Christmas In Cheyenne

Thought I'd share an excerpt from Christmas In Cheyenne. Enjoy!

Spending Christmas Eve in a remote logging cabin in the middle of nowhere wasn’t Cheyenne’s idea of a dream holiday. It hadn’t been her intention to spend her holiday in the cabin but then things hadn’t been working out as she planned for a while. Ever since she left TJ three months ago it seemed her life had been a constant series of ups and downs, with heart-stopping dips in between. The past forty-eight hours had been one of the heart-stoppingest times she’d had so far.

It had never been her plan to be in the middle of a roaring snowstorm, stranded in a barren wilderness with a strange man. But that’s exactly where she was, at least until the snow let up some. And she would have to wait for the stranger to—well, to do whatever he was going to do. He had been out cold for nearly two days now and she had no idea whether or not he was going to live or die. Cheyenne wouldn’t leave him as long as he was breathing but if he died she was leaving, snow or no snow. She had no intention of being stranded with a dead man. Men had given her enough trouble when they were alive. She couldn’t even begin to imagine what sort of issues could come up if she was hitched to a dead guy. No—if he died, she was leaving.

There were no communication routes out of the cabin that she had been able to discover. She’d checked for phone lines or some sort of radio, but hadn’t found anything even remotely familiar. The battery on her cell phone had died the day of the plane crash. Its battery had been low when she’d boarded the small Cessna but she had thought she’d be charging it in her hotel room on Oahu within hours. Now she knew she’d be more likely to charge the damn thing on Mars than in Hawaii.

Cheyenne tossed another log into the oversized fireplace and stretched, hoping to pull some of the kinks from her neck. Sleeping in an old, lumpy armchair hadn’t done anything great for her back but the only other space was the bed and that’s where she’d put the guy. Had she been sure he wasn’t going to die anytime soon she would have gotten under the covers with him. But she wasn’t sure, and wasn’t taking a chance on waking up with a corpse.

Bunking in the chair gave her a sore body and stiff back but that hardly mattered. It was a reminder she was alive.

A rustling grabbed her attention and she turned to look at the man in the bed. He was staring at her.

Cheyenne rose, conscious she had removed her bra sometime yesterday. She was busty, and her breasts jiggled beneath the loose plaid flannel men’s shirt she had found in the cupboard. She hoped the stranger’s eyes were on her face and not on her other assets.

“You’re awake.” Her voice was loud in the small space, the only other sound the snakelike hiss and crackle of the fire. “It’s good to see you awake. How do you feel?”

She reached the side of the bed and looked down at him. Now that he was awake, she was acutely aware of their close quarters. That and the fact that they were isolated—very isolated.
There was also the matter of his nakedness. It was a situation she didn’t think he had noticed yet, but sooner or later he would figure out his clothes had been removed. Would he mind? Or would he change from lamb to lion and assume she was his dinner?

“I don’t know. Kind of fuzzy, I guess.”

She reached out to smooth his hair away from the bump on his forehead. It was a gesture that came instinctively.

“That’s understandable after what you’ve been through.” She stroked his hair again, more to touch the thick, black waves than to check on the bruised lump. It looked ugly but now that he had awakened she was pretty sure it wasn’t going to kill him.

Torrid Teasers Volume 40 is available from Whiskey Creek Press Torrid. You can purchase it here.