She was soaked to the skin. As he peeled off her life jacket and raincoat, he was able to see her a little better. She had a strong face with a firm chin and a weathered, freckled complexion that suggested she had spent a lot of time outdoors. Her hair was brown with streaks of gray, braided tightly with strands escaping around her face. She had a wide mouth that he guessed would be mobile and expressive when she was awake, and there were lines that suggested she smiled a lot.
He looked forward to seeing her smile.
Dane took off her sweater and jeans, flushing, and left her underwear in place, trying to balance the need to warm her with the equal need to respect her privacy. He toweled off her hair and dried the rest of her as much as possible, finding out in the process that her freckles ran down her neck to her collarbones and chest above the neck of her T-shirt, and were also speckled across her arms like a little constellation of stars.
He had only the one bed, so he carefully tucked her into it. Feeling her hands, he found that she was starting to warm up, and her breathing was steady.
Now he tended to himself. He was shivering and tired. He used the damp towel on his own hair and body, then quickly donned a pair of jeans. With his swift shifter healing, the cuts on his bare feet had already begun to heal, so he didn't bother cleaning or bandaging them; they would hardly be noticeable by morning.
He put water to heat on the stove for coffee and dug into his supplies.
A gust of wind slammed into the house, shaking it. Sparks swirled in front of the fire's draft grate. The walls groaned, but the cabin held firm.
It was well built. He had found it and fixed it up, but the original structure had been here when he arrived on the island. Whoever had built it knew the old ways for making sturdy structures out of logs. It had been fastened together with no nails or other modern construction materials, and it looked to Dane as if the logs had been cut with an axe.
His friend Eren, who had grown up in the area and had shown him the cabin, had told him that it was an old fisherman's shack. Dane wouldn't have used the wordshackto describe a place like this. It was much too snug and well built for that sort of insult.
And in a storm like this, he could only be grateful for its cozy warmth.
As the water heated and the fire drove the chill from the cabin's interior, Dane kept glancing toward the woman in his bed. There was something incredibly magnetic about her. He was intensely aware of her presence no matter where he went in the cabin, as if there was a string tying them together and keeping him oriented on her.
How could this be his mate? he wondered. Now that he had time to stop and think about it, the situation hardly seemed real. What in the world did he have to offer? He was a broken hermit in a cabin in the middle of nowhere.
She is our mate,came the voice of his orca. It spoke rarely; its slow words felt as if they were rising from the depths of a sea inside him.None of the rest of it will matter.
Easy for you to say. All that matters toyouis where the next school of fish is coming from.
Dane wondered how she had come to be out here, so far from land. She must have been on a capsized boat or ship. Were there other survivors? He had seen no signs of any, and with the storm reaching a crescendo, he didn't want to leave her long enough to go search. He hoped he hadn't left anyone else out there.
At the time, he hadn't been able to think about anything other than getting her to safety.
He picked up her sodden outer clothes and draped them beside the fire to dry. When he got to the life vest, he noticed a bright orange object clipped to it, made of rugged plastic with a small antenna.
Alarm jolted through him. That was some kind of emergency beacon. Dane felt it all over until he found the switch to turn it off.
Had it gotten a signal out? Was someone even now on their way to rescue her?
Not until the storm clears,he reassured himself.
It would be best if someonedidcome to pick her up. He could hide until they left; all he had to do was shift and dive, and they would never find him.
No one would ever find him.
But he found himself deeply unhappy, even miserable, at the thought of standing by and letting her leave. It was a strange feeling having her in his cabin—but not at all unwelcome. He appreciated his sanctuary, but now it seemed to him that it had been missing something.
Perhaps what was missing was someone to share it with.
I don't even know her,he thought, suppressing the instinctive urge to trust her that seemed to come from his very core.
He had no idea who she was.She might have come from anywhere. She might even have come from—
No. There was no way she was associated withthem. He could tell just by looking at her. That firm, strong, beautiful face was not the face of a woman who would be involved with anything vile and underhanded. He didn't know what had brought her out in the storm, but he could not imagine it would be anything other than a decent purpose. He could see that firmness of character even in her lax, sleeping features.
Outside, the storm raged on. Inside, the cabin was warm and filled with flickering firelight. Dane checked the woman's vital signs again, found them strong, and picked up the beacon. He hesitated, then opened the door to the wild fury of the storm-filled night.
It was the matter of a few moments to run down to the water's edge and hurl the beacon onto the waves. If it avoided being ground to plastic fragments on the rocks, the storm would have carried it far away by morning.
Dane returned to the cabin feeling guilty, but he simply couldn't risk some unknown party picking up whatever signal it had sent and following it to his refuge. He barred the door again, and changed out of his now-wet clothes.
