Travis and Arden stumbled into the house, pushing the door closed behind them and falling to the floor on hands and knees. They sat with their backs to opposite walls, facing each other.
"Told you," Travis said.
Arden flipped him off.
CHAPTER TWO
Travis and Arden leaned against opposite walls, both breathing heavily. "That was some pretty fancy driving," Travis said. "You should run in the demolition derby over in Rogersville."
"Fuck you!" she said, with less force than she probably wanted being as she was exhausted.
Travis raised his brows in surprise. "Nice language, Princess."
"Listen, asshole, you couldn't have gotten us any farther than I did, so why don't you just back off." She sat up straighter and reached for her feet, wincing as she slid first one shoe off and then the other.
It was dark in the house, so Travis flipped on his cell phone. It was hard to tell in the bluish light, but her feet appeared to be uninjured. He leaned forward to look at them.
"They hurt really bad," she said.
He refrained from commenting on her shoes because she couldn't have known she would have been hiking in them. But still, why did women do that to themselves?
"It's like this dull throb that keeps getting worse and worse."
He looked up at her, annoyed. All this fussing over cold feet.
She met his gaze. "I saw this survival show and this guy was walking through some frozen tundra and he got frost-bite on his feet and his toes, like, fell off." Her look of desperation was so amusing, Travis had to stop himself from grinning.
He reached for one of her feet, but she jerked it back. "What are you doing?" she asked.
"Trying to shut you up." He snatched the foot back and wrapped his hands around it, completely covering it. He held it for a long time, gently massaging with his thumbs until most of the chill had left. Then he took the other foot and did the same with it. Arden leaned her head back on the wall and closed her eyes.
"That feels so good," she said. And he imagined doing this to her in bed, expanding that look of pleasure on her face, hearing her moan with desire and beg him for more. Before he realized it, he had moved from massaging her foot to stroking her calf and she hadn't stopped him. Maybe this night would turn out better than he'd originally thought.
Still, he didn't want to overplay his hand. So he slid back down to her foot and then set it back down gently. He took off his coat and laid it over her legs. "Wait here," he said. He used the light of his cell phone to explore the house. If he was going to rescue this princess and collect his reward, he needed to make her comfortable, fast. He stumbled into the living room. All the furniture was still there, but it was covered with plastic. There was a fireplace. Perfect.
He found another door leading off into the kitchen and out to the back porch. He followed this and loaded his arms with some firewood that was piled out back. He made his way back to the living room, dropping the logs on the floor. He knelt to place them in the fireplace. Arden walked in, then, hugging his coat to her. Travis glanced up at her and then back to the fireplace. He found a stack of old newspapers and rolled one up. Fortunately he had his lighter with him and soon he had a good blaze going.
Arden sat down in front of it, and rubbed her arms. Travis sat close to her. Now would be a good time for some sort of line about body heat being the best way to keep warm. But he couldn't bring himself to stoop quite that low. He should wait for her to move. She was engaged, after all. He didn't want to be a total sleaze about it.
Of course he also wanted to get laid and she didn't seem to be paying him any more attention now that he'd warmed her up. "How are your feet, now?" he asked.
"Better," she said. Then she turned to him. "We'll be able to go home, tomorrow, right?"
Travis sighed inwardly. He berated himself for temporarily forgetting that she was ice on the inside. "I don't know. It's snowing harder than ever."
She looked thoroughly disappointed.
"Don't worry. I will do my utmost to see to it you don't have to spend any longer than necessary in my company."
"Good," she said, staring into the fire.
He shook his head and then stood, headed for the stairs in the foyer. Arden jumped up. "Where are you going? You can't leave me here alone!" she shrieked.
Travis's eyes went wide. "What the..."
"If you leave, I'll die. I don't know how to start a fire. I don't have big boots to hike home in. They'll find me here weeks later curled up by this fireplace dead." She looked terrified.
Travis tried not to laugh. "I was just going upstairs to find some blankets and pillows."
Suddenly Arden's eyes narrowed and she drew herself up taller. "I am not sleeping with you, you presumptuous bastard."
"Obviously. I gave up on that dream thirty seconds ago. Will you stop acting insane please?"
"Insane? I'm trapped in an abandoned house with some strange man..."
"That's just it, Arden. I'm not a strange man. You and me have lived in this tiny hick town all our lives. We go to the same church, for Christ's sake. We're even friends with some of the same people...although certainly not at the same time. All I'm saying is, drop the kidnapped princess act and let's be like normal people for tonight. Okay?"
Arden's face was red and hate beamed from her eyes. Travis felt kind of afraid. But then her expression changed and she seemed to back down. "You're right," she said. "I'm sorry. I'll try to behave more graciously."
Travis stood stunned.
Arden seemed to pick up on his doubt. "I'm serious. I know you're right and I'm sorry. It's just, I don't socialize outside my tiny circle of friends very often and I'm clearly not good at it. I'll try to keep quiet. Okay?"
Travis swallowed and glanced away. "You don't have to be quiet. Just...stop being mean."
Arden smiled warmly and nodded.
"So...is sleeping with me back on the table now?"
She grew wary and lifted her chin. "No, Mr. Lanier. It was never on the table."
Travis drew himself up tall in mock indignation. "Well, Miss Butler, I think you'll change your mind." Then he gave her a grin and a wink and went upstairs to find blankets and pillows to sleep on.
CHAPTER THREE
They woke up that first morning starving. They rummaged in the kitchen cabinets and found lots of little, moldy balls of stuff. But they also found some canned foods and sealed up pantry items. They sat across from each other on the floor checking expiration dates and sorting out anything that looked or smelled spoiled.
“Wish I’d gotten stranded with Shannon Murphy,” Travis muttered. “She could probably whip up five kinds of pie out of this.”
Arden glared at him. “Well I wish I’d gotten stranded with Russ Murphy. Because he would have killed a rabbit or something by now and made us a stew.”
Travis seemed unperturbed. He continued to study the mish-mash of would-be ingredients.
"I think we can rig up some pancakes," Travis said, gesturing to a group of ingredients that included flour, creamed corn and baking powder.
"Don't you have to have eggs or something?" Arden asked.
"I don't know. If I eat breakfast I eat at the diner. Or Sweet Nothings whenever Dustin drags me there."
"So you can't cook?" Arden sat back on her heels and rubbed her upper arms.
Travis glanced up at her. "Nope. I was kind of hoping you could."
"Me?" Arden asked. "The princess? I have people who do that sort of thing for me."
Travis gave her a wry smile. "We'll figure it out together," he said.
They found a cast iron griddle and put it on the coals in the fireplace. Then they mixed their ingredients in a bowl they'd found until they wound up with a thick mess of something resembling batter. It stuck to the griddle and they burned the first batch, but they started figuring it out after that and by the third try wound up with some fairly edible corn cakes.
They ate with their fingers on the living room floor in front of the warm fireplace. Travis was thoroughly happy for the moment. Of course, he was a live-in-the-moment kind of guy. And this moment felt warm and communal and peaceful.
"What kind of pie is your favorite?" Arden asked him without looking up.
Travis frowned in thought. "Apple, I guess. But only if Rita Hendricks makes it. She may look like a hardened career woman, but she’s got a serious Martha Stewart streak in her."
“Apple pie,” Arden shrugged. “That’s very all-american of you.”
“‘Course Mrs. Tomlin...do you know her?”
Arden nodded.
“She makes a mean peach cobbler. So that might be my favorite.”
Arden was suppressing a grin, now. “You sure?”
He thought for a moment. “You know, little Amy Simmons made a blueberry pie for her 4-H cooking project last year. It had this layer of cream cheese stuff on the bottom. That was pretty damn good.”
“Little Amy gave you a pie?”
“Well, yeah.” He shrugged.
“She’s eleven.” She was grinning and maybe trying not to laugh.
“Well she can bake as good as the grandmas around here.”
Arden shook her head. She took a monstrous, very unladylike bite of her corn cake.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing. It’s just cute, that’s all.”
He grinned, then. “So what’s your favorite pie.”
"I like coconut cream," she said, with her mouth full. "But I don't know how to make it."
"You don't know how to make pie?"
She shrugged. "I don't know how to make anything. Do you?"
Travis shook his head. "I manage to find food to eat. But I'm not sure how."
"We should take a class. They have classes in the city."
"Or you could just watch YouTube videos for free."
Arden nodded. "That's a great idea. I'm going to find one on how to make pie."
"I wonder if there's any instruction on survival cooking." Travis licked the cake crumbs from his fingers and then leaned back on his hands. Arden did the same.
"I think we've got that down pat." They leaned forward and high-fived each other.
Boredom and full bellies led them back to their pallets where they dozed off.
CHAPTER FOUR
Arden woke up later that morning. She was facing Travis's pallet, but he wasn't there. She glanced up at the couch. He had pulled off the plastic cover and was lounging with his feet up and reading a romance novel.
"What are you reading?" she asked.
He turned the book and showed her the cover. A full-bosomed woman was clinging to a bare-chested man. Travis waggled his eyebrows at her. "Pretty hot stuff. June has boxes of them down in the basement." He nodded toward the door that led into the kitchen. There were two boxes sitting next to it.
"You're reading romance novels? Is this something you do often?" She took note of the fact that he was already nearly halfway through it.
"Not often. Just whenever I'm snowed in at a place where there aren't any car magazines or thriller novels...and with a chick who won't sleep with me."
Arden rolled her eyes. It had taken her a while to realize that he was hitting on her strictly because of gender and geography--she was the closest female. Once she'd figured that out, she'd managed to relax. It would be easy for her to resist a man who had no feelings for her other than a general lust for the female half of the population. Arden had never been interested in casual sex. Of course, if she had, Travis was exactly the kind of man she would have picked. And there was nothing wrong with admiring the physical beauty of another person so long as you didn't indulge in inappropriate fantasies.
"You know," Travis said, his eyes still moving back and forth over the page. "I think I'm actually going to check out some more modern romance novels. They're written by women, after all. I could probably pick up some good tips."
Arden gasped. "That's shameful, Travis."
"Is not." He looked genuinely offended. "Next time I hook up with Kristen I'm going to try page fifty-six." He tossed her the book. She caught it. "I think she'd like page fifty-six."
Arden found the page and read the scene. She felt her face turning red. Her mouth hung open. "This is completely ridiculous. Not realistic at all. No man would ever do that for a woman."
Travis chuckled. He slid down to the floor, sitting with his back against the couch and reaching for his book. She kept it, though, as she was scanning for more evidence of purely fantastical sex scenes. "It sounds to me like you might benefit from reading this with the fiancé."
"I would never," Arden said.
Travis shrugged. "You kids are young. You'll figure it all out. Might be nice to jump start things, though."
"Nick and I are just fine..."
"Or maybe he's just a selfish bastard."
"How dare you!" Really. It was none of his business and she couldn't believe she was having a conversation like this with a complete stranger and a man, no less. She also knew that talking about sex often led to having it. Perhaps that was his plan all along, the conniving bastard.
Travis reached forward and snatched his book back. He leaned against the couch and went back to reading.
Arden pulled her knees up to her chest and rested her chin on her knees. She looked around the room. "There's a pretty hot scene on page 129," she said.
He didn't comment but skipped forward to the suggested page. She glanced up at him occasionally while he read. The corners of his lips quirked up and he slowly lifted one brow. "Nice," he said, finally. Then he looked up at her, those cool blue eyes burning hotter than hell. She looked away.