Chapter 15
“Um, excuse me.”A woman’s voice penetrates the sleepy haze fogging my brain. I feel her slipping from the bed and wonder why I have a woman over when I feel so shitty. My body hurts like I was hit by a fucking truck. Twice.
I try to stretch out and find that I can’t. What the hell happened to my bed?
I crack open my eyes and take in the tiny cabin around me.
Oh, fuuuuuck.
It wasn’t a nightmare.
Shae presses the inside of her wrist to my forehead. Seemingly satisfied, she pulls away, and her entire body sags as if with relief.
“What’s that all about?” I sit upright and slowly move to the edge of the bed, noting my right shoulder is especially sore. A bandage peeks out from beneath my T-shirt, reminding me of our encounter with the bear.
“You had a fever.” She stands and crosses to the fire, keeping me from seeing her face, but I swear I heard a catch in her voice.
“Fever, huh. I suppose that explains the soreness.” I cram my feet in my boots but don’t bother tying them. When I stand, the world spins. Shae’s there in an instant to steady me.
“Hold up, tough guy. You need to take it easy.”
“What I need to do is take a piss. I think I can handle that.” She’s acting like I’m some sort of invalid, and I’m not sure why.
“Good. Maybe you can make it to the trees this time.” She opens the door for me with a raised brow.
“This time?” An eerie sense of déjà vu raises the hair on the back of my neck.
“Yeah, I helped you yesterday. Do you remember anything about being sick?”
I avoid her observant stare while slipping on my jacket. “Guess not.” I don’t remember anything, and I hate it. Blank spots in my memory feel like a violation. I’ve never liked the way it feels, which is why I rarely get drunk.
She wraps an arm around me and walks with me to the nearest tree like I’m her ninety-year-old grandfather. I want to tell her I don’t need her help, but I have a sneaking suspicion that I do. I draw the line, however, when she goes to help me with my pants. “I got it,” I snap.
She steps away to give me privacy.
Jesus, tell me she didn’t have to take out my limp dick so I could take a piss. It suddenly hits me what she said. “Yesterday? How long was I out?”
“About thirty-six hours,” she says in a somber tone that snags in my chest.
Fuck, she had to have been terrified. That means I was out of it a full day and two nights. A long fucking time considering how long I’d been without food and water before that. I take out my dick and unload a full bladder, the relief instantaneous. She must have been diligent in getting me to hydrate. I have a feeling I owe her. Big.
“There’s a stream nearby,” Shae announces with exaggerated energy. It’s almost like she’s uncomfortable. There are any number of reasons for someone to feel that way at this moment, but Shae isn’t the type to suffer that emotion, which makes me curious.
“That’s good news.”
“It means water isn’t an issue,” she continues, “but we need to source some food. There are traps hanging on the back of the house. I got two set up yesterday before the light started to fade. I need to go check them. Wasn’t able to work on that bonfire yet, but we can work on that now that you’re feeling better.”
“How the hell do you know how to set a trap?” I finish and tuck myself back in my pants.
“I didn’t.” She snickers. “Still don’t. No clue if I did it right.”
When I look at her laughing despite the epic unfairness of everything that’s happened—not freaking out or angry or despondent—I’m struck by how resilient she is. I can’t think of a single person I know who would be handling this as well as she is.
“Not sure I know how to rig a trap any better than you, but I’ll have a look.”
“Are you sure you’re up for a trek through the woods?” She leads us back inside the cabin.
“How far did you go?” I don’t like the thought of her wandering in the woods alone with that bear out there somewhere. No telling if it’ll come back.
“Not that far. You’ll probably survive.” She flashes me a smile with a wink, and my dick stirs to life.
Incredible.
It doesn’t matter that I was delirious with a fever for the past thirty-six hours. Shae Byrne has a way of getting to me like no one else. Frustration, fear, lust, amusement—my body and mind respond to her on every level, whether I want them to or not.
“You can use some of this for washing up.” She points at a five-gallon paint bucket half full of water next to the stove. “There’s no shower, obviously, but there is an outhouse out back. It’s essentially four walls around a hole in the ground, but it’s better than nothing.”
“You sure I was only out for a day?”
“Yeah, and I even slept the first half of the day yesterday. You’d be amazed what you can get done when there are no distractions.”
“I can imagine,” I murmur while looking at our tiny stronghold for the first time in the daylight. It takes minimalist living to a new extreme yet appears to have everything we might need at first glance. “This place is pretty incredible.”
“I’m glad you think so because … we might be here a while.” The hesitancy in her voice draws my attention back to her. She’s chewing on the inside of her cheek when she hands me a map.
I unfold the well-worn paper. It’s a map of the Quebec province. The cities are primarily clustered along the extensive coastline with the central portion mostly untouched save for a small settlement here and there. A small X has been penciled in a seemingly random location north of Montreal.
“You think this is where the cabin is?”
“It’s a safe bet, I’d say. And if you look at the scale, it says we’re sixty miles from the closest town.”
I let the information sink in. At full strength, I could easily walk fifteen to twenty miles in a day. But I’m not healthy, and we’d be walking in knee-deep snow. That means instead of three days of walking, it could be more like a week. Not to mention, our food situation is sketchy, and the nighttime temperatures would probably kill us.
Getting out of here could be a real problem.
I should be upset with this news. It means we’re likely stuck here until the weather is warm enough for us to survive a journey to civilization. I’m not pleased, but I’m not disappointed either. I’m not sure what I feel. Numb, maybe. It’s like when you say a word too many times in a row and it begins to lose its meaning. I’ve been faced with so many intense challenges in such a short amount of time that one more hardly registers.
But what does register is intrigue.
Alone in the wilderness with Shae, possibly for weeks.
I don’t hate the prospect. I don’t hate it at all.
“Sounds like we need to figure out how to hunt.”