Chapter 12 Baz #2
“Could be.” Her fire was adequately built, but she hadn’t left enough room for the air to flow around the bigger pieces of wood—probably because she was used to campfires, and within the stove’s iron firebox, there was less room and a lot less oxygen than in an open-air fire.
Baz used one of the sticks to poke the pieces of wood farther apart, then added some birch bark and smaller bits of kindling, and blew on it.
Moments later, the fire was crackling merrily. He closed the stove’s front door and fastened the iron latch that held it shut. Through the open grate in the door, flames danced cheerily and cast their golden flicker across the room.
“My hero,” Arden declared.
Baz fanned the front door a few times to try to get more of the smoke out before closing it. “Do you have an opening window?”
Arden shook her head. “That would be nice. This is pretty rudimentary.”
No fire escape window, Baz noted; this cabin was built before fire safety standards. And the bunk was at the back. “You shouldn’t sleep in here with a fire in the stove, not if you don’t have a way to get out. It isn’t safe.”
“I hadn’t thought about that. This is the first time I’ve made a fire in the stove.” Arden held her hands out to it.
Other than the stove snafu, his fears of Arden huddling in a soggy sleeping bag surrounded by drips like an inhabitant of a cartoon hovel turned out to be unfounded. The cabin seemed very snug and tight. It wasn’t even leaking as much as his place. In fact, he saw no drips anywhere.
Since he had last seen it, Arden had made the cabin into more of a home.
She’d placed some colorful pieces of pottery on the windowsill, with a bouquet in one of them, and she had set a chair beside the bunk to serve as a sort of bedside table, holding a couple of books and personal items like a toothbrush cup.
A bra was hanging from the chair back. Baz hastily averted his eyes.
“Sorry,” Arden said, blushing a little. She of course had noticed the quick dodge, and she hastily took down the bra and stuffed it into the top of her pack. “I wasn’t expecting company.”
“It’s not your fault I dropped by unannounced.”
“Well, your timing couldn’t be better. Thank you for the help.
” Holding out her hands to the stove again, she took in Baz’s bedraggled condition for the first time.
He had no idea what he looked like, but he could feel water dripping into his eyes from the ends of his hair.
“Uh .... Baz, do you want to use my towel?”
“I’d love a towel. Sure.”
She took down a towel that had been draped to dry over the top pole of her bunk, and it was only as Baz put it over his head that he was suddenly hit with two things.
Thing one: Arden’s strong female scent.
Thing two: the realization that she probably only had one towel, and no opportunity to launder it.
This towel, which was currently draped over his head, flooding his senses with warm female pheromones, had been rubbed all over her body in the not too distant past.
Over her breasts. Between her legs.
“Are you okay?” Arden’s voice asked, and Baz became aware that he had frozen in place with a towel over his head.
It was likely that humans couldn’t smell each other like this. Particularly humans who weren’t their mates. The towel also smelled like sunshine and grass. She had probably rinsed it in the creek and dried it outside and thought that it was clean enough.
It definitely was not. He didn’t mind. He also didn’t think he could move any part of his body below his waist without revealing a raging erection.
“Um .... fine,” Baz said, the speech centers of his brain lagging considerably behind the conversation. He scrubbed his hair, his senses still filled with the scent of Arden, clean and fresh, mixed with the smell of sun-dried towel.
Her legs. Her thighs. Her neck. Her ...
He froze again at the realization that every other shifter in his clan was going to be able to smell her on him.
“You’ve been under that towel for an awfully long time,” Arden said dubiously.
Baz jolted himself into motion, finished drying his hair, and let the towel slip down over his shoulders. “Uh, thanks. That was ...”
Horrendously, unexpectedly arousing. Will make the rest of this visit excruciating.
“—really a big help,” he said with a desperate grin.
“Um ... okay.” Arden held out a hand, and he returned her towel with a mix of relief and regret. With it went the smell of her sun-kissed skin, her hair, her thighs.
While she draped the towel over the chair back to dry, he took off his damp jacket with the intent of tying it around his waist to try to hide the evidence that had every chance of making her think he was a total perv.
“Oh, that’s a good idea,” Arden said, and she whisked away the jacket before he had a chance to do anything else with it. She looked around for a place to put it and found a nail pounded into the wall behind the stove, where she hung it up. “That’ll be dry in no time.”
She kept darting glances at his damp T-shirt-clad torso, with a slight flush turning her cheeks fetchingly pink. Baz tried not to intentionally flex.
Okay, maybe a little flexing. As long as she was looking there, she wasn’t looking farther south.
However, none of this was doing anything to help with his little ... problem. Especially when she turned even pinker and looked quickly away.
“I’ve got cocoa,” Arden said, sounding a bit desperate herself. “Like, the packets, the instant kind. Do you want any?”
“That’d be great,” Baz said. While she rummaged in her pack, he took advantage of the opportunity to move over to sit on edge of her bunk, pushing her sleeping bag aside so he didn’t get it damp from his still slightly wet jeans.
This at least got him a little farther away and let him calm down a bit.
He could still smell her—the cabin was full of her—but at least it wasn’t quite so .
.. present, especially in the form of a piece of damp terrycloth that had recently been rubbed all over her naked body.
... Okay, he was never going to get rid of his hard-on at this rate.
Arden poured water into a blackened camp saucepan and put it on top of the stove to heat.
“So I hope you had fun in town today?” he offered. “In spite of everything with that jerk who was hassling you.”
“I did.” She glanced at him. “Thanks. I really do appreciate it. Actually, I appreciate everything. You could have just kicked me out of Windrock when you found me here.”
“It really doesn’t seem fair to do that. You didn’t even know this place wasn’t abandoned. In all honesty, it basically was.”
“Yeah, I guess so, but thanks anyway.” Arden selected two mugs from the row on the windowsill. She flashed him a quick, bright smile. “Look, I even have more than one cup now, thanks to your friend Fern.”
“Where did those come from?”
“The trash.” Seeing the look on his face, she added quickly, “I gave them a good wash in the stream. It’s not really a trash heap in the modern sense—I mean, it’s just a pile of broken dishes and stuff like that. Fern showed me. She’s been picking up pretty little things to make her house nicer.”
Baz supposed he’d been doing the same thing with abandoned bottles in the store. Still ... “You should be careful. You might cut yourself or get tetanus or something.”
Arden lowered her head, flushing again. “I’ll be fine. I’m a big girl. I’ve been taking care of myself for a long time.”
“I’m not implying you’re not. It’s just that it’s easy to get into trouble out here.”
She looked at him from beneath her lowered lashes. “I did get in trouble. And you came to help.”
Arden set their mugs beside the stove, left the water to heat, and came over to the bunk. He quickly shuffled over to make room for her. She sat beside him, almost primly.
“So what was that about, anyway?” she asked.
“What was what about?”
“When you showed up to help me on the hill. You’d been running. Did you just happen to be there in that clearing when I needed you, or did you know I was in trouble?”
“I knew,” Baz breathed. He was captivated by her eyes, her lips, her nearness. He could feel the heat of her body. She was nearly touching him.
“But how?”
“Arden,” Baz began. “Do you know what fated mates—”
He was interrupted by a sudden, loud pounding on the door.
“Is that my door?” Arden asked, baffled. She withdrew, pressing herself against the wall.
“Arden?” called Lexie’s voice through the door. “Baz? Are you in here?”
“No!” Baz yelled back.
“Oh good! We need you.”
Baz sighed and got up. “I swear, I can’t even get five minutes alone.”
He went over and opened the door. Lexie stood outside with her jacket over her head. Rain continued to pour down.
“Oh good,” she said. “You are here.” She glanced past him into the cabin, a quick curious look that settled on Arden. “Hi, Arden!”
“Hi,” Arden said weakly, giving her a little wave.
“Yes, I’m here, and so are you,” Baz said pointedly. “Why are you here?”
Lexie turned her gaze back to him, and he knew immediately from the look on her face that it was something serious.
“I’m so sorry to bother you,” she said. “I really am. But we can’t find Fern. I don’t know where she is, Baz. We can’t find her anywhere.”