Zara had stayed at the cabin enough times to know what to expect. One room, one bed, one outside bathroom. No electricity, no hot water, no neighbors. One key hidden in the same spot behind the wood box on the porch.

Three-quarters of an hour after Alex took the key from her useless, numb fingers to open the door, Zara thought she might have stopped shivering. Finally. The fire he’d patiently built and nurtured from damp kindling into a blazing inferno helped. So had losing her wet clothes and wrapping herself snugly in one of the pair of thick sleeping bags Alex had found. 

Draped over the handlebars of her bike and a chair he’d dragged fireside, her thin gym clothes would soon be dry. So would his shirt, which meant she could stop not watching him prowl around the cabin, all bare-chested and beautiful in the rusty firelight. She’d decided it was much safer and more relaxing to watch the flames flicker and dance over the logs in the fireplace. 

Sitting cross-legged inside her downy cocoon, staring into the blaze, she could even put a positive spin to this misadventure. With Alex isolated out here, Susannah had more time to think—or to get wherever she’d gone to do that thinking—without him turning up to influence her decision. Zara might be stormbound with a man who stirred her libido in all kinds of forbidden ways, but she had willpower. She knew what she could have and what was off-limits. Take chocolate, for example...

Bad example. 

With a wry grimace, she pressed a hand to her empty stomach. Thinking about food reminded her of how little she’d eaten today and how little Alex had found in his preliminary investigation of the cabin. Two pillows, two sleeping bags, two kerosene lamps, no kerosene. One box of matches.

Right now she could hear him executing a more thorough search of the kitchen cupboards.

“Any luck?” she asked hopefully, when the sounds of doors opening and shutting ceased. 

“Unless there’s something edible in the first-aid kit, we’re dead out of luck.”

She turned then to find him leaning back against what passed for a kitchen bench. And for the first time since they’d walked through the door, for the first time since he’d ordered her out of her wet clothes, since he’d busied himself with building the fire and setting out their clothes to dry, he met her eyes.

Nice that it was across the width of the cabin. Nice that the distance and the shadowy light disguised the hot lick of reaction in her eyes, in her blood, in her bare-naked skin beneath the silky lining of the sleeping bag. She wrapped it more securely around her shoulders and attempted to relax. They were stuck with each other for the duration of the storm; why not make it as easy and comfortable as possible?

“Not even an out-of-date can of beans?” she asked.

“Sadly, no.”

“You know what’s really sad? I stopped on my way out here for fuel and what was allegedly lunch. At the time I thought I was doing myself a favor not eating it!”

“You didn’t save the leftovers?”

Zara chuckled at his hopeful tone. “No, although that’s not the saddest bit. In a moment of weakness I almost bought a couple of chocolate bars, you know, for later. But I resisted.” 

“Damn.”

“You like chocolate?” 

“Like is perhaps too mild a word,” he said with a slow smile. “It’s my sin of choice.” 

Standing there in the shadows with his bare chest and flat abdomen and low-riding trousers, with that deadly little smile exaggerating the sensual bow of his top lip and deepening the grooves in his lean cheeks, he looked like a different kind of sinner. And a different kind of sin.

Temptation snaked through Zara’s veins, the dark, rich, sumptuous chocolate kind. Temptation to ask how often he sinned, to suggest it had done him no harm, to ask about his second choice. To flirt and indulge herself for once.

She didn’t. She couldn’t. He was Susannah’s.

“I resisted the siren call.” Zara shrugged, a silky slide of her bare shoulders inside the sleeping bag. “It’s not been one of my better days for choices.” 

“I don’t suppose it worked out quite the way you planned when you got up this morning.”

“We have that in common,” she said, and regretted her candor instantly. The mood changed, grew thick and weighty with the reminder of how his day had started and what had brought them together. His wedding. Her worry.

“Why do you disapprove of me marrying Susannah?” he asked.

Zara exhaled slowly. So much for the easy banter. So much for comfortable. She felt the tension in his gaze, in her limbs, and concentrated on how to answer.

In truth, Susannah hadn’t told her much about her relationship with Alex Carlisle and that was the problem. If Zara ever fell in love, she couldn’t imagine clamming up on her best friend in their regular e-mail or IM or phone updates. She’d have sung it, laughed it, lived it, breathed it. Susannah hadn’t. Sure, she’d mentioned meeting Alex and going out with him a couple of times, then the next thing Zara knew, she’d agreed to marry him.

“I wouldn’t have disapproved,” she said slowly, “if Susannah had appeared more enthusiastic about her wedding.” 

“She wasn’t happy?”

“You’re asking me?” 

The line of his lips tightened. “We haven’t spent a lot of time together, not since she moved back to Melbourne.”

“You spent last weekend together,” Zara pointed out. They’d flown to his family’s outback station so Susannah could meet his mother and apparently there’d been a small engagement party. “Didn’t you notice anything the matter?” 

Heck, Zara had only seen her friend twice during the last week and she’d noticed her quietness, her distraction. That’s why she’d prodded her at dinner last night. That’s why she’d asked if Susannah was very, very sure.

Obviously her fiancé hadn’t noticed. He stood in stony-faced silence for at least another minute before he asked, “Is there someone else?” 

Even across the room and through the deepening twilight she could see the stormy tension in his eyes. The breath caught hard in her chest and she had to look away. Had to force her focus to that bolt-from-the-blue question. Something had definitely been going on with Susannah this last week, but another man? It seemed so unlikely that Zara hadn’t even considered the possibility. 

Perhaps she’d needed someone who gave her more time and consideration. Zara could belief that. But she couldn’t believe that Susannah would cheat.

“No.” She shook her head. “Not when she’d agreed to marry you.”

The moment spun out, taut and silent but for the whistling howl of the wind and the intermittent crack and spit of the fire. She didn’t know if he believed her, couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

“What will you do now?” she asked.

“What can I do?” He pushed away from the bench. “For now we’re stuck here with nothing to do but wait out the storm.”

Excerpt from THERUTHLESS GROOM, Silhouette Desire® November 2005, ISBN 0-373-76691-2
©Bronwyn Jameson

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