“It’ll take all night,” Baron said glumly. “And then maybe longer still. No chance of anyone coming down to see if we made it out alive, either. By the time I got to shore, I couldn’t see any of them anymore. They left us.”
Panic clutched at my chest once more. A man approaching me with a knife, I could handle. Diving head-first through glass windows, I could handle. Navigating across country guided only by the stars posed no challenge to me. But I had no way to battle the winter weather. The rest of the company was halfway up the mountain by now. We had no tent, no dry blankets, nothing. We were alone and had to somehow survive the coming night.
“We could try and run to warm up,” I suggested weakly.
Baron shook his head. “Pumping cold blood that fast will cause a heart attack.”
Of course. James taught me that. After being exposed to extreme cold, a person needed to be warmed up slowly and gradually. Even vigorous rubbing would trigger cardiac distress. Nor could we apply direct heat to our skin. So even though I longed to plunge my shaking hands directly into the flames, or hold the warm stones surrounding the fire, I held back. It would cause permanent nerve damage if I did anything of the sort.
“What are we going to do?” I asked, though the answer was already staring me in the face.
Baron didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. The reason I’d woken curled against his chest was painfully, humiliatingly obvious. If we didn’t share body heat while the fire struggled to warm the cave, we wouldn’t make it through the night.
We looked at each other.
“This is awkward,” I muttered. My teeth chattered so violently it made my jaw ache.
Baron gave a short, sheepish laugh. “That’s one word for it.”
I inched toward him, trying to figure out a way to make this less mortifying and came up with nothing. I managed to close the six-foot gap, but when I reached him, my resolve faltered. I hovered a handspan away, arms folded tight against myself.
“No funny business,” I warned, my voice trembling from cold and nerves. “If you tryanything, I will kill you right here.”
“On my mother’s soul,” he said solemnly, raising a hand as though swearing an oath. “No funny business.”
I narrowed my eyes at him, then finally leaned in, but only enough for my shoulder to brush his ribs. Baron held himself as stiff as a board, arms glued to his sides. The two of us were doing a spectacular job of sharing absolutely no warmth. Whatsoever.
“This…isn’t working,” he admitted, shivering hard enough that his teeth chattered even harder than mine. His lips were tinged blue; his fingers trembled uncontrollably. “Maybe we should move closer to the fire.”
“Yes! Yes, let’s do that,” I said immediately, leaping at the suggestion.
We shuffled only a few inches closer—it was all we could—but even that tiny shift felt like a lifeline. The fire cracked, throwing weak orange light over us. We looked at each other again, tension thick enough to choke on.
“I guess I can be grateful for your big, fat body now,” I said with the ghost of a smile. I still couldn’t bring myself to actually cuddle against him. This wasBaron.My captor. My enemy.
…Or was he?
True, he had kept me chained and confined for weeks. He also could’ve let me fall and let the collar snap my neck and solved a great many problems for himself. But he hadn’t. He had leapt after me without hesitation.
“Tell you what,” Baron said through chattering teeth. He was shaking so hard now it worried me. “Let’s call a truce. Just for tonight. When the sun’s up and our clothes are dry, we’ll keep moving and pretend none of this ever happened.”
I eyed him, doubt twisting in my gut.
“Look,” he continued. “I’m too cold to think about anything except not dying. That’s all I want out of tonight. Survival. Nothing else.”
“Fine,” I agreed grudgingly.
We began trying to get comfortable, with a great deal of snatching away of hands, readjusting, and “Beg your pardons.” We finally reached a suitable position, with my legs curled up in Baron’s lap, and our arms wrapped tightly around each other. He leaned back against the cave wall, and I rested my head onhis chest again. I could hear his heart hammering madly beneath his skin.
For a moment, all I felt was cold—a brutal, bone-deep cold that made Baron seem less like a man and more like a giant block of ice I’d been forced to embrace. My instincts screamed at me to flinch away, to retreat from the frozen shock of his skin. But I clenched my jaw and forced myself still.
Hypothermia didn’t care about grudges.
Baron was freezing. I was freezing. And unless we warmed each other sooner rather than later, neither of us would survive until morning.
CHAPTER 22
We didn’t speak for a long time. There wasn’t much to say. Little by little, the cold loosened its claws. Once our bodies were pressed flush together with no air left between us, heat began to bloom between our ribs and seep into our numb fingers and toes.
