“I’m…glad…you found me.” The chattering of her teeth was slowing as bit by bit, she warmed up.
When she shifted her body, he grew even more aware that he held an almost naked woman. Maybe he should have hit that resort in Cabo after all. Surely there was a single woman eager for a one-night hookup to ease this sudden unwanted desire.
While he loved the work he did, it was undeniably stressful. He saw people at their absolute lowest. Many didn’t make it. And he felt responsible for every life lost, for not reaching them in time, every single day.
He’d found Freya, though. He considered plying her with more questions about her identity, but he didn’t want her to tense up and shiver more, so he held his tongue. In time, her memory would return. If not, the Alaskan town wasn’t so big that he couldn’t find out who she was. Freya was a pretty unique name.
Under his hand, her fingers were slim cubes of ice. He began massaging them from the tips to the base of her palm.
Her closed eyelids fluttered open. Their gazes met. Suddenly, she looked as if she’d just realized she was in a stranger’s arms in only her bra and underwear, having the warmth massaged back into her fingers.
She drew her hand away.
“Tuck your hands under your arms or between your thighs.” Christ, why did his cock jerk at the idea of her thrusting her hands between her legs? He definitely needed to get her to a clinic or hospital so he could use his alone time up here to regain his sanity.
At the foot of the bed, Aries lay perfectly still, a personal K-9 heater unit. Thankfully, Freya didn’t seem to mind him lying there, despite her claim that she didn’t like dogs.
Long minutes passed. An hour. He chanced a look at the woman’s face. Her closed eyes were no longer pinched shut with the pain of blood flooding back into her frozen extremities. Her teeth didn’t chatter, and her breaths reached an even rhythm.
Hunt held still another few minutes. Realizing she really had slipped into a deep, healing sleep, he disentangled himself and eased out of bed.
Aries’s eyebrows shot up in expectation. Hunt held up a hand in a silent command for the dog to stay put. Then he went into the front of the cabin. He hadn’t even gotten a chance to settle in before he was sharing the space with the woman he’d found.
Questions bombarded his mind about where she’d come from, how she’d come to be on the mountain alone. He’d been in this line of work long enough to recognize foul play when he saw it. She wasn’t dressed for outdoor sports, and unless the wind had swung a branch into the back of her head, she couldn’t have sustained such an injury in a fall.
He needed to notify the police. Someone must be looking for her, worried about her.
He moved to the stone hearth and stacked another log on the fire. After that, he slipped his coat on over his bare chest and went out to his SUV to grab his bag and the rest of the supplies he’d brought.
Once inside again, he donned a sweatshirt and pulled out his thickest wool socks for Freya. He set Aries’s cushioned dog bed near the fire and went to put the kettle back on to boil.
While unloading supplies, he mulled over his visitor. She wasn’t like anyone he’d encountered in his years with the team. He’d searched for people who went on extreme ski trips or late-season hikes to the summit. Hikers who got turned around. But he’d never rescued someone dressed in a thin red sparkly sweater without a single clue as to how she’d gotten there.
Time to make that call to the cops. He withdrew his phone from his back pocket, but a soft cry followed by a thump from the other room had him pocketing his cell again and rushing to her.
Freya was sitting up in bed, hair a wild tangle around her face and her eyes wide and haunted. The blanket slipped downward to pool at her waist. Hunt swung his gaze from her simple white cotton bra to Aries. His dog stood at the foot of the bed, looking a bit guilty.
“I don’t like dogs,” Freya whispered.
“Aries won’t hurt you. But I’ll bring him into the other room with me while I make you some soup. Does that sound okay?”
She yanked the blanket back over her nakedness. “Where are my clothes?”
“Right here.” He laid them on the nightstand within her reach. “They’re dry now. Get dressed and I’ll fix you some food and more tea.”
Aries followed him into the kitchen and watched while Hunt completed the tasks of opening a can and dumping soup into a pot on the burner. He set out two mugs, placed teabags inside and then turned to the dog.
“You’ve been such a good boy, Aries.” The dog smiled and came forward to get his ears scratched. Hunt did better than that. He rubbed his favorite spot—right between his shoulder blades. Every time he scratched that area, it was like a magic button. Aries went down on the floor and rolled onto his back, legs up for his belly scratch.
Chuckling, Hunt squatted next to him to rub his belly. “You did such a good job, Aries. I would have driven right past her.”
Aries let his tongue loll out to the side.
“I think you deserve a treat.”
His pointed ears pricked up at the word.
Hunt pushed to his feet and walked to the box of treats he’d brought to the cabin. He tossed one up in the air. Aries flipped onto all fours, front haunches down and hindquarters up, before launching to catch the chicken-wrapped bone in his jaws.
Hunt couldn’t see how anyone would be frightened of his dog, but he supposed Aries was big and fierce in appearance, even if he was docile and a big baby when it came to belly scratches.
He was about to reach for his phone again to make that call to the authorities, when the whistle of the teapot set him on the path of caregiver once again. His top priority was getting Freya warm and out of danger. Then he’d figure out where to take her.
The cabin wasn’t one of those rustic structures for roughin’ it. A fact he was more grateful by the minute. This one came equipped with everything needed for a mountain retreat from cozy blankets to a fully stocked kitchen, including a wooden tray.
He laid a striped towel on top and added a bowl of chicken soup, a spoon and the mug of tea. On the side, he set a box of snack crackers.
When he carried this in to Freya, she was curled on her side facing the door, eyes wide and glassy. Damn, he hoped she wasn’t feverish. That would bring more urgency to the situation and involve traveling back down the treacherous mountain road to get her medical care.
She blinked at the sight of him. He paused in the doorway with the tray. “I brought you food and tea. Are you able to sit up?”
“Yes.” She’d put her clothes on again. They’d dried out while she slept, but that didn’t mean they were warm enough. The thin sweater wouldn’t hold out the cold, nor would those thin dress pants.
“If you can sit up, I’ll place the tray on your lap.”
As she pushed into a sitting position, he studied her. While she was hypothermic and he was warming her, he hadn’t noticed so many details about her. Now he realized how striking her eyes were. With more of an exotic tilt at the outer corners, they also held a quality he didn’t see every day.
Like she’d experienced things even darker than waking up in a snowdrift.
He studied her eyes a second longer, causing her to drop her gaze to her lap. When he settled the tray across her thighs, she looked up at him again. A tiny V was etched between her brows, as if she was trying to figure out why he’d brought her here and was feeding her soup.