Page 20 of Untamed Hunter Daddy

I grab the USB. “Thank you for trusting me.”

She replaces her hand atop mine, and I should pull my hand back. The list of reasons is long. Professional conduct. Fourteen women whose cases depend on mine staying clean.

I don't pull back.

I turn my hand over under hers, palm up, and let her fingers settle into the spaces between mine. We sit like that. The fire burns. The elk goes cold on the plates. The wind howls. My hand stays where it is.

"I should do the dishes," she says after a while. She doesn't move her hand.

"I'll do them."

"We could do them together."

"We could."

Neither of us moves. The word we hangs in the warm air between us.

Eventually we do the dishes. Side by side at the sink. She washes. I dry. Our elbows touch on every third plate and neither of us adjusts the spacing.

After she goes to bed I sit at the table alone. The sketchbook is in the drawer and I leave it there. I've drawn her hand once already. I don't need to draw it again.

I can still feel it.

10

Zoe

I see him without his shirt on the morning of day six and everything I've been carefully not feeling becomes impossible to keep not feeling.

It isn't dramatic. It's six-thirty in the morning and the cabin is cold because the fire died overnight. Ryker’s kneeling at the hearth rebuilding it, kindling in one hand and a match in the other. His shirt is on the back of the couch.

I’m awake. I've been awake for twenty minutes, lying under the quilts with my eyes mostly closed, listening to the rhythm of the cabin. Today the sequence is different because the fire went out and the cold woke him and he's fixing it before it wakes me. Except the cold has already woken me and I haven't said anything.

Now I'm looking at his back and I can't look away. Wow.

The scar above his left hip is worse than I thought. It extends further around his side, the skin pulled tight from deep tissue damage. But the scar isn't what holds me. What holds me is the rest of him. The way his shoulders move when he leans forward. The line of his spine. The width of him at the shoulder tapering to the waist. A body built by work. Smaller scars I haven't seen before. A circular mark on his right shoulder blade. A thin line along two ribs. A constellation of small white marks across the upper back.

He’s been hurt. Many times. And the evidence is written across his skin the way the tally marks were scratched into the wall of my rock hollow.

The match strikes. The kindling catches. Firelight flickers across his skin. The wanting is so sudden and so total that I shut my eyes and press my face into the pillow and breathe through it the way he taught me. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four.

When I open my eyes he's pulling the shirt back on. The moment is over. I lie there under the quilts and pretend I was asleep the whole time.

By afternoon, the pretending has become a second job.

Every near-miss registers on my skin. He reaches past me for the coffee pot and his arm moves through the air six inches from my shoulder. I hand him a plate and our fingers don't touch and the not-touching is louder than any contact would be. I'm on the stool and he's at the counter and our knees are two inches apart and those two inches contain the entire argument I'm having with myself about what I want and what I should want.

He asks if I want more coffee. I say yes. He pours it and slides the mug across the counter instead of handing it to me. He's managing the same distance I'm managing. He must be feeling it too. Right?

Late in the afternoon, I say something that changes the room.

We're talking about the storm. He's explaining how to read the barometric pressure by watching the smoke from the chimney, and I'm on the stool watching his mouth shape the words and not hearing a single one of them.

"You're not listening," he says.

"I'm not," I admit. No point in lying. The heat in my face would betray me anyway.

He stops talking, and looks at me, and something in the room shifts. "Zoe."