Snowbound with the Prince, page 1
Erin was aware of feeling free. It felt liberating, and exhilaratingly so, to just look at a man and appreciate him. It felt good to not be taken, spoken for, committed.
Snow blew in, right up under the porch. When she stepped back, Valentino had not moved but was studying the interior of the cabin. The look on his face was extraordinary. It was as if he was lit from within. Her eyes moved to the puffiness of that lower lip again.
Then he threw back his head and laughed. “Encantado,” he declared softly, his accent unconsciously seductive. And then his eyes came to rest on her. He had spoken in Spanish, so he translated. “I’m enchanted.”
She felt as if her breath stopped.
Was he referring to her? To her gazing at his lips? She was shocked to feel something primitive and powerful stir within her. After all, she knew nothing about this man who was looking so intently at her with a gaze that set fire in her blood. Wanting.
Wanting what? Erin asked herself primly. She just wasn’t the kind of girl who went around lusting after strangers on the ski hill.
She sighed inwardly. The universe had not only provided her with a Valentino for Valentine’s Day, but one that was going to challenge everything she believed about herself.
Dear Reader,
This morning I came across a story I must have written very shortly after learning to print. It was called Mary May and the Goldfish, and it reminded me I’ve really never been “in” the world.
Looking back, I was probably the weird one. While everyone else walked to school, I rode the prancing horses of a fertile imagination. I didn’t play in the backyard; I was a tightrope walker at the circus. I always had a story on the go, and I was always more immersed in that than in what was really going on around me.
To this day, I absolutely love the world of my imagination. All these years later, I can’t believe my luck that I get to share that world—imaginary kingdoms, a handsome prince, an ordinary girl finding magic—with you.
Thank you for allowing me to have a life beyond anything I could have ever imagined for myself.
With heartfelt gratitude to each of you,
Cara Colter
Snowbound with the Prince
Cara Colter
Cara Colter shares her life in beautiful British Columbia, Canada, with her husband, nine horses and one small Pomeranian with a large attitude. She loves to hear from readers, and you can learn more about her and contact her through Facebook.
Books by Cara Colter
Harlequin Romance
A Fairytale Summer!
Cinderella’s New York Fling
Cinderellas in the Palace
His Convenient Royal Bride
One Night with Her Brooding Bodyguard
A Crown by Christmas
Cinderella’s Prince Under the Mistletoe
Matchmaker and the Manhattan Millionaire
His Cinderella Next Door
The Wedding Planner’s Christmas Wish
Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.
To all those kindred spirits who have found sanctuary and salvation through imagination.
Praise for
Cara Colter
“Ms. Colter’s writing style is one you will want to continue to read. Her descriptions place you there.... This story does have a HEA but leaves you wanting more.”
—Harlequin Junkie on His Convenient Royal Bride
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Thee
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Epilogue
Excerpt from The Secret Casseveti Baby by Nina Milne
CHAPTER ONE
VALENTINE’S DAY TOMORROW.
Was there a worse day to be single? Particularly newly single? Somehow, Erin O’Rourke had thought Valentine’s Day, this year, was going to be extra special.
After the disappointment of no ring at Christmas, she thought Paul had decided on the much more romantic Valentine’s Day to spring the question.
Erin had pictured wine. Roses. And maybe, just maybe, a ring, small diamonds sparkling, tucked into the red velvet petals of one of those roses.
But she couldn’t have been more wrong. How could she have missed all the signals? How could she have interpreted a situation so incorrectly?
Two weeks ago, Paul had announced, It just isn’t working.
Erin had been stunned. It wasn’t?
While she was indulging a fantasy of commitment—wedded bliss; a little house; someday soon, a baby—her boyfriend of two years, Paul, had been moving in the opposite direction. How to get out of it. How to escape the traditional values—the ones she had adored—of the family he had been raised in.
So, instead of celebrating her new engagement, here Erin was on the eve of Valentine’s Day. Free. Well, basically free. There was always, thank goodness, Harvey.
She patted the bulge of precious cargo at her tummy, pulled her toque down even lower over her brow and her ears, her hair all tucked beneath it.
She had just gotten off the Lonesome Lookout chairlift, the highest chair at Touch-the-Clouds ski resort. Her grandfather had started the Rocky Mountain resort more than fifty years ago.
The resort had come a long way from its humble beginnings. It had once had a single chairlift and a T-bar, a simple, cavernous lodge heated by a stove made from a salvaged oil barrel.
But Touch-the-Clouds had some of the best deep powder in the world and, over the years, it was a secret that had gotten out. It had grown in popularity, particularly with the rich and famous. Finally, it had grown beyond her grandfather’s capacity to keep up.
It now consisted of an entire village with bars and hotels, shops, restaurants and condos. It offered a dozen different chairlifts and hundreds of runs. While it was still the preferred ski retreat of the rich and famous, everything depended on snow. They’d had a bad few years.
And a bad review in Snow Lust magazine. The resort had been called “tired and overrated.”
Although it was owned by a big corporation now—as were most high-end ski resorts that wanted to be viable—Erin was employed in the accounting department, and she knew the resort had spent several years in the red. How long could they keep that up? She lived at an apartment provided for her in the ski village complex, and she still had exclusive use of her grandfather’s original cabin, Snow Daze, but for how long? The cabin was well off the beaten track, and the snowy trail to it could only be accessed from this chairlift.
She had decided that Snow Daze was where she would spend Valentine’s Day, taking the day off tucked away in the rustic cabin. She hoped the intense quiet of deep snow outside and the crackle of a fire inside, and a cat on her lap, would soothe something in her, as they always had.
That way, tomorrow, she would not be on the receiving end of sympathetic looks from her coworker, Kelly, as she acted surprised and gleeful over the delivery of flowers and a gooey card from her husband.
Erin had, so far, managed to keep her humiliating breakup to herself.
See? There was a good side to Paul never producing a ring. A suddenly naked ring finger was like sending out an announcement card.
However, so was nothing arriving for her at the office on February fourteenth. It would be the equivalent of posting a group email around the office, its message the opposite of a valentine. I’m a failure at love. It didn’t work. I’m single.
Erin regarded the mountain in the waning light of a cold winter day. She knew it as few people did, and the snow was now coming so thick and fast that she could no longer see the peaks of the mountains that surrounded this bowl.
She had caught the chair as the old attendant, Ricky, was turning everyone else away for the day.
“You’re cutting it close,” he’d warned her. “I sent the ski patrol up twenty minutes ago to sweep the mountain for stragglers. You’re only about thirty minutes from full dark. I don’t think you can make it all the way down in that time.”
“I’m not going all the way down. I’m heading to the cabin,” she’d said. “Lots of time for that.” She’d patted her front pocket. “I’ve got a satellite device. I’ll let the patrol know when I get there.”
He’d cast a look at the thickly falling flakes of snow. “Okay, but be careful.”
She had actually laughed. “Going to that cabin for me is as routine as an afternoon commute for most people.”
“I know,” he’d said. “I helped your grandpa build that place. I know you’re as at home here as anywhere else. But it’s still a mountain, and Mother Nature can still surprise you. That looks like one doozy of a storm building. I don’t think we could mount a rescue in it.”
“You won’t be rescuing me,” she had assured him.
His concern for her had been a comfort.
On the chair, she put a hand on the warmth radiating from her belly and said out loud, “This is our family. Touch-the-Clouds is our ho me.”
And that, Erin was determined, would be enough.
Now, at the top of the run, in absolute solitude, Erin pulled her hood up as extra protection from the heavily falling snow, and slid her goggles over her eyes. She used her poles to shove off and heard the wonderful hiss of her ski edges cutting into the new powder.
She crouched, picked up momentum and speed, and felt her heartaches blow away as she became fully immersed in the exhilaration of the moment.
Snow, wind, the skis beneath her. Since she was a child, those things had filled her heart with a euphoria that nothing else had ever replicated.
Including her love for Paul, she realized.
She had also been going to Snow Daze since she was a baby. Her memories of the cabin were of multigenerational family gatherings. She had grown up to ducking through strings of clothes drying by the fire, wet from sledding and building snowmen. Her memories were hot-chocolate scented, rambunctious card games won and lost around a beat-up wooden table, books devoured in a rump-sprung easy chair, waxing skis on the kitchen counter.
Still, realistically, hadn’t those moments been few and far between? Her father’s pro racing, and then his coaching career, had sent him all over the world. Her mother, exhausted from his inability to say no to anyone who was charmed by the combination of fame and extraordinarily good looks, had finally left him when Erin was eleven.
The remainder of her childhood had been spent between their two households, with their ever-changing international backdrops. And partners.
She had longed for the things other people’s families stood for and that they seemed to take for granted.
Stability. Connection. Loyalty. Love.
Those were the things she had hoped for when she’d started dating Paul... Erin shook it off. The entrance to the trail that led to the cabin was difficult to find at the best of times. Part of the healing power of the mountain was that it forced you to stay focused.
There was no room up here for daydreaming. There were consequences for errors. It would be too easy in these conditions, even for someone as familiar with the mountain as she was, to swoop by the trailhead and have to do the arduous, sidestepping climb to backtrack up to it in the growing dark and the thickening storm.
She skidded to a halt, loving the wave of snow that shot out from her skis, the familiar ache of muscles used hard. Between wind gusts, it was deeply silent. Even the rumbling hum of the chairlift was gone, shut off for the day.
Still, the snowfall, she realized, was developing a different quality, becoming shardlike. She squinted through ice-crusted goggles up the hill and then slid them onto her forehead. She caught a single glimpse of the sky. It was taking on the ominous purplish tint that said, to those who knew the mountain, a storm was coming.
A doozy of a storm, just as Ricky had predicted.
She might end up at the cabin for more than a day, but that suited her. The cabin was always well stocked, plus she had, in her backpack, a special Valentine’s feast for one. She could check in with the resort by her sat device to let them know her plans.
Paul, not much of a skier, had never been to the cabin, so there was nothing there to remind her of him.
Had she deliberately saved it? Thinking it would be the most delightful place in the world for a honeymoon? Thinking, if they had a summer wedding, they could hike into that secluded place, untouched by modern technologies, and have a few blissful days all to themselves?
No phones. No computers. No interruptions.
Paul and his phone: the constant checking, tapping away, shutting out the world, shutting out her...
Again, she shook off her sudden awareness of the insult of it. Instead, Erin looked toward the tree line. Barely visible was the tiny opening that marked a secret trail. Nailed above it was a small sign, faded, nearly covered with snow, that said Private. No Entrance. It was a largely unnecessary warning since only someone looking for this narrow gap in the wall of silent, snow-covered fir could find it.
She slid the goggles back down, tightened her hood, and pointed her skis toward the opening. She was just about to plant her poles when a voice stopped her. Was it a voice? Or just the storm announcing it was intensifying with the odd howling wind gust?
She had thought she was alone on the mountain. She turned and squinted up into the driving snow. She saw nothing.
But then she heard the voice, louder than before. Definitely not the wind.
“Alisha, wait.” The voice was deep and masculine.
Alisha? Did that mean there were two people still out on the slopes in the storm? She couldn’t see anyone, the snow was so thick. Erin noticed it was beginning to blow sideways rather than drift straight down.
Then the veil of snow lifted and she saw him, making his way down the mountain toward her. It was a steep section and the visibility had gone extraordinarily flat, but he was a good skier, very technical, and she could see a natural athleticism in the aggressive way he tackled the challenging slope and traversed the ground between them.
He swooshed to a stop in front of her, covering her in a cascading wave of snow as powdery as icing sugar. As she shook it off, she was irritated, not because he had covered her with snow, but because he was still on the mountain after it had been swept.
Still, her annoyance abated somewhat as she became aware of his sheer physical presence. The storm seemed to pause around them. The wind and snow stopped abruptly. Was it possible it was going to blow over? Not likely.
He was much taller than she was and for some reason she noted that, probably because for two years she had been trying to shrink, as if her being taller than him was some sort of slight to Paul.
The athleticism she had seen in the way this man navigated the hill was even more apparent at close range. His shoulders were broad under a very expensive ski jacket and he wore the tight, flexible pant of a ski racer. Those pants molded the large muscles of powerful thighs. He carried himself with such sheer confidence that the reprimand she wanted to give him—what the heck was he still doing on the mountain—died before she spoke it.
It felt as if he, not she, had been born to this mountain, as if he owned not just it, but all the earth.
His eyes were covered by mirrored goggles. Below those goggles, he had chosen to be unprotected from the conditions by not pulling his neck gaiter up over his face. Was there something vaguely familiar about him? Probably. She had likely seen him around the resort village. He was the kind of man you would notice—and then quickly not notice—if you had recently been devastated by a long-term relationship exploding in your face.
Or fizzling, as the case might be.
She had to ground herself. She could not let the lull in the storm distract her from the seriousness of his situation, or that of his still missing companion, Alisha.
But instead of feeling grounded, Erin felt compelled to look at him again. A renegade tingle went up and down her spine.
It was just the wild unpredictability of the winter weather, Erin assured herself. It was increasing the intensity of her awareness of everything, including the stranger who had come out of its understated prelude.
Coming storms did this, infused the air and the earth with a humming current, both powerful and mystic. The awareness she was feeling because of the storm was transferring to him, it wasn’t because of him.
If she thought about it, she was also aware of the feeling of each snowflake falling on her face, the deep, muffled quiet, the scent that always rode in with strong weather. Indefinable. Pure. Untamed.
“Alisha,” he said. “I thought I had lost you.”
Any illusion Erin had that the intensity of her awareness was caused by the mountain preparing to unleash its savagery around them evaporated.
His voice was like warm honey. It was deeply and deliciously exotic. He had the faintest accent that carried her far away from the storm, to sun-drenched places that smelled of spice and flowers.
She wished she was Alisha.
Slowly, with a sigh, she lifted her hand, flipped down her hood and then raised her goggles off her eyes.
CHAPTER TWO
