Shameless - Sybil Bartel Page 0,28
was going to die.
On a mountain of snow.
Where no one but wolves would find my frozen corpse.
Sheer terror seized my lungs and my imagination, and I screamed as I sailed off the same last steep incline the SUV had.
But I didn’t fly over the road or hit it like the vehicle had.
A bodyguard jumped out of the Escalade, and two huge, blessedly warm arms snatched me out of thin air.
“Sh-Sh-Shade.” My hands numb, my body shaking, I could barely move my frozen muscles as I wrapped my arms around his neck.
“Fucking Christ, woman,” he reprimanded. “What the hell were you thinking?” Putting me on my feet and brushing the snow off, he didn’t wait for an answer. “You could’ve gotten yourself killed.”
“M-Me?” I chattered. “You went over the cl-cl-cliff!”
Shaking his head, he picked me up. “I was fine.” Carrying me around the front of the vehicle, he opened the passenger door and dumped me inside. “Warm up,” he ordered before shutting the door.
The instant heat inside the SUV compared to outside made all my clothes suddenly wet, and I was shivering harder by the time he got back in the driver seat.
Turning up the heater, he glanced in the back. “You got any dry pants?”
“Y-yes,” I chattered, nodding.
“Hang on, be right back.” He pushed his door open, and an icy blast filled the cabin before he quickly closed it again.
A few seconds later, the back opened, and I glanced at him as he first checked out the SUV, then rummaged around in my suitcases. What felt like a lifetime later, he shut the lift gate, and got back behind the wheel.
“Here.” He dumped a pile of clothes in my lap.
“Thanks.” I was still freezing cold, but I was no longer shivering uncontrollably. Holding my hands up to the heater, I nodded at the clothes. “I’ll put those on in a minute.”
“We don’t have a minute, princess.” Reaching for the borrowed sweatshirt of his I was still wearing, he unzipped it. “Get this off, and get the dry clothes on. We need to keep moving.”
Anxiety formed a lump in my throat, and I looked up at the road we’d just slid off. “We’re going to attempt to drive back up that?”
“Not we, me.” He pulled the sweatshirt off my arms.
The anxiety turned into full-blown panic. “You can’t leave me here in the snow.”
“I’m not.” He tossed the wet sweatshirt in back and fished a shirt from the pile on my lap. “Put this on.” He shoved my long-sleeved pajama shirt over my head. “I’m taking you up to the cabin on foot. Then I’ll come back for the SUV.”
My head was shaking no before I had my arms shoved into the sleeves of the thermal. “It’s too cold out there. We’ll freeze to death. We can just wait in here until the storm passes.”
“We’ll run out of gas long before the storm passes.” He picked up a thin sweater that was more for looks than warmth and handed it to me. “Put this on. We’ll layer up and be fine until we get to the cabin.”
As I put the sweater on, he slid off his jacket and reached behind his seat for the bag he’d pulled the sweatshirt out of earlier in the day. The restaurant, the meal we shared, his crazy ex—it all seemed like a lifetime ago.
Coming away with one of those long-sleeved shirts that men worked out in, Shade leaned forward and pulled his short-sleeved shirt off single-handedly.
The full impact of Shade No-Last-Name bodyguard and all of his ink hit me harder than the punch of the cold when I’d been shoved out of the Escalade, and I sucked in a sharp breath.
Holy. Fucking. Shit.
He was inked everywhere—from his pecs to his neck, across his shoulders, and down his arms. And his six-pack had a six-pack.
Holy fucking shit.
He pulled the tightly fitted, long-sleeved shirt over his head. “See something you like, princess?”
No intonation, not even a hint of tease in his voice, I couldn’t tell if he was being serious or not.
“You have a lot of tattoos,” I rasped past my suddenly dry throat.
“You have a sweet ass.” He nodded at my leggings. “Get those wet pants off and put on the dry ones, then put your jeans over them.”
Heat flamed my cheeks at his compliment, and a shyness I wasn’t accustomed to took hold. I’d put on weight since being in rehab, and even though my counselors had assured me it was normal, that my body weight