I’m a stunning work of art, I decided, staring into the mirror in the bathroom. It only showed my head and shoulders, but that was enough to see the two clashing plaid designs of my shirts, but I was at the point to where comfort and warmth were far more important than fashion. Once I was dressed and somewhat warm, I went over one of the windows – an unbroken one – and peered outside, gaping when I saw the sun trying to cut through the cloud layer.
I didn’t even think twice. I grabbed my tennis shoes and pulled them on, then took the extra coat from a hook by the door and headed outside. If I didn’t get some fresh air, I was going to go crazy.
I didn’t see Lukas anywhere outside, but more importantly, I saw no wolves.
I kept an eye out for both as I circled around the cabin, coming to a halt at the back where I saw a smaller, separate building tucked off between two towering pines. The tree branch that had crashed through the window was lying a few yards in front of the small shed, an ax buried in the trunk. Guess he didn’t lack for firewood around here. That was a good thing.
Curious about the shed, I started toward it. “It’s probably where he keeps the bodies of all the women he’s rescued,” I muttered morbidly. Not that I really believed it. He was…weird, but not creepy weird. Just…weird. And I wished he’d talk to me more.
The door was padlocked. Yet more proof of the weird. Somehow I didn’t think he had a lot of trouble with people breaking into his home around here. Annoyed, mostly because poking around in the shed would have given me something to do, I reached out to tug on the padlock.
I never managed to get my hand on it, because Lukas’s hand caught my wrist.
“You’re nosy,” he said right in my ear.
I shrieked, startled by his sudden and silent appearance.
Jerking back, I tried to pull away, but he hadn’t let go of my wrist.
“Good grief,” I snapped. “Make some noise next time.”
“What are you doing?” he asked, ignoring me. “Any reason you’ve got trying to dig around in my personal business?”
“I…” Huffing out a breath, I glared at him. “Yes,” I snapped. “I’m bored.”
“That’s no reason.” He gestured to the house. “There’s stuff in there. Go nose around in there.”
“Why? You afraid I’m going to find skeletons of the bodies you’ve got tucked in there?” I demanded.
A grin crooked his lips, momentarily lighting his eyes. “If you actually think I’ve got skeletons in my shed, how smart is it of you to let me in on the fact?”
“I don’t think that.” Sniffing, I tugged on my wrist again. He finally let go.
Backing away from him, I resisted the urge to rub the area where he’d been touching me. He hadn’t hurt me, but my skin burned where he’d touched. I could feel my pulse pounding against my skin, and there were other things pulsing as well. Abruptly, the dream from the other night came back to the fore of my mind, and that just pissed me off. “I just don’t see what the big deal is if I kill time looking around in the tool shed.”
“Because it’s my shed,” Lukas said, jutting his chin out at me. “Go on. Get back inside…or maybe you want to go chase down wolves again.”
“I didn’t chase down wolves,” I snapped.
“Could have fooled me.” But his voice softened a little. “Go on. Get inside, Stella. It’s safer in there. Look…the weather is clearing. Tomorrow, if you don’t drive me absolutely insane, I should be able to take you into the nearest town, okay?”
* * *
If I didn’t drive him insane?
A few hours later, his words were echoing inside my head, and I was hard-pressed not to sulk in a silent snit in the corner. Not that he would have noticed. Once he’d come in, hauling another armful of firewood, he’d prepared some food then retreated to his chair with a battered book.
He was clearly as talkative as ever.
I don’t know how much time passed or even what time it was, but finally, that silence, his refusal to look at me, even the memories of that dream were driving me crazy. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could put up with it, and at some point, after he turned what seemed like the gazillionth page in his endless book, I snapped.
“You know, I can’t wait to get to Denver. My boyfriend must be worried sick, and I’ve got admit, I miss him like crazy,” I said.
Over the top of his book, Lukas cast me a look, his brow arched.
“We’ve been dating practically since I started college,” I told him. What in the hell was I doing? He didn’t give a damn about Aaron and me.
His eyes drifted back to the page, and he slumped deeper in the chair. Clearly, his attention was not on me.
“I think he’s going to propose at Christmas.” The words popped out of me with no conscious thought of my own. “It’s been terrible being away from him all this time. He helped me get this job, you know. Well, it’s not like I’m not qualified for it – I am. I totally am.”
I kept rambling.
Lukas barely glanced at me or acknowledged anything I said.
Did that shut me up?
No.
It did have one positive benefit, though.
That night, he elected to sleep on a pallet of blankets in front of the fireplace instead of in the bed with me.
It probably had more to do with the fact that I hadn’t been able to shut my mouth up than anything, although would it have killed him to…I dunno, chat a little? Be nice? Talk to me?
He had to be one of the most anti-social people I’d ever met.
I was so ready to get back to town.
Get back to Aaron and away from Lukas, and how unsettling he was.
How attractive he was.
How…everything he was.
7
This time, it wasn’t pain that woke me, nor was it the absence of noise, but rather bright, almost blinding light. For a moment, I couldn’t even figure out what the light was. And then, I was so excited, I got out of bed in such a rush, I tangled myself in the sheets and comforter and ended up on my ass on the floor.
Sunlight. That was sunlight.
And not just a little bit of sunlight, but a lot of sunlight. The kind that blinded you on a bright, sunny day. Especially when it reflected off the snow.
I had known a lot of days like that. Clambering to my feet, I hurried to the window and peered outside, ignoring the chill that had settled in the cabin. The fire had died down again which meant Lukas had gone out.
That was okay.
It was okay because the sun was shining and the sky was blue.
It was so blue it hurt to look at it.
Pressing my hand to the clear pane of glass, I sighed happily. I could go home.
So what if Lukas had been taunting me about not taking me to the nearest town if I drove him crazy? That was some faulty logic there. If I was driving him crazy, didn’t it make more sense to take me to town where I wouldn’t drive him crazy?
With another sigh, I rested my head against the frame of the window and wondered how long it would take to get to Denver. Hank had said it would take days walking but I had no idea how long it would take driving the distance from here.
It didn’t matter. I was going home today. And heaven help Lukas if he thought he might keep me here any longer. I’d get my hands on the fireplace poker and threaten to beat him bloody.
I hurriedly got dressed, my cabin fever now at an all-time high. After I shoved my feet into my shoes, I hurried outside, hoping to find him out there, shoveling out the Jeep.
No such luck. The Jeep wasn’t even there. He had dug it out – I could see the snow piled up where he’d worked, and the churned mess where he’d been walking, as well as tracks that led around to the back, but I didn’t know where he was.
“What the hell?” I grumbled.
There was no answer. Not that I had expected one. Who was going to talk back to me? The birds? Lukas? Even if he had been here, the birds were more likely to speak to me than he was.
br />
Groaning in frustration, I spun on my heel and looked around. But there was no answer to his whereabouts other than the tracks that disappeared behind the cabin.
“Fine,” I said out loud. “I’ll just follow those.”
For a little ways, at least. I definitely wasn’t going out of sight of the cabin – we weren’t doing the dance with the wolves again. Besides, it wasn’t like I could get to town on my own, but at least I could get an idea of where he might have gone. Maybe he had some secret stash of firewood that he wanted to replenish before he left. A secret stash that he kept somewhere other than at the cabin. Because of course, that made perfect sense.
I came up short at the sight of the Jeep located right behind the cabin. I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t walked back here, but it was arrowed off, pointing to the east, and I could see beyond it where he had cleared some more of the road.
There was also a snow-plow attachment affixed to the front.
Now I felt silly. It had been snowing off and on for the past two days. Of course, he needed to do some work to clear the way so we could get off the mountain.
Feeling relieved, knowing that he was somewhere close by, I started to turn around, but a low, pulsing noise caught my ears. Music. It was music.
Curious, I cocked my head as I looked around. The Jeep was off, the engine quiet, so it wasn’t coming from there…I didn’t think. The shed, I realized. It was coming from the shed.
Now, I was more curious than ever.
The door was shut, but the music was playing loud enough that I could hear it despite the muffling effects of the snow piled inches thick on the roof, on the windows.
The snow around the shed itself was packed down, and I could see where he’d been adding to a woodpile outside the door.
His secret stash, I thought, amused.
I wondered what he did in there.
Maybe he was an artist. There wasn’t any way a lot of natural light could shine in there unless he had skylights, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t do something artsy in there.
It could explain why he was so temperamental and so private. Knowing I shouldn’t but unable to resist, I eased closer. I had no doubt that he had some way of locking the door from the inside. He just seemed like that kind of guy. But there were the windows…and I was so curious.
As I got closer, I could make out the strains of what sounded like metal music. Death metal, possibly. One of my friends from college had been in a death metal band, and I had learned far more than I wanted to know about the differences between screamo, death metal, and regular old heavy metal.
I never would have pegged Lukas for being a lover of metal, much less death metal.
The window up ahead beckoned me, the music like a siren song but not because I enjoyed it so much as because I just had to look.
I had some whimsical idea that I would find him at a potter’s wheel or maybe carving something. I could see him sitting under a beam of light, a block of wood in one hand and a knife in the other.
It was that whimsical thought, I decided later, that made what I saw that much more shocking.
A foot from the window, inside that packed space by the woodpile, I stood frozen in my tracks, my brain struggling to process what was happening.
It was Lukas. He was stripped down to the waist, and his back was covered in ugly, angry welts. And there was no doubt how those welts had come to be on his back because, as I watched, hypnotized by the scene playing out in front of me, a heavy leather belt came flying over his shoulder and landed on his back, leaving yet another dark, angry mark in its wake.
I sucked in a breath, horrified.
What was he doing? I wanted to rush in there and grab that belt, make him stop. But my feet wouldn’t move, and I couldn’t get my brain to engage either.
What was he doing?
He hit himself again, his entire body shuddering.
It happened a third time.
He stopped, swaying for a moment, and I stood there, still immobilized and horrified. What was this? Some crazed sex fetish?
But that didn’t make sense. I had a friend who had confessed to me her senior year of college that she was a sub and her boyfriend, one of the quietest, shyest boys I had ever met, was her Dom. I never would have guessed it from either of them, but I’d gone to a BDSM club with them once, and some of the stuff I had seen had almost clicked. And what Michelle had with her boyfriend Clay...it had clicked. It made sense in my head, for the two of them.
This…it didn’t make sense.
Nothing I saw in front of me made sense, and I had the surreal impression that Lukas was not enjoying what he was doing to himself.
Then why is he doing it? a small voice inside me whispered. Nobody is making him. He has to be enjoying it.
No, he doesn’t, another part of me whispered. People did things they didn’t like all the time. They felt compelled to. But it still didn’t make sense. And Lukas became more inexplicable to me with every passing second.
There was a break in the music, and I panicked, terrified he’d turn or that I’d make some noise and he’d know I was out there.
That fear was what broke my paralysis, and finally, I was able to make my legs move. Quicker than I would have thought possible, I rushed into the cabin, kicking off my shoes before cleaning up the snow I tracked inside.
Then, still feeling unsettled, I paced back and forth, struggling to make sense of what I had seen. Fifteen minutes later, I was still struggling when Lukas appeared in the doorway. He dumped an armful of firewood on the pile, and I swallowed back a hysterical laugh as I remembered my silly thought that maybe he had a top-secret woodpile stash tucked away somewhere.
“Are you ready to go?” Lukas asked shortly.
The sound of his voice made me jump.
His voice was ragged, almost husky. I wondered if it was because of pain.
Don’t wonder. Don’t think about it. It’s better that way, I told myself.
I needed to forget what I had seen.
But I didn’t trust myself to speak. As he continued to watch me, I gave a quick nod and turned to start gathering my things.
He disappeared into the bathroom and emerged almost ten minutes later.
He hadn’t showered, so that left me to wonder just what he had been doing. Don’t wonder! I reminded myself. I didn’t need to think about what he had been doing.
He went to pick up my suitcase, and I grabbed it before he could. “I’ve got it,” I said the words coming out shrill, almost panicked.
He gave me a strange look, and I flashed him a bright smile. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m nervous about the drive. It can’t be easy driving in this stuff. Do we need to clear the driveway?”
I didn’t think about the fact that he might have seen some of my footprints out in the snow. Yet he gave no sign that he suspected I’d seen him.
So I wasn’t going to let on that I knew.
“I already took care of clearing most of the snow around the cabin.” He continued to eye me strangely, so I turned away from him, determined not to let him pick up on anything from me.
“What about down the mountain? I don’t guess the street department comes up here to clear the roads.” I strived, and I think I succeeded, at keeping my voice light.
“I’ve got a plow attachment on the Jeep. Come on. Let’s get going.”
* * *
It took more than an hour to get to the nearest town. We had to drive at a crawl. If the roads were clear, it might have only taken twenty minutes. All this time and the nearest town was a few twists and bends in the road away.
But I understood why Lukas hadn’t wanted to drive these roads in the storm. There were drop-offs that made my heart thud in my chest even though the day was clear and he was a good driver.
The beauty of the mountains was enough to make my breath catch in my throat, and for a little while, I was able to forget about the past few days, even my uneasiness about what I had seen in the shed.
But as we reached the outskirts of the small town, it was harder to brush all of that aside.
It was getting hard to brush anything aside.
“We’ll stop and eat breakfast,” Lukas said.
“Okay.” I forced the word out. I managed to bite back, And then what?
Because I honestly had no clue. I didn’t have my cell phone. I could call Aaron because I had his number memorized and I could call the house back in New York, but my sisters? And were my parents home? I kept their numbers stored on my cell phone – I didn’t have their cell or work phones memorized.
What about my job?
What about a lot of things?
The diner we stopped at was a hole in the wall, but it seemed that was about all this town had. We placed our order and then I went to use the restroom. That was where I saw the payphone. They actually had a payphone here. I hurried to the restroom, then rushed out to get my purse and dig out the change needed to call Aaron.
Excitement burned in me as I dialed the number – finally, a connection back to my life.
The excitement fizzled out after ring number three as the phone clicked over to his voice mail and I had to leave a message. I sat down with Lukas after hanging up the phone and gave him a wan smile. “No answer. I had to leave a message on his voice mail. Hope nobody needs to use that phone.”
Lukas didn’t offer any response, staying bent over his coffee like it held all the answers in the universe.
Our food came, and we ate in an awkward silence made even more awkward – for me – by memories of what I’d seen him doing in the shed, memories of ugly marks on his broad, muscled back.
He took care of the ticket before I even had a chance to dig out my credit card. I’d told him I’d pay for the food as a thank you, but apparently, he had other plans. “I wanted to buy your breakfast,” I said as the waitress walked away, glowing over the ten dollar tip he’d given her.
He simply grunted an unintelligible response, and I rolled my eyes as I reached for my purse. “Fine, just leave me more cash to make phone calls. Wonder if they’ll swap me out a ten for a roll of quarters.” Loose change jangled in the bottom of my Michael Kors bag, but I wasn’t sure how many calls I could make with that handful of coins. “Man, I miss my cell phone right now.”