They were warm enough now. He should pull away, create distance.
The fire sputtered in the dark. The predawn sky beyond the trees was changing—the black softening to deep blue at the edges, the first suggestion of light bleeding through the canopy. An owl called again, closer this time, answered by another deeper in the forest, the two voices finding each other across the cold.
Fatigue bled through him, and his chin dropped, bumping softly against the top of her head. A fraction of an inch. The barest gravitational pull, his body tipping toward hers. The closest he’d been to another human being in years.
He caught himself and lifted his head.
The light in the east kept coming, and Pav sat with his arms around a woman he’d known less than six hours.
Dawn would be here soon. The excuse had expired.
But he still didn’t move.
17
Harper’s feethad gone numb two miles back.
Her limbs ached with a bone-deep weariness that went beyond tired and into something structural. Her body had used up whatever reserves it had been running on and was now operating on fumes and stubbornness alone. River grit had worked its way under everything, into the seams of her clothes, into the lining of his jacket, into places she didn’t want to think about—leaving a film on her skin that itched when she moved and stiffened when she didn’t.
But worse than any of that was the memory she couldn’t shake.
Pav shirtless by the fire.
The holster riding low on his hips when he’d stripped, casual lethality against bare skin. His chest against her back beneath the survival blanket. The shift of honed muscle when he adjusted around her. His breath warm at her nape, stirring her hair in a rhythm more intimate than any touch she could remember.
The way her breathing had synced to his without permission and she hadn’t wanted it to stop.
She was not thinking about this.
She was absolutely thinking about this.
What the hell, Harper?
She focused on the pain in her feet instead. Safer territory. The blisters forming on both heels, the raw skin between her toes where the wet boots had been grinding for hours. Concrete, manageable problems that a medical degree could address. Unlike the other thing, which no amount of training had prepared her for.
Pav walked ahead of her, same steady pace, same economy of movement, scanning the forest with that constant, unhurried vigilance that never switched off. The bruised ribs didn’t show in his stride anymore—either they’d eased or he’d buried the pain so deep it no longer registered as information worth processing. She suspected the latter. The man would set his own broken leg and call it not relevant.
The trees thinned, and a building appeared through the trees.
Her heart lifted for the first time in hours.
Shelter.
Food.
The mining station where he’d stored his cache.
She’d pictured something functional, not this low, squat structure of stained concrete and corrugated metal, half-consumed by the forest growing around it for decades. Rusted mining equipment hunched under shapeless mounds of snow.
One window, cracked and filthy. A door that looked like it had been kicked open and shut so many times the frame had given up.
But it had walls. And a roof. And somewhere inside, according to Pav, there was food and thermal gear and medical supplies and the possibility of feeling safe for five consecutive minutes.
That’s a win.
Pav slowed. His posture changed, his steady walking rhythm morphing into something coiled and watchful. He held up a hand.
She stopped, colliding with his back. The man was built like the mountains. “Wha?—”
