Mac pulled over. Pronto. “Do you need, um—”
Before he was reduced to using any more wild endearments, she filled him in. “I’ve been carrying toilet paper since I was four months pregnant. Believe me, I figured out a while ago that I needed to be prepared.”
The winds were gale force, the snow biting like icy teeth, and Kelly thought glumly that this was a hell of an auspicious way to start a marriage. But when she climbed back into the car with wet feet and wet hair and snow sticking to her nose and eyelashes, she caught the hint of a quicksilver grin from Mac.
“I don’t think we’d better take you out in too many blizzards for the next couple months,” he said dryly.
A startled chuckle escaped Kelly. Holy kamoly. Mac had actually teased her. Who’d a thunk it? And it seemed a crazy thing to be just discovering that her groom had a sense of humor... but she suddenly realized how many things she’d been judging about Mac on limited evidence. She’d assumed he was formal and serious by nature because that’s all she’d been exposed to. But their personal conversations over the last couple of weeks had been dead serious because they needed to be. And no, she’d never seen him casually joking around with staff at work before that, but really, how could he? His job was tough and required toughness. If someone had to make an unpopular decision, it always fell on his shoulders.
Maybe authority and toughness came naturally to him, Kelly mused, but the point was that she’d had no opportunity to know any other side of Mac... what he wanted, what he dreamed of, what he was like when the suit and tie came off. Who was there for him when he needed to vent that chestload of endless responsibilities? Heaven knew, she could imagine all kinds of women in his life. But by the farthest stretch of her considerable imagination—none of them remotely resembled the bride he was stuck taking home tonight.
And it seemed only moments later they were there. She barely caught sight of the tall, wrought-iron fence, before Mac was pushing a button that made the double gates electronically swing open. “There are a ton of things I need to show you—like how the security system works. But there’s time enough to talk about all that in the morning. I suspect you just want to get settled in and get your feet up. I want you to know, though, that the security system’s state of the art. You’re safe here, Kel.”
“I know.” It was the one thing she hadn’t worried about in the last two weeks. Since the night she’d been attacked in the parking lot, Kate and the family had cosseted her nonstop, but the security she felt with him was a world apart. She’d feel safe with a lion if Mac were around. It’s just the way he was. At this precise moment, though, she suddenly discovered that feeling safe from criminals and feeling safe with her new groom were two entirely different things.
Her pulse started skittering. Once the gates closed behind them, the look of anything civilized disappeared, and the drive seemed to go on forever. Even with the blinding, slashing snow, she could make out certain things. The private road twisted around a creek bed. Pines nestled around one turn, their branches bowed with heavy skirts of snow; a stand of virgin hardwoods stretched in another direction, then a field that rolled and curved and looked as if it was blanketed with whipped cream—there were no footprints in the snow, no sign of man. But up and around a sloping knoll, the house came into view.
The baby suddenly kicked, and Kelly’s hand instinctively covered her abdomen. Even with the dim visibility, she recognized the property and house.
Mac had brought her here once, a few days before. Two weeks was an incredibly short time to upend your whole life. He’d insisted she see it to decide if she could live here. Possibly he really meant to give her one last-ditch chance to say no to the whole marriage idea, but truthfully, Kelly never felt as if she had a chance or a choice. The attack had petrified her. She had to protect her baby. Nothing else mattered, but the last two weeks had still felt like a fastmoving train. There hadn’t been time to catch her breath, much less figure out what all these monumental changes and decisions really meant.
She still hadn’t had that time. But her first look at the house had touched something inside her. And it did now, even more.
The place was lit up. Snow spiraled in the outside porch lights, and inside lamps shone in the windows like welcoming beacons. Kelly remembered the first time she’d seen Kate Fortune’s house. She’d grown up on a struggling single mom’s budget, and the opulence of the home base Fortune mansion had her bug-eyed. It just went on and on—the landscaped grounds, objets d’art, priceless rugs, loot and luxuries she’d never seen outside of movies. Kelly remembered thinking God, how easy it would be to develop a lust attack for material possessions. But working with Kate had somehow sabotaged her developing that vice. She’d seen firsthand what a life of privilege was about, and she’d choose a mortgage anytime over having to live in a museum.
But Mac’s place was no museum. The house was stone. Two sturdy stories, with gleaming casement windows and gables and arched doorways. Compared to her three-room apartment, it was monster-size—and she hadn’t seen all of it—but the place had so much character and personality that it looked like... well, it looked like a home. Smoke chugged out of the chimneys and snow cuddled in the windowsills. Whoever had cleared the walk had left the shovel in the porch overhang. Maybe an ordinary person could live here. Like the kind of person who would forget to put away the shovel. Like her.
She only glimpsed the front for a second, then Mac punched a button and the garage doors opened. A Jeep already took up one parking place—not a fancy Jeep, but one with mud-crusted tires and a little dent in its fanny. It wouldn’t particularly have startled her, except that Kelly had never seen Mac dressed less normally than a suit, formally ready for a shot in GQ. “The Jeep is yours?”
“Yeah.” Mac was already climbing out, the Jeep obviously the last thing on his mind. If he hadn’t suddenly rolled his shoulders, she wouldn’t have realized that he was whip-tired from the challenging drive—not counting everything else that had happened that day. “Just head inside, Kelly. No one’s here—I can’t remember if you met Benz and Martha the other day. They live on the far side of the property, do some housekeeping and chores for me, and I’ve lined them up to come in more often. While I’m at work, I don’t want you here alone, especially when you’re this far pregnant. But for a few days, I thought you might want to explore the place on your own and not feel like strangers were hovering over you. If you don’t remember the layout, that door leads to the kitchen—just settle in wherever you want. I’ll follow you in two seconds—I just want to check a few things out here first. The house has a generator if we lose power, and the way this storm’s building we could be holed up for a couple of days—oops.”
“Oops?” Somehow Kelly didn’t think that expression got much of a workout in Mac’s normal vocabulary, and suddenly there was that potent quicksilver smile again.
“Yeah, I don’t know where my head was. Here I’m rambling on about silly subjects like blizzards, when I should have remembered there are bigger priorities. The bathroom is the first door on the left,” he informed her.
She chuckled, and for the craziest moment they shared a smile. A real smile. For an instant she forgot he was a sexy hunk, forgot he was the formidably powerful Mac Fortune, forgot he’d been sucked into protecting the woman his brother got pregnant. For that instant, Mac was just...a man. A man with rumpled dark hair and the shadow of whiskers on his chin and a smile that warmed up those cool green eyes. A man she wanted to know. Not had to get to know.
But he had that generator thing he wanted to look at, so she hustled inside. After shedding her coat on a kitchen chair, she kicked off her shoes and peeled promptly for the teal-and-white bathroom she saw off the kitchen.
When she washed her hands, she caught sight of herself in the vanity mirror and immediately considered hiding out in the bathroom—like for the next two weeks. She’d looked worse. She just couldn’t remember when. Her fine