Baby, It's Cold Outside by Jennifer Greene, Merline Lovelace, Cindi Myers Read Free Book Online Page A

know.”
    “It was fun. On the roof. For a while.”
    “Shh,” he said. The silly hat with the flapping fur ears, he threw a distance. Slowly, then, he started peeling off the layers, the mittens past frozen fingers, the scarf so stiff it didn’t want to bend.
    “Don’t take anything off! I’m freezing now!”
    “Shh. We’ll get you warm.” The boots didn’t want to tug off. He tugged them. Then the first layer of socks, then the second. It was bare feet and bare fingers that were the most endangered. The extremities. Toes. Fingers. Nose. Ears.
    She was clearly shiver-cold. White-cold. Miserable-cold. But there was color slowly shooting back to her skin. He couldn’t move fast, not when his own fingers still felt as if each were five inches thick. And he was too damned worried to smile yet, but by the time he’d tugged off the peripheral gear, she’d crashed on the hearth rug like an immobile zombie. He tugged off the giant-man snow pants, the parka.
    “Are you getting feeling back in your hands and feet?”
    “More feeling than I ever wanted to.”
    “Is there any body part you can’t feel?”
    “My nose.”
    He loomed over her, checked out the pink nose. Her eyes shone softly in the firelight, and her hair was a glistening tousle around her face. “Rick?”
    Her voice was still thicker than molasses.
    “Don’t worry about talking. You’ll feel stronger in a bit. Just go with it. Rest.”
    “It’s just…I didn’t know. That blizzard could kill us.”
    He sobered. “But it’s not going to.”
    “We could die.”
    “But we’re not going to.”
    “I’ve always thought of rough weather as…a nuisance. A serious nuisance sometimes, but nothing more than that. It never occurred to me to be afraid before. But that storm, Rick. That blizzard. It’s alive.”

CHAPTER FOUR
    E MILIE COULDN’T GET OVER IT —how fast the storm had come back. How completely blinded they’d been by snow and wind; how they’d been laughing at the impossible job of shoveling the roof—and yeah, it had been physically taxing and freezing, but they’d still had fun. She’d been laughing, the way she hadn’t laughed in weeks. Then…
    That sudden paralyzing cold.
    The wind screaming in her ears.
    The fear so huge that she couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe.
    “It was like a demon, that wind. It sounded as if it were alive, personally attacking us….” Abruptly Emilie realized that she was the only one talking. She still didn’t have the strength of a pansy. When Rick started peeling off her wet, heavy outer clothes, she’d just let him.
    It really hurt when he first pulled off boots and socks, and her bare feet suddenly started to get sensation back. Her nose, cheeks and chin were all stingingly coming back to life again, too. As Rick yanked off her dad’s old snow pants, then unzipped her ice-crusted parka…she couldn’t have stopped him, didn’t want to.
    He was shedding her clothes.
    She was still shedding her fear.
    Nothing suddenly changed, exactly. She just seemed to notice a tiny detail. All her outer layers had now been peeled off, and yet he was still shedding her clothes.
    Although she’d been looking at Rick the whole time they’d been talking…now she quietly, carefully, really looked at him. The firelight crackled beside them, shimmery, warm, golden. His eyes had that same golden warmth, focused intensely on her face.
    Maybe he wasn’t talking, but his hands were masterfully communicating. His fingers unfastened the last button on her cardigan, then peeled off the sweater as carefully and competently as he’d gotten rid of her jacket and scarf. Only this wasn’t an outer layer. This was a lot closer to her bare skin. To her bare heartbeat.
    Her lips parted. She thought she was going to say something else about the weather, but somehow disasters like blizzards and near dying of cold now seemed insignificant.
    His hands reaching for the snap of her corduroy pants…now that was