“Slowly,” he cautioned.
“Your accent gets thicker when you’re upset.” She pulled one of her hands free and cupped his cheek. “I’m all right, Ian.”
Her fingers were still icy against his skin.
Ian closed his eyes and shuddered. “I thought I’d lost you.”
“You came for me. I knew you would.” Her simple words of faith moved him. He didn’t deserve them.
Clearing his throat, he said, “Are you warming up?”
“Getting there,” she acknowledged. “But I vote we find an off season ski lodge to hole up in.” The faint curve of her mouth told him she was making some kind of joke, but Ian didn’t get it.
“Ski lodge?” he asked.
“For proper illustration of the whole roaring fire, hot bubble bath, mulled wine scenario, naturally.”
“Naturally,” he echoed, his mind taking a ready detour into a fantasy with her and all of the above. She was trying to lighten the mood, take his mind off what had happened.
“You have an unexpected romantic streak,” she said.
Ian blinked at her, trying to decide if he was insulted or just shocked. “Can’t say as anyone has ever accused me of being romantic.”
“Maybe it’s a hidden aspect of yourself you should explore, when all this is over.”
Their eyes met, clung. Something kindled in hers, and Ian felt an answering flare in response.
He could see it. An after. A life without missions. A life with home and hearth and family. A life he gave up on centuries before, the day they stripped away his humanity. But with Marley, he could see it. Because he was in love with her.
The realization flooded through him, had him rising, pacing away.
Christ, what a fucking kick in the ass. To finally find the one woman who’d ever reminded him of the thing he’d lost, who made him want to be human again, and know there was no way in hell he’d survive long enough to pursue it.
“I didn’t mean to make assumptions.”
He turned back to her, saw the shades of embarrassment and hurt clouded around her. “No,” he said, crossing, taking her hands, setting the cup aside. “No, it’s not that. I want an after. I can’t tell you how much I want an after.”
“Then what?”
It doesn’t matter what I want. They’ll hunt me like a rabid dog, he thought. He needed to tell her, to put an end to whatever fantasy she might be building in her head. But when he opened his mouth, he said, “You might change your mind, when all this is over. Intense situations foster intense emotions. They don’t always last.”
The look she gave him was long and measured. “That would be the point of after, wouldn’t it? To find out. Or is it that you don’t think we’re going to survive to an after?”
Ian lifted her hand to his lips. “I swear to you, I will do whatever it takes ensure you get the chance at that after.” As her smile bloomed, he hoped like hell she didn’t realize he had no expectation of being there with her.
~*~
“I know this place,” said Marley.
Ian looked up from the pack strap he adjusted for her. “Not exactly a popular postcard shot. People usually head west to Jackson Hole and Yellowstone rather than here. Remembering something?”
The sharp scent of evergreens and the salt of dry earth—welcome after their two-day drive from the Ozarks—tickled something in her memory. But as soon as she tried to grasp it, the thought darted away, back into the murky depths. She shook her head. “Not clearly. But if it was from before, I couldn’t have been more than three.”
He went back to fussing with her pack straps. “You did say North Dakota when the fudge shop clerk asked where we were from. Maybe you have been here before. Something might pop for you as we go. There,” he pronounced, hooking his fingers under the shoulder straps and lifting her to his mouth.
Marley’s mind blanked to everything but the taste of him, dark and dangerously addictive. Glorious sensation banished the nagging exhaustion, overrode the lingering pain from her brush with hypothermia, until she wanted to touch and take and demand.
Setting her back on her feet, Ian asked, “How’s that feel?”