He’d been forced to stay the night given the storm. No flights out of Bozeman airport, and the pilot who’d flown him on his small plane couldn’t fly him back to the city.
He was fortunate the pilot could put him up for the night when he returned the truck. If he hadn’t, what then? Stay the night at Ceci Rivers’s? He shuddered. The pilot had even been decent enough to accept Clark’s vague story regarding the black eye.
Cock-a-doodle-do!
What time is it? It’s pitch black out there, he thought, gazing out the window. Even with the light from his phone, he couldn’t make out anything, not even those imposing mountains in the distance. All he could see was darkness.
Cock-a-doodle-do!
He looked at his phone. Three a.m.
As he lay in bed listening to the wind whistle and rattle the windowpane, he wondered how a man was supposed to weather two storms in the span of time it would take him to finish one lap at Monza. At least that’s how it felt to him.
Ceci Rivers and now this.
Cock-a-doodle-do!
Don’t they only do that when the sun rises?
Some far-off corner of his brain was trying to remind him how he’d felt before she’d punched him. Hadn’t he been prepared to ask her to dinner? And wasn’t that because he didn’t want the date to end? She hadn’t meant to punch him. And she’d made sure the man who came at him suffered.
You mean, she came to my rescue, he thought sullenly, speaking to that remote region of his brain.Yes, she came to your rescue, the remote region responded.
Again.
Clarke lifted his head and punched the pillow, startling Holly, who’d already settled into the perfect slumber spot, the little space behind his bent knees, sandwiched between his calves and thighs as he lay on his side. She stood up and reproached him with those glossy black eyes.
“Sorry,” he muttered, laying his head back down.
Cock-a-doodle-do!
What did it matter whether the rooster crowed all night? He wasn’t going to get any sleep anyway.
He sighed, shutting his eyes. With any luck he’d be on a flight out of here tomorrow. With a little less luck, the day after.
Holly was already snoring and running in her sleep.
Maybe she’s reliving her victory today.
The movement, the rumbling, and the rhythmic humming of her snore put a hypnotic spell on him, and soon he was drifting off to a world he readily welcomed, if for one and only one reason—it was a world without Ceci Rivers.
Or so he thought.
He heard a voice. It slivered through a blizzard so thick he couldn’t see his hands.
Sir, the voice said.
The voice was followed by a scent, dreamy and sweet. It entered him like warm honey, making his legs tremble.
You like it? the voice said.
Suddenly out from behind the fog came a figure.
Is it a cat? It’s walking on two legs.
It’s a woman. A cat-woman.
Dressed in a black suit that covered her completely, from her neck to her wrists and ankles. And yet, it was revealing. He could see everything—every angle, every curve, where her flesh dipped and where it rose, every turn of that terrain.
