CHAPTER ONE
Elliot
Somebody’s walking up my drive.
I go still with the chisel in my hand and listen. Nobody walks up my drive. The road dead-ends at my place. The gate’s a mile down at the highway, and it’s been snowing since before dawn — knee-deep already, more coming. Whoever’s out there came up the whole mountain on foot.
I wipe the fog off the workshop window with my fist and look.
It’s her.
Three years.
Macie Randolph. Head down in the wind, dragging a suitcase that stopped rolling a ways back.
And she walked. A mile of it, in a blizzard, while I stood in here warm and clueless with a hand-plane.
The thought hits me like a boot to the chest. I should’ve been at the gate at first light.
I knew she was coming today. I let her climb my mountain alone in the cold and didn’t even know it was happening.
I’m reaching for my coat before I finish the thought.
I haven’t let myself look straight at this woman the whole time I’ve known her. Not at Tom’s kitchen table. Not at her wedding. And now she’s forty feet away, half-frozen, and I can’t look at anything else.
She’s in the wrong coat. Thin, city thing, soaked dark at the shoulders. She’ll be lucky if she’s got feeling left in her hands. I’m buying her real wool tomorrow. First thing.
She stops at the bottom of my steps and looks up at the dark windows like she’s not sure she’s got the right house.
God, that mouth. Bitten pink from the cold.
I want to bite it too. I want to find out what she tastes like and learn the sound she makes when I do.
I want her in my bed with my name in her mouth and my face between her thighs.
I’ve wanted it for three years and I’ve got no business wanting an inch of her.
She’s my best friend’s daughter. I’m forty-three and too rough for her and exactly the kind of man Tom trusted me to keep her safe from.
Doesn’t change a thing. Mine. It’s the truest word I’ve got.
I’m out the door and into the snow before I decide to be.
She’s swaying on her feet by the time I reach her. I take the suitcase out of her hand, then the bag off her shoulder, and she lets me without a word. She’s shaking. Not shivering — shaking, deep, the kind that means she’s been out here too long.
“You walked.” It comes out hard. I don’t mean it at her. I mean it at me. “A mile. In this.”
“Driver wouldn’t take the gravel.” Her voice is small behind the scarf. She pulls it down and there’s the rest of her — red-nosed, lips going gray at the edges, those eyes I never let myself look into. “Hi, El.”
“Inside. Now.” I get an arm around her before her knees give. “You’re frozen through.”
She makes it over the threshold on her own. Barely. The heat hits her and she stops just inside the door and stands in it a second, like she forgot a room could be warm.
I get her coat off her. She takes the scarf off first and folds it once before she hands it over, careful, like it matters. Then I pull the wool blanket off the shelf and put it around her myself, because her hands aren’t working and I’m not going to stand here and watch her fight a blanket.
“Sit. By the fire.” I steer her down onto the couch, crouch in front of her, and take her hands in mine.
They’re like ice. I rub them slow between my palms and watch her face for the second the feeling comes back.
“You could’ve called from the gate. I’d have been down in ten minutes.
I’d have carried you up if the truck couldn’t make the grade. ”
“I didn’t want to make you come out.”
“Coming out for you isn’t a cost.” I look up at her. “We’re going to fix that idea, you and me.”
She doesn’t know what to do with that. I can see it. So I let it go and get to work.
I pull her boots off. Her socks are soaked through and her feet are worse than her hands — white, cold to the bone. I don’t ask. I wrap them in the edge of the blanket and hold them between my palms till they start to pink up, and she lets me, watching like she’s never once seen it done.
“Anything hurt?” I ask. “Fingers, toes, ears. Sharp pain, or just numb?”
“Just numb. It’s coming back now.” She flexes her fingers and winces. “Pins and needles.”
“Good. That’s what we want.”
I get the chili off the back of the stove — it’s been on since noon — and pour her tea while it heats.
The way she takes it. Lots of milk, no sugar.
I watched her make it that way twice at Tom’s table two summers back and never forgot.
She wraps both hands around the mug and makes a small, broken sound when the heat finally bites her fingers.
It goes straight through me. It’s damn near the sound I’ve spent too long imagining her making in a very different room.
I put a bowl in her hands before she can argue about it.
“Eat. All of it. You walked a mountain today. You earned it.”
She eats. Slow at first, then not slow at all. I sit across from her and let myself watch her get warm in my house, and I think: I could get used to this. Truth is I’m already used to it. Three years of it, in my head.
“Thank you,” she says when the bowl’s empty. Then fast: “I’m sorry. For all of it. The walking, making you?—“
“You don’t apologize in this house.” I’m still close, elbows on my knees. “Not for the snow. Not for any of it.”
She looks down at the empty bowl. “There’s a contract,” she says, quiet. “Etta made me sign it. Thirty days. I read it twice on the bus up.”
“I signed it too.” I keep my voice easy. “Thirty days. Either one of us can walk, any time. No questions, no hard feelings. You want to go back down to Billings tomorrow, I’ll drive you myself and I won’t say a word about it.”
That’s the deal. It’s the truth. It’s what a decent man tells a woman who just got out of one cage and won’t be talked into another.
What I leave out is the rest of it. I’ve got thirty days with her under this roof. And I mean to make damn sure that by the end of them, walking back down this mountain is the last thing she wants.
She turns that over. Then she lifts her eyes to mine and holds them. She’s never done that. Not once. I don’t let myself decide what it means. I just want it to so bad it aches.
She’s close. Close enough that I can see the fire moving in her eyes, close enough to lean in and find out what that mouth does under mine.
The want climbs up the back of my throat and sits there.
I set my jaw against it and don’t move. Not tonight.
Not her first night, half-thawed, with nowhere else in the world to go.
Whatever this turns into, it doesn’t start with her cornered in my cabin and grateful for the heat.
I sit back on my heels and give her the room.
“Okay,” she says.
“You’re dead on your feet.” I stand up before I do something stupid with the wanting. “Bed. I’ll show you up.”
Her bag’s already in the guest room — I carried it up when she wasn’t looking. I leave a glass of water on the nightstand, an extra quilt on the end of the bed, dry socks folded on top of the quilt, because her feet will go cold again in the night and I won’t be in there to warm them.
“Holler if you need anything,” I tell her from the door. “Anything. I mean it.”
“I’m okay, El.” Something happens at the corner of her mouth. Almost a smile. “Thank you. Really.”
“Get some sleep, Macie.”
I start to pull the door shut. She stops me.
“Leave it cracked? If that’s—“ She stops. “I don’t like a closed door.”
Something in me goes still at that. I don’t ask. I just file it with everything else I’m starting to keep.
“Cracked it is.”
By the time I stretch out on a couch a half-foot too short for me, the cabin’s gone quiet around her. The guest-room door’s open an inch, the way she asked, and I leave it exactly there.
There’s a ring out in my cold shop. Amber, in a cherry box I built the week after I met her. I had the jeweler leave the crack in the stone and run gold through it instead of hiding it. It’s been waiting a long time for a hand I had no right to think about.
She thinks she’s passing through. She signed a paper that says she can leave in thirty days.
She can. I’ll hold to every word of it. But I let her walk a mile through a blizzard tonight because I didn’t see it coming — and that’s the last time the cold gets near her. Or anyone. Or anything.
She’s free to go. I just don’t think she’s going to want to, once she sees what staying looks like.
She doesn’t know that yet. She will.