Page 7 of Untamed Hunter Daddy

That's all. There's only one bed, this bed, and one main room. There's a couch against the far wall, leather, worn at the arms. The chair he's sitting in. No other doors except what looks like a small bathroom. I want to know where he plans to be tonight while I'm lying here in his shirt in a place where no one else on earth knows I exist.

I open my mouth. The question is right there, fully formed. And nothing comes out.

My throat closes around it. Not only because I'm afraid of the answer, but because asking means admitting I'm thinking about it. About him. About the space between his body and mine and what happens in a room with one door. Because asking means showing him that the fear is there, specific and ugly, and I don't want him to see it because what if seeing it changes the way he looks at me? What if the careful kindness shifts into pity or offense?

I take a breath. I open my mouth again. The words stack up behind my lips and not a single one moves forward. My face heats. I'm blushing, burning from my collarbones to my hairline, and the absurdity of it, of being embarrassed about a question I haven't even managed to ask, makes the blush worse. I duck my chin and look at the broth because at least the broth isn't complicated.

"I'll be on the couch."

I look up. Ryker is watching the fire, not me. His voice is matter-of-fact, like he's telling me where he put the firewood.

"Door stays unlocked. Bathroom's to the left. If you need anything in the night, say my name and I'll hear you. I sleep light." A pause. "I put fresh clothes on the chair by the bed. They're mine, so they'll be too big, but they're clean and warm. There's wool socks in the top drawer of the dresser. Your sneakers are done. I'll find you something better in the morning."

He says all of it to the fire. Casual. Easy. As if he's answered the question a dozen times before and long ago learned that the kindest way to address the fear is to acknowledge it without ever using the word.

The knot in my throat loosens. Not all the way. That's going to take more than one night and one mug of broth and one careful man on the other side of a warm room. But enough. Enough to breathe past it. Enough to lean back against the pillows and feel the quilts settle around me and allow, just barely, the possibility that this isn't a new kind of trap.

"Thank you," I say. My voice is small and rough and it carries everything I can't manage to put into better words. The broth. The quilts. The unlocked door. The answer to the question I couldn't ask.

He nods. Doesn't look at me. "Get some sleep, Zoe."

I close my eyes. The fire crackles. The storm presses against the walls. Ryker's chair creaks as he settles into whatever position he holds through the night, and the sound is so quiet and so steady that my body, against every screaming instruction from my ruined nervous system, begins to believe what he said.

Door stays unlocked.

I repeat it inside my head like a prayer. Three words that shouldn't mean everything but do. The opposite of every door Tyler ever closed behind me. An open path. A choice I get to make in the morning. Stay or go. Trust or run. Let someone in or build the walls higher.

Sleep comes in uneven waves. I drift under, then surface gasping at a sound that turns out to be the wind. Under again, then jolted awake by my own heartbeat, too loud and too fast, my body convinced that the warmth is a lie and the cold is waiting just outside the quilts. Each time I surface I find the same thing. The fire still burning. The storm still raging. And the quiet, steady sound of breathing from the couch across the room that tells me he's still there. Still keeping watch. Still close enough to hear me if I say his name.

I don't say it. Not tonight. But I listen to the breathing and the fire and the storm, and sometime around the third or fourth time I surface, I stop scanning for exits. My fists unclench inside the quilts. My shoulders drop an inch from my ears. And I sleep. Not well, not deeply, not the way I used to sleep in my little apartment above the diner with the radiator clanking and the hedgehog mug waiting on the shelf for morning. But I sleep. In a bed that isn't mine, in a cabin I didn't choose, in a world that contracted to a point of terror and is now, carefully and without any guarantees, beginning to expand again.

Door stays unlocked.

I hold onto that and let the rest go.

4

Ryker

She's been asleep for two hours and I haven't sat down once.

There's a rhythm to this kind of work. Triage. Stabilize. Secure the perimeter. Only then do you let yourself think about what just happened. I'm still on step three.

The generator needs diesel. I keep a fifty-gallon drum in the lean-to off the back of the cabin. I pull on my coat, step out the back door, and walk into a wall of white. The storm has settled in hard. Wind driving snow sideways, visibility cut to ten feet. The lean-to is fifteen steps from the door and by the time I reach it my beard is crusted with ice.

I top off the tank by feel. The motor catches on the second pull. Reliable machine. Old and loud, but it hasn't failed me yet. I clear the snow from the exhaust vent, secure the lean-to door against the wind, and head back inside.

I stamp my boots on the mat and take stock. Firewood. Two days' worth stacked inside against the kitchen wall and another cord under the tarp on the porch. Water. I fill two five-gallon jugs from the tap as backup because generators fail and pipes freeze. Food. Freezer's stocked with elk and venison. Pantry has rice, oats, canned tomatoes, dried beans, powdered milk, salt, honey. Enough for two people for a week without rationing.

Two people. The math keeps doing that. Folding her into my supplies and my square footage. I shake it off and move to the next task.

The ankle.

I wrapped it once already when I first got her inside, but that was just field work. Now I need to do it right. I pull my medical kit from the closet and carry it to the bedside. The fire throws enough light to work by. Zoe is deep under. The kind of sleep that looks less like rest and more like her body shutting systems down because the resources aren't there to run everything at once. Her breathing is slow and shallow. Even in sleep a faint crease holds between her brows.

I unwrap the elastic bandage carefully. She stirs but doesn't wake. The joint is worse than it looked in the field. Swelling has spread into the arch of her foot and up toward the shin, the skin mottled purple and green. Grade two sprain at minimum. Three to four weeks to heal if she stays off it, which in this cabin in this storm isn't going to be a problem.

I check the bones. Fibula is intact. Swelling is concentrated over the anterior talofibular ligament, the one that goes first in an inversion injury. Classic misstep on uneven ground. Moderate laxity on the drawer test. She's lucky. Another degree of rotation when she fell and we'd be talking about surgery in a hospital she can't get to.