Page 17 of Untamed Hunter Daddy

The locked drawer pulls at me. I don't try it. Whatever is in there, he locked it for a reason. But the desk surface is open, and on it, beside the field journal, there's a letter.

Handwritten on cream-colored stationery. Neat, slanted, feminine handwriting. I don't read the body. That's a line I won't cross. But the closing is visible:

I'm proud of you, even when you make it hard to say so. Come home before the snow gets bad. I'll make the cobbler. Love, Mom.

His mother. The cobbler. The chamomile tea she sent two Christmases ago. I look at the letter and see a mother who loves her son from a distance, with patience, through food and letters and seasonal packages of terrible tea.

Something opens in me. Quieter than the broth or the panic attack. A door I didn't know was closed. My mother used to write me notes on the backs of grocery receipts, slipped into my lunchbox or tucked into my coat pocket. You're braver than you think. I found one in my winter coat two months after she died and held it until the paper went soft.

I don't have the note anymore. It's in the apartment above the diner, if the apartment is still there.

The back door opens. Cold air. Boot stamps. The familiar sequence of Ryker returning from the perimeter. I step away from the desk and turn toward the kitchen, and my ankle chooses this exact moment to quit.

Not a stumble. A full sideways buckle. The joint rolls inward with a bright flash of pain and my weight lurches toward the floor. I grab for the edge of the desk and miss. I grab for the back of the chair and it skids away. I'm going down.

He catches me.

I don't see him move. One second he's in the doorway pulling off a glove, the next his arm is around my waist and his other hand is gripping my elbow and my fall has been converted into a controlled stop. Just the sudden absence of falling. Just the solid wall of him, closer than he's been since he carried me through the snow on the first day.

His arm is around my waist. My hands are flat against his chest. I can feel his heartbeat through his shirt, steady and unhurried. His other hand is still holding my elbow, fingers wrapped around the joint with careful pressure. Enough to steady but not enough to grip. The warmth of his palm through the flannel is so specific that I can feel the shape of each finger.

I look up. He looks down. The distance between our faces is measured in inches and we are both aware of every single one of them.

His eyes are dark. This close I can see a small scar through his left eyebrow. The individual hairs of his beard where they lighten at the edges of his jaw. The way his pupils have dilated in a response that has nothing to do with the firelight.

I should step back. My rational mind knows this. Professional boundaries. Trauma responses. The fact that I've known this man for a week and the last man I trusted took my life apart. My rational mind is correct and completely irrelevant because my body has its own opinions and right now its opinion is that the warmth radiating from his chest into my palms is the best thing I've felt since the elk broth.

He doesn't move either. His arm stays where it is. His eyes stay on mine, and in them I see the same war I'm fighting. The badge. The duty. The word compromised. He wants to pull me closer. I can feel it in the tension of his arm, the controlled stillness of his body.

One breath. Two. Three.

"Ankle?" he says. The word comes out low and rough.

"It's fine," I say. Which is a lie. The ankle is screaming. But the scream is distant compared to the reality of his hand on my waist.

He nods. Slowly. And then he does the hardest thing I've ever watched a person do. He loosens his arm. He slides his hand from my elbow to my forearm to my wrist, the contact diminishing by degrees instead of disappearing all at once. He guides me to the chair. Makes sure I'm seated and stable. Then he steps back and the air between us cools.

"I'll wrap it again," he says. Already moving to the med kit. Already rebuilding the distance.

"Ryker."

He stops.

"The photograph on the shelf. The woman."

A pause so brief it barely qualifies as silence. "My sister. Sarah. She lives in Boise with her husband and two kids. I see them at Christmas when the roads allow."

His sister. The relief that floods through me is so transparent that I press my lips together to keep it from reaching my face. I don't think I succeed, because when he turns back with the elastic bandage in his hand, something in his expression has shifted. Something that knows exactly why I asked and is choosing not to name it.

He kneels in front of the chair and unwraps my ankle with steady hands. I sit there with my pulse hammering and my palms still warm from his chest and the Mary Oliver poem running through my head. The one with the leaf pressed between its pages. The one that ends with a question about what I plan to do with my one wild and precious life.

I don't have an answer yet. But the list of possibilities just got longer.

9

Ryker

I make elk steaks for dinner because I'm running out of ways to avoid sitting across from her at the table. The stool-and-counter arrangement won't hold much longer without becoming a statement about something I'm not ready to state.