Page 45 of Breaking His Exile

No threat.

He’d slept — deep, dreamless with no room for anything, the type of sleep his body had forgotten how to do — and it registered the loss of the rifle with a dull, animal confusion before the rest of him caught up.

The gauze on his forearm itched. He left it alone.

Rainey stood at the stove with her back to him, stirring something in the pot. She wore his shirt, sleeves rolled past her elbows. Her hair fell loose past her shoulders in a gold tangle. Tilly lay at her feet, chin on paws, watching the door the way she always did, except this morning her tail thumped once against the floor when Evander sat up.

Rainey turned and smiled at him, bright as a sunbeam. “Coffee’s fresh.” She crossed to the shelf, picked up a tin cup, filled it, and set it down on the table. “But you’re getting low on beans.”

He rose from the cot. His body felt strange. Looser, heavier, aching with real sleep instead of the wired half-rest he’d lived on for years. He crossed to the table and found she’d set it for breakfast.

Or at least as much as she could with the few dishes he owned.

He checked the dented can he kept the coffee beans in. He’d just bought a bag a month ago. By his calculations, he should still have a week’s worth left. Maybe two, if he stretched it. But sure enough, the beans were almost gone.

He scowled and replaced the lid. “I, uh, wasn’t expecting a visitor.”

“It’s fine,” she said cheerfully. “We won’t be here long enough to run out.”

And that hit like a knife straight through his chest. His breath caught, and he rubbed at the spot where the pain radiated as he sat at the table.

It shouldn’t matter to him that she was right. She couldn’t stay in this cabin with him forever. She wasn’t a hermit like he was. She needed people the same way he needed the quiet of the forest.

And now that the rain had stopped, she’d want to signal the ranch and make a plan to get to her brother.

Fuck.

He didn’t want this to end.

He wrapped both hands around the cup, breathing in the coffee steam. The heat soaked through the metal into his palms as he watched her prepare breakfast.

And he waited.

Waited for the other shoe— the barrage of questions, the concern, the backward step people took once they’d seen the thing you kept in the dark.

But it didn’t come.

Rainey had apparently said what she needed to say about his self-destructive tendencies last night and had no intention of rehashing it. She lifted the pot off the stove, set it on the iron trivet, and portioned whatever was in it into two bowls.

“You slept,” she said. Not a question.

“Yeah.”

“Good. You needed it.” She carried the bowls to the table and set them down. Oatmeal — the last of the rolled oats from the supply drawer, cooked with the dried apples and a spoonful of crystallized honey. She’d stretched it further than he would have.

He set the coffee down and picked up his spoon, suddenly starving. The oatmeal was good — sweet from the honey, the apples soft and tart. He’d made oatmeal a thousand times in this cabin and never once made it taste like this.

Rainey sat across from him. Ate three bites, set the spoon down, and reached across the table. “Let me see it.”

He extended his arm. She took his wrist, her fingers warm against his skin, and peeled back the edge of the gauze. The marks underneath were angry but clean. Not infected. Not serious. She pressed the gauze back into place with her thumb and let him go.

“Keep that bandage on for another day to keep it clean.”

He grumbled at that. He had every intention of pulling it off as soon as she wasn’t looking, and judging by her exasperated half-smile, she knew that.

She picked up her spoon and motioned to his bowl. “There’s more if you want it.”

He did. He finished the first bowl and went back for seconds in the time it took her to eat her one bowl.