Snow Baby. Brenda Novak

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СКАЧАТЬ a napkin to wipe the blood from her mouth. “How could you expect anyone to stop so fast in this kind of storm?”

      He stiffened. “I managed to miss the car ahead of me. And you want to know why? Because I wasn’t tailgating him for the past thirty miles!”

      “I wasn’t tailgating you,” she said, but a memory of her struggle to keep up with his taillights raced through her mind and made her wonder if she’d been following too closely, after all. She’d hardly been able to see anything—except his lights.

      “Regardless,” he said abruptly, “we have to move off to the side. We’re stopping traffic. Are you okay to drive?”

      She nodded, shivering despite her navy wool coat. “I think so.”

      “Just pull over there.” He indicated a couple of spots other cars had just vacated. It seemed to Chantel that his initial anger had softened to mere irritation.

      Feeling jittery, she slowly eased the Jaguar over so the traffic behind them could get through. A couple of motorists paused to see what had happened and a chain installer jogged over and hollered something at the guy she’d hit, but the weather was too bad for anyone to linger. No ambulance, no fire trucks. The accident wasn’t nearly as interesting as it could have been.

      Thank God!

      Chantel watched the man from the Landcruiser stride toward her and wished she was safe in her new condominium in Walnut Creek, curled up in front of the television. She was exhausted and cold and rattled. But she had to make it to Tahoe. After all the years she and her sister hadn’t spoken, Stacy was finally ready to give her another chance.

      I won’t blow it, Stace. I’ve changed, grown up. You’ll see.

      She lowered her window as the Landcruiser’s owner gave her car a skeptical frown. “You look like you belong on the streets of Beverly Hills,” he said. “I bet you’ve never driven in snow.”

      “Listen, I come from New York. You’ve never seen snow until you’ve spent a winter back East.” She didn’t add that she hadn’t owned a car for most of the ten years she’d lived in the Big Apple. Taxis, public transit or, more often, limousines had always carried her where she’d wanted to go, but she wasn’t about to volunteer that information. He didn’t need to know how precisely his accusation had hit its target.

      “Excuse me,” she said to get him to step back. “I want to see the damage.” She buttoned up her coat and scrambled out of the car, wincing as her white tennis shoes sank deep in the cold slush. Her vision swam for a moment, but she kept one hand on the door for support and soon the world righted itself.

      Like most people, the Landcruiser’s owner did a double take when he saw her at her full height. His gaze started at where the snow buried her feet, then climbed her thin frame until it met the withering glare she reserved for gawkers.

      She raised a hand before he could make any comment. “I know, I hear it all the time. I’m almost six feet, so you don’t have to ask.” She gave him a glacial smile to cover the way her body shook with reaction to the blizzard and the accident. “That doesn’t make me a freak, but it does intimidate some men.”

      He grunted. “Short men, maybe.”

      Chantel had to admit he didn’t look like a man who could be easily intimidated. Similar to her in age, he had shoulders twice the width of her own and was taller by at least four inches. But she’d always hated her height, even when she stood next to bigger people. She’d grown up to taunts of “Daddy Long Legs” and “Miller High Life” and couldn’t see herself as anything but gangly and awkward, despite a successful modeling career.

      She shut her door and leaned into the wind, fighting the weakness of her legs as she trudged over to check out the damage. “Ouch,” she said, sheltering her face from the snow so she could view the Jag’s crumpled front bumper and broken headlight. The Landcruiser sported a smashed right rear panel. “Well, my car certainly got the worst of it, don’t you think?”

      He cocked an eyebrow at her, but didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to; she could guess what he was thinking.

      “It was your fault, too,” she said, irritated by his smug attitude, which reminded her too much of Wade, even though this stranger looked nothing like her ex-boyfriend. “You slammed on your brakes for no apparent reason.”

      He gave an incredulous laugh. “The car in front of me stopped. What did you want me to do? Drive off the cliff?”

      Is it too late to consider that option? Chantel bit her tongue, knowing her hostility was spurred by the memory of Wade and not this stranger. Not really.

      Glancing at her car’s smashed front end a final time, she hurried back into the driver’s seat. The accident had caused some expensive damage, but it was still pretty much a fender bender. She wanted to swap information and be on her way, or Stacy would think she wasn’t coming.

      She hoped this guy wouldn’t insist on waiting for the Highway Patrol.

      “Why don’t you grab your driver’s license and insurance card and come get in my truck?” he called after her. “It’ll be drier and warmer than trying to do it out here.”

      Never get in a car with a stranger, her father’s voice admonished.

      Especially such a powerful-looking stranger, Chantel added on her own.

      “I’ll just write it all down and bring it to you. You’re not planning to wait for the police to arrive, are you? There’s really no need. In a collision like this, the rear ender’s always on the hook.”

      He smiled, transforming his expression from a Terminator-style intensity to the guilelessness of an All-American boy. “There’s a good reason for that, you know.”

      “Okay, so I might have been following a little closely, but in a storm like this, calling the cops could hold us up for hours. Can’t you just file a report in the morning or something?”

      “No problem. I want to get out of here, too.”

      “Great.” She gave him a relieved smile—a semblance of the smile that had made her a living for the past ten years—and hurried back to her car. After scribbling down her policy number, insurance agent’s name and phone number, license-plate number and driver’s license number, she walked toward his truck.

      He rolled down his window and glanced at the slip of paper she handed to him. “What about your name and telephone number?”

      “My agent will handle everything.”

      “No way. You’re not leaving here until I have your name, your number and your address. Just in case.”

      Chantel fought the wind that kept blowing her long blond hair across her face. “In case of what?”

      “In case I need to contact you.”

      “I don’t think my husband would like me giving out that information,” she hedged, blinking the snow out of her eyelashes.

      He scowled. “I’m sorry, but you just rear-ended my truck. I want to know I can get hold of you. And I don’t care whether your husband likes it or not.”

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