Page 4 of Ensnared By the Mountain Man

“I have been. For about a mile.”

I look up at her. She’s looking down at me with her jaw tight and her chin lifted slightly, the way people do when they’re trying to hold themselves together. Her cheeks are flushed and her eyes are glassy and she’s blinking too fast, and I watch her throat work as she swallows hard. This is a woman who takes care of everyone and doesn’t know what it feels like when someone takes care of her, and right now she looks like she might break apart if I say the wrong thing.

So I don’t say anything. I stand up, shrug off my flannel, and wrap it around her shoulders. Her hands come up to pull it closed, and she takes a breath that shudders on the way in.

“My cabin is closer than town,” I say. “Can you walk if you lean on me?”

She nods.

I put my arm around her waist. She slides hers across my shoulders, and the contact sends something through me that I have no business feeling right now. Her body is cold against mine, shaking, weighing almost nothing when she leans into me. If I’d stayed inside tonight—if I’d sat on the couch and stared at the walls the way I do most nights—she’d still be up here. Alone. In the dark. Getting colder.

The walk to the cabin takes twenty minutes. It should take ten, but I keep the pace slow and steady and don’t rush her.

She doesn’t talk much. A few times she stumbles, and I tighten my arm around her—and she makes a small sound that guts me. More surprise than pain. Like being caught before she falls is something her body doesn’t know how to process yet.

The cabin comes into view through the trees, and I feel her exhale against my shoulder. I get her inside and onto the couch, and I don’t think about how she looks in my space—in my flannel, with her hair falling loose around her face and her eyes following me as I move around the kitchen getting the kettle on.

I don’t think about it because if I start, I won’t stop.

I kneel in front of her and unlace her shoe, easing it off her swollen ankle as carefully as I can. She winces but holds still. I get a bag of ice from the freezer and wrap it in a dish towel and press it gently against the joint, and when I look up, her eyes are full and her lip is trembling and she still hasn’t cried.

“Thank you,” she whispers.

I nod. Because that’s what I do. That’s all I ever let myself do around this woman.

But my hands are still on her ankle and her skin is warming under my fingers. I eat that blueberry muffin at the station every morning while I replay the sound of her voice. Same as always? I almost said something to her today at the counter, and I still don’t know what it was going to be. All I know is that if anything had happened to her on that trail tonight, I would have burned this whole mountain to the ground.

The kettle whistles. I stand up and go to the kitchen and pour two cups of tea and bring them back, and when I hand her the mug, our fingers touch. Neither one of us pulls away.

3

MORGAN

The tea is peppermint. I don’t know why that surprises me, but it does.

I had Elias pegged for black coffee and nothing else—the kind of man whose kitchen holds the bare minimum, and none of it has flavor. But the mug in my hands smells like peppermint and honey, and the cabin smells like wood smoke, and nothing about this evening is going the way I expected.

Not that I expected any of this.

He’s sitting in the chair across from me. Not the couch. He could have sat on the couch, but he didn’t, and I’m not sure if that’s because he’s giving me space or because keeping distance is just how Elias Riggs is wired. Either way, he’s close enough that I could reach out and touch him if I wanted to, and far enough that I don’t have to pretend I’m not thinking about it.

The ice on my ankle is doing its job. The sharp edge of the pain has dulled into a deep throb that pulses every time I shift my weight, but it’s manageable now. More manageable than the silence, which isn’t uncomfortable exactly, but it’s full. Heavy with all the things neither of us is saying.

I look around the cabin because it’s easier than looking at him. It’s small. One main room with the kitchen along the back wall and a woodstove in the corner and a hallway that probably leads to a bedroom and a bathroom. The furniture is solid, simple, nothing decorative. No photos on the walls, no books on the shelves, no evidence that anyone lives here except the firewood stacked neatly by the stove and the single pair of boots by the door.

It looks like a place someone sleeps in. Not a place someone lives.

“How long have you been in Wildwood?” I ask, because the silence is starting to make me aware of things I shouldn’t be aware of. The way his forearms look in the lamplight. The way he’s watching me with an expression I can’t read. The way my whole body is wrapped in his flannel and it smells like him and I don’t want to give it back.

“Three years.”

Two words. More than he usually gives me, which is something.

“Where were you before?”

“Northern California for a while. Bend before that.”

He says it the way you list places you’ve passed through, not places you’ve lived. Like they were rest stops on the way to somewhere he hasn’t found yet. Or somewhere he’s trying to get away from.