Desire & Ice: A MacKenzie Family Novella (The MacKenzie Family) Read online

  Desire & Ice

  By Christopher Rice

  A MacKenzie Family Novella

  Introduction by Liliana Hart

  Desire & Ice

  A MacKenzie Family Novella

  Copyright 2016 Christopher Rice

  ISBN: 978-1-942299-32-5

  Published by Evil Eye Concepts, Incorporated

  Introduction copyright 2016 Liliana Hart

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or establishments is solely coincidental.

  Book Description

  Desire & Ice

  by Christopher Rice

  From Liliana Hart’s New York Times bestselling MacKenzie family comes a new story by New York Times bestselling author Christopher Rice…

  Danny Patterson isn’t a teenager anymore. He’s the newest and youngest sheriff’s deputy in Surrender, Montana. A chance encounter with his former schoolteacher on the eve of the biggest snowstorm to hit Surrender in years shows him that some schoolboy crushes never fade. Sometimes they mature into grown-up desire.

  It’s been years since Eliza Brightwell set foot in Surrender. So why is she back now? And why does she seem like she’s running from something? To solve this mystery, Danny disobeys a direct order from Sheriff Cooper MacKenzie and sets out into a fierce blizzard, where his courage and his desire might be the only things capable of saving Eliza from a dark force out of her own past.

  About Christopher Rice

  New York Times bestselling author Christopher Rice’s first foray into erotic romance, THE FLAME, earned accolades from some of the genre’s most beloved authors. “Sensual, passionate and intelligent,” wrote Lexi Blake, “it’s everything an erotic romance should be.” J. Kenner called it “absolutely delicious,” Cherise Sinclair hailed it as “beautifully lyrical” and Lorelei James announced, “I look forward to reading more!” He went on to publish two more installments in The Desire Exchange Series, THE SURRENDER GATE and KISS THE FLAME. Prior to his erotic romance debut, Christopher published four New York Times bestselling thrillers before the age of 30, received a Lambda Literary Award and was declared one of People Magazine’s Sexiest Men Alive. His supernatural thrillers, THE HEAVENS RISE and THE VINES, were both nominated for Bram Stoker Awards. Aside from authoring eight works of dark suspense, Christopher is also the co-host and executive producer of THE DINNER PARTY SHOW WITH CHRISTOPHER RICE & ERIC SHAW QUINN, all the episodes of which can be downloaded at www.TheDinnerPartyShow.com and from iTunes. Look for their new You Tube channel in Spring 2016.

  Also by Christopher Rice

  Thrillers

  A DENSITY OF SOULS

  THE SNOW GARDEN

  LIGHT BEFORE DAY

  BLIND FALL

  THE MOONLIT EARTH

  Supernatural Thrillers

  THE HEAVENS RISE

  THE VINES

  Paranormal Romance

  THE FLAME: A Desire Exchange Novella

  THE SURRENDER GATE: A Desire Exchange Novel

  KISS THE FLAME: A Desire Exchange Novella

  Contemporary Romance

  DANCE OF DESIRE

  DESIRE & ICE: A MacKenzie Family Novella

  Acknowledgments

  I can’t thank Liliana Hart enough for inviting me to into her world and allowing me to play around. And as always, profound gratitude to the wonderful and talented team at Evil Eye - Liz Berry, M.J. Rose, and Kimberly Guidroz, as well as Asha Hossain and Kasi Alexander.

  An Introduction to the MacKenzie Family World

  Dear Readers,

  I’m thrilled to be able to introduce the MacKenzie Family World to you. I asked five of my favorite authors to create their own characters and put them into the world you all know and love. These amazing authors revisited Surrender, Montana, and through their imagination you’ll get to meet new characters, while reuniting with some of your favorites.

  These stories are hot, hot, hot—exactly what you’d expect from a MacKenzie story—and it was pure pleasure for me to read each and every one of them and see my world through someone else’s eyes. They definitely did the series justice, and I hope you discover five new authors to put on your auto-buy list.

  Make sure you check out Troublemaker, a brand new, full-length MacKenzie novel written by me. And yes, you’ll get to see more glimpses of Shane before his book comes out next year.

  So grab a glass of wine, pour a bubble bath, and prepare to Surrender.

  Love Always,

  Liliana Hart

  Available now! Click to purchase.

  Trouble Maker by Liliana Hart

  Rush by Robin Covington

  Bullet Proof by Avery Flynn

  Delta: Rescue by Cristin Harber

  Deep Trouble by Kimberly Kincaid

  Desire & Ice by Christopher Rice

  Table Of Contents

  Book Description

  About Christopher Rice

  Also by Christopher Rice

  Author Acknowledgments

  An introduction to the MacKenzie Family World by Liliana Hart

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Discover the Liliana Hart MacKenzie Family Collection

  Discover the World of 1001 Dark Nights

  An excerpt from Dance of Desire by Christopher Rice

  Special Thanks

  1

  “Danny Patterson,” Sheriff MacKenzie growled. “If you follow your hormones into the middle of the worst blizzard to hit this town in years, you’re gonna be looking for another job, son, I promise you!”

  Danny was willing to bet serious cash his boss wanted to use a different word than hormones, a word not quite suitable for public broadcast. But Cooper MacKenzie managed to keep things clean when he was speaking over the police radio, even when he’d just been forced to grab the mic from the dispatcher because one of his deputies had disobeyed an order.

  At twenty-three, Danny was the youngest member of the department, and unlike his fellow deputy, Lane Greyson, he didn’t have a second of military experience. That explained why, even though he’d been wearing the badge for over a year, everyone in the department still called him The Kid.

  Working to overcome that not-so-intimidating title wasn’t easy.

  It meant always be willing to prove that yes, he really did belong in the department despite his age and lack of experience. That the chance Cooper MacKenzie had taken on him was going to be worth everyone’s while. Sometimes it meant being the first to volunteer for grunt work, like rounding up wayward steer during a torrential downpour and corralling them through a gauntlet of aspen, as he’d done just a few weeks before. And it always meant being the first to follow orders. Always. And yet, here he was, going rogue on the eve of one of the worst snowstorms to hit Surrender in decades.

  “She’s up there by herself, boss,” he responded. “When I saw her this afternoon she said she was headed to the old Laughlin Place.”

  “Yeah, I heard you the first time,” Coop said. “Lot of people are going to be on their own during this storm and we gotta be ready to help all of ‘em. So exp
lain to me, why is it you’re not pulling a u-ey and getting back to the station like I said?”

  “Laughlin Place’s been empty going on three years now. You really think she’s got a working heater up there?”

  “What I think is Eliza Laughlin grew up in Surrender and she knows how to handle a snow storm. Alone.”

  “She’s been gone a while, sir. She might be out of practice.”

  And she’s Eliza Brightwell again, he thought. I checked.

  “And she’s not your teacher anymore either, is that it?” Coop asked.

  “Sir, should we take this to cell phones?”

  “Oh, I bet you’d like that, wouldn’t you? No. Let’s stay right here on radio so I can let everyone with a scanner know that Danny Patterson’s disobeying an order from the sheriff because of some schoolboy crush he can’t let go of.”

  He had nobody to blame but himself for this dig.

  He’d always had a reputation for flapping his gums. When he’d worked as a ranch hand fresh out of high school, the other men had worried the cattle might all drown themselves just so they wouldn’t have to hear any more of his questions about weather patterns and plant life.

  It was a mistake, telling Coop about his run-in with Eliza down at Rawley Beamis’s wilderness store just that afternoon. He should have just kept to himself how concerned he’d been to see his former teacher rushing through the aisles as if her life depended on her next purchase. Make that his still radiant, still beautiful former teacher; the same woman he’d fantasized about for years during English class, wondering what she thought about when she got that faraway look on her face while her students were bent over their tests. Wondering if he could grow up to be the man she thought about in those quiet moments.

  Surrender was a small town, around 3,000 residents at last count. Maybe if the town, and the high school, had both been just a little bit bigger, Eliza wouldn’t have ended up being Danny’s English teacher for four years straight, a length of time during which his attraction to her went from innocent crush to full-blown desire. But there was no changing the past, or the size of his hometown, for that matter. And, given his racing pulse when he’d laid eyes on her again for the first time in years, there was no changing his attraction to Eliza Brightwell either.

  Still, he should have kept all this to himself and never should have uttered a word of it to Cooper MacKenzie or anyone else in Surrender.

  The town was just too small for secrets. A postage stamp of a place, really, nestled snugly at the bottom of a hill, with hundreds of acres of pastureland on either side of one long road. The surrounding mountains were so beautiful they could make atheists into believers, but like all small towns, people here didn’t put much stock into minding their own business. It just wasn’t possible.

  But if Cooper MacKenzie had minded his own business, Danny wouldn’t have a badge, a Smith & Wesson, or the patrol car he was currently using to disobey the man’s order. He’d probably still be working as a hand out on the Proby Ranch, bored out of his mind and driving all the other men crazy with his constant talk.

  True, he’d loved working outdoors, had loved the changes backbreaking work had made to his once gawky body. But then one night when they were all drinking at Duffey’s Bar and Grill, Sheriff MacKenzie had overhead the boys giving Danny a ream of crap about his perpetually running mouth. Big Caleb Watson, their resident Texan, had said the words that finally drew the sheriff over to their table. “Danny, I swear to God, how many times can we identify every type of tree on that spread? If you wanted to be a botanist, you should have gone to the damn college.” When he saw the sheriff standing over him suddenly, Danny thought the man might know more about his story than the rest of them did.

  Truth was he had wanted to go to the local college, but the necessary scholarships had failed to materialize. Coop’s brother Riley taught archeology there, and so when the sheriff first offered to buy him a beer, he found himself wondering if the guy might have a line on some night classes or something. But no, the only MacKenzie brother to go into local law enforcement had been working a different agenda that night.

  “You love Surrender too much to leave it, but you also love giving people the third degree,” Cooper had said. “Sounds like I’m the one you should be working for, Patterson.”

  The next day he’d started saving.

  A few days later, he’d signed up for three different online courses in law enforcement.

  In another week, he was driving two hours to Myrna Springs to put in hours on their local shooting range, and on the drives back and forth he’d pull over to pick up any boulder pieces he could haul in the back of his truck so he could add them to his backyard gym.

  So what if he’d never attended anything close to a police academy or parachuted into Afghanistan under the cover of darkness? By his first day with the Surrender Sheriff’s Department, he had the body of a Greek god and the firearms qualifications of a secret service agent.

  None of that would matter now if he incurred Coop’s wrath, however.

  “I just want to check on her, Sheriff. That’s all. I just want to make sure she’s got everything she needs to stay safe up there.”

  The answer was silence, studded with some light crackles that suggested interference from the storm’s approach.

  The ominous, piled-high clouds seemed far behind him. But they only seemed that way.

  Contained in his rearview mirror, they looked deceptively small, even though they were swollen with snow and crawling over the peaks like something out of a science-fiction movie.

  The cold front driving them was the real monster, however.

  It was the middle of April, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t be a helluva storm.

  Everyone in Surrender knew full well the Arctic was perfectly willing to take their state into its icy clutches pretty much any time of year. Yesterday the temperatures had been in the seventies, but the forecast had been for a fifty-degree drop in less than twenty-four hours. They were already twenty degrees of the way there. The worst part, as always, would be the winds, the powerful arctic winds that could whip an inch of snow into a twenty-foot high drift in no time flat.

  When he thought of Eliza Brightwell alone on that old ranch in the middle of that icy nightmare… Well, that just wouldn’t do. That just wouldn’t do at all.

  But Coop was right. She had to know what was coming. Everyone in town did.

  All day farmers had been rushing to pen what livestock they could. Rawley Beamis had been prowling the aisles of his store that afternoon, shouting out warnings that he’d be closing down in a few minutes, even as Eliza had searched desperately for a shovel.

  Just one really good shovel, she’d told the clerk breathlessly.

  But you needed a lot more than one good shovel to make it through a blizzard, and he wasn’t exaggerating when he’d said she’d been gone a while. Four years, to be exact.

  But her time away wasn’t the only thing that worried him. It was how distracted she’d seemed.

  Not just distracted, Danny told himself now. Not just rushed. She was something else. She was terrified.

  Still, the sight of him all grown up, sporting the body he’d worked so hard on, had startled her out of her frenzy. And yes, he’d seen a flare of lust in her expression when they’d first locked eyes. That lust had quickened his already galloping pulse as he’d approached her.

  She’d certainly never looked at him that way when he was her student, that was for sure. And yeah, sure, okay, maybe his memory of that look was part of what now had him driving farther away from the center of town. Or maybe it was the strange, fragmented conversation that had followed.

  “Just checking on some things up at the old place,” she’d said when he’d asked what brought her back to town.

  “Your husband’s place?”

  “Ex-husband,” she’d quickly corrected him, then clearly regretted it since it made her answer sound even stranger.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,”
he’d said.

  “Don’t be. I’m not.”

  “But you’re still friends apparently, since you’re checking on his place.”

  “Something like that, yeah,” she’d muttered.

  Lance Laughlin, the man Eliza had married. Handsome as sin and determined to get out of Surrender as soon as he’d landed Eliza’s hand in marriage. His parents had been ranchers, but from a young age Lance had aspired to be everything from a famous actor to a tech mogul to pretty much anyone who just made piles of money and bought yachts. And he’d held these aspirations loudly and in public, and in a way designed to make anyone who didn’t leave Surrender the minute they turned eighteen feel like a sheep’s cousin. Worse, Surrender was largely in agreement that Lance didn’t seem to have the talent or the work ethic his aspirations required.

  Thanks to the miracle of social media, just that afternoon Danny had learned that Lance still lived in a Santa Monica townhouse, drove a Jeep Cherokee, took lots of douchie selfies on the beach and while driving, and when he was just out of the shower and while he was eating and while he was hiking in the mountains. Not a bad life, but certainly not the one he’d bragged about having as a teenager, and his inheritance probably funded most of it.

  It was damn near impossible to think of the guy as rightful owner of the Laughlin Place. He’d sold off most of the acres and all of the horses and cattle as soon as his parents died. The home and horse barn had sat empty for so long they now made up the closest things Surrender had to a haunted house. There were even rumors Lance had let the place fall to ruin because he was using it as some kind of tax shelter.

  The idea that the woman of his dreams had ended up married to a full-on slime ball, as opposed to just a douche, had always pained Danny more than he cared to admit. He’d wanted her to be happy at least, even if she wasn’t going to be his. Even if his feelings for her, still Jägermeister-strong after all these years, were just as Coop said: a schoolboy fantasy.