Chapter 3
Ella
I poked around Axel’s bookshelf while he played lumberjack outside. Yes, he was chopping wood in the middle of a freaking snowstorm. A totally normal thing to do, and not suspicious at all.
He’d apologized that he hadn’t prepared the extra firewood because he hadn’t expected company, like that explained everything. But wouldn’t he need to keep the cabin warm even if he was alone? Maybe whatever type of shifter he was didn’t feel the cold.
I’d gotten a good look inside his fridge when he was putting away his groceries. He was stocked up like he was prepping for the apocalypse. Had he planned to hibernate here?
Maybe he was a bear shifter.
My eyes darted around the cabin. The cabin was just two rooms, if you didn’t count the bathroom and the closet. Every piece of furniture in here was oversized. I’d had to climb up onto the chair earlier. Bear-sized?
Even the mugs were the big ones normally used for soups.
I looked back at the row of outdoor nature guides on his bookshelf. There was one titled The Bears of North America, but there was also one right next to it titled Cougar Sightings. He could be either. Weren’t both animals solitary?
I thought of the streaks of white in his hair. A polar bear shifter? Was there even such a thing? I didn’t even know if they existed. I wasn’t going to get hacked to pieces by an axe-wielding psycho. No, I was going to get mauled by a sexy AF bear.
This was when I realized that his massive boots—how big were his feet? And why hadn’t I noticed before?—were still sitting right next to my shoes. Did he wear another pair?
Curious, I went to the window and peeked outside. My jaw dropped and I gawked at the sight.
Axel was out there, shirtless, barefoot, and muscles flexing as he swung his axe in the snow.
I squinted at his feet. At first, I thought he was wearing a pair of furry boots.
But the more I stared, the more I realized that that was his own fur, because those were toes.
Furry toes. That didn’t look anything like a bear or a cougar paw, but I’d heard of half shifting before. Maybe that was what was happening.
I tried not to stare, but that was impossible. His skin was flushed from the cold, but he didn’t seem to feel it. His body moved in a powerful rhythm, like the storm around him didn’t even exist.
Heat pooled low in my belly as I watched him work, his muscles flexing. Every movement was purposeful, deliberate, and way too sexy. I went back to my previous thought of being mauled by a bear, and decided that if it were him, then I wouldn’t mind a sexy mauling. Or two. Or three.
He paused to wipe the sweat from his brow, then turned to me and waved with a panty-melting grin.
Shit! I’d been caught staring.
Maybe I wasn’t the one who needed to be careful, but him, because I wanted to run out there and climb him like a tree.
I waved back, face flushed, then I forced my gaze away. It was just biology. Any red-blooded woman would react to a half-naked, musclebound man chopping wood in the snow like some Norse god.
But the guy was being nice, and he didn’t need a sex-starved hussy jumping him.
I scanned his literary offerings again. No romance novels here. Or cozy mysteries. Why oh why didn’t I bring my e-reader?
I knew why. I hadn’t wanted my nosy brothers to pry into my thorough collection of digital “cliterature.” But now I was stuck with whatever Axel read. But to be honest, his having a bookshelf with actual books was a good surprise.
I glanced around the room to see what else he did for fun and found a rather impressive gaming station set up at the desk, complete with an ergonomic chair (how he managed to find one in his size, I didn’t know), a large monitor, and sizable speakers.
A tiny red light blinked on his modem, signaling that the internet was down, just like our phones.
Axel might live in the woods, but he was fully up to date with modern technological amenities.
I guess there wasn’t much else to do out here.
I picked up a book on the edible plants in the area. That looked interesting and might come in handy one day.
Deciding I wanted a peppermint tea to go with my reading, I went over to his kitchen. He’d said to make myself at home, so I was. The kettle was easy to find. The tea, however, was less intuitive.
Unable to actually reach the cabinets, I pulled a chair over and climbed onto it. The first cupboard boasted row after row of protein bars and three bottles of rum. The next cupboard was full of beef jerky.
Okay, so maybe the whole axe murderer thing was still a possibility. Who the hell needed this much beef jerky?
I was about to open the third cupboard—because yes, I was curious as to what else I would find, and also because I really wanted that tea—when the door slammed open. A gust of wind whooshed in, bringing the blizzard with it and nearly knocking over the stool at the entrance.
Axel stepped in, still shirtless, and holding a giant stack of firewood in his arms like it weighed no more than tiny twigs.
Snow clung to his hair, his shoulders, and his very bare chest, which was annoyingly perfectly sculpted and glistening in a way that made me forget what I was even looking for.
He stomped his feet on the mat, and I blinked. It looked like a normal human foot again. Normal sized too. If I hadn’t known about shifters already, I would have thought I was hallucinating.
“You look confused,” he said, voice low and with a tone of amusement.
There wasn’t even a hint of irritation that I was elbow-deep in his cupboard. So either he had nothing to hide, or he was really good at hiding it.
“I’m looking for tea,” I said, trying to sound casual and not like I’d just been rifling through his kitchen like a hungry raccoon. “Preferably peppermint.”
He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he stomped over to the fireplace and neatly stacked the wood next to it.
Then he grabbed a towel hanging on the wall I hadn’t noticed before and started drying off.
Arms, shoulders, chest. I tried not to stare and failed.
I mean, who goes out into a blizzard topless and comes back looking like a Calvin Klein ad?
“I don’t have peppermint,” he said. “Will green tea do?”
His arm brushed mine as he reached past me for the tea tin, and suddenly the air felt thicker, like the cabin had shrunk around us. I turned my head at the exact wrong moment… or was that the right moment?
Our faces were inches apart, close enough that I could feel the heat rolling off his bare chest, even in the chill of the cabin.
Heat radiated off him, his chest still damp from snow, muscles flexing with casual ease.
My breath caught. His scent wrapped around me, all pine and smoke and freshly fallen snow.
My knees wobbled when his eyes locked on mine, and for a second, I forgot how to breathe. They weren’t just looking at me, they were undressing me, stripping me down layer by layer.
Heat rushed through me, as his gaze dropped to my mouth and lingered there. My lips parted on instinct before I could stop them. My heart thudded hard, like it knew something, but my brain hadn’t caught up to it yet.
I was so sure that any moment now, he’d close the gap between our lips, and—
Axel handed me the tea like nothing had happened. I stared at the tin a full second before I managed to collect myself.
He was already filling up the kettle and putting it on the stove.
“Want one?” I asked, grabbing the two giant mugs still on the drying rack.
“Sure. Thank you.” He dug in the freezer and brought out a tray of that frozen lasagna he’d stocked up on, as well as a chicken pot pie. “Which one?” he asked.
“Do we have garlic bread?”
“We have garlic, butter, and bread. Does that count?”
“Sure does. The lasagna then.”
Axel set the lasagna on the counter and reached for a pan, bare-chested and completely unaware of the havoc he was causing in my brain. The storm outside still raged, but inside, the cabin had settled into something quiet and strangely intimate.
The kettle hissed, and I poured us both mugs of green tea. Steam curled between us, fogging up more than just the windows. Something thick and electric hung in the air.
I didn’t know how to explain it, but things felt... right. And I couldn’t believe I’d thought for even a millisecond that this man, who was currently chopping garlic to make me garlic bread, could harm me.
Finding my ex-husband balls-deep in the neighbor’s wife was bad enough. But when I realized he’d been funneling money out of our joint accounts to gamble, I was sure I’d sworn off men forever. But seriously, does abstinence still count when you’re getting railed by life?
Either way, Axel was giving me second thoughts.
And maybe getting stranded wasn’t so bad after all.