Page 55

Instead, every breath of it went through me and came out the other side as something I had no name for and refused to call safety.

I shifted in the chair, and the linen in my lap shifted with me.

I looked down and found his shirt. I‘d cut it off him two nights ago and dropped it by the hearth to deal with later, and at some point between midnight and dawn I had gathered the ruined thing up off the floor and settled it against my chest like a woman holding a cat. I had no memory of doing it. None at all.

“Is that my shirt?”

I did not jump, because I am better than that, but it was close. He had not moved and his eyes were barely open, and there was something insufferable already assembling itself at the corner of his mouth.

“I was going to wash it,” I said.

“While holding it against your chest?”

“It’s cold.”

“There’s a fire.”

“There’s also a window I could throw you through.”

His mouth curved. “Good morning to you too, Little Ghost.”

I put the shirt down with great dignity and went to see about breakfast.

By late morning he was moving around the cabin, which he had no business doing, and he ignored my opinion on it with the serene confidence of a man who has never once been successfully managed.

My own clothes, however, were past saving.

Blood didn’t wash out of wool, and it didn’t wait politely either. I’d hauled that man up the whole north ridge with his arm across my shoulders and his side opened up. The entire left half of me had gone stiff and black with it. Two days in a closed cabin with a fire going had finished the job. By midmorning the smell had turned from clean iron into something sweeter and considerably worse, and I could no longer tell where the dead stink ended and I began.

I was not going to sit in a small room with a man smelling like a butcher’s floor.

Even I have limits…

So I took my grandmother’s soapwort from my kit, pulled a rough linen cloth out of the chest, and went down to the spring.

The pool sat a hundred yards below the cabin where the water came up out of the rock and gathered in a basin before it ran off down the hill. My father used to send me to it in the mornings and laugh at me for shrieking. It fed straight from the ground, which meant it was unspeakable in June and genuinely dangerous in October, and I stood on the flat stone at the edge of it for a good while working up to the idea.

Then I stripped out of every bloody stitch I owned and waded in.

The cold took my breath entirely. It went up my legs like a blade and closed around my ribs and sat down hard in my chest, and for ten full seconds I couldn’t have told you my own name.

I made a sound I wasn’t proud of.

Then the worst of it passed,and relief flooded through my body. The heat had been building under me since dawn and the cold was the first thing in two days that had been able to touch it.

No suppressants.

The last dose had been weak and I’d felt the difference the moment it left my system. The ache between my legs had been a constant, low throb all morning, and the water only sharpened it.

My nipples tightened into hard peaks the second the air hit them, and it wasn’t just the cold. It was the thought of him still up at the cabin, the knowledge that an Alpha’s scent was already under my skin, and the fact that it had been a very long time since anyone had looked at me the way I wanted to be looked at.

I dunked my head under the water, then worked the soapwort through my locs and down my arms, and scrubbed until the water around my left side went faintly pink and then clear again.

I knew he was there before I saw him. That wasn’t an Omega’s instinct and it had nothing to do with scent. It was three years of living in a forest where any snapped twig might be a man with a rope, and I had stood up out of the water and turned toward the tree line with my heart in my throat before I had decided to.

Guy stood at the top of the path with one hand braced against a birch, holding himself up on his bad side, which meant he had walked a hundred yards down a hill with twelve stitches in him.

“You were gone a long while,” he said.