The Loner And The Lady. Eileen Wilks

didn’t wake. He found several lacerations. It looked as if she’d fallen and scraped or torn the skin on a rough surface. None of the scrapes were deep enough to worry about, and the cuts had pretty much stopped bleeding.

      Time for a proper reading of her pulse and pressure. He cuffed her and timed the pulse, watching her chest rise and fall as he counted. Respiration shallow but not too fast, which was good. Pulse over ninety…bad. Blood pressure at the low end of normal. Skin chilly to the touch.

      She wasn’t in shock yet. But she was in danger of it. He had to get her warm and pray there was no internal bleeding.

      She sure wasn’t dressed for the mountains. Or for a storm. Her sleeveless green top and full pants looked dressy. They had the sheen of silk, too. Linda had worn a lot of silk, expensive things like this. Whatever this woman’s outfit had cost originally, though, it was useless now, muddy and torn.

      The top buttoned down the front with those aggravating little cloth-covered buttons that women like. Her skin beneath the cloth had a disturbing chill, and his big fingers made slow work of those blasted buttons. So he quit trying to preserve her ruined clothes and tore the top open.

      She had beautiful breasts.

      Seth didn’t stop, couldn’t stop in the middle of stripping her chilled body to stare, but he couldn’t keep from looking, either. To save him he couldn’t have stopped looking.

      She was soft and white and…perfect. From the coral tips of her breasts, nicely peaked from the cold, to the way her slender waist flared into the curve of her hips, to the pretty nest of curls at the top of her thighs, she was the most perfectly shaped woman he’d ever seen.

      Or maybe I’ve just forgotten, he thought, lips tight with anger at himself when he realized he’d been so busy gawking at her that he’d forgotten to take her shoes off before pulling down her slacks and panties. Her well-worn running shoes sure didn’t go with the rest of her outfit. Quickly he pulled the knotted laces free, jerked the shoes off and finished stripping her.

      It had been so long. So very long.

      He removed everything—socks, watch and a dainty little locket on a chain, dropping them in the pile with her clothes. But he kept his touch impersonal as he checked her as quickly as he could for any injuries that had been hidden by her clothing.

      No detectable damage. He could hope that meant he’d found everything. He wrapped her carefully in a blanket, struck with a ridiculous sense of loss when her lovely body was covered. Changing the damp bedding beneath her didn’t take long. By the time he had her settled between clean sheets and fresh blankets with her legs slightly elevated by pillows, her skin was warming, though her color was still bad.

      He waited a few minutes, rubbing his knee, then took another blood pressure reading. The results told him plainly that she was responding to the increased warmth, which meant it was unlikely she had any internal hemorrhaging. Relief swamped him.

      He decided to get an antibiotic dressing on the facial lacerations. When he applied it, though, she jerked away, dislodging the covers. He paused, waiting to see if she’d wake. Almost hoping she wouldn’t. Because then she’d see him.

      “I’m sorry,” he whispered, and he meant for everything he was and wasn’t, everything he’d thought but hadn’t done when he looked at her. His hand lingered for a moment, just a moment, on her soft flesh before he tugged the covers up and stood.

      First he added a couple of logs to the fire. Then he got out of his own wet things, rubbed himself dry briskly and pulled on jeans and a shirt he didn’t bother to button. He filled the coffeepot with water and hung it from the hook over the fire.

      It was going to be a long night. He’d have to keep an eye on her, try to wake her every hour or so.

      He looked over her clothing as he spread it out on the hearth to dry, noting the designer label hand-stitched inside. Damp sheets and quilts went anywhere he found a spot for them. Good thing he didn’t intend to sleep anytime soon. There wasn’t a dry blanket in the place, except for those covering her.

      He pulled the big, handmade rocker next to the hearth in the sleeping area and sat, heaving a sigh of relief. His knee and calf ached badly, but he hoped the heat from the fire would help enough that he wouldn’t be too crippled up tomorrow.

      He held up her watch and necklace, examining the mellow gold in the glow of firelight. Both were expensive. Neither told him why a woman like her was out in the wilderness at midnight, bloody and wounded.

      An automobile accident? It wasn’t completely consistent with her injuries—the lump on her head was in the wrong place, for one thing—but it was all he could think of just then. Highway 142 did lie on the other side of Old Baldy, and the climb wasn’t a difficult one—in dry, daylit weather, for a hiker in good shape. Hard to believe she’d crossed Old Baldy’s slopes in the middle of a thunderstorm, at night, with an injury to her head.

      He glanced at the bed where she lay, a small, helpless lump under the blankets. He had no business, no business whatsoever, remembering what she looked like without the covers, without any covering at all. He’d better remember that. Because she was going to wake up. That was the only acceptable alternative. She was going to look at him and realize he’d undressed her, that he’d seen her.

      She’d probably hate him for that.

      His hand lifted absently to stroke the scar tissue on the left side of his face, scarring that ran down his neck to his shoulder and splashed across the top of his chest. Life wasn’t like fairy tales. The woman in his bed wasn’t going to like knowing that the Beast had looked on her beauty.

      

      Pain came in colors and textures. At the bottom of the ocean, pain was mostly pressure, a distant, enveloping purple, but as she drew nearer the surface, pain turned a crackly, yellowish green.

      A bruise-colored feeling. That was the surface, and she didn’t want to go there, not yet. Not when the pain was still so strong. But something, someone, was calling her, pulling her reluctantly nearer…gradually she realized the pain came from her head. It hurt. Completely. Relentlessly. And there was something else…all at once she remembered terror, and fought her way up and out.

      Her eyes opened. Someone groaned. And above her, bending over her…

      He was big. His inky dark hair hung loose around his face, and his eyes were as black as his hair. His skin was rough, as were the features in his narrow face, and half of his face was ruined.

      And she knew him. He’d come to her out of the terrible darkness, catching her when she fell, stopping her flight with his big arms. She remembered seeing his face in the white flare of lightning, seeing his eyes, black and liquid as the night around them, seeing the ruined side of his face and thinking that he was hurt, too, hurt like her. With a sigh of relief she closed her eyes and let herself sink back down, knowing she was safe. Because he was here.

      

      Seth stared down at the woman in his bed. She’d woken. She was going to be all right. She’d woken and seen him…

      And smiled.

      

      She woke to the smell of food cooking and the sound of bird song. Dreams and nightmares sluiced off her like water as she surfaced, a swimmer rising from murky depths. Her head hurt worse than it ever had in her life, and her bladder was miserably full. When she cracked open her eyes, light seeped in like pain.

      Bacon? Did she smell bacon frying?

      She looked around without turning her head. Moving would definitely be a mistake. The light wasn’t really very bright, she realized as her eyes focused. The closest window showed a dim, rainy day outside, though that didn’t seem to discourage the noisy chorus of birds. Inside was a cabin, a real log cabin with the walls planed smooth and varnished in some places, left rough in others. The effect was unusual but pleasing. She looked up at a high ceiling of glossy boards. The big bed she was in pointed her feet at a fireplace in the center of the room, circled by a low, brick hearth.

      Something—no,