by Mia Sheridan
“What happened to you?” she asked, moving closer and running her finger across a long, jagged scar that ran from his lower ribcage to the middle of his back. He had other scars on his back as well, but that one was by far the worst.
He turned toward her. “A pig. It tried to gut me.”
“A pig? One of those wild boars?” She shivered internally. She hated those things. They were crazy and unpredictable, and she’d heard awful stories about people being horribly maimed or even killed by them when they’d unexpectedly encountered one.
“He was wild. But so am I.” Something came into his eyes then, something challenging, though she wasn’t sure whether the look had to do with the memory of being attacked by the wild boar, or a warning he was issuing to her.
She raised her chin, meeting his eyes. “Clearly he didn’t get the best of you.”
He watched her for a few moments, and then he let out a breath, turning. Over his shoulder he said, “I’ll be inside.”
She stood there for a moment, watching him walk effortlessly through the snow, knowing he’d done it a thousand times, under a thousand different winter skies. Why had he made a point to comment about being wild, she wondered as she turned and made her way inexpertly to the water pump a few feet away. Was it a warning? Why? Did he want her to go because she bothered him by interrupting the way of life he’d become familiar with and had no desire to change? She thought about what he’d told her the night before. How someone had taken him from his baka and left him out there. She supposed it wasn’t much worse than what she’d already thought she understood: his parents had abandoned him to the elements. But didn’t he want answers to the questions of who and why? Who had been cruel enough to do that to a little boy? And could it be a coincidence that he’d seen the helicopters looking for her parents on the same night he’d been left out there?
She pondered on what little she knew of the mystery as she splashed frigid water on her face, letting out a sharp squeal as it hit her skin. She smoothed the water back through her hair, rinsed her mouth, and used her finger to clean her teeth as best as possible. He had a toothbrush in a cup next to the water pump, but no toothpaste. No products at all. Apparently, he hadn’t been willing to trade with Driscoll for shampoo. She used the other rustic amenities before heading back inside.
When she got to his door, she knocked, feeling uncomfortable with just opening it and letting herself inside. Jak pulled it open, now having put on the same long-sleeved shirt. She gestured over her shoulder. “It looks like a winter wonderland out there.”
He looked past her for a moment, his gaze softening. “Things aren’t always . . . the same as they look.”
She stepped inside and he closed the door. “Yes. I know. I mean, it’s beautiful, but no less harsh. Is that what you mean?”
“Yes.” He turned away.
As she was removing her coat and boots, she noticed two long, flat boards sitting against the wall in the corner. As she eyed them, she realized they had hand-made “straps.” Had he fashioned his own version of snow shoes from long pieces of wood? She was amazed. He really was . . . incredibly industrious. It was humbling to get a personal glimpse at the lengths he’d gone to to survive.
He set something in his bowl and mug on the table and Harper walked to where he stood, sitting on one of the stools. He’d opened one of the cans of pears she’d brought and had put some of the smoked fish next to it. She smiled her thanks, and he looked pleased as he sat next to her. “Thank you, Jak. I appreciate your hospitality.”
His eyebrows did that funny thing where one went up and one went down. She was beginning to recognize it as the expression he made when he was trying to put a word he didn’t know into context. She resisted defining hospitality for him. He was clearly intelligent, and possibly more well-read than some people walking around Helena Springs, conducting perfectly successful lives, so she would allow him the time to deduce the meanings of words he didn’t know. Or he could ask her. “Speaking of hospitality, I hope you’re okay extending a little bit more.” She shot him a slightly embarrassed glance. “My truck is under a sheet of ice and I can’t imagine those back roads ever get plowed. They’re too far out of town.”
His gaze was now focused on a pear as he sniffed it suspiciously and then apparently happy with the scent, put it in his mouth. His lips curved as he chewed, his gaze meeting hers. Harper’s stomach flipped at the pure joy contained in his expression. His smile grew and he said around the mouthful, “You can stay here as long as you need to.”
“Thanks.”
After she’d taken a few bites, she turned to him, wiping pear juice from the corner of her mouth. “Jak, what you said out there about being wild. You know, it’s nothing to feel ashamed of. The way you grew up was not your fault. You did what you had to do to survive. Most people wouldn’t have been able to.”
“Survival is the greatest training of all,” he murmured, his brow furrowed.
His statement confused her. “Training? For what?”
He shook his head as though bringing himself back to the moment. “What happened after your parents died?”
“Me? Oh, I . . . grew up in foster care in Missoula.”
“Foster care?”
She bobbed her head. “Yes. It’s a state-run program for kids who don’t have anyone to take care of them. Group homes or private residences.”
“Which one were you in?”
“Uh, both. I moved around a few times.”
He watched her closely, and she fidgeted for a moment, feeling exposed. Something stuck in her throat.
“And now you work at one?”
“Yes. I mean, part-time, mostly for something to do to fill my time during the colder months when my business slows down. I help out with the kids there.”
“But you work at night when they’re sleeping.”
She blinked at him. He didn’t miss a beat, did he? “Well, yes.” She felt like she was on shaky ground very suddenly. “They need night shift workers too.”
“You watch them while they sleep?” He tilted his head, his eyes running over her expression, reading her. Figuring her out, the same way he figured out words and customs, and things he knew nothing about until he came upon them in the new world he’d been thrust into. Or more specifically, had been thrust on him in the form of her, showing up at his home over and over again.
“Did you survive too, Harper?” he asked, his blue eyes piercing her.
She swallowed. She’d always sugarcoated her time in foster care to her friends and others she knew. But with him, she felt no need to. He’d called her honest, and she wanted to be. Not only with him, but with herself. Maybe brushing off her experience all these years as no big deal had done a great disservice to her own spirit. “Yes. I had to survive too. In different ways but . . . yes.”
Their eyes met and an understanding moved between them. “Are those the things you keep inside? The things you don’t tell people about?”
Harper nodded, giving him a small smile before spearing her last pear. She felt close to tears. Edgy. The way he was looking at her . . . like he knew every fearful, lonely moment she’d experienced, like he’d been there. She swallowed the pear with effort. If she kept sitting there, the emotions filling her chest were going to bubble over. They needed to bubble over. They were demanding to be set free. Just not there . . . not with his eyes probing her that way.
She stood so suddenly the heavy stool rocked backward before settling on the floor. His face filled with surprise as she took him by the hands. “Come on. I want to try out that thing you told me about.”
“What thing?”
“Yelling my secrets to the mountaintops.”
He gave her a quizzical look, but didn’t resist when she led him to where his coat and boots lay discarded on the floor by the door.
They put their winter gear on and then descended the steps, walking to the back of the house again. The sun was higher in the sky now and the ice sparkled golden instead of silvery wh
ite. Winter birds twittered in the trees, and the sounds of dripping water could be heard all around. She suddenly felt silly. The crisp air had made her feel better, helped her zinging emotions settle, and now she hesitated. What am I doing?
But as soon as the thought went through her mind, she spotted a rock sticking up out of the snow. Well . . . why the heck not? She took a deep breath and stepped up onto it, facing toward the blue-gray mountains in the distance. As if each and every sorrow demanded release, swirls of emotions rioted for first place in her mind. She cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled, “I’m so hurt and . . . and angry that no one in town wanted to take me in when my parents died! Sometimes I want to move far away from this damn town and never look back!”
She let out a huge heaving breath, watching the tips of those mountains, imagining she could see the vapor of her words—the long-held truth—floating away from her body to take residence in those dark peaks. She turned, stepping carefully off the rock where Jak stood looking at her thoughtfully.
“Better?” he asked.
She sucked in a big breath, her chest rising and falling. “Yes. I think so.” She paused. “Yes. You were right. It helps. I feel better al—”
“Keep going.”
She paused but then nodded once, climbed back up onto the rock, and turned toward the mountains. “Sometimes I hate God for taking my parents from me! I . . .” A sob came up her throat but she tried to stop it from escaping. “Sometimes I wish I’d died that night too.” Her throat felt tight, as she instinctively tried to resist more painful words spilling from her tired, love-famished soul, and simultaneously made the effort to force them out. “I’ve been so scared and alone.” And that was all she could do. The sob that escaped then was followed by a small hiccup as she tried desperately to get her emotions under control. She turned back toward Jak, but too quickly, slipping on the ice-covered rock, losing her footing and plunging forward.
Jak caught her, his arms wrapping around her waist as she wept. “You’re not alone,” he whispered. The whimper died on her lips as she opened her eyes to his face directly in front of hers, his mouth mere inches from her own. Her heart stuttered, swelled. For a suspended moment, their quickened breaths mingled in the air between them. She blinked in surprise, her body stilling. He glanced at her lips, his gaze heating and his arms squeezing her just a little tighter. Kiss me, she thought. Oh please, kiss me.
She could see the indecision on his face but knew he had to be the one to advance whatever it was between them. For a frozen moment, the entire forest stilled. The whole world waited. And then as quickly as that, their mouths were meeting, and Harper exhaled a breath of relief and joy over the sudden overwhelming pleasure of his mouth against hers. The knowledge that he had chosen her. And she had chosen him.
For a second, they were both still, then he let out a small sound, a combination between a grunt and a groan as he opened his mouth very slightly and rubbed it over hers. Despite the completely unpracticed nature of the kiss, sparks shot through her veins, her blood heating. She didn’t want to take control of the kiss. The waiting, the discovery of what he would do instinctively, was more arousing than anything she’d ever experienced.
He was holding her off the ground easily with his arms wrapped around her waist, and she sought even more closeness with him. She wrapped her legs around his body, bringing their cores together. He breathed out a harsh breath but didn’t disconnect his lips from hers. The meeting of their bodies seemed to give him more confidence in their kiss, and he tilted his head, his lips parted from the escaped breath. His tongue flicked hers and she couldn’t help it then, taking his face in her hands and meeting his tongue with her own, showing him what to do. What she was practically dying for him to do.
His breath stuttered again and then their tongues were twisting and dancing, and the moans that they were making echoed in the quiet of the ice-shrouded morning.
“Take me inside, Jak,” she managed to say.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
He kicked the door of his cabin open, his kick so strong the door banged against the wall, bouncing back and hitting him in the shoulder before he could carry Harper inside.
A grunt sounded somewhere. It must have been him because she answered with one of her own, wrapping her legs tighter around his waist.
She was everywhere. All around him, inside him. Her scent. Her heat. Her. He felt the wildness—the thing he’d tried so hard not to be—tearing at him from the inside, shouting for him to give in to it. “Jak,” she whispered between kisses. The sound of his name on her lips made his chest squeeze so hard he had to suck in a breath. He couldn’t believe this. She was here. With him. Letting him touch her and kiss her. Hot. Beautiful. His. The wildness moved forward, taking over.
He threw her on the bed, and she let out a surprised laugh as she bounced once, then twice. She stilled and her eyes went wide as she stared up at him, but not with the fear he thought he’d see. He wasn’t sure he was glad of that or not. He needed her to tell him if what he was doing was right or wrong, because he didn’t know how to do this. All he knew were his instincts—that wild wolf inside him—and his instincts wanted to take, wanted him to lose control, to feed the hunger pounding through his veins.
“You’re trembling,” she said, so soft he almost didn’t hear her for the blood whooshing in his head. She took his hand and pulled him down to her, bringing one hand to his cheek and tracing his cheekbone. He closed his eyes at the shocking happiness of this woman touching him with . . . sweetness. “Have you ever seen yourself in a mirror?” she asked, smoothing a long piece of hair back from his forehead.
He shook his head, unable to speak, his world turning back to only pictures, only feelings and smells, the way it’d started to become before he’d found the car, the words. The notebooks that had made him human again. Before her mother brought him from the darkness.
She smiled, a slow curving of her lips, the ones that were plump and pink from kissing him. He felt pride in his chest that he had made her look that way. Him. He had claimed her. He wished other males could see. Know that she was his. “You’re beautiful.”
“Beautiful?” He frowned. He thought that was a word used for females, and he didn’t know if it meant she thought of him as a woman. That was definitely not what he wanted.
Harper laughed, running a finger down his scar again. “Handsome. Sexy. Beautiful in a masculine way.” It was like she knew what he had thought, and it made him feel happy. The light from the window made her skin look golden and her eyes sparkled. She was the beautiful one. He leaned forward and kissed her because he could. That fire in his veins grew hotter again and when she let out a moan, it caused some of his control to slip. Hold on. Hold on.
He needed to smell her. Everywhere.
He moved his nose to her neck and inhaled, and in that spot he could smell her, not the things she wore on top of her smell, but the scent of her skin. Her, and only her. The scent that brought the whispers moving fast through his blood. “I like the way you smell,” he said against her throat. She let out a small sound that might be a laugh, but the good kind. And she put her fingers into his hair, her nails scraping over his scalp. He growled, low in his throat and then went lower, stopped by the top of her sweater.
“You can take it off,” she whispered.
He didn’t pause, sliding the material up her ribs and over her head, as she lifted for him. His blood spiked as he threw the piece of clothing aside, but then he frowned when he saw she was wearing something else underneath it—something white that covered her breasts. She laughed again, but as he looked up, her eyes were happy. She put her hands behind his head and brought him down to her.
They kissed for a while longer, him following her lead and quickly learning what she liked by the way she moaned and pressed her body into his. He loved the taste of her tongue. The way it was soft and wet and twisted with his. He loved the feel of her, so much smaller and more delicate than he was. It made him wa
nt to protect her and fight for her.
He wanted to do whatever she told him to do. From that moment until forever.
He brought his head down to between her breasts and inhaled there, her true smell even stronger. It made his head dizzy. It made him want to thrust and take.
He let his instincts lead him then, he couldn’t help it. He removed her clothes, needy to know her, to smell her every secret place, to have her. He didn’t want her to keep secrets from him. He wanted to know them all. To take, and then take more and more and more. To feed himself until he was finally full and then sleep and feed himself some more. On her. Animal instincts, he reminded himself. I might scare her. Woman is sacred, he whispered in his mind, the quote from the notes her mother had written about the book he hadn’t yet read.
Sacred. Something that was a treasure. To him, she was. And he was still hungry for her. He didn’t know how to balance the two sides of himself. Not when she was lying beneath him, making sweet sounds and running her fingers over his arms, through his hair.
“Jak, yes,” she moaned when he removed her boots and then her jeans, sliding them down her legs and tossing them on the floor. He came over her again and her eyes showed a flash of fear then. He hesitated, trembling. Please don’t make me stop. But she reached for him, bringing him back to her.
He moved down her body, sniffing all the places he wanted to know, going back over her belly when she gasped. He licked her skin, tasting the sweet and the salt, nipping at it lightly so her backside came up off his bed.
He could smell the place between her legs, and the scent of it so close to his nose made him growl from the pleasure—pain—of the way his body swelled and hardened like he’d never experienced before. He ran his nose over the womanly mound beneath the cloth of her underpants and she gripped his hair in her hands, tugging. The need to smell her there was a hunger he could not ignore and with one quick movement, he brought the material down her legs and tossed them on the floor.
He nuzzled her with his nose and his mouth, inhaling, learning her scent so it became a part of him, and she jerked when his nose rubbed the spot below her mound.