Page 16 of One-Track Pride

"I was scared," he admits, quiet now, wrecked. "Watching that come down. I didn't have a plan for you not being under it."

"I know." My voice cracks. "I was scared for you two cars back, holding a ceiling up with your spine. So we're even, and we still have four miles to walk."

He hauls me to my feet, keeps my hand, doesn't let go. We turn toward the door, toward the storm, and go.

12

EVANDER

The whiteout swallows the world about a mile short of the emergency station. We've already covered three brutal miles since leaving the wreck, and daylight disappeared somewhere behind us more than an hour ago. One minute I can make out the path for the pass; the next there's nothing but a howling gray wall that eats sound and light and any sense of direction a normal person might trust. I trust my nose instead, and my nose says shelter, close, off to the left. The old maintenance hut squats against the rock like it's been waiting for us, half-buried, roof sagging.

I get the door open with one heave and pull Camille in after me. The wind slams it shut behind us, and the sudden quiet is almost violent.

"We're not going anywhere until this breaks," I tell her, throwing the bolt. "Could be one hour, could be four."

"I did notice the part where I couldn't see my own hand." She's already pacing the cramped space, taking inventory the way she takes inventory of everything. "There's a stove. Old, but the flue looks intact. If there's fuel, I can get us heat without smoking us out."

There's a scuttle of coal by the wall and a box of stiff matches. She has a fire going inside ten minutes, crouched over the little iron belly of the thing, coaxing it like it owes her money. I watch her work and feel the day catch up with me.

"Sit," she says without turning around. "You've been favoring your left side since the vestibule. Don't argue, just sit, and take the jacket off."

"It's nothing."

"Evander." She finally glances at me, firelight catching the sharp hazel-green of her eyes. "I have watched you lift a train car and shrug off a beam. I am well aware that 'nothing' from you would put a normal man in the hospital. Jacket. Off."

I don't have it in me to fight her. I shrug out of it and the thermal beneath, and hear her breath catch when the firelight finds my ribs. There's a black bruise spread across the left side, the skin split in two places from the beam. She kneels and sets cool fingers to the edge, careful, clinical, and I hold very still because her touch does something to the animal in me unrelated to the pain.

"This should have you flat on your back," she murmurs. "And it's already closing. The cuts have scabbed. That's… hours, days of healing in what, forty minutes?"

"Faster than a human, slower than my sister likes to brag she isn’t." I try for lightness. "We're hard to kill. Not impossible, don't get ideas."

"I'm cataloging, not plotting." Her fingers trail the bruise once more, then still. "How long have you known? That your lion, that it noticed me. Specifically."

The question lands in the small warm dark between us, and I've promised her no more half-truths. So I give her the whole one.

"Since the first day. You were crouched over that coupling telling me the metal had been helped, and my lion just… decided. Before I did, before I had a single reasonable thought about you, it had already made up its mind that you mattered. Every hour since, I’be been trying to talk it out of the position."

"Talk it out." Her mouth curves, not quite a smile. "How's that going?"

"You're kneeling in a hut on the side of a mountain, and I've never lost arguments as badly as I do with you in my life."

That earns a real laugh, the one I've started collecting like a miser. But she straightens fast, and when she speaks again there's an edge under it.

"I have a problem with your lion, though." She sits back, level with me. "It doesn't get a vote, not about me. I'm the one who decides where I go and who I let close, and I'm not handing that to an instinct just because the instinct happens to be attached to you. If this is happening, it's because I choose it. Not because you scented me and filed a claim."

"Good, because I don't want a woman my lion picked out. I want the one who told me adrenaline doesn't let a man catch a falling adult one-handed and then didn't run when she found out why. The lion wants you, fine, but so does the rest."

The fire pops, and outside, the storm keeps trying to tear the roof off, but in here the whole cramped world has narrowed down to the six inches between us.

"Say that again," she says quietly. "The rest…"

"The rest wants you, Camille." I don't soften it. I've softened everything since I met her and I'm done. "Not to protect, not to manage. Just, want. It's the most selfish thing I've felt in so long, and I keep waiting to feel guilty about it, but I don't."

She closes the distance.

Her hands slide up my chest, her mouth finding mine, and I let her lead because she's just told me that's what she needs, to be the one choosing. The kiss on the train was a spark. This is the whole fire catching. She tastes like cold and smoke and something underneath that's just her, and when I finally settle my hands at her waist she makes a sound against my mouth that unravels the last of my restraint.

I push her jacket off her shoulders. It drops behind her with a soft thump, and my fingers find the buttons of her shirt next, working them open one by one while she keeps kissing me, teeth catching my lower lip. The torchlight throws hard shadows across her skin as the fabric parts. I peel it down her arms and toss it aside, she's left in a thin camisole and the black lace of her bra. I hook my thumbs under the camisole and drag it up over her head. Her hair falls loose around her face. I reach behind her, unhook the bra, and pull it free. Her breasts fill my hands, warm and soft. I bend and take one nipple into my mouth, sucking hard that she gasps and digs her nails into my shoulders. My tongue circles, then I switch to the other side, biting lightly before soothing with my lips.