Her jaw dropped as she took him in from head to toe. She had heard that avalanches ruined clothes, but she hadn’t heard of one that ripped every stitch of clothing right off you. It had also clearly done a number on his skin. He was scraped like crazy, especially around his shoulders and neck. He was also going to get hypothermia in about five seconds.
“Are you okay?” she asked and closed her eyes. What an idiotic question. He was the furthest thing from okay she had probably ever found in the woods.
He was also suspended over a snowfield, and she could not get any closer to him.
He looked at her and groaned.
She frowned. Normally, people lost in the woods were pretty happy to see her, another job she took on a regular basis with a local Search and Rescue team.
“You just had to arrive right then? You couldn’t wait a single minute more?”
“I can go…”
She glimpsed genuine fear on his face. “No! Do you know where we are?”
She squinted at him. “Like on Earth?”
“Do you know where there is shelter?”
Oh, good, he was lucid enoughnotto want to be naked on a pine tree. That was very good. She could work with that.
“Yes. I can bring you to shelter if you get down from there.”
She expected him to climb down the broken tree away from the deep snow, but he leaped ten feet to another upright pine, cursed a blue streak as he landed, and then scrambled down toward her.
He stepped into the snow, and it came up to his thighs.
He was huge, built like a professional bodybuilder, if a bodybuilder had camped out in a rock tumbler for a day and then surfed an avalanche.
She started searching her pack, pulling out an emergency space blanket and her snowshoes strapped to the front. They were rated for her, which meant he would have a terrible time, but he needed something.
“Here,” she said and thrust the blanket at him. He was shivering, and his fingers were white as he took it. As his pinky brushed her thumb, she was plunged immediately into an X-rated vision of her twined around him.
She yanked her fingers back with a gasp.
“What?” he asked.
“What are you?”
3
Mateo could just see a pair of light eyes through the mask that covered her entire head. This close, the scent of musk and roses was overwhelming. He wanted to fold her into him and never let go, but he had a couple more important things to take care of first, like not freezing to death.
“I mean who?” she said. “Whoare you?”
He blinked twice. “Can introductions wait until we’re anywhere else but here?”
“Right.”
His wolf, well-caged again, roared within him.
He knew that salvation lay a shift away, but that would mean leaving her, and he could not do it.
We’re going to be fine.
His clattering teeth gave lie to his reassurances, but he wrapped the space blanket around himself.
She examined him. “Hold on a sec.”
