“My darling, my darling,” he said comfortingly as he patted her back. “Everything’s all right. You’re safe now. Was it too ghastly?”
Ghastly? Hysteria came very close to the surface. Paradise? Shangri-la? Utopia? Yes. But never ghastly. “I… I’m just glad to see you,” she said as she continued to cling to him. By shutting her eyes she could blot out everything else.
Helmut instructed one of the men to give her something warm to drink. The fellow must have obeyed because Helmut was soon pressing a silver cup against her lips. “Here, darling, drink a sip. It will start to warm you.”
The hot coffee was generously laced with brandy and she choked on the first swallow. His hand was running briskly up and down her back. “Slowly, my dear, slowly. We won’t start back down until you’re ready. No storm is forecast for tonight. I blame myself for not checking the weather report before we started out yesterday. That first storm was expected in the higher elevations. I could have prevented this entire nightmare.”
How glad she was that she and Reeves had been innocent of the storm predictions. They couldn’t be held accountable. They had been victims.
“Reeves, you seem hale and hearty enough despite your ordeal,” Helmut beamed. She didn’t turn around, though she heard Reeves’s footsteps crunching on the snow. “Someone pour this man a drink,” Helmut ordered. “I’m eager to hear how you managed to survive the night and come out of it seemingly unscathed and none the worse for wear.”
Jordan rotated slowly in Helmut’s arms and saw Reeves take a cup similar to the one she was drinking from. He sipped the hot coffee and thanked both Helmut and his assistant.
“After eating that bountiful lunch you brought along, Jordan and I decided to walk it off and go farther up the mountain. We sat down to rest awhile and …” His voice trailed off. Green eyes slid to Jordan, where she was still leaning against Helmut. The eyes bore into her and Reeves’s voice was hard when he continued. “We fell asleep. When we woke up, it was snowing.”
Briefly he outlined their halting trip back down the mountain until they discovered the tool shed. “Luckily we were able to take refuge there.”
Again his eyes flew to Jordan and again she read the open hostility and scorn there. He ignored her then as he turned back to Helmut. “Before the night was over, we were grateful both to a benevolent farmer and to your picnic basket.”
Helmut laughed then and clapped Reeves on the shoulder. “Thank you for taking care of my girl for me.”
Jordan winced at the words. She dared to look up at Reeves. A disdainful sneer marred the handsome features of his face. “She’s a woman easily pleased.” The underlying insult was understood only by her, but she caught his disparagement and resented it highly. She hadn’t exactly ripped off his clothes and chased him around that shed until he finally submitted to her!
She turned back to Helmut and asked, “What about your airplane?”
He stroked her cheek with a loving finger. “How like you, Jordan, darling, to be worried about someone else’s crisis when living through one of your own. My pilot crash landed the aircraft. He, the crew, and the cargo were all intact.”
“I’m so glad,” she said.
He raised her hand to kiss it and exclaimed, “Jordan, where is your ring? Not lost in the storm I hope.”
“No, it…I…” She looked helplessly toward Reeves but his face gave away nothing of what he was thinking. It could have been carved out of stone. The green eyes glinted frigidly. “It’s in my backpack,” she muttered at last.
“Fetch me that.” Helmut pointed to the backpack one of his men had retrieved. Once he had it in his hands, it was only a matter of moments before he found the diamond ring zippered into one of the many pockets.
He slid the cold metal ring onto Jordan’s nerveless finger and said with deep satisfaction, “There. Things are back to where they should be.”
But nothing was as it should be. She raised mournful eyes to Reeves, but the spot where he had been standing was empty. As Helmut pulled her into an encompassing embrace, over his shoulder she saw that Reeves was already stalking away from them on his way down the mountain.
Knowing that this might well be the last time she would ever see him, she whispered, “My love, my life. I’ll love you forever.”
Hearing her words and mistakenly interpreting them, Helmut hugged her tighter.
CHAPTER 10
Thank you for coming by, Helmut,” Jordan said as she shut the door of the bookstore behind him, put the closed sign in the window, and pulled down the shade.