Chapter 6 MAYA
MAYA
Warm.
That's the first thing. The feeling of warmth against the full length of my body. More warmth than I've felt since California.
For a few seconds I let it be, the way you let yourself stay in a dream when you know you're waking up and the waking is worse. The air smells like woodsmoke, and the light behind my closed eyelids is amber, flickering, alive.
Then the throbbing starts. Low and steady above my left eye, building from background noise to something that demands attention, a pulse of its own keeping time against the inside of my skull. I try to move my hand toward it.
I can't.
Something is holding my arms down. The weight is too warm for a restraint, too specific, settled against me.
Heavy across my middle. And my face is resting on something that isn't a pillow, something that has the give of muscle underneath skin, something that is breathing in a rhythm slower than mine.
I try to make sense of it before I open my eyes.
My brain, still sluggish, gives me the information in pieces: weight across my ribs.
A body curved against my back. The full contact of another person from shoulders to knees, my head on a bicep, and my nervous system registers the shape of it, the closeness of it, before my mind has finished assembling the picture.
Every muscle between my throat and my stomach locks at once. Exposure. Hands on me that I didn't agree to.
I pull a slow breath in through my nose trying to control the panic rising.
Pine. Leather. Something clean underneath, faintly cedar, and the familiarity of it stops the tightening before it crests.
I know this smell. I can't place it to a face or a name, not yet, but some part of me knows it's not a threat.
That part is louder right now than the part that wants to bolt, and I stay with it, breathing it in again. Slower.
The arm across my middle shifts. The weight lifts slightly and then resettles, a sleeper adjusting, and the motion brings the smell closer. Pine and leather and warm skin.
"She's waking."
The voice comes in a whisper from across the room. Quiet. Owen.
The arm lifts away from me. The warmth goes with it, the sudden absence of contact along my entire back, and I make a sound I didn't plan to make.
Something between a protest and a whimper that comes from the animal part of my body, the part that doesn't know about context or caution, the part that only knows it had something and lost it before it was ready.
A hand on my shoulder. Careful. Fingers spreading wide enough to hold me as he turns me onto my back, the pressure firm enough to guide and slow enough that my body can follow without bracing.
Jace is looking down at me.
Close enough that the firelight catches the line of his jaw, the auburn in the stubble at his chin.
His eyes are direct, pale blue and assessing, but the thing behind them is not the expression I've seen on Jace's face before.
No edge. No amusement. No provocation waiting in the corner of his mouth.
Something careful sits there instead. Watchful.
"Hey," he says. "You're okay."
I look at him. Then past him, at the room.
My brain assembles the picture in visual pieces: stone fireplace, floor to ceiling, the fire going strong and orange and real.
Dark wood beams above. The dim suggestion of an antler chandelier, unlit, its shadow thrown huge and branching across the ceiling.
Owen in an armchair to my left, forearms on his knees, watching me with a close attention that registers against every surface of my skin.
Reid on the sofa beyond him, already coming upright, already moving, the transition from rest to fully operational happening in a single motion.
I'm on the floor. In front of the fireplace. In a sleeping bag.
With Jace.
"What..." I say. It's the only word I have.
Reid drops to his knees beside me. His hands come to my face before I've finished processing, two fingers under my jaw finding the pulse point with the precision of someone who has done this hundreds of times and never once needed to fumble for it.
Then a small flashlight from his back pocket, the beam into my right eye, then my left.
The light sends the throbbing above my brow into something sharper and I wince.
"Follow the light," he says.
I follow it. His face is close enough that I can see the specific blue of his eyes shifting toward grey in the low gold of the firelight. The focus in them is total.
"What's today's date?"
"March." I have to think. The gap between where I am and where I was is complete, a wall of nothing. "Seventh? Eighth? One of those."
"What's your full name?"
"Maya Sophia Reeves." The questions are orienting me.
"Do you know where you are?"
"No." Then, looking around at the stone and the wood and the fireplace and the three large men arranged around me like points on a compass: "Your home?"
He nods. His hand moves to my forehead, careful, fingers reading the area above my left eye. I feel the tenderness of the wound, the skin hot and swollen, and I pull back slightly.
"Easy." His voice doesn't change. "Superficial cut. You're going to have a headache for a day or two." He sits back on his heels, the assessment still running behind his eyes even as his hands leave my skin. "Do you remember what happened?"
I try. There's the woodpile. The cold. The logs shifting under my feet. And then nothing.
"The woodpile," I say. "The stack collapsed." I can feel the shape of it, the understanding that something fell on me, but the actual memory stops at the sensation of falling and starts again here, in this sleeping bag, on this floor. "And then I was here."
"We found you behind the cabin," Owen says from the armchair. "We noticed the smoke was missing from your chimney. We went to check."
I look at him when he says this.
They noticed. Which means they were looking.
I wait for the feeling that should produce.
The tightening. The protection instinct, the sense of being watched without consent that has lived in my nervous system since Daniel.
I wait for it and it doesn't come. What comes instead sits lower and quieter than fear, closer to the warmth I woke up in.
Owen holds my gaze. He doesn't explain or clarify what he said.
Jace comes from the direction of the kitchen carrying a mug. He holds it out to me without ceremony. "Drink this. All of it."
I take it. Both hands around the ceramic, the warmth immediate against my palms. My fingers are trembling and the surface of the liquid catches it, tiny concentric rings I can't hide. Ginger and honey, hot enough that the steam curls against my chin.
I drink. The warmth tracks through me from the center of my chest outward. I close my eyes for a second. When I open them all three of them are watching me, and the quiet in the room has weight to it, the particular silence of people holding something back.
"Thank you," I say. The words too small for what's behind them. "For finding me. I think you might have saved my life."
"You'd have been all right," Reid says. Like the statement itself is the end of the conversation, which is the most generous assessment of what would have happened to an unconscious woman in freezing temperatures with a head wound.
"Definitely," Jace says, which is certainly not true and we both know it. His mouth does something that wants to be a smile and stops short.
Owen says nothing. Which is the most honest response in the room.
"How long was I out?"
"Couple of hours," Reid says.
I look at the sleeping bag. At the space where Jace was lying beside me, the fabric still holding the impression of his body, the warmth still present if I let myself feel for it.
It's then that I register he's not wearing a shirt.
I look down at myself.
I'm wearing a grey t-shirt that falls past my hips.
Sweatpants with a drawstring cinched tight and the cuffs rolled twice and still pooling at my ankles.
Both of them smell like laundry soap and something underneath it, the pine-and-leather scent that stopped my panic ten minutes ago.
These are not my clothes. The cotton sits against my bare skin where my own layers should be, soft and worn in the way fabric gets when someone has lived in it, and the intimacy of that registers in my body like a low current.
"We had to change you out of your wet clothes," Reid says. "Your core temperature was too low. Skin-to-skin contact is the most effective field treatment for moderate hypothermia."
Skin-to-skin. I look up and see Jace pulling a sweatshirt over his head.
The visual information arrives whole and immediate and completely without my permission.
The firelight does nothing to diminish it.
The evidence of every physical thing he's ever done is written in the specific way muscle sits on a man who uses his body for actual labor.
The tattoo sleeves I'd noticed before are detailed and dark and disappear under the neck of the sweatshirt as he pulls it down, and there is a scattering of ink across his upper chest that I do not have time to identify because I am now looking at my tea.
The tea is extremely interesting. The tea is the most interesting thing that has ever happened in this room. I study the surface of it with the complete focus of someone who has found their life's purpose in a mug of ginger and honey.
"It wasn't a hardship," Jace says. I can hear the edge of a smile in it without looking up.
Something sparks in the back of my throat.
A comeback. The old Maya, the one who would have said something sharp and quick and slightly inappropriate, and I catch it before it clears my lips and hold it there, the taste of it metallic and warm, and I am annoyed at myself for almost saying it and annoyed at him for being the kind of person who provokes it.
I drink my tea.
"I'll finish this," I say, "and then I'll get out of your way. You've done more than enough."
I'm already dreading it. My cabin is going to be freezing.
Every muscle I own is filing its own individual complaint.
My head is a slow persistent argument I'm losing.
My ankle, now that I'm paying attention, throbs hot and thick when I shift my weight even slightly. None of this is information I share.
All three of them start to say something.
Reid's voice is the one that lands. "No."
Flat. The single syllable fills the room. Not unkind, but the tone of a man who has made a decision and is communicating it rather than discussing it.
"You had the beginning of hypothermia just a couple of hours ago. You have a probable concussion. And your ankle is sprained." His gaze drops to my left foot and mine follows.
"No weight on it for at least three days," Reid says. Not a suggestion.
"I can manage. I'll be careful, I just need to get back to my cabin—"
"Reid is right. You stay here." Jace cuts me off. "You done with the tea?"
I look at the mug. Swallow what is left.
I nod.
He takes the mug. Sets it on the stone hearth.
And then he crouches beside me and his hands go under my knees and behind my back and he straightens and I am off the floor, lifted clean off the ground in a motion that contains no visible effort, no adjustment, no recalibration for my weight.
The room swings and then steadies around the fixed point of his chest against my shoulder, the solid lock of his arms beneath me, and the heat of him seeps through the borrowed cotton into my ribs, my hip, the length of my thigh where it presses against his forearm.
The ease of it. The complete, undeniable ease of it.
A laugh escapes from somewhere in my chest, disbelieving. "What are you doing."
"Taking you to your room." Already moving. His stride doesn't change to accommodate the additional weight of a protesting woman. I might as well be a blanket.
"My room? I don't have—"
"You do now."
He carries me through the living room and I have enough composure left to notice Reid following, and Owen behind him, and the fact that all three of them appear to consider this a settled matter.
Jace kicks a door open with the side of his boot and the room beyond it is already warm, a fireplace lit and going in a stone surround that matches the living room, a bed made with a dark quilt and white sheets pulled down at one corner, a lamp on the side table throwing amber light across wood-paneled walls.
They prepared this room for me.
Owen steps past us and pulls the quilt back further, moving out of the way.
Jace lowers me onto the bed.
He doesn't step back.
He puts one hand on the mattress on either side of my head and he's close, closer than the act of setting me down requires, his arms and shoulders forming a cocoon that eliminates everything in my field of vision except his face.
Firelight on one side of it. Shadow on the other.
The pale blue of his eyes direct and unguarded.
He looks at me for a beat too long.
Then he says, quietly, like the words cost him something to release:
"You scared the hell out of us. Don't do that again."
His eyes stay on mine. And I hold very still, not because I'm frightened but because I'm not.