New Year's Wish: After Midnight / The Prince She Never Forgot / Amnesiac Ex, Unforgettable Vows

“Maybe that’s not a bad thing,” she murmured. “I wasn’t trying to slam your choices, Carter. Lord knows I’ve made a few of them that haven’t been the best. I guess I’m feeling out of place so I’m not being my nicest.”

He had the prettiest eyes, she thought. Especially when he leaned even closer and she noticed those little blue flecks in his irises.

“I like it when you’re not all nicey-nice,” he admitted. “And when have you ever made a bad choice? My entire amateur career I’ve heard how perfect Lindsey Collins is.”

She doubted that. Her coach had pointed out every little flaw she had on every run she’d ever taken. Her mother thought her hair was too long. Her sponsor—a manufacturer of a beeswax-based lip balm—thought she needed to look Nordic and had asked her to wear blue contacts for her last photo shoot.

“Well, I’m far from perfect,” she informed him. “And I have many regrets.”

“Like what? Name one.”

She sighed. “The things I regret most are maybe not living as much as I should have. I mean, I’m almost thirty, and my twenties were spent training every day.”

“I can’t believe you regret that. Maybe because of the way your career ended you think you should have done something different...” Carter said.

Their conversation was just starting to get interesting, but their drinks arrived and he got pulled into a conversation with a Thunderbolt energy drink representative.

“Carter Shaw is hot, isn’t he?” a tall, svelte redhead said as she sat next to her at the table.

“Yeah, he is. He knows it, too,” Lindsey replied, turning toward the other woman. “You’re Georgina Poirier, right? Stan’s wife? I’m Lindsey, by the way. I saw you with Stan earlier but you and I haven’t had a chance to meet.”

They shook hands. “Nice to finally meet you,” Georgina said. “And you’re right—Carter does know how good-looking he is. I think that’s part of his appeal.”

Lindsey had to agree. Confidence was very attractive.

The rest of their group filed in, and Georgina left to chat with one of the Hollywood starlets who’d had the lead in the film screened at the film festival earlier today.

Lindsey slowly sipped her cocktail, feeling oddly out of sorts. Truth was, she wasn’t enjoying this party as much as she had the one on New Year’s Eve. It suddenly dawned on her that the reason was that she didn’t have Carter’s undivided attention. Then the band started playing, and the song was that catchy Pharrell Williams’ tune “Happy.”

She grabbed Carter’s hand before she could think twice about it. “Dance with me.”

He smiled at her and followed her out onto the dance floor. Moments later, when he pulled her close and they swayed to the music, moving their bodies together, Lindsey finally knew why she was here tonight. Finally, she admitted to herself that this was what she’d missed and what she craved.

She wrapped her arms around his broad shoulders and told herself that it was the only the music and the nighttime influencing her, but she had a feeling that she was lying to herself. Knew that she wanted Carter all the time, not just after midnight.

* * *

CARTER WAS FLYING HIGH on energy, and not the kind supplied by the Thunderbolt energy drink company. Stan and Georgina had left and he was free to do whatever he wanted. Lindsey was in his arms, the club was jumping and, as far as he was concerned, life was about as good as it could be.

He thought of what she’d said earlier about missing out on her twenties. In a way he’d done the same thing, but he wouldn’t trade it for anything. Without that decade of really hard work he wouldn’t know Lindsey and wouldn’t be holding her tantalizingly close at this moment.

And she felt so good.

The music played on, and the two of them stayed on the dance floor for most of the night. She seemed lost in the music, and the moment they gyrated to the hip-hop beat until he couldn’t resist her for another second. He pulled her off the dance floor and into the first quiet corner he could find.

He trapped her between the wall and his body. She wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him closer to her until they were pressed together. Her breasts rubbed his chest; her thigh twisted around his leg. Her mouth under his, she kissed him in a way that made every other high he’d experienced in his life pale in comparison.

There was magic in her kiss, and he felt caught under her spell. She was tall, so he didn’t have to bend to meet her mouth, and she never left any doubt that this embrace was hers. To the world it might seem as though he was surrounding her, but she’d been invading him body and soul. She’d taken up residence in those empty places inside him and he didn’t question it.

Only wanted to let her have her way with him. Not just physically but emotionally, too. She made him want to be a better man. The kind of man that she’d be proud to call her own.

He knew they weren’t close to being a couple, but he also knew that until he made a few changes she’d never want him to be her man.

But for tonight he was happy enough to let that go. To just let his hands slide up and down her torso, caressing her through the blouse she wore. She moaned and bit his lip with delicate force.

He groaned as all of his blood rushed to his groin, and he knew that every shred of logical thought was gone. Gone for the night at least, but maybe longer because this was Lindsey and all she had to do was to crook her little finger and he would follow her wherever she led.

That was dangerous. But it didn’t matter. All he wanted to do was to keep kissing and caressing her. To do whatever he had to do to stay right there in her arms.

He lifted his mouth from hers, buried his fingers in her soft, silky hair and dropped kisses on her neck. He felt her fingers moving over the tattoo on his neck, and then her mouth was there, her tongue tracing the lines, and then she suckled at the base of his neck as she arched her body against his.

He thrust back before realizing that things were getting out of hand. This was Lindsey, not the kind of girl he wanted to screw in the hallway of a bar. He pulled back but she held on to him.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said.

She seemed startled when she realized they were still in the club. She nodded, and they went back to the table to grab their coats before weaving through the crowd to get outside. He thought the cold January air would help cool him down, but it didn’t.

Not for Lindsey, either. As soon as they were out of the doorway and in the puddle of darkness between the streetlamps, she pulled him back into her arms.

He went willingly, holding her to him with his hands on her butt, anchoring her firmly to his growing erection. Her mouth moved over his, her tongue rubbing over him, and he couldn’t help but rub sinuously against her in the same motion.

These weeks without Lindsey had been too long. He was trying to remember his plan. He wanted to be more than a hot lay for her, but right now his body didn’t care and his mind was outvoted.

He braced his hands on the wall on either side of her head and seduced her slowly with his mouth. She pushed her hands inside his coat, caressing his chest and moving lower. She stroked him through the fabric of his jeans, her hand moving up and down, and she tore her mouth from his to look up at him with eyes dilated with passion.

“I want you,” she said. “You make me forget everything except what you feel like inside me.”

He shuddered and almost came right then. He needed her desperately. But not out here on the street. He stepped back, grabbed her hand and led her to the parking lot where he’d left his SUV. He opened the door and lifted her onto the seat. She pulled him into her arms, wrapped her legs around his hips, and he thrust against her once.

“Get your seat belt on, gorgeous. We need to get home in record time.”

She nodded and he closed the door, going around to the driver’s side as quickly as he could. He stood there for a minute, looking up at the stars as he took several calming breaths. But the fire she’d started in him wasn’t about to be abated.

He got behind the wheel and she put her hand on his thigh, moving closer to his erection. Pulsating with need, he let her caress him as he drove through the town, thankful the traffic was light.

* * *

LINDSEY FOLLOWED CARTER into his hotel room. He held her hand loosely, but the drive from the town to the lodge hadn’t lessened her passion. Today had been another one of those points where she knew there was no going back to her old life. They’d happened at different times—the first when she’d been invited to train with the national team and had move out of her family home at twelve.

But this was different. This was Carter and that hot, hard sexy body of his. She wanted to make it about sex. To balance out the developing feelings she had with him and try to manage it. To lessen the impact of what he was coming to mean to her.

He dropped his keys on a table near the door and hauled her against him. She stopped thinking. Instead she felt as though she was right back in his arms with the electric pulse of the music surrounding them. She grabbed the sides of his shirt and pulled him closer to her, arched her body against his as she had earlier and lifted her head to meet his mouth, which was coming down to claim hers.

He let her take control just as he had before, and she felt a trickle of warmth flow inside her. Felt everything feminine that had once been buried beneath being an athlete now rising up and taking over. She devoured his mouth as she rubbed her hands over his chest and found the buttons of his shirt. She had it undone and pushed off his shoulders in less than a minute.

She caressed his shoulders and down his arms, feeling them flex as he wrapped an arm around her waist and lifted her off her feet. He was strong. Stronger than she’d expected him to be. She wrapped her fingers around his biceps as he set her on her feet and flexed his muscles again.

“Like my guns?”

She nodded. She continued caressing his bare chest as he flicked on a lamp on the nightstand and she realized they were in his bedroom. She undid his jeans and pushed them down his legs, wanting him naked. Needing to keep this in the context that she’d tried to assign it. She didn’t want to notice the picture on his nightstand of the two of them from New Year’s Eve. Didn’t want to admit that this was so much more than just sex.

But it was too late. A flood of emotion washed over her. Gratitude for how he’d seen past her ice-queen facade and lust at seeing his face harden with desire for her. He wanted her. He made her feel as if she was the only girl in the world. And that shouldn’t make her heart feel fuller...but somehow it did.

She pushed him backward and he fell onto the bed. She pulled her shirt up over her head and tossed it aside, then shimmied out of her jeans and underwear. He lay on the bed naked and staring at her. There was something on his face; a quiet emotion that she couldn’t identify. She knew that he was used to women.

The way he’d driven here at that high speed worried her, dimmed a little of her joy. But she pushed that aside. He wasn’t a saint. He was a man.

Human, with all the faults that went with that. And he wanted her.

“Are you going to just stand there?”

“For a minute. It’s not often that I can enjoy you naked and quiet. Totally at my mercy.”

“Gorgeous, you’ve got about three seconds before I’m going to lose it and have my way with you.”

She smiled at him and climbed onto the bed, straddling his lean body. She sat on top of his thighs. “Is this better? More what you had in mind?”

“Hell,” he growled. “It’s better and it’s not.”

He reached up for her breasts, cupping them in both of his hands, and she arched her back, thrusting them at him. Then she slid up his body until she could rub her moist center over his long, hard erection. It felt good as she rocked against him, and he shifted his hips, thrusting up toward her.

Pulse fluttering in her throat, she leaned over him and fused her lips with his. He pushed his tongue into her mouth, and she sucked hard on it as she rocked her hips and felt the tip of his cock at the entrance of her body. She slipped down just a bit so that he was barely inside her and moaned at the feeling. At the anticipation of being filled by him. And then she spread her thighs and glided all the way down on him until he was deeply seated inside her.

His hands slid to her waist, and he lifted his back off the bed, finding her nipple with his mouth as she moved on him. Pulled them both deeper into the web of lust and arousal. She leaned back, bracing her hands on his thighs as she continued to move.

He suckled harder at her breast and then bit lightly at her nipple, and she felt the first fingers of her orgasm shivering down her spine. She arched more frantically against him. Trying to take him deeper until everything inside her clenched and she climaxed hard. He pulled his mouth from her breast and thrust up into her three more times before she felt the warmth of him fill her.

She wrapped her arms around his shoulders, still moving her hips against his as they both slowly came down. He held her close, his hands tangling in her hair as he kissed her until their breathing slowed and they both returned to themselves.

Falling on his side, he cuddled her close. “I’ve missed you.”

13

THE ADMISSION SLIPPED OUT, but Carter didn’t want to take the words back. Deep down he had missed her and the realness he experienced when he was with her. He knew that it would be easy to say he could be himself around her, but that wasn’t exactly true. With Lindsey he could be the man he wanted to be. He didn’t have to be on his guard with her.

True, they competed, but with her it felt good. As though they were both doing it from a kind place, unlike some other people in his life.

“You have?” she asked.

“Never mind,” he said, getting up from the bed and going into the bathroom. When he came back a few minutes later, she was sitting on the side of the bed looking at the picture of the two them.

“Where did you get this?”

“The hotel gave it to me,” he said. “If you’d stuck around that morning you would have seen it.”

She pursed her lips. “True. Why is it on your nightstand?”

“Because I like it,” he said curtly. He’d already said he missed her—what else did she want from him? To admit that he felt something for her he’d never experienced in any of his other relationships? He knew that was the truth, but telling her wasn’t exactly something he fancied doing.

“Fair enough. And I’m sorry for what I said, Carter. I’ve...missed you, too. I think you scared me when you said it,” she admitted. “Because the truth is, I’ve been thinking about you too much.”

“And why’s that a bad thing?” he asked, moving to sit next to her. Nothing was easy with her. And a part of him thought that was probably the way it should be. His father had always espoused the fact that value was only placed on the things he had to work hard to have. But just this once, he wanted Lindsey and him to have something easy.

“It just is,” she said. “Like I’ve said before, I’m figuring out a bunch of stuff. Each day, even over these past two weeks, I can feel myself changing. And you’re part of it. But none of it is real. It’s that discovery of a life I’d thought I’d lost. But I’m also trying to find a new path.”

When she gazed up at him, he could see a glimmer of uncertainty. Yet he saw hope and tenderness, too.

“And what I feel for you is strong. I meant it when I said I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about you.”

“Me, too. That’s why we can take this one moment at a time. Pretending we don’t want each other or that this is never going to happen again is ridiculous. And if I know one thing about us, it’s that we don’t make dumb decisions.”

“Speak for yourself,” she said with a grin. “I’m not sure about being a team. You and me. I’m so used to being on my own.”

“We wouldn’t be a team per se, we’d be dating. We’d be a sort of couple.”

“Sort of couple?” she asked. “How does that work?”

“However we want it to,” Carter said. He knew himself well enough to know that he didn’t do well with rules. He always wanted to break them. But with Lindsey he wanted to take things slow. No rushing in and just jumping. That was why he’d been careful about keeping his distance when he’d needed to and being himself around her.

“Okay, but just know that I might have to put distance between us. Skiing has always been my main focus, and I’m close to getting that back. I don’t know how to balance anything with skiing.”

He understood that. He’d known her for a long time, and she’d always been one of those people not distracted by the spectacle of international games or tempted to cavort with athletes from other countries. She’d gone to bed early, eaten well-balanced meals and skied.

That was it.

“I thought you wanted to maybe change that. Remember how you mentioned that your twenties were a blur?”

She nodded. “I do, Carter. But it has to be for me. If I figured out anything over the past year, it’s that trying things for other people doesn’t make me happy. And it’s also not real.” She blew out a breath. “I have to figure out skiing for myself, but I want you, too. I like this hot little thing we have and I don’t want to lose it. Can you be okay with that?”

No. Hell no. “Sure. Whatever you need. I’m not a serious kind of guy anyway.”

Liar.

He had turned into the biggest fraud...and why? She had just said she didn’t want anything serious. He knew this was karma. This was payback for all the times when he’d played fast and loose with a woman’s feelings. And it sucked.

He was tired of talking, and would love for just a few moments to hold her in his arms and pretend that the facts he knew weren’t real. Pretend that she was his and he could be with her all the time, not just in this unique little sliver of time when her guard was lowered and he was so desperate he’d say anything to keep her.

So he gave in to temptation.

He pulled her into his arms, tucked them under the covers, and she turned on her side to cuddle close to him. He stroked his hand over her hair as she rested her head over his heart and he felt the minute exhalation of her breath over his skin.

He knew this wasn’t real. That it was a chimera of the one thing he craved most in the world at this moment, but he didn’t give a damn.

She tipped her head and he looked into her sleepy brown eyes.

“I’ve missed you, too,” she whispered. Then she lifted her head, dropped a quick kiss on his chest and went to sleep.

He lay awake until dawn crept in with its pinky-pearl color. In a way he felt as though he had everything he wanted in his arms, but at the same time she felt farther away than ever.

* * *

CARTER ASKED HER to put on the mask and get into his SUV. Given that he liked to play little bedroom games, she wasn’t too sure what to expect.

“Are you going to ask me to take my clothes off?”

“Not yet,” he said with a chuckle.

She felt his hands on her waist, and then he leaned over her, pulling the seat belt into position around her. She heard the door close, but all of her senses were hyperalert. She felt the breeze wrap around her the moment he opened the driver’s door, heard the sound of the cloth of his jeans against the leather seats.

“No peeking,” he warned softly.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m kidnapping you.”

“Will there be a ransom note? My folks already think you are something of a bad boy.”

He laughed, and she was reminded of how much she liked the deep timbre of his voice.

“No note. This is just between you and me. I’m sure we can come up with something for you to do in order to achieve your freedom.”

“I’m not sure where you are going with this, Shaw, but I’m game,” she said. And she was. She’d checked her inhibitions at the door when, almost a week and a half ago, she’d gone with Carter back to his place from the bar. Ever since then, they’d played sexy games with each other, trained with their teams for the big charity event kickoff and pretty much lived in limbo the way she had been for the better part of the past year.

The only difference was that Carter was with her now.

He put the SUV in gear, and at first she tried to keep up with the turns he made but soon realized she didn’t know Park City or its surrounding area as well as she thought she did. He had some blues music playing on the radio, and the heat was cranked up, so she wasn’t cold.

“Can I get a hint about this place?”

“You’re going to be cold at first, but then you’ll warm up and be hot and wet,” he said in a deep, husky voice.

The images that came into her head were of the two of them kissing and making out in the little clearing where he’d taken her on New Year’s Day. She still remembered that kiss in the snow and how it had changed everything for her.

“I get the cold, but hot and wet? Give me another hint.”

“It’ll feel like the Caribbean,” he said. “But we’re not flying anywhere.”

He really wasn’t helping her to figure out where they were going. “I guess I’ll have to wait and see. What will we be doing there?”

“Something daring from your resolutions list,” he teased.

“I hope it’s not a cheese tasting,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “I told you I’d start eating cheese when I’m ready.”

He laughed. “No, not at all. That’s one thing I’m happy to let you explore on your own.”

Not cheese. She had put “try something new” on her list, but she had no idea what it would be. She racked her brain, thinking hard...then inspiration struck. It was something Elizabeth had mentioned just the other day. So why not borrow a page from her book?

“Carter, have you ever heard of picking a word for the year?” she asked. “Kind of a resolution, but more an attitude thing.”

“I haven’t, but it sounds intriguing,” Carter said. “What word would you pick?”

“Something about returning to myself. But that sounds lame-o, doesn’t it? Something better—maybe rejuvenate? Great, now I sound like a spa. What about you?” she asked. Surely he’d have an idea of something that might help her come up with a better word.

“Different,” he said.

“Different? How?” She couldn’t see how he’d done anything different this year from the years before. Except that he had retired from amateur snowboarding and had entered the professional realm.

“Just my attitude. Experiencing things that I wouldn’t have before,” he said. “I’m not sure how else to explain it.”

She reached out and fumbled until she found his thigh and squeezed it. “I like it when you let me see the vulnerability behind that big ego of yours.”

He put his hand over hers and squeezed. “That’s your imagination, gorgeous. I’m always confident.”

“Really?” she asked, but then chided herself. Of course he was. He hadn’t fallen. He wasn’t flawed and scared the way she was. He was decorated with his tattoos and his badass, can’t-be-stopped attitude. In a way she resented him for that strength, but she knew that really she wanted it for her own. She wanted to claim it and find her way back to the top of the mountain instead of being on the bottom in a crumpled heap.

“Yes, really. If I feel myself slipping and doubt starts creeping in, I immediately push it out. I do the same with most of my emotions.” There was a pause. “Well, the ones I can’t control,” he qualified.

She realized she was asking him questions she never would have if she wasn’t wearing the blindfold. There was a freedom at not being able to see. It kind of made her forget her fears. In the dark she could divulge her secrets and ask him about his.

“What kind of emotions?” she asked softly. “I mean, I’m the Ice Queen, but even I can’t keep my emotions locked up forever. That’s why I don’t usually get involved with anyone.”