Harlequin Romance March 2021 Box Set Cara Colter (the mitten read aloud TXT) 📖

She would be proactive, she decided. She pressed the hazard lights on, and then veered toward the shoulder. And then it felt like the steering wheel jerked from her grasp and the car was moving of its own volition. It was spinning, she realized numbly. Black ice! Losing all sense of balance and control with the kaleidoscope that was flashing in her eyes, Ronnie closed her eyes and braced herself for the inevitable impact.

She opened her eyes timeless moments later, realizing there hadn’t been a life-threatening impact. In fact, there hadn’t been a crash at all. Her car had simply skidded onto the shoulder of the road and then come to a stop in the snow-covered field, several yards from the stand of pine trees parallel to the road. Thank God, she thought, her jaw muscles unclenching. She was unhurt but her stomach was coiled in a tight knot, and her heart, which she suspected might have frozen for a few seconds, was now clanging in post-shock alarm.

Blinking, she peered out the window and saw the black truck that had been behind her was slowing down and coming to a stop on the shoulder. Her jaw dropped. “Jerk,” she muttered. He could have been going slower, in which case she wouldn’t have felt the compulsion to let him drive by.

And she wouldn’t be stuck in this mess right now.

She felt her cheeks burn at the thought of what might have happened, how she could have been killed if her car had slammed against a tree trunk. Or an oncoming vehicle. Some angel had been watching out for her.

And Andy…

Ronnie took several deep breaths, trying to calm herself. The worst hadn’t happened, thank heavens. She had to concentrate on what she needed to do now to get herself and her car back on the road.

She watched as the door of the truck swung open and the driver emerged. Her view was diminished by the icy drizzle accumulating on her windshield, but when she tried to start the car to get the wipers going, the noise her car emitted made her turn off the ignition right away. Muttering an expletive, she waited for the driver to approach. She squinted, catching a glimpse of russet hair before the man whipped the fur-trimmed hood of his parka over his head and started walking toward her vehicle.

He was a giant, well over six feet, and the size of his green parka and jeans-clad legs hinted at broad shoulders and an athletic physique. He took huge strides, but sank with each step into the knee-high snow. Which meant that she would be sinking up to her thighs if she ventured out.

Ronnie shivered. Her fingers were starting to feel numb, even with mitts on. The freezing rain pelting down on the hood of the car seemed to have intensified, and she felt her stomach muscles tighten.

She had to call Casson. She hadn’t told him or his wife, Justine, that she was heading into town…

She fumbled to get her cell phone from her handbag, and groaned when she saw that the compartment where she usually kept it was empty. It must still be on the kitchen table, where she had absentmindedly placed it before searching for her boots. She was stranded in a town she had just moved to, and the truck driver was getting closer, now just a few giant steps away. She would have to rely on him to help her. The first thing she needed to do was to call her cousin. Then she’d need a tow.

Ronnie took a deep breath, trying to steady her jangled nerves. She was irritated with herself on several counts. First for being oblivious about the weather conditions, and second for skidding off the road, and third for forgetting her phone and being in a position where she had no choice but to depend on a stranger for help. Trust that he meant well…

* * *

She had always prided herself on being self-sufficient, but even more so when her husband had decided that he couldn’t handle dealing with their son’s life-threatening illness and abandoned her and Andy when he was midway through his series of chemo treatments.

The fact that he had found solace with another woman before he left her had been just as hard a blow, and Ronnie had had to wrestle through alternating feelings of shock, sadness, anger, disbelief, resentment and self-pity.

She had struggled, but she had been fiercely determined to carry on, for the sake of their son. Ronnie had vowed to herself that she would never depend on a man again. For anything. And now here she was, vulnerable and helpless, with no choice but to depend on this mountain of a man. It was a situation that could have been prevented, she berated herself for the umpteenth time.

Ronnie tapped her fingers against the edge of the steering wheel. They slowed as the man came into view. She could make out his furrowed eyebrows, caught glimpses of startling bluish green in his narrowed gaze, a straight nose and ruddy upper cheeks, and glistening, golden-red scruff that covered his upper lip, well-defined jaw and chin. It matched what she could see of the guy’s hair under the hood of his parka. Reluctant to let in the freezing rain, Ronnie waited until the man was a couple of feet away before rolling her window down a few inches. She felt a flutter shimmy down the length of her. He looked like a Viking. A Viking in a Canadian parka.

“Hey there, are you okay?”

His voice was baritone deep, the kind of voice that matched the height and breadth of him, and for a few seconds her words caught in her throat. She was tempted to ream him out for being the cause of her decision to get off the road, which led to her spinout, but conversely, she was grateful he had stopped and had been concerned enough