Alone With You (Cabin Fever Series Book 1) Read online

  “I’m not pulling one over on you, Logan, I swear.” John’s voice leveled. “I know it’s no time for pranks.”

  Logan squeezed his eyes shut. He knew by John’s tone that his friend was telling the truth. He was on a knife’s edge these days and all he wanted was to be left alone.

  “It would have been a great prank,” Logan conceded, tracking the movement of the female pacing in the room. “I can tell you, it sure knocked me off my feet.”

  “Yeah,” John said, relief in his voice. “And you’d be the luckiest man on earth if I set you up with Dr. Vance because she’s brilliant and unattached – hey. Wait a minute.” John’s breath caught. “What did you say before about finding a woman in the shower?”

  “You heard me right, boy-o.”

  “Naked? You saw Dr. Vance naked?!”

  “Mmmhmm,” he mumbled, as the image seared a little deeper into his brain.

  “Holy cow. I know some guys who’d give up their grants to glimpse the Ice Queen without her lab coat, never mind….”

  Ice Queen? Logan raised his lashes to watch the lady in question shove her hands into the folds of her pants.

  “So?” John said. “Got anything to tell me? I mean—”

  “Absolutely not.” And John should know better than to ask for details. “She’s right here, maybe you’d like to ask her some questions yourself.”

  Logan held out his cell to a startled Dr. Vance. She took the phone without touching his fingers and turned away to grant him a view of a sweetly curved back. He let his gaze slip over the narrow shoulders to the slender waist, to the curves hidden under the folds of her pants, working more on memory than his sight to recreate the vision he’d glimpsed for just a single blessed moment in that bedroom.

  She swiveled and caught him ogling. The temperature in the room dropped so fast that frost practically rimmed the windows.

  “Dr. Springfield – John,” she corrected, somewhat reluctantly. “Please don’t apologize. It’s just a mix-up.”

  John gushed more apologies through the tinny speaker, and Logan grudgingly accepted that John’s remorse must be genuine. Even if John had set him up, it would have come from a place of good intentions. Jennifer Vance would have been a hell of a distraction from his troubles, for at least a little while, if she’d been interested in some hot, no-commitment sex. By the chill in the room, clearly she wasn’t. It was just as well that every tailored inch of her looked the part of the composed intellectual. Judging by the sudden technicality of the conversation between her and John, she was.

  “No, John, I insist.” Her voice changed as her gaze to flit to Logan. “We are two rational adults, we’ll work something out.”

  Logan dropped onto the sofa and folded his hands behind his head. She didn’t like surprises. She looked like the kind of woman who willed the world around her to conform to her speed and her rules. He had his own rules he lived by these days. And they didn’t include smooth-skinned women who bathed their hair with—he breathed the fragrance a little deeper—strawberry shampoo.

  “Here.”

  Her eyes were the color of iced tea with a healthy slice of lemon.

  “John wants to talk to you again,” she said, as her pearls swayed against her throat.

  He took the phone. “Well, buddy?”

  “She says you two can work something out.” John said. “Are you good with that?”

  No. But he knew John had enough on his plate dealing with a wife still in childbed and a preemie newborn in the NICU. “No worries, John. We’ll figure it out.”

  “I owe you one. Listen, I think I just saw the pediatrician cross into Judy’s room. I’ve got to go.”

  “Send Judy my love.”

  He hung up the phone, tossed it on the coffee table, and then eyed the problem before him. He’d lied to John. This wasn’t going to be easy. John had offered this place to him for an indeterminate time, because Logan didn’t have an apartment to go home to, and he needed a place to land. He sure as hell wasn’t going back to Montana.

  “Seems you were right,” he said, as he stood up from the couch. “You do have permission to shower in the bedroom.”

  “Seems you were right, too,” she countered, putting a recliner between them and digging her nails into the leather back. “You didn’t have to knock before barging into the cabin. Or into the bedroom.”

  The air thickened with her unspoken demand for an apology. Considering the vision he’d been a witness to, he wasn’t sorry at all.

  He chose silence over lying.

  “It seems,” she continued in a voice so cool it should form a visible mist, “we have a situation here, Macallister.”

  “Logan. Just call me Logan.” He narrowed his eyes, seized with the urge to knock some of the frost off her. “And what should I call you, Dr. Vance? Jennifer? Or just Jenny?”

  “Jenny?”

  “We may as well be informal,” he said, “seeing as we’re going to be roommates.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Jenny? He was going to call her Jenny? The last person to call her that was her grandmother, back when Jenny was fourteen-years-old. On his lips, it sounded like a call out to the restless tomboy of the girl inside her.

  “Students call me Professor Vance.” She pushed the words through the stretch of her throat. “My closest colleagues call me Jennifer. If either of those names is too much of a mouthful for you, Jen would be fine.”

  “No, it’s definitely Jenny for you.” He gave her a wolf’s grin. “I think it fits you fine.”

  Her pulse jumped as if pulled by a string. What the hell had the kid in the coffee shop slip into her brew that morning? “The point is moot, Macallister. Since we won’t be sharing this cabin.”

  “John would have my head on a platter if I shipped you off to a hotel.”

  “That’s not an option. A hotel won’t have a laboratory with a hood and gas lines. Dr. Springfield converted the basement of this building into a mini-lab with all the necessary equipment and safety specifications—”

  “So?”

  “I’m here to work. My work requires a lab.” According to John, this guy was here just to crash, just to take care of the place. Hewing logs and pounding nails, if those muscle-honed arms were any indication “I’ll be doing distillations and wet extractions. I need a hood, the proper equipment. They won’t have those amenities at the local Bed & Breakfast.”

  Crossing those arms, he scrutinized her, his shadowed gaze stripping right through the linen and silk for the umpteenth time since she entered the room, heating the surface of her bare skin in a way that baffled scientific explanation.

  He said, “You’re angry.”

  Great catch, Sherlock. “Anger will not solve this problem.”

  “But you won’t be satisfied unless I clear out.”

  Satisfaction was a strange word. It reminded her that the sheets on the bed were still rumpled.

  “I work best in solitude.” Like at three in the morning when all the graduate students had abandoned the lab, leaving her alone with her beakers and her thoughts.

  “I’m not surprised. So do I.”

  “Look, Macallister.” How would she work with a brawny cowboy with sleep-mussed hair hovering around, disrupting her concentration? “I have nothing against you personally. I don’t know you.”

  “I know why you want me to disappear.” His gaze flickered toward the hallway. “I wasn’t exactly the welcoming committee in the bedroom.”

  “Let’s just take things from here and now, shall we?”

  “Didn’t mean that to happen, by the way.” He rubbed his stubbly chin. “I’m not sorry that it did.”

  Her spine aligned like a row of tin soldiers. Was he trying to unnerve her intentionally? She’d spent her whole professional life cultivating coolness under pressure. She’d be damned if she let this prowl of a man think he could unsettle her by reminding her of a single moment of nudity.

  Hell, she looked pretty good without her clothes o
n.

  “We’re both adults.” she said, raising her chin. “But only one of us is acting like one.”

  With a sigh, he dipped his head and came toward her. She would have sensed his approach even if blind. Logan emanated an intensity that appeared inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, like microwave radiation. That freethinking graduate student of hers—Maritza—would interpret this close-proximity sensation as a red-wave aura. Maybe that’s why Jen couldn’t stop the urge to lean back, away from danger.

  “I’m not going to lie to you.” Logan dipped his voice and leaned a hip on the back of the couch. “This isn’t going to be easy. I’m used to my own company. Don’t have much patience for visitors.”

  “I wouldn’t have guessed.”

  She tried to straighten an inch taller. She was used to being eye-level with most men. It helped, in her testosterone-driven world, to be born a long-legged woman. But with this guy, she had to arch her neck to hold his gaze. His eyes were a pale green, and full of strange, shifting shadows.

  “I figure,” he continued, crossing those arms until they bulged, “that the house has two bedrooms and two baths. Enough space to share for a couple of weeks without invading each other’s space too much. I’ll stay out of your way. And you can stay out of mine. Sound like a deal?”

  How was she supposed to avoid him in this tiny, two-bedroom cabin? Right now he looked as immovable as a mountain.

  “Provisionally,” she said, her throat tightening. “We could give cohabitation a try.”

  “Good.” He pushed off the edge of the couch and strode toward the kitchen, back muscles flexing.

  She said after him, “I suppose you’ll want the master bedroom, too?”

  “It’s yours. Too many ruffles.” He spoke over his shoulder as he paused in the portal. “And I won’t enter that room again, Red, without remembering you floating out of the bathroom.”

  ***

  A half-hour later, Jenny shouldered open the kitchen door, bracing the first box of equipment in her arms. At the other end of the kitchen, an open door revealed a set of stairs leading into the basement laboratory. She heard Logan rustling around below, long before she reached the bottom stair.

  “I’ll be out of your way in a minute.” A box lay open on the long center island. “I’m almost done.”

  She stilled with her gear in her arms, eyeing the lab. She saw a clutter of trays near the island sink. Brown bottles of Kodak chemicals stood on a shelf against the wall. A rope strung across a pair of pipes held a row of photographic prints she could only see from behind.

  “You’re a photographer, Mr. Macallister?”

  “Logan.” He snatched a print and added it, face-down, to a pile. “It’s a hobby.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were using the lab?” She was usurping his space more than he’d let on. “I’ll be out in the field for a couple of days and there’s no reason you can’t use this space while—”

  “If I need a darkroom, I’ll rig up the second bathroom.” He laid the prints into the box and flipped the flaps closed. “You get your work done.”

  And move on.

  The words were unspoken but as clear as a bell. Logan veered around her and dipped his head to avoid the overhang as he headed up the stairs. Suppressing a sigh, she set her gear down on the now-empty table and sank down on a barstool whose padding had seen better days. Well, Jen, you bumbled it again. Over the past few years, she’d managed to earn a Ph.D., publish dozens of papers, and be nominated for tenure at a state university. But, in the immortal words of her sixth grade teacher, she still hadn’t figured out how to play well with others.

  Drop-dead sexy men were a particular weakness. Logan had left the room but the scent of him lingered, the perfume of cut wood and shaved pencils. Breathing it in kicked up old instincts and lurched a wave of heat through her. She closed her eyes and experienced the warmth with a measure of scientific detachment as it suffused every cell of her body…and then ebbed away into hollow disappointment.

  Yeah, she’d been working too hard. Correcting too many papers, administering too many finals, shepherding too many students through the last of their laboratory projects. Exhaustion nibbled at her, making her easy to unsettle. It had been a while since any man had seen under her clothes…or slipped under her skin. But, after her ex, she wouldn’t let anyone have that kind of power over her again.

  She pushed up from the stool and slapped the dust off her hands. No use wasting time thinking about Logan Macallister. She took the stairs two at a time, barreled through the empty kitchen, and headed for her car to retrieve another box. When she returned, she thought she heard the buzz of some electric tool coming from the back yard. A quick glance through the basement window revealed a roomy shed some distance apart from the cabin. A splatter of what appeared to be sawdust flew out of the open door. He was hewing logs for the winter, no doubt. She forcefully pushed the image of Logan shirtless with a chain saw out of her mind, opened the first box, and plunged into the task of setting up her temporary lab. She had no sooner scraped a digital scale on the table when she noticed the tracks it left through the grime on the surface. She’d better clean first. She was elbow-deep in a sink full of suds when the basement door scraped open sometime later, flooding the basement with light.

  Macallister pounded down the stairs, stopping mid-flight to grip the sloping ceiling, showing off the flex of his arms.

  “Whoa,” he said, looking around.

  She swiped her brow and followed Macallister’s gaze to the room. The counters and island gleamed, the machines sat neatly in a row, and rinsed glassware sparkled on crisp paper towels.

  She said, “I like a clean workplace.”

  “No kidding.” He dropped his arms to his hips. “You planning to eat sometime today?”

  “Eventually.” She turned back to a sink full of suds, away from that strange pulsing aura of his. “I’ll manage something later.”

  “Something more substantial than M&Ms?”

  She glanced at the bag of candy she’d opened a while ago, now spilled in a colorful pool on the island. “I’ll eat real food later.”

  “It already is later, Red. Past eight o’clock.”

  Jenny glanced toward the single basement window. Rays of dusky gray light poured through the outside grime. She must have been working for hours.

  “I’ll order in,” she said. “Know a good pizza place?”

  Logan rumbled a laugh that dragged her attention back to him. Bits of chaff clung to the thighs of his jeans. Dirt streaked his once-white T-shirt. His hair looked like he’d spent the afternoon tracking his fingers through it.

  “City girl.” He gestured to the woods that could be seen at the edge of the yard. “You’re in the wilds now, Jenny. There isn’t a pizza joint or a Chinese take-out within twenty miles.”

  “Oh.”

  “All the grocery stores are closed, too, though you could probably get some Twinkies from the gas station ten miles away.”

  “Is there a point to this conversation, Macallister?”

  “I’m cooking up rice and beef.” He planted his elbows on the banister. “Should be ready in ten minutes.”

  A deliciously spicy odor floated down the stairs and coaxed a growl from her stomach. “Is that an invitation to dinner?”

  “Yeah.”

  That was it. No explanation, no conditions, no flirtation, no compromise. “So much for staying out of each other’s way.”

  “Don’t get excited, Red. I’m not asking you on a date.”

  The words pinched. What the hell? It wasn’t like she wanted to go on a date.

  “Look.” He pushed up from the banister. “We’ve got some things to talk about. House rules. And you’ve got to eat. I’ve made enough dinner for two. Are you coming?”

  She was hungry—really, she was starved. If she didn’t eat now, she’d be famished later, and would have to ask him if she could eat what was in the fridge or try to sati
sfy herself with the granola bar going stale at the bottom of her purse.

  “Thank you.” She snapped off a cleaning glove. “I’ll be right up.”

  A few minutes later, she ascended the stairs to the sound of meat sizzling. Steam hissed into the air under the hood of the stove, billowing around Logan, who was planted in front of a cast iron pan, wielding a wooden spoon, his jeans sagging low on his hips.

  “Sit down,” he said, without turning. “This is ready to go.”

  She’d expected paper plates, plastic utensils, and greasy paper napkins. Certainly not the tender strips of sirloin and crispy vegetables he spooned directly from the frying pan onto the bed of white rice molded upon mismatched plates. Hunger yawned. She hadn’t eaten anything all day save a cup of coffee, a Danish, and the peanut M&Ms she’d left downstairs. Choosing a fork over chopsticks for expediency’s sake, she speared a piece of the sirloin and let the spiciness explode in her mouth.

  “Oh my God,” she said around a mouthful, “this is amazing.”

  “Glad you like it.”

  He swung a leg over the back of a chair and sat. The table was small, the distance between them made smaller as he leaned over his food. She plastered her spine against the back of the chair away from that red-wave aura, a forkful halfway to her mouth.

  “This is the way I see it,” he said, stirring the beef into the rice with a pair of chopsticks. “Breakfast and lunch, we’re on our own. On weekdays, we can cook dinner on alternate nights. Forget about the weekends. I might not be around.”

  I might not be around. She blinked at the idea that Logan might have a girlfriend. Of course he had a girlfriend, one who loved his rough and unshaven look, one who feathered her fingers through the long, dark hair curling at his neck. She heard the splatter of something drop, and realized it was a piece of meat falling off her fork.

  “It makes more sense to share dinner,” he continued. “Otherwise we’d have to buy separate food and divide up the refrigerator.” He eyed her half-empty plate. “You’re no vegetarian.”