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Trapped in the dilapidated tree house, Suzy shivered violently. She didn’t know where her wits had been when she had run off into the trees. She could have done with the knowledge in advance that someone had mysteriously cut the woods in half with a giant metal fence, which meant that it was no longer possible to reach the main road on the other side of them. Getting over the fence had entailed climbing a tree and jumping and, in that mad panic that had gripped her where only adrenalin ruled, she had managed those actions fine even if the dress was the worse for wear as a result. The snow coming on had persuaded her to head for the old tree house to take shelter for a while.
And then everything else that could go wrong had gone wrong. The tree house she remembered from childhood had lost its roof long ago and offered no shelter whatsoever. She had only just managed to make it up onto the platform when the ladder, which had cracked under her weight, fell and smashed to pieces. Now she was stuck until she had gathered the energy to climb back down the tree, but she was horribly cold and she no longer trusted her arms and legs to keep her safe. Worse still, it hadn’t even occurred to her to snatch up her phone when she ran and, dazed with physical misery and aches and pains, she was feeling very sorry for herself even while she wondered vaguely why she wasn’t more actively concerned about her predicament.
Ruy walked along the fence and found the obstruction. It was a branch, he assumed until he reached it and saw that it was the remains of a very roughly put-together ladder. He tossed it away from the fence.
‘It would have to be you,’ a woman’s voice pronounced in a tone of loathing. ‘Just my luck.’
Startled when he had believed himself utterly alone, Ruy swung round and glanced up in sheer disbelief at the woman swinging her boot-clad legs on the edge of a tumbledown wooden structure that he had not even known existed in his woods. A tree house, he realised, or at least the remains of one, something he had craved as a child but had never been allowed to have.
‘Is this the part where I say, “Rapunzel... Rapunzel...let down your hair”?’
‘You’re not my prince!’ Suzy hurled at him accusingly, not in the mood for a fairy-tale allusion. ‘But you can still get me down from this blasted tree!’
‘Sí, Your Highness,’ Ruy countered with appreciation at such rudeness and the novelty of it. ‘The use of the word please might be sensible in the circumstances.’
‘You’ve got smartass written all over you!’ Suzy raged down at him incredulously.
‘I’m stuck... I’m freezing and it’s snowing. So, please, please, please!’
Ruy stared up at her, dark-as-pitch eyes narrowing in disbelief and flaring gold as he registered the veil fluttering into view behind her fall of copper spiral curls. ‘Are you wearing a wedding dress?’ he almost whispered.
‘Are you going to help me get down from here? Or are you planning to keep on asking me stupid questions until I’m a frozen corpse?’ Suzy snarled, her tongue stumbling round the words and slurring the syllables.
Involuntarily, Ruy grinned. ‘You’re not that far from the ground. Jump down and I’ll catch you,’ he told her.
‘And you’re smiling at seeing me in this condition!’ Suzy framed, almost incandescent with fury at such stupidity while she wondered why she could no longer speak properly. ‘Don’t you recognise an emergency?’
All that passion fired her eyes to green-glass brilliance in her pale little face. His fingers itching for a stick of charcoal and a blank page, he studied her with the fierce enchantment of a born artist and walked beneath the tree house. ‘Just push yourself over the edge and fall,’ he instructed.
‘I’m scared of heights, you dummy!’ Suzy launched.
‘So close your eyes and trust me,’ Ruy advised without sympathy, ‘while you’re telling me how you got over my fence.’
‘Your fence...should’ve guessed. I climbed a tree and jumped down.’
‘I thought you were too scared of heights,’ Ruy pointed out, since she had yet to move an inch.
‘I was running on adrenalin just then,’ she mumbled shakily, and he regretted mentioning the height because he had already noticed the shivering and the slurring of her speech and the pale colour of her lips and he suspected she was suffering from hypothermia.
‘You’ve left him at the altar...haven’t you?’ Ruy gathered harshly, keen to distract her because she was shaking so badly without seeming to be aware of it that he was beginning to appreciate that she could also be deep in some kind of shock.
She nodded her head jerkily in silence.
‘Not a very kind thing to do,’ Ruy dared.
‘How dare you?’ Suzy shot as hotly at him as he had hoped, and she slid off the edge of the platform and down into his arms.
Ruy staggered as he caught her because of the force of her fall but she was a slight weight, a small, curvy shape that smelled of oranges and sunshine. Weird, he thought, abstractedly drinking in the scent of her hair, liking it in some even weirder way. ‘I just wanted you down from the tree as fast as possible,’ he murmured soothingly as he tried to put her down again. ‘Winding you up seems to work a treat.’
Her legs buckled and he told her to lean against him while he removed his coat and wrapped it round her before lifting her again.
‘I don’t know why you wind me up so much...well, actually I do,’ Suzy muttered jaggedly, from the depths of his giant warmly lined jacket. ‘If you hadn’t been in the bar last night talking to me, it wouldn’t have happened...but maybe I’m lucky it happened because I had no idea he would do what he did, so maybe I should be thanking you instead of thinking it was all your fault because he thought you were flirting with me.’
‘How was it my fault? And what did happen?’ Ruy pressed, strong arms closed firmly round her and making her feel oddly safe for the first time after long hours of agonising while she had lain sleepless throughout the night.
‘Nothing...nothing happened,’ she muttered, struggling to concentrate.
In the stark harshness of the spring light, Ruy looked down at her and registered the bruise on her cheekbone and the reddening and hint of swelling round her little nose. ‘He hit you? That’s why you left him standing?’ he demanded rawly.
