But it does anyway.
Because holding hands is about choice. About choosing to keep holding on even when you don’t have to.
That’s the terrifying part.
I follow him back toward the house, our gloved hands safely separate in the cold, and I try not to think about what happens when the real world comes crashing back in.
16
Gregory
The deep snow crunches under my boots as we trudge back toward the house, and all I can think about is last night.
Her skin under my hands. The sounds she made. The way she surrendered completely when I pinned her wrists and proved that every inch of her wasmineto claim.
Fuck.
I need to focus. We just spent four hours repairing a fuel line in subzero temperatures, and my back aches from being hunched over machinery, but all my brain wants to do is replay the moment she came apart beneath me by the firelight. When I kissed her in the generator shed, it was all I could do not to strip off my pants and fuck her right there. If it wasn’t so goddamn cold, I might have.
“Gregory,wait.” Sorrel says behind me.
I stop instantly, and turn around to look at her.
She’s staring at something near the north side of the house where we’ve been storing the food.
“What is it?” I move beside her, following her gaze.
That’s when I see them. Large tracks in the snow, circling the storage area. The prints are massive, easily four inches across, with four toe pads and no claw marks visible.
My blood turns colder than the air around us.
“Mountain lion,” Sorrel says quietly. Her voice is steady but I can hear the fear underneath. “The tracks are fresh. Probably from this morning after the storm cleared.”
I step closer to examine them, and the pattern becomes clearer. The cat circled the entire storage area multiple times, investigating. “How the hell did it walk on top of the snow without sinking?”
“Large paw surface area distributes its weight,” she whispers, slipping into scientist mode. “Plus the snow has had time to settle and compact after five days of accumulation. A two-hundred-pound cougar can move across snow that would swallow us because of how that weight gets distributed across those paws.”
Two hundred pounds of apex predator. Drawn here by the scent of our meat supply, which is supposed to frozen. And it can run ontopof the fucking snow, giving it easy access to our most vital body parts.
Fucking perfect.
“We need to move the food back inside,” I say immediately. “Into the fridge.”
“No.” She shakes her head. “That means plugging the fridge into the wall and draining our precious generator fuel. We’ve got maybe two more sessions with that generator before we’re completely out.”
“Then we bring it all inside and let it rot.”
“The scent will still linger here for hours,” she counters. “And the mountain lion has likely already marked this area with urine. It knows this is a food source now. It’ll come back whether the meat is here or not.”
I want to argue but she’s right. Moving the food won’t eliminate the danger, it’ll just waste our limited resources.
“So we leave it,” I say flatly.
“We leave it.”
The thought of that thing prowling around my property, aroundher, makes something primal surge in my chest. I’ve spent billions building a mining empire, controlling supply chains across three continents, but I can’t controlthis.
Can’t pay it to go away.
