Page 25 of Mail-Order Viscountess

Thomas’s gaze found hers across the flames. Something in his expression had softened, the defensive anger bleeding into something that looked almost like understanding.

“Who didn’t care for you?” His voice carried across the fire, quiet enough that she almost missed it beneath the wind’s howl beyond their shelter.

The question landed too close to her broken center. Her throat tightened, and she looked away, fixing her attention on the flames instead of the concern in his tone. She shouldn’t have said that. Shouldn’t have let her own bitterness bleed through into words.

“It doesn’t matter.” She forced the words out steadily and looked away from his face, back to the flames. “We were talking about your situation, not mine.”

The silence stretched again, heavy with things she wouldn’t say. Couldn’t say. Because once she started talking about her father’s weakness, her stepmother’s cruelty, the way they’d both treated Clara like a commodity to be traded and Kate like she didn’t deserve to be there at all—where would it stop?

She’d spent years building walls to keep those memories locked away. Opening them now, trapped in an ice cave with a man she barely knew, felt dangerous in ways she couldn’t articulate.

His gaze lingered on her face, studying her the way she’d studied him since they’d met. Calculating. Measuring. Trying to understand what lay beneath the surface.

She hated it.

Finally, he shifted, the movement accompanied by a barely audible hiss of pain. “I should get more wood.” His voice had returned to that careful neutral tone—the one that gave nothing away. “Fire’s burning faster than I thought.”

Relief slipped through her, sharp enough to make her chest ache. He was letting it go. Not pushing for answers she couldn’t give. Not forcing her to examine wounds that hadn’t finished scabbing over.

She nodded without looking at him, keeping her attention fixed on the fire. “The storm sounds like it’s getting worse.”

He stood, the movement stiff and careful. “Won’t be long.” As he moved toward the entrance, his shoulders hunched against the cold that already pressed in from the opening.

The blue-white light from the ice silhouetted him for a moment before he disappeared into the swirling white beyond.

CHAPTER 9

Thomas ducked back into the hollow with his final load of wood—hopefully. This third load came from a deadfall he’d found wedged against the rocks upstream.

Frost clung to his eyelashes, turning his vision crystalline at the edges, and his fingers had gone past aching into the dangerous numbness that meant frostbite wasn’t far behind.

He blinked hard to clear his sight and get his bearings in the cave.

Kate had already wiped the snow from the last two loads he’d brought, and those branches stood like a wall around the fire, drying. Nice that she’d done that without him asking.

She sat huddled near the fire and started to stand as he dropped his load, but he motioned for her to stay put. “I’ve already knocked most of the ice off these.”

Her gaze turned hesitant. She watched him another moment, then settled back to her former position—knees drawn to her chest, arms wrapped around them. The firelight caught the exhaustion in her face, the way her shoulders curved inward.

“Thought you’d gotten lost out there.” Her voice carried the edge he was beginning to recognize as her defense.

“Missed me, did you?” He dropped the wood near the fire and crouched to feed the flames. “I’m touched.”

She didn’t take the bait. Just watched him as he knelt by the fire and shucked his wet gloves so his hands could feel the heat.

He focused on the fire—if he only fed a log at a time, this should be enough for the flame to burn slow and steady through the night.

The night. The word sat heavy in his chest.

He glanced around the cave. Stone walls. Stone floor. Ice on one side, casting everything in that eerie blue-white glow.

The fire helped, pushing back the worst of the cold, but the chill still seeped from the ground like water through a cracked dam.

They’d need to sleep eventually. And there was exactly one spot in this whole frozen hollow that offered any protection from the wind feeding around the edges of the waterfall and the cold radiating through the rock—the narrow strip of floor between the fire and the back wall.

One spot. Two people.

He flexed his fingers closer to the flames, their color shifting from white to mottled red as sensation crept back in painful increments. The tingling burned worse than the cold had—like a thousand needles working their way from bone to surface.