re not going to faint, are you?”

“No!” Her denial was vehement, given the fact that she had been contemplating that very possibility—heart implosion—only seconds ago.

“You’ve gone quite pale.” He was looking at her too intensely.

“It’s my coloring,” she said. “I always look pale.”

This was, unfortunately, more than true. Though she had the dark brown hair of her father, she had not inherited his olive complexion. Her mother had been a redhead, and she had her ultrapale, sensitive skin and green eyes.

“You are an unusual combination of light and dark.” She squirmed under his gaze, until he tightened his hold.

“Remember Murphy’s Law,” he warned her. “It’s very slippery out here, and those shoes look more suited to a bowling alley than a fresh snowfall.”

A bowling alley? “They’re Kleinbacks,” she insisted on informing him, trying to shore up her quickly disintegrating self-esteem. The shoes, after all proclaimed arrival, not disaster.

“Well, you’ll be lyin’-on-your-backs if you aren’t careful in them. You don’t want to add to your injuries.”

“Injuries?”

Still holding her one arm firmly, he used his other—he seemed to have his cell phone in it—and whipped off the towel he had around his waist!

Still juggling the towel and the phone, he found a dry corner of it, and pressed it, with amazing gentleness, onto the top of her head. “I didn’t see it at first, amongst the chocolate curls—”

Chocolate curls? It was the nicest way her hair had ever been described! Did that mean he was noticing more about her than his sack-of-potatoes hold had indicated?

“—but there’s blood in your hair.”

His voice was perfection, a silk scarf caressing the sensitive area of her neck.

“There is?” She peeked at him around the edges of the towel.

He dabbed at her hair—again, she was taken with the tenderness of his touch, when he radiated such a powerful aura—and then he turned the towel to her, proof.

It looked like an extremely expensive towel, brilliant white, probably Egyptian cotton, and now it had little speckles of red from her blood. Though for some reason, maybe the knock on the head, the sight of all that blood was not nearly as alarming to her as he was.

Since he had removed the towel, Stacy forced herself not to let her gaze stray from his face. Water was sliding out of the dark silk of his hair and down the utterly and devastatingly attractive lines of his features.

“You aren’t naked, are you?” she asked, her voice a squeak of pure dismay.

Something twitched around the sensual line of his mouth as McAllister contemplated Stacy’s question, but she couldn’t really tell if he was amused or annoyed by it.

His mouth opened, then closed, and then, his eyes never leaving her face, he said evenly, “No, I’m not.”

She dared to unglue her eyes from his face. They skittered over the very naked line of his broad shoulders, down the beautiful cut of chest muscles made more beautiful by the snowflakes that melted on them and sent beads of waters sliding down to the ridged muscle of washboard abs. Riding low on his hips...her eyes flew back to the relative safety of his face.

Only that wasn’t really safe, either.

“Underwear?” she squeaked.

He regarded her thoughtfully for a moment. She resisted an urge to squirm, again, under the firm hands at her elbow, and his stripping gaze.

“Kleinbacks,” he said, straight-faced.

She was pretty sure the designer company did not make men’s underwear, and that was confirmed when something very like a smile, however reluctant, played along the hard line of those lips. Stunned, Stacy realized she was being teased by Kiernan McAllister.

But the light that appeared for a moment in his eyes was gone almost instantly, making her aware he had caught himself lightening up, and not liked it. Not liked it one little bit.

“Swim trunks.” His voice was gravelly, amusement stripped from it.

“Oh!” She sagged with relief, then looked, just to make sure. They were really very nice swim trunks, not the scanty kind that triathletes wore. Still, there was quite a bit more of him uncovered than covered, and she felt herself turn scarlet as she watched a another snow drop melt and slide past the taut muscles of his stomach and into the waistband of his shorts.

“It doesn’t really seem like swimming weather,” she offered, her voice strangled.

“I was in the hot tub in the back of the house when I heard the commotion out here.”

“Oh! Of course.” She tried to sound as if she was well acquainted with the kind of people who spent snowy afternoons doing business from their hot tubs—he did have his phone with him, after all—but she was fairly certain she did not pull it off.

Knowing what she did about him, it occurred to her that perhaps, despite the presence of the phone, he wasn’t doing business. One thing she knew from her life interviewing high-powered execs? They were attached to those phones as though they were lifelines!

Kiernan McAllister might be entertaining someone in his hot tub.

“Alone,” he said, as if he had read her thoughts.

She didn’t like the idea that he might be able to read her thoughts. But there was also something about the way he said alone that made her think of icy, windswept mountain peaks and a soul gone cold.

Even though he was the one with no clothes on, in the middle of a snowstorm, it was Stacy who shivered. She tried to tell herself it was from snow melting off her neck and slithering down her back, but she knew that was not the entire truth.

It was pure awareness of the man who stood before her, his complexities both unsettling her and reluctantly intriguing her. His hands resting, warm and strong—dare she consider the thought, protectively—on her. How on earth could he be so completely unselfconscious? And why wasn’t he trembling with cold?

Obviously, his skin was heated from the hot tub, not that he was the kind of man who trembled! He was supremely comfortable with himself, radiating a kind of confidence that could not be manufactured.

Plus, Stacy’s mind filled in helpfully, he had quite a reputation. He would not be unaccustomed to being in some state of undress in front of a lady.

Impossibly, she could feel her cheeks turning even more crimson, and he showed no inclination to put her out of her misery. He regarding her appraisingly, snow melting on his heated skin, a cloud of steam rising around him.

Finally, he seemed to realize it was very cold out here!

“Let’s get in,” he suggested. She heard reluctance in his voice. He did not want her in his house!

She was not sure why, though it didn’t seem unreasonable. A stranger plows into your fountain. You hardly want to entertain them.

But he was expecting someone. He didn’t want to entertain that person, either?

“I’ll take a closer look at your head. There’s not a whole lot of blood, I’m almost certain it’s superficial. We’ll get you into Whistler if it’s not.”

It occurred to her he was a man who would do the right thing even if it was not what he particularly wanted to do.

And that he would not like people who did the wrong thing. She shivered at the thought. He misinterpreted the shiver as cold and strengthened his grip on her, as if he didn’t trust her not to keel over or slip badly on his driveway. He turned her away from her car and toward the warmth of his house.

Aside from her car in the garden, the driveway was empty. The household vehicles were no doubt parked in the five-car garage off to one side.

The house inspired awe. If this was a cottage, what on earth did McAllister’s main residence look like?

The house was timber framed, the lower portions of it faced in river rock. Gorgeous, golden logs, so large three people holding hands would barely form a circle around them, acted as pillars for the front entryway. The entry doors were hand carved and massive, the windows huge, plentiful and French-paned, the rooflines sweeping and complicated.

Through the softly falling flakes of snow, Stacy was certain she felt exactly how Cinderella must have felt the first time she saw the castle.

Or maybe, she thought, with a small shiver of pure apprehension, more like Beauty when she found Beast’s lair.