Chapter 4 #2
He took the pants from her hands, and she glanced down and away, feeling the first curl of warmth she’d felt all day.
She shook her head. She did not need to be ogling werewolves. When she looked back, he was rolling up the cuffs as he hopped toward the window.
“Tape?” he asked.
She shook her head. Maybe there was some in the tubs she hadn’t searched, but they didn’t have time. “Just stretch it over.”
It was a log cabin, which meant there were gaps between the logs. It did not bode well for their chance of ever being warm again, but it was good for sticking things to the walls.
She picked up the knife again and froze. She knew she had to move closer.
It took another twenty seconds to convince her brain to move her feet, but she finally did.
She wedged the blanket into the logs with the blunt edge of the blade.
He got the hang of it quickly and joined in, shoving the crinkly fabric into the mortar between the logs with his bare fingers.
The moment they got a bit of a seal, the silver fabric puffed out immediately with the wind, and a corner flapped free.
He grabbed the water bin, staggered a little because it clearly still had water in it, but adjusted and shoved it against the fabric along one side of the window.
She stepped back as he grabbed the cooler off the floor and put it against the other side, so at least the wind was a rough gust and not a full-blown gale in the cabin.
He clapped his hands. “I don’t suppose there were boots anywhere?”
She pointed, and he dove under the bed, pulling out the rest of the drawers and crying with triumph as he found winter clothes.
“Thank you, whoever!” He sniffed and frowned. “It smells like a wolf.”
She winced. “That might have been who stayed here? He left, though.”
He froze. “I can’t be here.”
“What?”
He started undoing the buttons of the shirt. “I can’t be in this. He’s going to smell me. He’d hunt me down, and I can’t kill anyone today.”
She felt the phantom “else” in that sentence and frowned. Had he already killed someone today? That wasn’t helping with her quest to calm the hell down.
He saw the look on her face. “Don’t worry, we don’t hunt humans. We don’t have anything to do with humans. We love squirrels and rabbits. Occasionally deer. That’s as big as it gets, right?”
“There’s moose,” she said automatically, stuck on his insistence that they didn’t kill humans. What about witches?
“I’m not going to eat you.”
She closed her eyes. “How did I end up in Little Red Riding Hood? How many fairy tales have an evil witch and a terrible end for a doe-eyed girl in a cloak?”
He froze again with his shirt half unbuttoned, and she was kind of sad he was going in the other direction, and then shook herself for being an absolute fool.
“What?” she asked but then realized. She said the word witch. She said the word witch to a werewolf. “You know, witches in fairy tales.”
“Yeah, but you also said that a wolf lived here. You knew about shifters before you saw my wolf.”
She held up her hands. “I just have receptive magic. I can’t do anything to you!” Dear god, she just told him she was powerless. She’d put herself firmly in his hands, which he held up carefully and slowly as if, finally, he realized that he was dealing with something delicate.
“I will never harm you or yours.”
“Then why are you here?” she exploded. “You’re from the house? Double Thirteen?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“113 County Rd. 13, the Double Thirteen house, the lost pack.”
“Is that what you call us?”
“Why did you come back?”
“Vacation?”
“I don’t believe you,” she crossed her arms, partly to keep from trembling.
“Not to harm witches! There are half a dozen covens in New York, and I’ve never even spoken to any of them. We keep to the treaty.”
“Sure. Great.” Did she believe him? Could she afford not to?
“You’re freezing,” he said slowly.
“Well, yeah, it’s freezing.”
She realized her teeth were chattering. She thought it was fear, but it was also cold.
He looked around the cabin as if seeing it for the first time. “Hey, do you have a cell phone? Because I can get us out of here. I can call in a helicopter…”
“No, you can’t.”
“They’ll be here in less than an hour.”
“Not in this blizzard. Everything is grounded. And besides, there’s no service.”
“Well, I can grab some snowmobiles. Bring people in that way.”
She smirked. “Even if I had a satellite phone, the atmosphere is scrambled in the storm. We’d never get out.”
“So there’s no way to contact anyone.”
She burst out laughing. It was a normal laugh this time, not the hysterical release of stress. “If you had a billion dollars, there is still no way you would ever get off of this mountain.”
He did not meet her eyes.
Her mouth fell open. “Do not tell me you have a billion dollars.”
He winced. “Well, I—”
“Didn’t I just tell you not to tell me?”
He held up his hands. “Okay, I won’t tell you?”
“You have a billion dollars?”
There was a hint of a smirk at the corner of his mouth. “Should I tell you now?”
“Just tell me you’re not some kind of werewolf mafia hitman.” She thought about that. Would a billionaire werewolf kill someone himself? Probably not. “Or orderer of hitmen?”
He laughed. The resonant sound filled the cabin and made something jolt down her spine. She couldn’t tell if it was good or bad. “I could be the best assassin in the world, but I still don’t think I would be efficient enough to earn a billion dollars in murders for hire.”
She sniffed. “Right.” She forced herself to stop yelling. She was surprised to realize he was calmer than she was. She’d heard about legendary werewolf tempers, but this guy seemed remarkably calm. And still freezing.
She could not feel her toes.
He kept his hands open easily as he said, “So we’re stuck in the cabin. Presumably until the storm passes?”
She nodded.
“So how the hell do we get that thing on?” he said and stuck his thumb at the stove.
“I found matches, but no wood.”
He shrugged. “Okay. I can get wood. There’s a ton of wood.”
She shook her head. “Not in this weather. People freeze to death in minutes or get lost.”
He smirked. “I wouldn’t get lost.”
She raised an eyebrow. “So you were standing on a tree limb over an ice field on purpose and genuinely wanted to be there.”
“Admittedly, I was slightly unaware of exactly where I was. I just meant I would never lose you.”
“What?”
He bit his lip.
“Say whatever words you’re trying to swallow.”
“You smell.”
She gasped.
“Good! Really great! And extremely strong. I don’t really understand why, but I would never lose you if you were in…”
“Smelling distance?”
“Exactly. So if we’re not lighting a fire tonight, we’re…” He looked at the bed.
“Oh hell no!” she said.
“No funny business! But my wolf is extremely warm.”
Her jaw dropped for the second time in this conversation. “You want me to get in bed with a wolf.”
“You’re shaking.”
“It’s actually a good thing. When you’re too cold to shake, that’s when the real trouble starts.”
“Great! Let’s not go there.”
“Not the wolf,” she whispered. She could not get into bed with a carnivore.
“Just me? I will be a perfect gentleman.”
“Gentleman wolf.”
“Exactly.”
He started picking up around the cabin, undoing her elaborate system of defense that lasted for all of two seconds, and put the quilt back on the bed.
It took her all that time to get her feet moving, and she sat on the bed.
She pulled off her boots and wiggled her toes, afraid of what she would find, but there was only a little whitening around the edges, the smallest start to frostbite.
She dove beneath the quilts and hissed at the iciness.
He lay down next to her, slowly and deliberately. He made no other moves until he finally said, “You’re shaking the bed.”
His muscular arms came around her as he rolled her into him and trapped her feet between his.
He was warm. It was horrifically unfair. He’d been on the edge of hypothermia, and all he had to do was change forms, and he was fine.
He rubbed a hand up and down her back, and she realized he had a scent too, the dregs of a sophisticated cologne that warmed his skin with just the hint of wild mountains beneath it. She melted.
Do not mistake a heat source for your soulmate, she told herself firmly as she drifted off.