Page 17 of Defiant Hearts

“It’s not a base.”

Now that she’d started babbling, she couldn’t stop. “I know things. About medicine. I know what a fever this high means. I know what it means when my brain’s so foggy I don’t know what I’m doing. I know—” She heard herself spitting out words in a stream she had no control over anymore.

She said something about electrolyte imbalances and something about sepsis—a word that should have terrified her but instead, it just floated past her lips.

He didn’t respond to her delirious ramblings about her own declining health. Maybe he wasn’t listening and was just glad she was still conscious and still upright—with his help.

The ground beneath her feet changed. The loose rock gave way to packed, hard ground. The trees thinned around them, opening enough to let a gust of cool night air stroke over her heated skin.

Then her boots scraped on harder ground.

Pavement.

Oh god. No.

She couldn’t make her mouth work to say the words and blinked at the road, pale silver in the moonlight, cutting through the dark. Roads belonged to her other life, a life of hotels and hospitals and steak dinners and all of the things she’d spent two months learning to live without.

The sight of it should have brought relief. Instead, panic exploded through her entire body. Her muscles locked to run but her knees only buckled.

She crumpled.

He caught her before she hit the ground and she was aware of him lifting her, one arm under her knees and one behind her back. She cried out in pain. She wanted to scream and scream from it, but she didn’t have that kind of energy left.

“I’ve got you.” He cradled her against his chest and carried her as if she weighed nothing.

She roused more. “You always carry strange women off the mountains?” The words were slurred but she still had enough sarcasm to sound like herself.

“First time.” He didn’t break stride. “You always lie about having brothers?”

Her mouth twitched, but a smile was far beyond her. “Only when I panic.”

She let her head drop against his shoulder, too tired and sick to do anything else, and watched the dark trees blur past her in slow, dizzying waves.

“Stay with me. Tell me something. Anything.”

“Like what?” she mumbled.

“Your real name would be a start.”

She issued a moan that didn’t sound human. “Not yet.”

He didn’t push, only adjusted his grip on her and kept walking.

She came back to herself a minute later—or maybe far longer—to the thud of his boots on the road and the sound of her own ragged breathing.

She turned her nose against his collar and drew in his scent. Woodsmoke and clean man and a note underneath it that some fevered, foolish part of her brain thought was the best thing she’d smelled in months.

Better than the pine. Better than the bodywash made of ash, stream water, flower petals and herbs.

“Why are you doing this?” she whispered, her lips crushed against his shoulder. “You don’t know me.”

“I can’t leave you there.”

Her memory fired. “You were in training.”

“Yeah, well.” He didn’t look at her, his stare fixed ahead on the road. “Story of my life.”

She wanted to ask what he meant and press for more. In her other life, she would have been curious about a stranger instead of afraid of him. But the world she lived in right now was faded to gray at the edges, and the question dissolved like a puff of smoke.