Page 17 of Mustang

She came back to the fire with everything gathered in her arms and crouched in front of me on the packed dirt floor, her knees pressing into the hard ground, the first aid kit open beside her thigh.The firelight caught the copper in her hair where it had come loose from the knot, and the smell of the herbs from the windowsill,rosemary, thyme, the purple oregano,mixed with the sharper scent of the antiseptic as she uncapped it.

“Take the shirt off.”

I peeled it over my head slowly.The fabric stuck where the blood had dried, pulling at the skin beneath in a burn that ran from my ribs to my shoulder blade, and I heard myself suck a breath through my teeth before I could stop it.The shirt came free with a sound like tape being ripped from skin, and I dropped it on the floor beside the chair and sat there in the firelight with my chest bare and my hands flat on my thighs and Hannah’s eyes on the damage.

Two cuts across my left ribs.Not deep—a knife, probably, or a blade that had caught me twice in quick succession while I was putting someone else on the ground.The top one ran parallel to the bottom of my rib cage, about four inches long, the edges ragged where the blade had dragged.The lower one was shorter, cleaner, a slice rather than a tear.Beneath both, a bruise was spreading outward from my hip in a bloom of purple black that would be worse by morning, the tissue already swelling where the hit had connected with enough force to drive the air from my lungs.My right knuckles were split along the middle three, the skin torn and crusted over with dried blood that had been there long enough to turn brown.

Hannah didn’t flinch.Didn’t gasp or step back or do any of the things a person who baked bread for a living might be expected to do when confronted with the geography of damage on a man’s body.She soaked the cloth in antiseptic, wrung it once, and pressed it against the deepest cut without warning.

I went rigid.Every muscle in my body locked at once, my back arching off the chair, a sharp breath hissing through my teeth that sounded too loud in the quiet cabin.The antiseptic burned cold and then hot, working its way into the cut with a precision that felt deliberate, punitive almost, and I braced both hands against the chair arms and stared at the far wall where the log joints met the ceiling and tried to think about anything except the woman kneeling between my knees with her hand pressed flat against my ribs.

She held steady.Didn’t pull back when I tensed, didn’t ease up on the pressure.Just kept the cloth against the wound, her fingers spread wide across my skin, and after ten seconds the worst of the burn subsided into a duller ache I could breathe through if I focused on the breathing and not on the fact that her hair was brushing my bare arm every time she leaned forward to check the edge of the cut.

The fire popped.Sparks flew against the cast-iron door and died, and in the sudden flare of orange light I caught the color of her hair—not just red, not the flat copper it looked like in daylight, but warmer, layered, strands of amber and gold mixed through the deeper red where the flame caught them.She was close enough that I could smell the soap she’d been using, herbal and faint beneath the sharper notes of antiseptic and blood, and her breathing had synchronized with mine without either of us directing it, her chest rising and falling in the same slow rhythm my own had fallen into once the initial sting had passed.

She lifted the cloth.Checked the cut, her fingers moving along the edges with a careful pressure that tested the depth, her brow furrowed in concentration the same way it furrowed when she was working dough.The top cut was clean, superficial, likely to close on its own if I kept it clean.The lower one was deeper, angling between two ribs where the muscle was thinner, a cut that could get infected if it wasn’t handled right and would leave a scar either way.

“What happened?”Her voice was quiet.Not demanding, not pushing—just asking, the question laid between us the same way she’d laid the chair in front of the fire, with a directness that expected nothing and accepted whatever came back.

“Loose ends.”I kept my eyes on the far wall.My hands were still flat on my thighs, my fingers pressed hard enough into the denim that I could feel the fabric creasing under my grip.“Nothing you need to worry about.It’s handled.”

She nodded once.Didn’t press.Didn’t ask for names or locations or the thousand details that lived in the space between loose ends and handled.Just reached for the gauze from the first aid kit and began cutting strips with the scissors I kept in there for exactly this purpose, her movements measured and sure, and the silence that settled over us as she worked had weight but no edges, no sharpness, nothing to push against or deflect.

That was worse.Anger I could have handled.Questions, demands, the familiar brand of female exasperation that usually followed when a man showed up bleeding and refused to explain why.Those things had structure.They gave me a target to react to, contain, redirect, or shut down with the efficiency I’d spent twenty years perfecting.

This silence had none of that.It was just quiet, just the sound of the fire and the scissors cutting gauze and Hannah’s breathing and my own, and underneath it all the keen awareness of her kneeling between my knees with her hands on my skin and neither of us saying the things that actually needed saying because the cabin was too small for those words and the mountain outside was too big, and some truths, once spoken, couldn’t be taken back.

She applied the antibiotic cream she had removed from the first aid kit and then pressed the first strip of gauze across the lower cut.Her fingertips were warm against my ribs, steady, and I stared at the far wall and kept my hands flat on my thighs and did not reach for her.

Not yet.

Not here.

She pressed the last piece of tape across the gauze with her thumb, smoothing the adhesive down along the edge where it met skin, and sat back on her heels to check her work.Our faces were close—closer than they’d been since the night in her kitchen when I’d pointed a gun at her and she’d offered me coffee instead of screaming, closer than either of us had allowed in the week since.

The fire threw her in relief.Copper hair loose around her shoulders now, the knot she’d twisted it into long since come undone, strands of it falling across her forehead where the sweat from working had dampened them.Her green eyes moved over the bandage, then up to mine, and held there for one beat.Two.The cabin was quiet except for the pop of the fire and the sound of our breathing, which had synchronized sometime during the bandaging and hadn’t desynchronized, and I could smell the antiseptic on her hands and the herbs from the windowsill and underneath it all the warm, specific scent of her, impossible to catalog.

She rose up on her knees.

One smooth motion, fluid, her body coming forward into the space between us until her knees pressed against the chair between my legs and her hand came up to the side of my jaw.Her palm was warm against my stubble, her fingers finding the angle of my cheekbone with a certainty that suggested she’d been thinking about doing this for longer than either of us wanted to admit, and then she kissed me.

Not hesitant.Not exploratory.Her mouth pressed against mine with a directness that bypassed every defense I’d built in twenty years of making sure nothing got through that I didn’t authorize, and for one full second I went completely still—my hands on my thighs, my breath caught somewhere behind my ribs where the gauze was already sticking to the sweat on my skin, my entire body locked in the paralysis of a man who’d been expecting a different outcome and hadn’t prepared for this one.

Then the restraint came apart.

My right hand came up to cup the back of her head, fingers tangling in her hair where it fell loose against her neck, and I kissed her back the way a man kisses when he’s been holding a hunger in check for too long and the check has finally failed.Hard.Thorough.My left hand gripped the arm of the chair beside her hip, the wood creaking under my grip, and I pulled her closer with the hand in her hair and felt her respond—her mouth opening against mine, her free hand finding my bare shoulder where the bruise was spreading purple black and resting there with a gentleness that acknowledged the damage without treating me like I was broken.

The kiss said everything.The week in the cabin, the oatmeal and the stew and the laughter over burned eggs and an onion that had made a grown man cry.The way she’d hung herbs on my windowsill and fixed my coffee and made this place into a home it had never been before.The way I’d fixed the skillet handle while she slept and bought her gloves without being asked and sat at the table night after night listening to her hum while she worked because the sound of it had become necessary in a way I couldn’t explain and didn’t want to examine.All of it was in that kiss, in the pressure of her mouth against mine and the warmth of her hand on my jaw and the fire throwing our shadows against the log wall in a single shape that had no edges between us.

I pulled back.

Not far.My forehead dropped to hers, my hand still in her hair, her breath warm against my mouth where the kiss had left us both breathing harder than we should have been.I could feel her pulse under my palm where it rested against the side of her neck, fast and steady, and my own was doing something similar against my ribs where the gauze pressed tight with each inhalation.

“I can’t do this.”The words came out rough, unpracticed, my voice carrying a gravel I hadn’t heard in it before.“Not like this.Not here.”

She started to say my name,the name she didn’t know, the one nobody used except the club, the one that wasn’t on any of the IDs I carried,and I shook my head once, slowly.Her forehead was still against mine.Her hand was still on my jaw.The fire kept burning behind us, and the cabin held the heat the way it always did, and none of that changed the fact that what I was about to say was the only honorable thing left in a situation that had stopped being honorable the moment I walked through her back door with a gun.

“When this is over.”I kept my voice low.Steady.Each word measured and placed the way I placed everything that mattered.“When you’re free to walk out that door and go anywhere you want.If you still want me then, I’ll be right here.But I’m not going to let what’s happening between us get tangled up with the fact that you have nowhere else to go.”