“Ula?” He thought for a moment, then reached down and rubbed his hands up and down my arms over the deer skin, causing my skin to warm underneath with the friction.
“Ula?”
Warm, he was asking if I was warm enough. I smiled up at him and nodded. “Ula. Tek.”
He grinned at me, then started back down towards the river. I leaned over to watch him, until I saw him pull his leather tunic over his head. He….
Oh. He's going to...
Suddenly, as though he sensed me looking, Daska glanced back up catching me watching him. I jerked back quickly out of sight, my face flaming red.
He's just bathing. It's normal. People bathed together all the time in prehistory. This isn't weird. Stop making it weird.
Then I caught the deep rich sound of his laughter floating up from below and my face went even redder, if that was even possible. I heard him moving, heard soft footsteps on the loose stones by the river, and then the rush of water as he entered.
I snuck a glance. Just one.
Oh God.
Daska stood at the water's edge, completely naked, his back to me. Broad shoulders tapering to a lean waist, powerful legs braced against the stones. His thick, chestnut brown hair had been released from whatever normally kept it tied back, and it flowed in soft waves to just below his shoulders. Without meaning to, my eye drifted further down and noticed a rather nicely rounded rear end.
I forced my eyes away again, clutching the furs tighter, but my heart was hammering, and heat prickled across my skin that had nothing to do with the sun or the furs.
Stop it. You barely know him. You literally just recovered from a life-threatening injury. This is not the time to be noticing very sexy men.
But I was noticing. How could I not? He was beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with modern standards, raw and powerful and utterly male. Built for this world, for survival, forlivingin a way Nathan had never been.
Nathan, who'd left me for someoneprettier. Someone clever, braver. Who'd made me feel like I wasn't enough.
The bitterness rose automatically, but it felt... distant. Smaller than it had before.
Because Daska had seen me at my absolute worst, and he'd stayed. He'd cared. He'd washed my hair like it mattered. LikeImattered.
I snuck another glance. He'd come out of the water and was standing on the rocks, water streaming down his body, his hair dripping. He shook his head like an animal, scattering droplets, then reached for his clothes. My eyes moved downwards of their own accord and I snapped my gaze away, my face burning.
Get it together. You're acting like a teenager.
But God, it had been so long since I'd felt anything like this. Nathan's betrayal had carved out something inside me, left me numb and hollow. I'd thought maybe that part of me was just... gone.
Apparently not.
CHAPTER 14
ELLIE
The word forwolfwas the first one the children taught me three days after I could finally walk without help, giggling when I'd pronounced it wrong the first six times. Vahr. Wolf shifter was vahr-shen. it meant one whose spirit was also of the wolf. That’s how they explained it. That instead of one spirit, Dar Ama, the Great Mother of All Life, had granted certain peoples a human spirit and an animal spirit, fused together. I loved the idea, and it spoke to me a lot more than the genetic modifiers Nathan had often talked about when we were dating.
Now, nearly four weeks after Daska had carried me into this camp more dead than alive, I knew maybe two hundred words. Enough to greet someone, ask for water, thank someone for food, to ask where Daska was. I had always been good at language, they came naturally to me. When I had trained in Paris, it hadn’t taken me more than a few months to become conversational, and less than a year to become fluent. Asidefrom my cooking, it was the one thing Nathan had been slightly impressed by.
I pushed the thought away and focused on the little girl crouched beside me, her small hand pointing insistently at a carved wooden deer.
"Elu," she said clearly, her dark eyes bright with the particular patience children reserved for teaching adults obvious things.
"Elu," I repeated, and she beamed.
She grabbed a carved bear, nearly as big as her torso. "Dru."
"Dru." That one I knew. Bear. I'd heard it often enough around camp, usually whispered with respect.
