Man of Ice Read Online Free PDF Page B

have.”
    “Are they right?” she asked, glancing at the ring on her finger.
    “Sure,” he drawled sarcastically. “I’m dying for love of a woman I lost and I can’t make it with any other woman. Doesn’t it show?”
    If it did, it was invisible. She laughed self-consciously. She’d known there were women in Dawson’s life for years, but she and Dawson had been enemies for a long time. She was the last person who’d know about a woman he’d given his heart to. Probably it had happened in the years since they’d returned from that holiday in France. God knew, she’d stayed out of his life ever since.
    “Did she die?” she asked gently.
    His chin lifted. “Maybe she did,” he replied. “What difference does it make?”
    “None, I guess.” She studied his lean face, seeing new lines in it. His blond hair had a trace of silver, just barely visible, at his ears. “Dawson, you’re going gray,” she said softly.
    “I’m thirty-five,” he reminded her.
    “Thirty-six in September,” she added without thinking.
    His eyes flashed. He was remembering, as she was, the birthdays when he’d gone out on the town with a succession of beautiful women each year. Once Barrie had tried to give him a present. It was nothing much, just a small silver mouse that she’d saved to buy for him. He’d looked at the present with disdain, and then he’d tossed it to the woman he was taking out that night, to let her enthuse over it. Barrie had never seen it again. She thought he’d probably given it to his date, because it was obvious that it meant nothing to him. His reaction had hurt her more than anything in her life ever did.
    “The little cruelties are the worst, aren’t they?” he asked, as if he could see the memory, and the pain, in her mind. “They add up over the years.”
    She turned away. “Everyone goes through them,” she said indifferently.
    “You had more than most,” he said bitterly. “I gave you hell every day of your young life.”
    “How are we going to Sheridan?” she asked, trying to divert him.
    He let out a long breath. “I brought the Learjet down with me.”
    “It’s overcast.”
    “I’m instrument rated. You know that. Are you afraid to fly with me?”
    She turned. “No.”
    His eyes, for an instant, were haunted. “At least there’s something about me that doesn’t frighten you,” he said heavily. “Go and pack, then. I’ll be back for you in two hours.”
    He went out the door this time, leaving her to ponder on that last statement. But she couldn’t make any sense of it, although she spent her packing time trying to.

Three
    I T WAS stormy and rain peppered the windscreen of the small jet as Dawson piloted it into his private airstrip at Sheridan. He never flinched nor seemed the least bit agitated at the violent storm they’d flown through just before he set the plane down. He was as controlled in the cockpit as he was behind the wheel of a car and everywhere else. When he’d been fighting the storm, Barrie had seen him smile.
    “No butterflies in your stomach?” he taunted when he’d taken off his seat belt.
    She shook her head. “You never put a foot wrong when the chips are down,” she remarked, without realizing that it might sound like praise.
    His pale green eyes searched her face. She looked tired and worried. He wanted to touch her cheek, to bring the color back into her face, the light back into her eyes. But it might frighten her if he reached toward her now. He might have waited too late to build bridges. It was a sobering thought. So much had changed in his life in just the past two weeks, and all because of a chance meeting with an old buddy at a reunion and a leisurely discussion about Tucson, where the friend, a practicing physician, had worked five years earlier in a hospital emergency room.
    Barrie noticed his scrutiny and frowned. “Is something wrong?”
    “Just about everything, if you want to know,” he remarked absently, searching her