His calm tone belied the message of his eyes. 'This is our pilot for today, Charlie James.'

  Damon scowled. 'Where's the guy who flew yesterday?'

  'It's his day off.' Impatience was weaving its way through the calm, now. 'Charlie is as competent a pilot as Leon, perhaps more so. Now, if you'd kindly join my group --'

  Charlie barely had time to appreciate the rare compliment.

  'Get the other guy back. I ain't flying with no babe at the wheel.'

  'Don't, then,' Gallagher challenged tersely, and folded his arms across his chest.

  Damon smiled a crafty smile, and nodded at the milling skiers. 'These people are my friends. I don't go, they don't go. One word's all it would take.'

  Charlie read the set of Gallagher's face, and knew the word was going to be said. She laid a staying hand on Gallagher's arm. She had a lot of experience in dealing with Kenny. And a lot of experience in dealing with stubborn men. The two combined would be more than a match for Damon.

  She smiled sweetly at him. 'Do you ski because you like the danger, Mr Damon?' she asked, her tone awed. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Gallagher give her a disgusted look.

  Damon, however, thrust forward his chest and grinned. 'You betcha, babe.'

  The sweet smile dropped from her lips. 'Some people seek danger because they're really not very brave. Did you know that? They're trying to prove something. But sometimes they also look for excuses along the way. A set of circumstances that would allow them to bow out and save face at the same time.' Her voice was soft—polite but lethal. 'Excuses like not liking to fly with a woman. The least dangerous thing you'll do today, Mr Damon, is board that helicopter. I'm very interested in whether you'll do it or not.'

  Damon hesitated, scowled at her, and then brushed by them and boarded the helicopter.

  Cherry was looking at her with her mouth hanging open. Gallagher's eyes were fastened on her with amazement. And then with respect, and finally, unexpectedly, with mirth.

  'You're one tough lady,' he said slowly.

  'When I have to be,' she returned, stiffly. Tough? Was it because he thought she was tough that he was so callous towards her?

  'Remind me not to cross you,' he teased her.

  The teasing note was so unexpected, so warm after the long chill, that she melted, despite herself. 'You already have,' she warned him, but there was sudden laughter in her voice, too.

  Their gazes locked for a long time. Laughter-filled. Appreciative. Asking and giving forgiveness.

  But she reminded herself how utterly foolish it was to leave herself open to this man, reminded herself how she had paid for breaking her rule already.

  He remembered seeing her with her boyfriend at the cinema.

  The familiar coldness settled in—and was made even colder for that brief sighting of the sun.

  'Did you check the straps?' he asked shortly a few minutes later as he took the seat beside her.

  She sent him an exasperated look. 'Of course.'

  'Then what the hell are you waiting for?'

  Maybe, she thought wearily, even pity would have been better than this.

  'I'm glad I caught you before you left,' she said to him over the phone the next morning.

  'Don't you dare tell me you're sick. Have you seen the snow we got last night? It'll be the best skiing of the year today!'

  His boyish enthusiasm was just appealing enough that she managed to forgive his lack of concern for her health.

  'I'm not sick,' she said drily. 'My driveway has fallen victim to the ploughs again.'

  'Is that all? I'll be there in fifteen minutes.'

  It occurred to her, as she sat beside him in his truck, that she really could have called Cherry and got a lift in one of the minibuses. She wondered why she hadn't thought of that. Why would she spend an extra minute in this boorish man's company when she didn't have to? Except, she had to admit, he wasn't being his usual Boorish self this morning. His enthusiasm over the snow was overriding that—until they came to the last curve in the road before the airport. A truck had overturned and the way was completely blocked. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police were on the spot, and one of them ambled over.

  'Good morning, Gallagher.'

  'Until ten seconds ago, it was a fairly decent morning,' Gallagher muttered, glaring at the overturned truck.

  The police officer laughed. 'We'll have this all cleared up in half an hour or so --'

  'Half an hour?' Gallagher exploded.

  'Say the Serenity Prayer,' Charlie suggested sweetly.

  Gallagher glared at her. 'Do you need a hand, Michael?'

  'No, save yourself for the slopes.' He winked at Charlie with sympathy, and walked away.

  'Maybe we should go and get a coffee or something,' Charlie suggested tentatively when Gallagher continued to glower at the road as though his will could move the wreckage out of the way.

  'They might have it cleared up sooner.'

  'Gallagher, it's half an hour. Out of a lifetime. Lighten up.'

  He let his eyes drift wistfully to the fresh snow visible on the mountain peaks, then he sighed, and grinned at her, a trifle humbly. 'Am I being that rotten?'

  'Yes, not that it's anything new.'

  'At least the police are here.'

  'I beg your pardon?'

  'After half an hour in this cab together, one of us could end up dead.'

  She took a deck of cards out of her bag, and fanned them in his face. 'Especially if I win?' she taunted.

  A glimmer of a smile touched his lips. 'Especially then,' he agreed. 'Deal.'

  Some moments later, Charlie said tentatively, 'Gallagher, maybe this is a good time to talk about why we're not getting along.'

  He frowned at his cards. 'We're getting along. We'd be getting along a lot better if you weren't winning. You play blackjack like a man.'

  She sighed. 'You're avoiding the issue.'

  'What is the issue? And why do women always do this? Wait until they have a captive audience, and then decide it's time to talk.'

  'I think it's the only time they can nail you guys down. And did you just notice how I can't win? I play blackjack like a man, and that's a fault, and I trap you into talking, like a woman, and that's a fault.'

  'I guess you just have a lot of faults.' He glanced at her face. 'Should I call Michael back over now?'

  'Maybe,' she said. She was feeling a bit murderous.

  He slowly set down the cards, and looked at her intently. She could feel her cheeks start to heat from the intensity of his scrutiny. And from something else—from the way those eyes, darkened to midnight-blue, had trailed over her hair like a physical touch, and were now fastened on her lips.

  She should look away, she told herself. But, after all, she had started this. Besides, she had discovered that she was powerless to look away.

  He leaned towards her, as if drawn on an invisible thread. Again she was aware of what she should do. She should back away. Laugh. Put words in between them. And again she could not do it, could not break the mesmerising spell of those eyes, could not deny her own aching need to feel his lips once more on hers.

  His lips touched hers, tentatively—as if he would find some answer he sought there. The softness lasted for one beat of a hummingbird's wing, and was gone. A savage groan emitted from him, he tangled his hands in her hair, and pulled her into the fury of his kiss.

  It was a summer storm. Thunder cracked and lightning split the heavens. It was magnificent. Exhilarating. Awesomely powerful. Frightening. His kisses were like hard, merciless rain, sizzling across the heated surface of her skin. At first she was just an innocent bystander caught in a torrential downpour. But then it changed. She was the storm. Its passion was coming from within her, not from outside her. They were joining, two untameable forces, fired with electrical energy, swirling around each other, crackling, sizzling, hissing. And then melting. Surrendering. The fury dying and giving way to the stillness that followed the storm. Washing them in a silent calm, touching tormented souls with a promise of peace . . .

  Gallagher tore his lips from hers and shoved her away from him. His mighty shoulders were heaving, and he turned his face from her. When he turned back, his face was composed, save for the strained line about his mouth.

  'There it is, Charlie,' he finally said, his voice gravelled. 'That's why we're not getting along.'

  She stared at him, wide-eyed. The trembling within her was only just beginning to subside, and it was being replaced by a cold chill. As if she had indeed been swept away by the magnificence of a summer storm, but now was left cold, and drenched to the skin. Uncertain, now that the magnificence was fading in the distance, if the price she had paid to be a part of it was not too high.

  'I don't understand,' she whispered.

  He gave her an impatient look. 'It's there, Charlie. It's always there.' He looked grimly out of the window, his voice cold and controlled. 'And it's never going to go away.'

  She wanted to press him, wanted to play innocent, and insist he tell her what was there. But she couldn't. Because she knew. Something so strong between them, it was tangible. She could reach out with her fingertips and touch it. A physical, a chemical reaction to one another. Made even more abhorrent, to him, no doubt, as well as to her, because it overrode the fact that they could both rationally acknowledge that they were too different. Intellectually they could both acknowledge that they had too much to lose by following that feeling. Too much to risk. Too many scars, too much history.

  And yet he was right. It was still there, shimmering in the air between them.

  A rap on the window.

  'OK, lovebirds,' the RCMP constable told them with a knowing grin. 'Road's open.'

  She glanced at Gallagher. The stern line around his mouth was white. And she knew that things were going to be worse than ever.

  That night Charlie sat beside Kenny, blankly watching the TV, her mind whirling as she tried to figure out what to do. Today had put them on the edge, she thought. The very edge. Of danger. Of discovery. How easy it would be to throw herself over, into a world fraught with the unknown. Into a world of risk and daring that might eventually lead her to the promise she thought she had seen at the very core of this man. But she had glimpsed that promise so infrequently. Was it really there, or just a rationalisation for the strong physical pull she felt towards him?

  It was there. She knew it. He knew it. And as long as they continued to work together it would continue to surface. They would be forced to make the decision to ignore it, to walk away from it, again and again. Only how long could that last—before one of them, or both of them, capitulated?

  Decisions. She thought of Paul, for the first time in months. Her decision back then had been absolutely without option. As painful as walking barefoot over jagged ice, but still a decision without alternative. But her feelings for Paul had been childish, romance untempered with any form of realism. There was nothing childish, or fairytale-like, about the storm of conflicting emotion Gallagher stirred within her. Anger, confusion, desire and tenderness were all components. It was not like what she had felt for Paul. It was not comfortable, and yet oddly enough it was both more compelling and more real.

  Her gaze flicked to Kenny. If Gallagher asked her to choose—she shut off the thought with brutal force, but not quickly enough. She had just contemplated betraying Kenny and, from the twist in her gut, the contemplation felt as great as having actually committed the sin.

  She stood up and turned off the TV. 'Time for bed, tiger.'

  'I'm not a baby!' Kenny screamed at her. He turned it back on, and sat there mutinously.

  She realised that she had known this was coming, had seen signs of it for weeks. There was a baffling restlessness in Kenny. A stubbornness in him that hadn't been present before.

  She realised, too, that she didn't have the energy for it right now. She couldn't handle a fight with him. 'Turn off the set when you're through,' she said, and wearily climbed the stairs.

  It wasn't really Kenny, anyway, she thought, in bed. It was his relationship with Mike, Tanya's brother, that seemed to be at the heart of these disturbing changes in her cousin.

  With regret, because she had come to like Tanya very much, she spoke to her the next morning.

  Tanya listened to her solemnly, and then shook her head slowly. 'Charlie, I don't think the problem is Mike, so much as it's that Mike shows Kenny what he could be.'

  'Tanya, Kenny's not as advanced as your brother.'

  'It took Mike a lot of hard work to become that "advanced". He's not doing a thing that Kenny couldn't do, with training, and hard work, and support.'

  'That's not true, and it's not fair to let Kenny think it's true.'

  'Let him go, Charlie. Let him test his wings.'

  'No,' Charlie whispered. 'You just don't understand.'

  Tanya shook her head, her eyes gentle on Charlie's face. 'What would be wrong with letting him try a job?'

  'He tried to work once. It was a disaster. It broke his heart.'

  'So now you're going to protect him. From broken hearts? That's part of this business called living, Charlie.'

  For some reason the words struck her as a double-edged sword. It wasn't just Kenny she desperately tried to protect from broken hearts. Perhaps that elusive 'something' that she always felt was missing from her life wasn't romance at all. Perhaps it was that, somewhere along the way, she had forfeited her ability to risk, forfeited her opportunity to ever live life as fully as it was meant to be' lived.

  'Just think about it,' Tanya suggested softly.

  She found herself agreeing. But it just meant that there was one more situation in her life that was left unresolved. And her life was beginning to feel like a collection of unresolved conflicts.

  Perhaps the real resolution was going to be to leave Revelstoke. It was not working out as she had hoped for Kenny. It was not working out as she had hoped for herself. Her trial period with High Heaven was nearly over. Should she leave voluntarily, instead of waiting for the axe to fall?

  She was running again, she realised. Running from risk. She also realised that she was tired, so tired, of running.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Gallagher drove slowly through downtown Revelstoke. Grizzly Plaza looked merry. Christmas lights blinked from colourful awnings. Carollers chirped cheer from under the bright red dome of the bandstand. Shoppers bustled between banks of snow. Some child had even hung garlands around the necks of the three life-size bronze grizzly bears that guarded the entrance to the cobblestoned plaza.

  A perfect Christmas scene, he thought, unmoved. Christmas was only three days away. He didn't feel like Christmas. He didn't feel anything but tired. He had even fobbed off entertaining tonight.

  Because I would have killed Damon if I had to spend one more second with him, he thought. Probably would have killed him already, if it hadn't been for Charlie. She had a knack for keeping the troublemaker in line.

  Still, there had been difficult groups before. Plenty of them. Why was it so different this time? Why was it wearing him down, sapping his energy, making him impatient and irritable? Because of her, he supposed. Charlie. Damn her. He had decided it would take a lot of energy to get involved with a woman like that. Now, he was discovering, it seemed to take just as much energy not to.

  And there they were again, Gallagher thought blackly. Why did he have to see them tonight? Charlie's face, red-cheeked, shining out of the crowd. The guy with her, their arms laden with parcels. Merry Christmas. Ha-ha.

  Since that night at the movies, he seemed to see them all over town together. Just by themselves. He saw them, at a distance, in the downtown stores, getting groceries, out for walks. Once, he'd seen them chasing each other through the waist-high snow of the deserted Queen Elizabeth Park. He knew he should have kept driving, but he hadn't. He had stopped and watched them from a distance, watched their joy-filled faces as they cavorted like young puppies, heard the faint tinkle of her laughter.

  And he'd felt so angry. What right had she to be happy, when she was at the root of the worst confusion he'd felt in his life?

  He didn't want her. She was sharp-tongued, shrewish and entirely too sure of herself. She was, in a nutshell, not very feminine. But, if he didn't want her, he had to admit that he didn't want anybody else to have her, either.

  Didn't want anybody else to tame that independent spirit, to share her strength, to make her laugh that warming laugh, to make the sun rise in her eyes.

  Gallagher became aware that he was still watching them, still frowning. Hell! He put his foot on to the accelerator. He didn't want her to spot him sitting in his truck staring at her. He braked as suddenly as he had sped up.

  The couple had stopped abruptly, and were having a heated discussion. Gallagher unwound his window, unabashedly listening to them. Maybe normally he wouldn't have. Only, the hair on the back of his neck was tingling with a strong sixth sense.

  'Chuck!' the guy screamed at her, throwing down one bag and then the other. Gallagher heard glass breaking, registered and hated the fact that he had a pet name for her in the same instant. He saw the man's movement, sensed the anger in it, and sprang from his truck.

  He wasn't fast enough. He saw her boyfriend push her, send her flying into the snow. For the first time in his life he felt entirely out of control—his rage causing his vision to be entirely washed in red.

  He tackled the man from behind, feeling satisfied at the frightened whimper of surprise that escaped him as he tumbled. Propelled by rage, Gallagher straddled him and lifted his fist, in the back of his mind hearing Charlie's startled cry, her fearful scream.

  'No, Gallagher, no!'

  But, if anything, her loyalty, and the note of pleading in her voice, only enraged him more. The guy deserved to have his lights turned out. He deserved to be beaten to a pulp. His reaction had nothing to do with his confused mixture of feelings about Charlie—he was almost positive of that. It sprang from his belief that men did not push women around—not in the privacy of their homes, not on public streets.