Barely believing his good fortune, he placed the oilskin on a nearby table and set to removing his clothing. He closed his eyes in bliss as he draped a warm, thick fur over his bare shoulders. Hugging it close, he squatted before the fireplace. The firewood rack was nearly depleted, unusual for the inclement weather. Whichever eccentric owned the cabin must have recently departed. Surely, they wouldn’t begrudge him a life-saving fire.
As the small flame slowly suffused the cabin with warmth, he used his remaining energy to clean up after himself. He carefully draped his union suit over a chair and moved his boots to the stone hearth. The wet marks on the floor where he’d walked around also had to go.
At last, trembling with exhaustion and relief, he crawled into the bed. Tears sprang to his eyes, and he buried his face in a pillow to stifle a groan. He’d come too close to losing everything. Too close to death.
He adjusted the blankets around him, sifting through them until he found a soft flannel that smelled of cinnamon and vanilla. The comforting scent eased the tension from his muscles, and he tucked the cloth close to his face.
“Get warm,” he ordered himself, his words slurring. “Get energy. Get back to Seattle.”
Then he fell into a deep sleep.
Chapter 2
Miss Imogen Radford glowered at the large boot prints leading to the hand-carved door of her family’s hunting cabin. Boot prints that continued over the threshold and into her private sanctum, the one place available for her to stew in a vat of well-earned misery.
“Haven’t I dealt with enough lately?”
Jilted by her fiancé—check. Lackluster reception at her first photography exhibition—check. Artistic block and crippling self-doubt ever since—check.
And now an intruder.
Whoever it was, they’d better be bleeding. Sore at the very least. She and her Aunt Judith hadn’t spent hours setting booby traps around the perimeter of the cabin for nothing. That had been part of their agreement: Judith would stay in the nearby town and give Imogen time to sulk in privacy and rediscover her muse. But only as long as she stayed within the confines of their protective traps and returned to Seattle in January. The alternative—attending a slew of holiday parties hand-selected by her parents that would surely be equal parts mortifying and insufferable—had her leaping headlong into accepting Judith’s terms.
At least she would be able to use the self-defense techniques she’d recently learned at a meeting of the Seattle Suffrage Society. Bolstered by the silver lining, she dropped her bundles in the soft snow, freed her chin from her coat’s wide roll collar of French marten fur, and raised two fists.
“Prepare. For. Pain.” Each whispered word was punctuated by a quick jab into the icy afternoon air.
Well, more like awkward thrusts.
She tried once more, then shrugged. It was hard to make proper fists while wearing thick wool mittens. Besides, what were fists compared to her aunt’s prized Remington double-barrel 12-gauge shotgun?
The intruder wouldn’t know Imogen had never fired it in her life.
She quickly removed her mittens and unhooked the leather strap securing the abhorrent thing across her back. She hefted it to her shoulder with both hands, then nudged the door open with the toe of her brown leather boot.
“Hello? Is someone there?” The wobble in her voice made her wince, so she squared her shoulders before adding, “I’m armed.” She shuffled inside, the shotgun aimed upward, her pointer finger curled around the trigger as her aunt had showed her.
No movement but the tremble of the barrel in front of her.
No sound but her own half-swallowed gasps and the muffled crunch of snow where her boots met the wooden floor.
She pirouetted in a slow circle, each new frame of empty space easing the tightness in her chest. The photography equipment appeared untouched, the bed was still the same chaotic jumble of all her favorite blankets?—
No. Not the same.
A man lay sprawled in her cozy den. A head covered in bright red hair rested on her goose-down pillow. Pale, freckled—and, dash it all, gorgeously muscled—shoulders peeked from the cocoon of wool and flannel. And was that...? Yes, her nightgown was tucked under his chin as if he’d cuddled it in his sleep.
Unacceptable.
She closed her eyes and called forth the voice of righteous indignation her mother used on gardeners who didn’t properly prune her roses. On her only daughter who preferred doing things her own way.
A ragged snore ricocheted through the silent room like a gunshot. Imogen jumped, every muscle in her body tightening at once. The ensuing explosion—an actual gunshot this time—was deafening.
She flew backward into a chair with a pained grunt before toppling over. The shotgun skidded across the floor, and a pile of fabric—clothing she’d meant to organize—tumbled from the chair and buried her lower half. Splintered wood chips rained down from the fresh hole in the ceiling, and one of her carefully cut paper snowflakes lost its grip on the rafters and fluttered down to land on her face. She lay stunned, her worldview shrunk to the size of a diamond-shaped pinhole.
“Ouch,” she whispered.
The man flailed about in the blankets, his loud curses filling the room, and then two feet thudded to the floor.
