It's Only Fake 'Til Midnight & Trapped with Temptation by Katherine Garbera

Author:Katherine Garbera
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2023-03-27T19:56:58+00:00

Two

Shelby Llewelyn squinted at the wall of howling whiteness as miniature ice chips pecked her eyes and cheeks.

Somewhere behind her, the SUV sat idle, the rear tire on the driver’s side sunk in the ditch beside the disappearing road.

She’d done everything right.

Everything that everyone, especially her father and brother, had explained about driving on snowy roads when they’d tried to talk her out of this trip.

Don’t panic. Don’t stomp on your brakes. Turn into the slide.

She’d breathed. She’d tapped. She’d turned.

And slid into the ditch, anyway.

Where she’d remained calmly stationary, as also instructed.

Until.

Until the battery in her phone—perpetually used until she wrung every minute out of four percent—died.

Before it had, her one last glance at the charge-guzzling map revealed she was a quarter mile away from Bastien Renaud’s twenty-acre property.

That his actual home would be so deeply buried within, she hadn’t counted on. Got Wood’s store manager may have all but spelled out the land’s location in her zeal for gossip, but Shelby had begun to suspect she’d had never actually set foot in Bastien’s home.

Had Shelby known, she wouldn’t have chugged what remained of her coffee before stashing the essentials on her person and body-slamming her door open. She buried her face in the borrowed scarf and breathed the intoxicating scent of Bastien Renaud into her lungs.

At two minutes into her walk, the numbness became annoying.

At five, slightly vexing. At ten, rage-inducing.

At seventeen, a large, dark shape bloomed out of the ether, making sounds that Shelby eventually recognized as words.

“What?” she shouted. Or thought she shouted. Her lips and tongue seemed to be moving slowly and only with great effort.

The road disappeared from beneath her boots as something collided with her. She stared up and saw the white dome of the sky and thought for a minute she might have fallen down a snowbank.

Except the snowbank was moving.

And swearing.

Shifting her glazed eyes, she caught the underside of a jaw and a nose and a mouth that chugged steam in time with the foulest combination of words she’d ever almost heard.

Her weight shifted abruptly, and she was hoisted upward into a completely different universe. This one was warm, and bright, and filled with a scent that reminded her of clean laundry.

Then she heard a loud bang followed by muffled panting in ears still ringing and stinging from the bitter cold.

As a dedicated student of art history, she felt uniquely qualified in her assessment that Sebastien Renaud was not a man who could be reduced to the two-dimensional realm. He had to be experienced. The hulking form. The piercing eyes. The brute strength. All of which she’d had the advantage of observing when she’d nearly wiped out trying to chase him down the sidewalk. Her humiliation burned anew at the memory of him effortlessly hauling her up one-handed. Zipping her into her coat. Wrapping her in his scarf. Gazing down into her eyes with a potent mix of protective fury and smoldering—

“What the hell were you thinking?”

Yes, she thought. That, exactly.

Preempting seemed like the thing to do here.

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