“Nothing.” His voice was rough, quiet. “You look warmer.”
Something stuttered in my chest. “That was the point, Silas.”
He hummed, eyes dropping to the fire again, and I told myself that was the end of it.
But I stayed kneeling there, close enough to feel the heat off his body, the small shifts in his breath. The blanket slipped from one shoulder, and before I could fix it, he reached over — wordless, instinctive — and tugged it back up around me.
His fingers brushed my neck. Barely.
It was nothing.
So why did it feel likeeverything?
We didn’t move for a long time, just watched the fire catch and climb. Then, quietly, his voice cut through the silence. “You’ll never sleep like that.”
“Like what?”
“Half frozen.” He stood, brushing the ash from his hands. “Stay here.”
Before I could argue, he crossed the room — sleeves shoved to his elbows — and dragged the mattress halfway toward the hearth. It scraped softly against the floorboards.
“What are you doing?”
“Preventing hypothermia.”
“You can’t just?—”
“I can.” He looked over his shoulder, with the faintest curve at the corner of his mouth. “Unless you’d prefer the floor.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it again. “I can’t sleep there. You’ll?—”
“It’s just a mattress,” he said. “You need the warmth more. Probably better to be as close to the fire. Unless you’re afraid I’m an arsonist, Colette.”
Something in me twisted — some small, unsteady pulse of guilt and gratitude. “Are you?”
He just laughed as he spread one of the spare blankets out across the couch for himself. I climbed onto the mattress, still wrapped in my blanket, still shivering a little.
The firelight played over the room in slow, drowsy strokes. My heart was in my throat. I was with him —Josh— for years. And I’d never felt… cared for. Not like this.
Ridiculous.
“Warmer?” he asked.
“Yeah.” My voice came out smaller than I meant it to. “Warmer.”
I lay back on the mattress, pulling the covers tight around me. It should have felt better — safer, warmer — but all I could feel was the space between us, thick and strange, humming with everything unspoken.
After a while, I whispered, “Silas?”
A low hum in the dark. “Mm?”
“Thank you.”
The pause stretched out so long I thought he might’ve fallenasleep. Then, his voice echoed in the small cottage. “Go to sleep, Colette.”
My name, low in his voice, felt like another kind of warmth entirely. I did what he said. Or tried to. But even as my eyes closed, I could still hear him breathing across the room, slow and steady, like the sound was keeping the cold at bay.
CHAPTER 6
