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Bound by the Italian's Contract(34)

By:Janette Kenny


                “Hold on. It gets rough for the next few kilometers,” he said after they’d been on the trail a good thirty minutes.

                Halfway point, she hoped. Yet this was an exhilarating slice of heaven she wouldn’t have wanted to miss. The vistas were incredible, dwarfing the Rockies with their beauty.

                Just as she was getting into her stride the heavy ATV busted over the uneven track with another, larger, bared slope rising to the summit. Clearly a small avalanche had scrubbed a narrow pathway, leaving gullies and massive boulders clinging to the face. The ATV bucked and sprayed gravel, sand and slush in a rooster’s fantail that covered their trail over this rugged patch. Then the route evened with thick trees on the slope and a swift running stream to their right.

                On the other side of the stream rose a smaller ledge of firs that flattened out into a dense stand of trees. It made the area they traveled more a wedge of safety than a valley, and by no means eliminated them from danger. In fact she couldn’t imagine this route being used at all during the winter months. Isolated? Chillingly so, she thought on a shiver.

                A mile or perhaps more up the winding rising track, the surface turned dangerously rocky. Luciano geared down and took it slower over the track, which rose unevenly. Instinctively she looked up the towering slope to the slab of deep snow suspended in above them, stretching across the face near the summit.

                “Has it been cool here?” she asked in a near shout.

                She felt him tense and peer up the slope as well. “It had been, but my groundsman alerted me to the sudden spike in temperatures yesterday and today, coupled with above-freezing numbers at the summit.”

                Her stomach clenched painfully, her heart kicking up pace. “Avalanche danger.”

                “It’s a possibility,” he said. “That is why I was hesitant to come up here today.”

                It wouldn’t take much for that ridge of snow to turn deadly. Above-freezing temperatures at night. Hot days. Rain. Any combination could send that mass of ice and slush tumbling down the slope, wiping out everything in its path.

                “Why didn’t you say so at the lodge?” she asked.

                He snorted. “You wanted this done with, and I do as well.”

                Was she that transparent to him? Was he that anxious to be free of her?

                Her palms skimmed over the grab bars until a burst of speed up the tree-lined track jolted her. She wrapped her arms around his lean waist and leaned against his strong back. Cooler air buffeted her face and back while the heat of the man seeped into her length.

                “Hang on. We’re almost there. See the green roof on the far ledge?” he shouted over the rev of the engine that tormented the tender flesh between her legs in a sinfully delicious way. “That is my rifugio.”

                She caught a glimpse of the chalet-like structure before the winding trail took the ATV speeding down a sharp, curving dip in the trail. She buried her face against his broad back for a millisecond, then looked up.

                Excitement hummed through her, her heart accelerating with each rev of the engine that gave a sensual jolt of her body against his broad back. Feeling his muscles tighten was a delicious torment that she had never felt on a pleasurable level, but she wanted more, wanted to explore those feelings.

                Don’t pursue it, the rational part of her brain warned as the ATV all but crawled over the rough track, the dips and jolts creating a delicious torture she hadn’t anticipated.