His Secretary Mistress(40)

‘This is hopeless; I’m going to turn back before we get snowed in,’ he growled, his tone plainly accusing.

‘I told you to turn right—you’re the one who decided you knew better than the map, in typical pig-headed fashion,’ Jenna snapped furiously. ‘I am capable of reading a map, you know!’

‘Fine, so it’s my fault we’re lost?’

‘If you hadn’t been so impatient we could have just sat in the traffic jam for a few minutes. We’d be at the hotel now, instead of struggling to find our way out of a snowstorm.’

Alex muttered under his breath and attempted to turn the car around, but the wheels spun on the icy road so that he lost control and they slithered backwards into a ditch.

‘Terrific, we’re well and truly stranded,’ he reported, after climbing out of the car to inspect the situation. ‘The back end’s right in the ditch. You’d better get out in case the car slides any further.’

An icy blast of air hit Jenna as she opened the car door, her feet sinking into a snowdrift at least a foot deep. ‘What are we going to do?’ she asked as Alex waved his mobile phone in the air, trying to locate a signal.

‘Walk, I suppose. Even if I could ring for roadside assistance nothing’s going to be able to get down this narrow track until daylight.’

‘Maybe we should just wait in the car,’ Jenna said, with a fearful glance across the dark fields at the rapidly mounting snow.

‘For what?’ Alex snapped witheringly as he reached onto the back seat of the car for his overnight bag. ‘Lassie? A Saint Bernard with a barrel of brandy around its neck? We’ll head back up the lane. I’m sure we passed a pub a few miles back.’

‘A few miles?’ Jenna repeated faintly as she picked her way through the snow, trying to keep close to Alex who held the torch.

Within minutes it was obvious that her thin coat was totally inadequate for the wintry conditions, and she struggled to keep her balance in her high-heeled boots, her bruised foot aching with the effort.

‘Come on—keep up,’ Alex ordered after they had been walking for ten minutes, his tone impatient as he flicked a beam of torchlight over her bedraggled form, his frown deepening when he noticed her limping. ‘What’s the matter with your foot?’

‘Nothing—apart from frostbite.’ She stumbled to a halt in front of him and he tilted her chin to stare into her eyes, his sixth sense alerted by a nuance in her voice.

‘Let me guess—you walked into another door?’

Jenna sighed. ‘I dropped something on my foot and bruised it, that’s all.’

‘It must have been something extremely heavy, you can hardly walk. What was it?’

Jenna was too cold and tired to think straight, let alone come up with a suitable lie to placate Alex, and she stared at him in silence.

‘If your husband values his life, don’t ever allow him anywhere near me,’ he bit out violently, his jaw rigid as he fought to contain his anger.

For the life of him he couldn’t understand why she remained in a marriage that was at best unhappy and at worst placed her in physical danger from her husband. He had spent hours listening to his client, who stood accused of murdering her husband, horrified by the litany of abuse she had suffered for years at the hands of the man who had purportedly loved her, and he felt sick when he imagined Jenna in a similar situation.

His anger sent him striding on ahead, but minutes later he realised that she was no longer following him and turned back.

‘I can’t walk any further,’ Jenna whispered as she sat huddled on the stone wall that ran alongside the road. ‘You’ll have to go on without me.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Do you really think I’d just abandon you in the middle of nowhere?’ She looked small and fragile, her eyes blinking at him like a startled doe in the light from the torch, and he felt a hand squeeze his heart. ‘I’m not leaving you, sweetheart, so either we both sit here and freeze or you hold my hand and we keep going until we reach civilisation.’

With her fingers curled around his big hand they battled on, until Jenna could barely lift one foot in front of the other. She was too exhausted to offer any resistance when he lifted her into his arms and carried her to the door of an isolated pub.

The landlord was a true Yorkshireman, who welcomed them inside and stoked the fire until it roared, urging them to warm themselves while he called his wife.

‘I can’t believe anyone’s out on a night like this,’ she said as she bustled in from the kitchen with hot drinks, and Jenna smiled weakly, her body limp as it acclimatised to the warm pub after the freezing temperature outside.