Page 33 of Driving Him Wild

CHAPTER FOUR

THINGS WENT FROM bad to worse between Graciela and me while I was in the middle of kicking

myself for overreacting the night before.

Now I’d had time to cool down, I couldn’t blame her for assuming the worst. The British media

were notorious for privacy invasion, and with a family like the Mortimers, with their well-

documented clashes with the tabloid press, it didn’t surprise me that she’d be wary.

So what if we’d shared a few intimate moments the night before?

Everything about our encounter reeked oftemporary.

Regardless of certainty, though, a hard bite caught me every time I thought of this project being

over, that what happened in the tent last night would never be repeated.

Fuck, if I wanted the blood to relocate from what felt like its new permanent residence in my groin, I needed to stop thinking about last night and concentrate on the real threat of the snowstorm heading our way.

It’d caught me unawares, much like a lot of things had since meeting Graciela Mortimer.

Jaw clenched, I resisted yet another urge to glance behind me. To catch another glimpse of her face.

She’d been asleep, thankfully, when I eventually returned to the tent last night. Knowing I couldn’t join her inside the sleeping bag, despite being sorely tempted, had been another unpalatable lesson in self-control. Common sense had been little comfort as I’d shivered in the blankets on the other side of the tent.

Breakfast had been predictably chilly, and I wasn’t surprised when she treated me to haughty

silence as we packed up and reloaded the sled. Nor could I stem my disappointment when she

informed me of her plans to cut short her involvement in the project.

There was no avoiding talking to her now, though.

I glanced over my shoulder. ‘There’s a storm headed our way. We’re not going to make the

rendezvous point to meet the chopper.’

Her eyes narrowed before leaving mine to scour the landscape and sky. ‘The sky is clear. I don’t

see anything resembling a storm.’

I curbed a smile. ‘This isn’t a trick. We have about half an hour tops to find shelter before the storm hits. Your pick-up point is ninety minutes away.’

‘Can’t we hunker down somewhere, wait for it to pass?’ she asked.

I shook my head, feeling almost sorry for her. Almost. Her hurry to get away from me rankled. ‘No,

we can’t. It’s better to find solid shelter rather than camp out.’

She reached for her satellite phone. ‘I’ll call my pilot, and you can redirect him here to pick me

up,’ she said.

‘If the storm’s as bad as I think it is, he won’t be allowed to fly out at all. And if he does, you’ll be risking everyone getting stranded—’ The sound of her phone ringing interrupted us. ‘I bet that’s him now calling to tell you the same thing.’

With an icy glare at me, she answered. ‘Hello?’ She listened, her expression growing tighter by the second. Any moment now, I expected her to snap at her pilot to come, regardless of the procedures.

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