Chapter 21 #2
A fire crackled somewhere nearby, its pops and hisses echoing softly off stone walls.
Pine, woodsmoke, and leather scented the air, all familiar, comforting smells I’d always loved.
Strange… I hadn’t thought the afterlife would smell so earthly.
Or if it did, I must have been sent downward instead of up.
With the way I’d behaved lately, I wouldn’t have been shocked.
Eternal torment by a warm fire while still feeling this cold? Fitting.
I forced my eyes open. Everything blurred at first, the world smearing as things slowly came into focus. I was in a cave lit by a dancing, flickering campfire burning not far away. I blinked hard, trying to sharpen the edges, but my eyelids kept drooping, heavy and stubborn.
Something weighted my back, warm and comforting. I tried to lift a hand to investigate, but my arm hung heavy in protest, too cold to move. So I turned my head instead. An arm, thick and muscled, lay draped over me, anchoring me in place.
I blinked again. That was definitely not my arm.
Panic fluttered weakly in my chest, but I still couldn’t move enough to act on it. I looked down at what I’d been using as a pillow and saw skin.
I blinked again, harder this time, and the shape beneath me finally came into focus.
I shrieked and pushed myself away, suddenly wide awake and full of adrenaline.
It wasn’t just Baron, it was a half-dressed Baron, with nothing on from the waist up.
I put a hand up to my face to shield him from my view.
It was then that I noticed what I was wearing.
My outer dress was gone, with only the thin, soggy under slip remaining. I felt exposed.
“What did you DO?” I asked accusatorily, folding my arms tightly across my chest. Luckily, nothing was visible; my dark green slip covered from just below my collarbone down to my knees. But I still felt violated nonetheless.
“I saved your life. You’re welcome,” Baron responded tersely. He got up and tossed more wood on the fire. I tried to avert my eyes from his bulging muscles. It was difficult—even Little John didn’t look like that on wash days.
“Saved my life by taking my clothes?” I snapped, determined to stay angry.
“Yup.” He crouched beside the fire, hands stretched over the flames. To avoid looking at him, I stared at the ceiling of the cave we were in. The last thing I could remember was falling from the cliff into the water below.
“What happened?”
“Dorian shoved you off the cliff, and I knew if I didn’t go down too, that collar would have hung you.”
I paused, digesting this information. It took some time; my brain seemed to be working at half-speed.
“Wait, you jumped?”
“Yeah. I know, it was a stupid move. I had less than a second to decide.”
“Why?”
“You are important to…to the sheriff.” His eyes didn’t meet mine.
I was stunned. Baron had leapt off a cliff to save me. Whatever his reasoning was, he had saved my life. “Thank you.”
Baron met my gaze. “You’re welcome.”
The adrenaline that had initially flooded my system began to fade, and the cold took hold of me again.
He moved to his previous seat and we both sat in silence, shivering against the frigid air, and tried not to look at each other.
I saw our cloaks, boots, Baron’s shirt, and my dress all stretched out to dry.
Of course, Baron would have had to remove them.
We would’ve both died from frostbite otherwise.
We still could, if I didn’t get warm soon.
The fire’s glow didn’t seem to reach very far.
“I remember hitting the water,” I said, teeth chattering. “But nothing after that.”
“You wouldn’t. You passed out,” Baron said, and rubbed his arms to try and coax some feeling back into them. “I swam you back to shore, brought us to this cave, built up a fire, and here we are.”
“Here we are,” I repeated, imitating Baron and trying to rub some warmth into my hands and arms. It didn’t work. It felt like I was just rubbing two ice blocks together. There was no sensation at all in my fingers.
“How long until the clothes are dry?” I asked.
“It’ll take all night,” Baron said glumly. “And then maybe longer still. No chance of anyone coming down to see if we made it out alive, either. By the time I got to shore, I couldn’t see any of them anymore. They left us.”
Panic clutched at my chest once more. A man approaching me with a knife, I could handle.
Diving head-first through glass windows, I could handle.
Navigating across country guided only by the stars posed no challenge to me.
But I had no way to battle the winter weather.
The rest of the company was halfway up the mountain by now.
We had no tent, no dry blankets, nothing.
We were alone and had to somehow survive the coming night.
“We could try and run to warm up,” I suggested weakly.
Baron shook his head. “Pumping cold blood that fast will cause a heart attack.”
Of course. James taught me that. After being exposed to extreme cold, a person needed to be warmed up slowly and gradually.
Even vigorous rubbing would trigger cardiac distress.
Nor could we apply direct heat to our skin.
So even though I longed to plunge my shaking hands directly into the flames, or hold the warm stones surrounding the fire, I held back.
It would cause permanent nerve damage if I did anything of the sort.
“What are we going to do?” I asked, though the answer was already staring me in the face.
Baron didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. The reason I’d woken curled against his chest was painfully, humiliatingly obvious. If we didn’t share body heat while the fire struggled to warm the cave, we wouldn’t make it through the night.
We looked at each other.
“This is awkward,” I muttered. My teeth chattered so violently it made my jaw ache.
Baron gave a short, sheepish laugh. “That’s one word for it.”
I inched toward him, trying to figure out a way to make this less mortifying and came up with nothing. I managed to close the six-foot gap, but when I reached him, my resolve faltered. I hovered a handspan away, arms folded tight against myself.
“No funny business,” I warned, my voice trembling from cold and nerves. “If you try anything, I will kill you right here.”
“On my mother’s soul,” he said solemnly, raising a hand as though swearing an oath. “No funny business.”
I narrowed my eyes at him, then finally leaned in, but only enough for my shoulder to brush his ribs. Baron held himself as stiff as a board, arms glued to his sides. The two of us were doing a spectacular job of sharing absolutely no warmth. Whatsoever.
“This…isn’t working,” he admitted, shivering hard enough that his teeth chattered even harder than mine. His lips were tinged blue; his fingers trembled uncontrollably. “Maybe we should move closer to the fire.”
“Yes! Yes, let’s do that,” I said immediately, leaping at the suggestion.
We shuffled only a few inches closer—it was all we could—but even that tiny shift felt like a lifeline. The fire cracked, throwing weak orange light over us. We looked at each other again, tension thick enough to choke on.
“I guess I can be grateful for your big, fat body now,” I said with the ghost of a smile. I still couldn’t bring myself to actually cuddle against him. This was Baron. My captor. My enemy.
…Or was he?
True, he had kept me chained and confined for weeks. He also could’ve let me fall and let the collar snap my neck and solved a great many problems for himself. But he hadn’t. He had leapt after me without hesitation.
“Tell you what,” Baron said through chattering teeth. He was shaking so hard now it worried me. “Let’s call a truce. Just for tonight. When the sun’s up and our clothes are dry, we’ll keep moving and pretend none of this ever happened.”
I eyed him, doubt twisting in my gut.
“Look,” he continued. “I’m too cold to think about anything except not dying. That’s all I want out of tonight. Survival. Nothing else.”
“Fine,” I agreed grudgingly.
We began trying to get comfortable, with a great deal of snatching away of hands, readjusting, and “Beg your pardons.” We finally reached a suitable position, with my legs curled up in Baron’s lap, and our arms wrapped tightly around each other.
He leaned back against the cave wall, and I rested my head on his chest again.
I could hear his heart hammering madly beneath his skin.
For a moment, all I felt was cold—a brutal, bone-deep cold that made Baron seem less like a man and more like a giant block of ice I’d been forced to embrace. My instincts screamed at me to flinch away, to retreat from the frozen shock of his skin. But I clenched my jaw and forced myself still.
Hypothermia didn’t care about grudges.
Baron was freezing. I was freezing. And unless we warmed each other sooner rather than later, neither of us would survive until morning.