Dammit! She hadn’t even insured the car yet! Now what in the heck was she going to do? Tears sprang to her eyes, but with a will borne of hard times, she blinked them away and stepped out of what was once a running car. At least she hadn’t suffered more than a couple of bruises and a huge dent to her pride. She really hoped the bulk of the physical damage was only to her car and not the other vehicle.

“What in the hell are you doing out on the road if you can’t even do as simple a task as stopping at a big red sign? Did you decide that today would be a great day to plow into a complete stranger?”

Instant fury filled her. Natalie’s eyes burned as she watched Hawk Winchester stalk toward her, his face a mask of irritation.

“Yeah. I just learned how to drive. I thought, what the hell—I’ll go screaming through this incredibly small town, and then I’ll blow through a stop sign and kill my car on the back of some idiot’s butt-ugly truck!”

Sure, she might regret her quick temper later, but right now, she was ready to throw a kicking, screaming, and gleefully adolescent temper tantrum. Too much had happened in the last fifteen hours, and this was just the icing on a very frozen cake. At least her fury was masking the fact that she was still freezing. There was nothing like an exploding temper to heat the blood.

“Why would you be driving a car without snow chains in this weather?”

“I just moved in last night, as you well know, and I haven’t had time to buy chains, not that it’s any of your business!”

“Well, maybe you should have walked. Of course, that’s another disaster waiting to happen in those absurd shoes you’re wearing.”

Natalie had been mad enough before, but his disdainful look made her want to smack the crap out of the man. She had never, ever had the urge to close her fingers into a fist and slug anyone, but at this moment her mind was urging her to do just that.

Too bad her fingers were freezing and incapable of forming a fist.

“You are the most pompous, self-absorbed man I have ever met in my life.” She’d thought of him as gorgeous the night before, but now he counted as monstrous, like his truck. “Just bill me for the damage.” She spun around and did her best to storm off. Not easy in heels and all that snow, and without a working car. But she was so done with this conversation, done with speaking to this man, and done with a ridiculous town that didn’t even have an open store on a freaking Thursday, for goodness’ sake.

“You can’t just go off like that. We haven’t even exchanged insurance information yet!” he yelled, but she wasn’t listening.

“Call the cops on me, then!”

She was feeling pretty damn good about her exit until her feet decided they weren’t going to cooperate. She didn’t even have a chance to stop the fall.

“Natalie!”

He couldn’t catch her this time. One minute she was walking away. The next, everything went black . . .

chapter

3

Hawk reached Natalie just in time to see her head slam into the ground and her eyes roll back in her head. Damn! Possible concussion. He lifted her in his arms and raced back to his truck, where the heater was still running. “Come on, Natalie. Open your eyes,” he commanded.

She began to stir. “What happened?” Her eyes fluttered open, then widened when she saw him only a few inches from her face.

“You fell down and hit your head,” he said, and then he ran his hands over her ankles and wrists.

“Ouch!”

“That’s what I thought. You bruised your wrist, too.”

Dammit! It was Thanksgiving and he was already running late. His mother was going to kill him.

“I’ll take you to the doc. Give me a minute to move your car out of the road.”

Leaving her on the front seat of his truck, he jogged back to her car. She’d crushed her radiator, and there was no chance that the heap of metal would start now. After he put the car in neutral, it took him a few tries for his feet to gain traction on the ground, but he managed to roll the car to the curb before jogging back to his truck. He found Natalie there huddled in a ball, her entire body shivering.

“It’s okay. Don’t worry about the car,” he told her. “But the doc should look at you.” He knew he didn’t sound very reassuring. Normally, it was his job to reassure people who’d been in accidents, as he was a damn fine paramedic as well as being fire chief. So why was he so tongue-tied all of a sudden?

“I’m fine. If you can just drop me off at my house . . .” she said, her voice alarmingly quiet.

“Not gonna happen.”

He didn’t say anything else. He threw his truck into drive and headed out of town. The doc didn’t live far from his parents. Maybe he’d even get a piece of the doc’s wife’s sweet apple pie. That woman had the best pie in the county—hell, maybe the country—though he’d never say such a thing to his mother, or he’d be banned from her table.

Hawk’s gaze strayed repeatedly over to Natalie as he cruised the snow-covered country roads. Forcing his eyes forward, his thoughts strayed to the conversation he’d had with the town meddlers.

We have a perfect tenant for your house. That should have been Hawk’s first clue that the women had been up to no good. When he’d received a phone call from his mother demanding that he make the new teacher feel welcome in their little town, he’d been suspicious, but apparently not enough to say no to letting her use his rental house.

What in the hell did his mother and her best friend, Bethel, think? That he was going to make Natalie some blueberry muffins and show up on her front porch carrying a basket? Hawk didn’t do that. And he certainly didn’t mingle with fiery-tempered red-haired schoolteachers. Not ever.

Hawk liked women. That’s women, plural. He never dated anyone like the schoolteacher, who was really rubbing him the wrong way right now. She was the sort of woman who would want commitment—he could see that clearly from the moment he’d met her in her uptight clothing.

Hawk dated a woman for only one night. Okay, he wasn’t rigid about it. If she was truly spectacular, then he’d make it two or three nights. Third time, however, was the charm. It would only go downhill from there, so he chose to avoid any further contact after that.

This was a prime reason he never, ever dated women from Sterling. It was too small a town and he couldn’t run and hide from them. He’d had several false fire calls from eligible women and their mothers, just to get him to their house. He’d been forced to get a little stern once or twice to stop all that from happening again.

The last such call that had come in had been from a mother who’d purposely set her trash can on fire. He’d lectured her for an hour about the danger she’d put her home, family, and pets in. As he’d walked out the door, the woman had still had the gall to slip her daughter’s phone number into his pocket.

Women! He just couldn’t figure them out.

Arriving at Dr. Holo’s house, throwing the truck in park, and rushing around to Natalie’s side of the vehicle, he lifted her into his arms before running up the walkway to the front door.

“Hawk, what are you doing out on Thanksgiving? And with such a pretty young woman?”

“Hi, Maybelle. This is the new schoolteacher, Natalie Duncan. We had a slight fender bender, and then she fell and hit her head. Wrist seems bruised, as well.”

“Oh, darling,” Maybelle gasped. “That’s not a very good welcome to our town.” Ushering them both inside, Hawk set Natalie on her feet and then Maybelle wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “Alfred just finished his Thanksgiving dinner and was getting ready for dessert, but he’ll certainly take care of you first. Hawk, you just sit on down and I’ll dish you up a piece of pie,” she added, and then led Natalie away.