I debated about whether I should turn on the radio, then decided not to use the battery any more than I needed. After a few minutes, I started to dig for my phone so that I could read something while I waited for rescue, before I realized what I was doing and laughed hollowly.
There was really nothing else to do. I pulled the sleeping bag over my face and went to sleep.
Chapter Fourteen
I was woken abruptly by a heavy thump against the driver’s window. I jerked upright, confused about where I was and why I couldn’t move any of my limbs. After a moment of panicked thrashing, I remembered. Going perfectly still, I peered at the darkness surrounding me. My hand warmers had gone stone cold. My face felt like an icy mask.
The thump sounded on the driver’s window again. I twisted towards it, breathing shallowly, heart hammering. What if it was an animal? If I rolled the window down or opened the door, a grizzly could rip my head off like a champagne cork.
“Hello?” I shouted.
“Grace?” somebody shouted back.
“Yes! It’s me!”
“Open the door!” he shouted, with an accusatory impatience that identified him immediately.
Caleb. Of course.
I worked my arms free of the mylar blanket, then back into my parka sleeves, then struggled to find the zipper on my mummy sleeping back with my cold-numbed hands.
“Would you open the fucking door!” Caleb shouted.
“I’m trying!” I snarled. Finally, I found the zipper and jerked it down, freeing my arms. I pushed the door open to the howling wind, dropping a curtain of snow on my head.
Big hands clamped onto my shoulders. After the absolute darkness of my snow-blanketed truck, Caleb’s face was surprisingly easy to see. He wore a snowmobile helmet with the visor pushed up. He squinted against the wind, staring down at me with an expression of pure rage.
“What the hell are you doing out here?” he demanded furiously.
“Seemed like a nice night to go camping,” I said caustically. “What do you think I was doing? My truck broke down.”
“And you didn’t think to call anybody?” He looked ready to wring my neck.
“I lost my phone!” Instead of being relieved at being rescued, I was so angry and embarrassed at my stupidity, I was on the verge of tears.
Caleb’s grip eased on my shoulders. He shook his head and leaned past me to look at the dashboard. The gauges were all lit up, but the truck was so heavily blanketed by snow that I couldn’t see the headlights at all. He turned the key and pulled it out of the ignition.
“Come on,” he said. He nodded at the sleeping bag and mylar blanket still wrapped around me. “Bring your kit.”
“I’m not that cold. Once I get in a warm vehicle, I won’t need—”
“I don’t have a warm vehicle.”
“What? How’d you find me.”
“Snowmobile. The roads are impassable right now.” He reached out and unzipped my sleeping bag all the way. “Come on. Roll that up. You’re going to need it.”
That sounded ominous. “Why?”
“We’re not going to make it back to Longtooth in this. There’s a dry cabin not far from here. We’ll hole up there until the blizzard passes.”
Stiff from the cold, I stumbled as I stepped down from my truck. Caleb caught me by the arm. He grabbed my gear with his other hand and guided me to his waiting snowmobile without a word. He lifted the seat and stuffed my things into the compartment underneath. He stuck a spare helmet on me and strapped it beneath my chin when my fingers were too stiff to work the nylon through the buckle.
“Are you going to fall off?” he asked impatiently as I clumsily boarded behind him.
“Hopefully not.”
“Seriously, Grace. Don’t fall off.”
“Oh, well, now that you told me not to, I definitely won’t.”
He growled, but faced forward and started the sled.
In the darkness and the swirling snow, I couldn’t see what was coming at all. We dipped up over the snowbank and then plunged steeply down the embankment on the edge of the road. Trees appeared suddenly in the snowmobile’s headlight, startling me. And then we were in the woods, weaving between trees, lurching over uneven ground. Even within the cover the forest, wind and snow drove at us. I closed my eyes, buried my face in Caleb’s back, and held on tightly. My thighs were clamped against his, and I could feel the flex of his muscular torso as he shifted with the movements of the snowmobile. It was uncomfortably intimate, but the discomfort was not as great as the fear of falling off.
The snowmobile came to a stop. In the glow of the headlight was a rustic little cabin. A blanket of snow at least six inches deep covered the roof. Caleb grabbed the gear from the seat compartment and then led me inside.
I dug the flashlight out of my roadside emergency kit and flicked it on. The interior was about as sparse as a cabin could be. The uninsulated walls were just wooden planks nailed to the exterior timbers. Plywood platforms were mounted on both sidewalls, one above the other, forming rustic bunk beds. There were no bedrolls or mattresses of any kind. A narrow walking space ran between the bunks, leading to the back wall where a small wood stove sat next to an empty wood bin.
Caleb let out a sigh. “Of course it was too much to expect firewood.” He looked over at me. “We’ll have to bundle.”
“Bundle?”
“We’re going to share your sleeping bag.”
“Are you serious?”
“It’s for warmth.”
“I’ve heard that one before.”
He scowled. “Fine. Freeze to death.”
It’s not that I didn’t trust Caleb. He might be an asshole, but he was an asshole with principles. The problem was, I didn’t trust myself. I still hadn’t forgotten how the heat of his touch rolled through me like an explosion. I couldn’t forget the way he’d grabbed me in the hallway and pressed his face into my neck, and just inhaled—like he wanted to breathe me in and savor me. Like he needed to.
But I also couldn’t forget the cutting things he said every time I initiated something. He didn’t like me. Didn’t trust me. I was unbearably attracted to him, and it hurt that he was so repulsed by my very existence. To share a sleeping bag with him, to have our bodies pressed together, knowing he loathed every minute of it, might be more than I could bear.
But what could I do? Caleb was right. My only other option was to freeze to death. “Alright…” I said uncertainly, not able to look him in the eye. “How are we going to do this?”
Caleb took off his jacket and spread it across one of the lower bunks. “Lay your jacket out. It’s not much, but it’ll pad the platform a little bit.”
I did as he said, then stood shivering as I watched him roll out the sleeping bag.
“Take your boots off, but keep the liners on.” He did the same, and then he unzipped the sleeping bag and crawled into it. “Alright then. Get in.”
I hesitated for a second.
“Grace, it’s fucking cold.”
Like Jeanne d’Arc going to the stake, I crawled onto the bunk and into the sleeping bag. Caleb turned the flashlight off, plunging the cabin into total darkness. The wind seemed to grow louder in the darkness, howling and raging as the cabin’s walls groaned under its assault.
The plywood bunk creaked as Caleb sat down on the edge. The sleeping bag rustled as he found the edge of it. The plywood creaked again as he moved closer. He slid his legs in beside mine and then shimmied his big body in next to me. He was clearly trying to position himself with the least amount of intimate touching, which only made things worse. I’d rather have him accidentally touch my boobs than have to deal with the humiliation of him trying so hard not to.
Eventually, he seemed to conclude that no amount of maneuvering would prevent us from being glued together. With an impatient sound, he wrapped an arm around my waist and pulled my back tightly against his chest. The intimacy of it paralyzed me.
“Zipper the bag,” Caleb prompte
d.
His no-nonsense tone jarred me back into motion, and I pulled the zipper up, sealing us in together. Caleb’s touch seared me as it always did, blooming a decadent warmth beneath my skin that sank all the way into my bones. I wanted to relax, to curl into his luxurious heat, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead, I lay as stiff as a pole, with my arms crossed over my chest and breathing as shallowly as possible so that my body wouldn’t move at all against Caleb’s.
“So what’d you do to the truck?” Caleb asked. His mouth was so close to my ear, I felt the heat of his breath.
“I was driving it. The way they’re meant to be used.” I couldn’t bring myself to tell him I’d run out of gas. He’d find out eventually, but I intended to never have a conversation with him about it.
“Anthony Daaldinh rebuilt that engine,” Caleb said. “He’s the best there is. If something went wrong, it’s because of operator error. Do you even know how to drive stick?”
I think I blacked out for a split-second, out of pure murderous rage. “No, I’ve just been making my best guess all this time,” I snapped. My first car had been a manual, and I’d driven that beast for six years. I’d started driving tractors, skid-steers, and combines at a dangerously young age on my grandparents’ farm. And up until Grandpa died and the farm was sold, I’d still been driving them every time I went back for a visit. Growing up, my dad had always had ancient snowmobiles and Frankensteined dirt bikes to tool around on. I could drive anything on wheels or a track. I was pretty sure I could figure out how to drive a tank if the need ever arose.
“Does your ‘best guess’ include fueling it up every once in a while?”
Fuck. He knew.
My face flooded with heat. “I can’t believe this happened. I never let my vehicles get below half full in the winter,” I said stiffly.
“I don’t think ‘never’ is the right word here, Ms. English teacher.” The laughter in his voice made my blood pressure spike. The worst part was that he was totally right. There was nothing I could say to defend myself. Any insults he lobbed my way would be impossible to fight without making myself a liar. I couldn’t leave him thinking I was both stupid and unrepentantly so.
“It’s the dumbest thing I’ve done since I was nineteen,” I admitted, swallowing my pride. “It was insanely stupid, and I’m sorry that you got dragged into my mistake.”
Caleb didn’t say anything for a long minute. He shifted slightly, “What’d you do when you were nineteen?”
“What?”
“You said this is the stupidest thing you’ve done since you were nineteen. I want to know what you did that was stupider than this.”
My face burned even hotter. “Not telling.”
He made an impatient sound. “I had to fight my way through this mess to make sure you weren’t freezing to death, and you can’t even give me a simple story?”
My face burned even hotter. I huffed out a breath. “I will tell you if you swear never to repeat it to another soul.” He’d promised not to tell anybody about Alex, and he’d held true to that.
“Scout’s honor.”
I opened my mouth, then hesitated, brow furrowing. “Were you actually a scout?”
I couldn’t see his face, but I swear I could hear his smile. “No. But I promise not to tell, anyway.”
“Very reassuring.”
“Quit stalling. What’d you do when you were a genius nineteen-year-old?”
I couldn’t quite bring myself to speak.
“If you tell me, I’ll tell you how I got the scar on my shoulder.” I knew exactly which scar he was talking about. A thick raised line of puckered white flesh that ran across the top of his left shoulder and slashed across his chest. The only time I’d seen it, he’d been shirtless in my room. “I promise you it’s not a flattering story.”
I wasn’t hesitating because of embarrassment. I was hesitating because Caleb knew more of my personal vulnerabilities than anybody in Longtooth, and I wasn’t sure I wanted him to know any more. Especially since he seemed to want nothing more than my speedy departure from Longtooth. But his offer to share something of himself was hard to resist. Knowing something embarrassing about him might balance the scales between us a bit.
“Alright. Fine. So I grew up in a really small town—even smaller than Longtooth. But I went to college in Minneapolis. I’d never lived anywhere but my podunk little farm town, and I was kind of naive about people. I was driving back to campus from my part-time job when I saw a guy waving frantically at the passing cars. I couldn’t believe nobody was stopping for him. So I pulled over and rolled my window down to ask him if he needed help. My car doors weren’t locked. He pulled the passenger door open and got into my car.”
Caleb tensed.
“He told me he needed a ride to his house. And instead of screaming and telling him to get out of my car… I drove him. I let this stranger sit in my car and direct me to a place I didn’t know in a city I wasn’t very familiar with. I could have been driving to my own murder scene. But I just… I just did what he told me to.”
“Grace,” Caleb said, aghast.
“I know. I look back on it, and I still can’t believe… I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking, actually. I was only eighteen, and I’d never experienced anything like that, and I was just so scared when he got into my car that I went into autopilot.” I let out a breath. A decade later, and I was still rattled by it. “He had me stop at this one house and said to wait for him, he’d be right back out. But as soon as he went inside, I drove away.”
Silence followed. The wind roared and the cabin walls groaned. Caleb’s arm tightened around my waist. He probably didn’t mean anything by it, but it comforted me all the same.
“Anyways,” I said hastily, “Now it’s your turn. How’d you get that scar?”
He was quiet for a second. There was a thoughtfulness to his silence that made me uneasy. I wondered if he was trying to find the words to properly berate me for being so stupid. As if I hadn’t berated myself enough for it in the intervening years.
But he didn’t. “When I was a kid, we used to go sledding off of rooftops in town.”
The tension lifted from my shoulders.
“Well, we didn’t actually use sleds. We’d just body surf down the roof, and then drop into the snowdrifts below.”
“Sounds safe.”
“Extremely,” he agreed. “We were always getting in trouble for it. The adults kept warning us, there might be something buried in a drift that could hurt us. Turns out, they were right. I went diving off of Wade Evers’ roof when I was seventeen without knowing that the night before the last snowstorm, he’d put some fifty-gallon barrels along the side of his house.
I drew in a sharp breath.
“Steel drums, too. Not just plastic.”
I winced.
“I went down the roof on my belly, headfirst. Wade has the steepest roof in town, and it’s aluminum. You can really get some good speed on it.” He chuckled. “I hit the barrel so hard and so fast that I didn’t even know what happened to me. Knocked me clean out. Next thing I knew, my friends were standing over me screaming my name, while someone else was sprinting off screaming for my ma. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t move. I thought I was dying. Someone got me on a sled—I don’t even remember who—and took me to the clinic, but I was too busted up for Anna to fix. I needed surgery, and fast. I had to be flown to Fairbanks. I had a broken collarbone, three broken ribs, and a collapsed lung.”
“You could’ve killed yourself!”
“Told you it wasn’t flattering.” But there was a smile in his voice when he said it, and it made me think of all the sledding accidents from my own childhood.
“When I was fourteen, I went sledding with a bunch of friends, and I ended up crashing into the guy I had a crush on while he was walking back up the hill. I broke his foot.” I flushed as soon as the words were out of my mouth. Why had I even told him that?
But Caleb
laughed. I felt his body shaking against mine and another surge of heat bloomed beneath my skin.
“That’s nothing,” he said. “When I was fourteen I was trying to impress the new girl who’d moved to Longtooth. I decided the best way to do this was by doing handstand pushups in the middle of math class. I lost my balance and smashed my face so hard against the floor that I broke my nose.”
I felt bad for laughing, but I couldn’t help it. “And she instantly fell in love with you?”
“Yes. If by ‘fell in love’ you mean ‘was so scared of blood that when she saw my messed-up face she puked in the classroom trashcan.’”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I meant.” I was laughing again and Caleb was laughing with me, his arm tight around me. His breath coasted over my neck and ear. Somewhere during the conversation, our bodies had relaxed against each other like lovers spooning in bed. We both became aware of it at the same time. We shifted awkwardly away from each other—as much as we could, anyway, until my ass was no longer cradled against his groin, his forearm no longer snugged up right below my breasts.
“We should sleep,” Caleb said.
“Okay, goodnight!” I said too brightly.
The sound of the wind seemed to swell back into a roar, filling the awkward silence between us. I lay stiffly, listening to the cabin walls creak and pop. I was too conscious of Caleb’s big body pressed against mine. I didn’t think I was ever going to fall asleep.
And then, at some point, I did.
Chapter Fifteen
I woke to total silence. No wind. It took me a second to understand why I was being halfway crushed by a warm weight against my back.
“Caleb.”
“Mm.” He buried his face against my neck, gusting out a warm breath.
A not-unpleasant shiver rippled through me. I shifted away from him. “Caleb. I think—”
His arm wrapped around me, pulling our bodies flush together. I gasped as I felt the hot, hard press of his erection.
Cold Hearted: An Alaskan Werewolf Romance Page 13
