A Paratrooper in a Pear Tree
“I’m going insane. First I think Nadine’s feeling me up, now I see a parachute in a pear tree.” Destiny Driven straightened and shot the ceiling a furious glare. “It’s the middle of September. There’s a blizzard outside and now I’m seeing things.”
“You actually see a parachutist in a tree?” Jess Blaine, senior editor for St. Paul’s Publishing, asked.
“You’re not going to believe me but he’s in a pear tree.” Destiny’s breath fogged the windowpane; she used the sleeve of her cotton sweater to wipe the glass. “He’s wearing army fatigues. I think something’s wrong. H’s not moving. This is the last thing I need.”
“Hang up and call 911.”
A burst of static blasted Destiny’s eardrums. “Damn. Jess, you there?”
She looked at the iPhone’s screen. No bars.
Nothing had gone right from the moment she’d left St. Paul’s New York headquarters this morning. A momentary lull in the offending white fluff spinning by the wall of windows allowed her a clear view of the man hanging from the branches of the tree. Large neon orange letters on the man’s green and black fatigues spelled out the words “82nd Airborne Division.”
“I might as well get this over and done with.” She shrugged on her denim jacket, zipped up the front, and pulled the hood around her face.
She shuddered the second she opened the door. A blast of frigid air blew the hood off and her hair took flight whipping her cheeks and chin and scrambling her vision. At least two inches of snow carpeted the green turf. Sandals and a blizzard didn’t mesh. Her toes curled as she sprinted across the narrow clearing heading for the grove of fruit and pine trees lining the ridge of the mountain.
Destiny hopped from one foot to the other as she surveyed the man stuck in the trees. He hung around seven feet off the ground. The parachute’s white material lay half in a pine tree, half in the pear tree, and the impact of his landing had scattered brown fruit around the tree’s trunk. A jagged cut ran from his temple to the tip of his ear.
How to get him down from the trees and into the cabin?
She’d have to climb the tree and cut the parachute’s ropes.
Two hours, later, Destiny dragged the sheet she’d rolled the man onto through the cabin’s entrance and closed the door. She slumped to the wooden floor, cupped her hands, and blew warm air over fingers so numb with cold they burned.
“You probably gave me frostbite,” she complained glaring at the wounded man lying prone next to her. “Damn, it’s cold in here.”
“I bet you know how to start a fire.”
How hard could it be?
“I suppose I should clean you up first.”
Getting the helmet off his head proved a harder task than she anticipated. Destiny worked up a good sweat. He had to weigh near two hundred pounds. His shoulders were rock hard and both her hands couldn’t span his corded neck. He groaned when she cut the chinstrap and tugged the hard hat off. He had the usual armed forces buzz cut, a square face, and a nose that had met a few fists at some point in time. Features too irregular to be called handsome. Yet something about him.
“I bet you have an ego the size of this state. And I bet you’ve never even heard of War and Peace.”
His skin smelled of Irish Spring soap and leaves. The layer of stubble covering his chin felt soft and downy.
“Tolstoy,” he said.
Destiny yelped and sat back on her haunches.
He couldn’t have woken up two hours earlier?
Hazel eyes, clear and focused, met hers; then his gaze swept the cabin. “Where am I?”
God, what a voice. His words rumbled and shuddered up her spine and the barometric pressure in the cabin dipped and danced.
It’d been a long time since she’d been with a man.
And she’d never been with a hard-body guy.
Stop Destiny. Stop. You will not think of a roaring fire and naked, entwined limbs.