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

her next to him. His warmth, hisstrength, made her aware how tense she’d suddenly become. “Your traditions sound more fun than mine…but I also suspect everybody tends to remember the funny goofs rather than the perfect holidays. I remember one Christmas dinner where the turkey slid off the plate. Another, where all the food was served, and four of us got paged at once to head for the hospital. And another one, when we sat down and realized my oldest brother was AWOL. We found him outside, a little too much scotch before dinner, I suspect, lying in the snow making snow angels and singing. Oh, he was in such disgrace with my dad.”
    “Sounds like your family are ‘good people.’”
    “So do yours.”
    He leaned his head back, slouching down the same way she was, using the coffee table for a footrest. “But you’re here, instead of with your family.”
    She closed her eyes. “I had all my presents for everyone under the tree before I left. They know I love them. Know I’ll miss them. But if I were there…I’d be hearing an endless round of heavy-duty advice. I’ve heard it all before. I have to get back in the saddle. When you’re a doctor, you have to deal with life and death. You can’t always win those battles. It’s not on you. You still do what you can. And you’ve been moping enough.”
    “From everyone?”
    She nodded. “I’ve already heard the same thing, over and over. Christmas would have amounted to a lynching with the whole group ganging up on me. I’m happy not to be there. Happy to have made the choice to come here, blizzard or no blizzard. I needed the time. That’s no crime, darn it.”
    “No, it isn’t.”
    “And I found you. Even if it’s only for a few days,” she said, “I found you.”
    Abruptly she twisted in his arms, hooked an arm around his neck, and kissed him. His mouth was familiar now, the taste and texture, the mesh and melt he created for her and with her, and her eyes were already closed. She didn’t want to talk about herself anymore, was tired to bits of thinking about her life, herself, her reality right then.
    She wanted her lover.
    She wanted the only man who’d ever spun her out of herself, who gave as aggressively as he took, who made her forget who she was and everything she didn’t want to be. With him, when his arms were around her, she was nothing more, nothing less, than a woman in love.
    Whether this was the kind of love that lasted…she didn’t give a damn.
    Her mouth took his. Her arms enfolded his. Her body took him in. That was all she knew, all she wanted to know.

CHAPTER FIVE
    E MILIE WOKE UP IN THE MIDDLE of the night to a familiar dream. It wasn’t the kind of nightmare that made her shake, but the opposite. It was the kind of nightmare that made her ache.
    It was just that little boy’s face in her head. The so-long eyelashes. The two untamable tufts of hair, boyish cowlicks. The pinched fear in his face when she’d first walked in. The trusting smile she’d worked so hard to win from him before surgery…now gone. The light in his eyes…gone.
    The loss of that child…aching in her heart like an insidious piranha.
    Rick’s voice came from the darkness. “Try talking about it.”
    She didn’t know she’d wakened him. Didn’t remember exactly how they’d gotten from the couch to their makeshift bed by the fire. She remembered making love—exquisitely well—but now she seemed to be spooned against him, her back to his chest, his arm around her side. Maybe because she wasn’t looking at him, maybe because it was the darkest time of the night and she was exhausted from wrestling the problem on her own, she started to spill.
    He responded in a deep, sleepy voice, and offered her all the empathy she could conceivably want. “Why should you?” He echoed her own words. “Why should you feel you have to take on the responsibility of life and death?”
    “Exactly. I’m not God. I never wanted to be God.”
    “You could make a