Then she smiled.
It was barely a curve of her frost-blue lips, a tiny softening of her features. But that smile drove the breath from his lungs and the thought from his mind. His beast howled in triumph, in recognition, in a joy so fierce it bordered on pain.
Mate. Claim her. Keep her. Protect her.
“You—” His voice came out rough, barely intelligible. He tried again. “You’re safe. I have you.”
Her smile widened fractionally before her eyes closed and she went limp in his arms.
He stood in the wreckage of the crash site, holding the unconscious female against his chest, his beast still raging beneath his skin. He should put her down and walk away before this became something he couldn’t escape.
But she was cold.
She was hurt.
She was his.
He wrapped the remains of his shirt and his coat around her, then he turned back towards his cabin and began to run.
CHAPTER 3
Something crackled and popped nearby—a warm, familiar sound that didn’t belong in the cold void of space.
Ember’s consciousness crept back in fragments. Wood smoke. The soft weight of furs against her skin. Heat radiating from somewhere to her left, gentle and steady. Those sensations made no sense. The last thing she remembered was cold—bone-deep, terrifying cold—and the hiss of the escape pod’s systems failing around her.
Then golden eyes. Eyes that glowed like twin suns in a face carved from shadow and stone.
I dreamed that,she thought.I must have dreamed it.
She opened her eyes.
The ceiling above her was rough-hewn timber, firelight flickering across the beams in shifting patterns. She lay in a bed—no, not a bed exactly, more like a sleeping platform built into the corner of the room—piled high with animal pelts that held her body heat like a cocoon.
She slowly turned her head, cataloging her surroundings. A single room, maybe twenty feet across. A stone fireplace dominated the wall to her left, flames leaping behind an iron grate. Wooden shelves were lined with supplies—smoked meat, cloth-covered baskets, tools she didn’t recognize. A heavy door reinforced with metal bands stood at the far end of the room, and narrow windows, currently shuttered against what sounded like a screaming wind, flanked the door.
A cabin,she realized.Someone’s home.
Movement in her peripheral vision made her freeze.
He sat in a chair by the fire, so still she’d almost missed him.Massive.That was her first coherent thought—he was massive, easily twice her size, all broad shoulders and long limbs and coiled muscle. Dark hair fell past his jaw, half-obscuring a face that was roughly handsome in a way that made something flutter low in her belly. Silver grey skin, angular features, and a strong jaw.
And those eyes. Golden eyes watching her with the patient intensity of a predator observing prey.
Not a dream, then.
Her heart should have been racing. He was not human. He was Vultor and she was alone with him in an isolated cabin. Every lesson she’d ever received about proper behavior, about the dangers of the frontier and the violent reputation of the Vultor should have had her terrified and searching desperately for an escape route.
Instead, she felt… calm. Curious. And underneath that, something warm and entirely inappropriate that she chose not to examine too closely.
“You’re awake.”
His voice was a low rumble that seemed to vibrate through the floorboards. No emotion, just a simple statement of fact.
She pushed herself up on her elbows, wincing at the ache in her muscles. The furs slipped down past her shoulders, and she realized with a start that she was no longer wearing her nightgown. She was dressed in a linen shirt far too big for her body.His shirt.Which meant that he had changed her clothes and seen her naked body—a body that no male had ever seen before.
She should have been mortified, but a different type of heat colored her cheeks.Did he like what he saw,she wondered before she quickly pushed the thought aside.
“Where…” she managed, her voice rough. “Where am I?”
