Page 13 of Untamed Hunter Daddy

"Most of us land somewhere between both. Occupational hazard."

I pull the quilt tighter and try to imagine a life where hiking twenty-one miles on broken ribs is a story you tell casually. I can't. My world before Tyler was small and soft. Diner shifts and animal mugs and secondhand curtains. The worst physical hardship I'd experienced was a double shift during the summer tourist rush with a blister on my heel. And then the wilderness happened, and eight days happened, and it turned out my body could do things I'd never imagined.

"The man you caught," I say. "The fugitive. Was he like Tyler?"

Ryker's expression shifts. A tightening around the eyes. "No. Different kind of monster. Weapons trafficking, not people. But the mountains don't care about the distinction. They're just the place where people go when they don't want to be found."

"And you're the person who finds them."

"That's the idea."

I look at his face in the firelight and try to reconcile all the versions of him I've seen in three days. The tracker who read my trail through the woods. The medic who wrapped my ankle. The man who fed a fire all night so I wouldn't wake up cold. The voice that counted breathing cycles while I fell apart over chamomile tea. The laugh that cracked the seriousness for just long enough to show me what was underneath.

"Ryker?"

"Yeah."

"The sleepy tea really is terrible, by the way. I didn't want to say anything, but it tastes like hot water filtered through a sock."

The corner of his mouth moves again. This time it makes it all the way to something that could almost be called a smile. "Noted. I'll tell my mother."

"Don't you dare. If she's anything like my mom was, she'll just send more, and then I'll have to drink it out of obligation, and the cycle continues."

He looks at me. The almost-smile holds. And something passes between us. Not romantic. Not loaded. Just warmth. The uncomplicated warmth of two people finding that they can make each other laugh.

The storm presses against the cabin. The fire crackles. The terrible chamomile tea sits on the side table, abandoned and cooling. Neither of us reaches for it. Neither of us mentions moving. And for the first time since I walked through that door unconscious in his arms, the room begins to feel like a place where something other than survival might be possible.

7

Ryker

The storm breathes out on the morning of day four.

The wind drops from a scream to a mutter, the snow thins from a curtain to a veil, and the sky lifts just enough to give me fifty yards of visibility where yesterday I had ten. I've been watching these mountains long enough to know the difference between a pause and a stop. This is a pause. The system is resting, and when it starts again it'll come back harder. But the window is real and I'm going to use it.

I have an emergency cache a mile northwest of the cabin. A waterproof ammo box buried under a cairn of rocks at the base of a dead ponderosa. First aid supplies, ammunition, a backup radio, MREs, and a few other things the part of my brain that never fully left the military insists on keeping within reach. I rotate the contents twice a year and haven't needed any of it in three years. But the cache isn't the only reason I'm going out.

I need to walk the perimeter. The storm has been a wall between the cabin and everything else for five days, and walls work both ways. They keep threats out but they also keep information from coming in. I don't know what's happened since Davenport packed up the mine site. I don't know if Tyler's been identified. I don't know if anyone has been moving through this country while the weather pinned me inside.

Zoe is at the counter with her coffee. The weak one, powdered milk, her mug. She's sitting on the stool, which has become her post in the kitchen the way the chair beside the bed has become mine. She's wearing my flannel shirt over the gray T-shirt, the sleeves rolled four times and still hanging past her wrists. She's reading a paperback she pulled from my shelf yesterday. A beat-up copy of Lonesome Dove with a coffee stain shaped like Idaho on the cover.

"I need to go out," I say. "There's a supply cache about a mile up. I want to grab a few things and check the perimeter while the weather holds."

She looks up from the book. Something moves behind her eyes. Not panic, not anymore, but the ghost of it. "How long?"

"Ninety minutes. Maybe two hours if the snow is deeper than it looks."

"And if the storm comes back while you're out there?"

"Then I'll come back faster." I pull my jacket from the hook and check the pockets. Compass, fire steel, folding knife, a space blanket. "Generator's topped off. Fire's good for another two hours without feeding, but there's split wood beside the hearth if you need it. Sat phone is on the table. Mason's number is the only one in memory. If anything happens and I'm not back in three hours, you call him."

She nods, and sets the book down. Then she slides off the stool, limps two steps to the counter, and holds out a mug. Not her mug. A fresh one, full, with the thermos of coffee beside it. "Take this. You drink it faster than you make it and you haven't had a second cup today."

I take the mug. Our fingers overlap on the handle for a second. Her skin warm from the ceramic, mine already cooling. She steps back. I drink the coffee standing in the doorway with one boot on the threshold. It's strong. Full strength. Not the diluted version she drinks. She made it how I make mine.

"Be careful," she says.

"Always am."