Lumberjacked (A Holiday Lumberjack Mountain Man Romance) - K.C. Crowne Page 0,46
but he didn’t. He took another bite of food, and for a while, we ate in silence.
“I really need to call my mom,” I told him. “It’s important to me that she isn’t worried, that she doesn’t think anything happened to me.”
“We can’t go right now,” he told me, glancing out the window at the rain pounding. “I’ll take you after the storm passes.”
I nodded, though I was unsatisfied with the answer. “I have to go back to pack and say goodbye to my mom.”
“It’s not safe right now, Malen kiy,” Viktor said.
I looked toward the window with the torrential downpour swallowing the world outside.
“No, apparently, it’s not,” I said with a sigh.
Viktor
The storm lasted two days. Two fucking days. Normally, it didn’t bother me so much. Mother Nature liked to rage from time to time, and honestly, I got it. I had those days, too.
But with Angela here, it changed everything.
On the one hand, I was happy about the storm. It was a reason to keep Angela with me, and she couldn’t fight me on it. She was getting antsy to get back home, and I didn’t blame her. But with the blip getting closer, and since she’d gone into town with me and introduced herself, told people she was staying with me, it was a risk I didn’t want to take, allowing her to leave.
It also made me feel less guilty about the fact that I hadn’t done anything about a date with her. Time was passing, but we’d had to stay in. So it made sense not to plan a night out. And that blip worried me, too. Going into town now would be like waving a red flag, saying “here I am”.
Speaking of blips, that was the part that pissed me off about this weather. I hadn’t been able to go back to the mountainside to check my equipment for movement. The plane had landed a day and a half ago, if they were headed here. It was dangerous as fuck for me to head out into the rocky terrain with the lightning dancing around the way it did. It was a good way to get fried, which wouldn’t do anyone any good.
I was getting anxious. That was a problem. I still didn’t know how the fuck they’d found me. Not to mention the fact that Angela was in trouble now, too. I didn’t want her to go, but I didn’t want her here either.
I was torn in two. Send her away and risk her getting hurt? Keep her here and risk them finding her when they came for me?
On a different note, we were running short of food. I’d stocked up for a long time. I went to town once every six months, usually, to load up on provisions. The rest of the time I hunted, made it work with food straight from the Earth. But with Angela here, we were going through my food much faster. And with the storm, I wasn’t able to hunt. So the food went faster still as we dipped into my non-perishables.
By the end of day two, just before it started growing dark again, the rain eased up enough for me to want to risk getting out and taking care of a meal or two.
“What are you doing?” she asked as I shrugged into my hunting jacket and boots.
“I’m getting us something to eat.”
She looked horrified. “You’re going out hunting in the rain?”
“If we want to eat, yes.”
She stared at me for a second, then glanced out the window. “Can I come?”
Surprised, I lifted my eyes from my gun, which I’d been loading. “You want to come?”
She shrugged sheepishly. “I mean, I’ve never been hunting. Not sure I’ll like it, but I’m here and I’m bored. I might as well try something I’ve never done.”
I frowned, wondering if she’d could handle the actual killing of something, and I’d planned to use the free time to check my satellites again. In the short time since I’d checked, probably nothing had happened. I looked at her again, an unfamiliar grin on my face. She made me so fucking happy. Dangerously happy.
“Are you sure you can take it?” I asked her seriously. A flash of defiance in her eyes intrigued me. She was so strong.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I’m going to shoot an animal,” I told her, trying not to sound condescending and failing.
She snorted derisively. “I know what hunting means, Viktor. And I’d like to go.”