Page 5 of Untamed Hunter Daddy

I lay her down. She makes a small sound when I pull my jacket back. Loss, not pain. I move fast. Fire first. Match to kindling, then split pine. Flames catch and start pushing heat into the room. Then her.

I strip the soaked coat and dress off with steady hands and clinical focus. She's too far gone to notice. Mottled skin. Bluish tinge at her lips and fingertips. Fine tremors running through her. I wrap her in the heaviest quilt, then another, then a third. Check the ankle. Swollen and discolored but bones are aligned. Sensation when I press the top of her foot. Sprain, not fracture. I wrap it with an elastic bandage and prop it on a folded blanket.

Water next. Small sips from a cup I hold to her cracked lips. She drinks like desert things drink. Desperately. I make her go slow.

Her eyes open. Clearer now with the fire's warmth. She looks at me like her exhausted mind is still trying to figure out what I am.

"Ryker," she says. Testing the word. Then, "My name's Zoe. I was a waitress. Before all of this. I made really good tips on the cherry pie."

The plain ordinary humanness of it does something to the back of my throat that I cover by reaching for the water cup again.

"Rest now, Zoe." My voice sounds rougher than I want it to. "Storm's going to keep us here for a while. You're safe. I'm not going anywhere."

She nods. Her eyes drift closed. Tension in her face softens as the warmth and exhaustion pull her under. One hand stays on top of the quilt, fingers curled loosely. Nails broken. Knuckles scraped raw.

I sit in the chair beside the bed. The fire grows. The storm hammers the cabin. Inside it's warm and quiet except for the flames and the sound of her breathing finally evening out into something that resembles sleep.

I should radio Davenport. I should call Mason. I should document her condition and enter her into the system as a recovered victim. I should do a dozen things the badge on my belt says are my job.

Instead I sit in the chair and listen to her breathe and think about the tally marks scratched into the wall of a rock hollow by a woman who counted every day she survived because the counting was all she had left.

Eight days. She should be dead. She isn't. She's in my bed in my cabin in my mountains, and the storm outside has just sealed us in together for however long it decides to last.

I lean back. My rifle's by the door. The fire's burning steady.

I don't move the chair back. I don't reach for the radio. I just sit there and keep watch.

3

Zoe

I wake up warm and the wrongness of it almost kills me.

My body jackknifes off the mattress before my brain catches up. I'm gasping, hands clawing at blankets I don't recognize, legs tangling in fabric that's soft and heavy and dry. Everything is dry. The disorientation is so total that for three full seconds I don't know where I am or what year it is or whether I'm alive or dreaming or still dying in the snow.

"Easy. You're all right. You're in my cabin."

The voice comes from somewhere to my left. Low. Calm. The kind of calm that doesn't sound forced. My eyes find the source and land on Ryker Stone sitting in a wooden chair beside the bed with his forearms on his knees and his hands loose between them. Not touching me. Not reaching for me. Just there. Present and close and very deliberately still, like a man who understands that sudden movement is the wrong move right now.

I remember. The hollow. The rock. His face above me, framed by gray sky and pine branches. Dropping to his knees in the snow so I wouldn't have to look up at him. The jacket that smelled like woodsmoke and pine sap and something underneath that was just skin, just a person, warm and alive in a world that had been nothing but cold for eight days.

"Ryker," I say. My voice sounds rough and scraped. "The marshal."

"That's me."

I look down at myself. Quilts. Three of them, layered, the top one a deep blue with small white stars stitched into the pattern. I'm wearing a T-shirt that isn't mine. Soft gray cotton, enormous, hanging off one shoulder and falling past my thighs. It smells like laundry detergent and the same woodsmoke scent from his jacket. Underneath it my body is doing something I don't understand at first. I'm shaking. Not from cold. The room is warm, genuinely warm, with firelight flickering across the log walls and the sound of wood popping softly in the hearth. I'm shaking because warmth, it turns out, hurts.

Nobody tells you that part. I always thought hypothermia recovery would feel like thawing, a slow pleasant softening. It isn't. It's pain. Sharp, stinging pain as the blood vessels in my hands and feet dilate and the feeling comes back in stages, each one worse than the last. My fingers burn. My toes feel like they're being crushed. Even my lips sting, cracked and swollen, the split at the corner throbbing in time with my heartbeat. The warmth is attacking me with the same force the cold used to, and my nervous system can't tell the difference between being saved and being hurt.

A small sound escapes me. Not a word. Something lower, a whimper that I try to swallow but my throat won't cooperate because it's raw from days of breathing frozen air and not enough water.

Ryker leans forward. "Your body's working through the rewarming process. The pain is normal. It means the circulation's coming back properly, which is what we want. It's going to get worse before it levels off, probably another hour or so. Can you handle that?"

I nod because I can't imagine saying no. What would be the alternative? Going back to the snow?

"Your ankle's wrapped. It's a bad sprain but nothing's broken. I checked the alignment and you've got full sensation in your foot, which is a good sign. I've been pushing fluids while you were out. You kept most of it down. How long since you ate something real? Not berries."

I try to think. The days in the woods fold into each other, one day blending into the next until I can't separate them. "I had a sandwich," I say. "At the mine. Before the—" I stop. The word won't come. The shooting, the chaos, the door I slipped through, the running. All of it jams together in my throat. "Before," I finish.