the other down one leg. Her feet were wet. She’d walked through the lake.
So he went to the fireplace. He’d laid a fire earlier. It was down to embers now—he’d fallen asleep on the couch. He knelt in front of it and carefully laid her down on her back. Mick came over and stood guard.
She stared at him, silent tears still flowing as he tugged off her wet boots followed by her wet socks. Her jeans were wet up to the knees, too, so he unbuttoned them. She lifted her hips so he could get them off her, and as he did so, she shrugged out of her parka.
He’d only been intending to get her out of her wet clothing, but she kept going. She crossed her arms and reached for the hem of her sweater and lifted that off, too. When she got stuck, he helped.
She had not been wearing a bra.
Which was not the kind of thing he should be noticing right now. She was still crying.
But oh God, she was beautiful. The pixie doctor. The woman who fixed things. She was a healer who couldn’t conquer death. Her hair was glowing almost silver, and the dying light from the fire was gold.
She was breaking his heart.
There were a couple of his mom’s quilts on the couch. He reached for them and tried not to mourn the loss of her as he covered her up. Mick curled up next to her and whined. She turned her face into his fur.
Jake turned his attention to the fire. Spent a few minutes with some kindling getting it started again and fed it a log, then another, making sure it was really going.
By the time he turned back to her, she had stopped crying and was staring intently at him. One of her legs was sticking out of the quilt, so he moved to cover her better, but in the process his hand brushed her foot. Though dry now, it was still freezing. He pushed the quilt up a little and reached for her other foot with his other hand. He squeezed, and she sighed. He rubbed his palms briskly back and forth over the tops of her feet and slid up her ankles.
His intent had only been to warm her chilled skin, but she slid the quilt farther up, exposing her shins. So he slid his hands farther up and sent them around to massage her cold calves, staring at her the whole way.
She stared back, watching him evenly and with what looked like great concentration. He kept going, kneading up and down from her Achilles’ heel to the backs of her knees, keeping track of her breathing as he went. It was slowing. It had been rapid before, shading into panting as she’d been crying. But now it was syncing itself to his, which he’d deliberately slowed as he’d been working on the fire. Or maybe that wasn’t right. Maybe his was syncing to hers.
As he approached the backs of her knees on an upward pass, she tugged the quilt higher, exposing her thighs. She kept staring, her expression hard to read but the invitation in her gesture clear. It felt like more than an invitation, actually, it felt more like…what? Not a command exactly. An expression of need.
So he slid his hands slowly up past her knees, massaging the tops of her thighs. Her quads were tight, perhaps from all the running. He dug his thumbs in, watching her like a hawk, wanting to deliver exactly what she needed. Pressure, but not pain. Comfort, but not pity. Protection, but not constraint.
Her breath, which he was using as his gauge, kept slowing, shading into sighs.
But then, as one thumb brushed the crease where her thigh met her torso, there was a hitch.
His aim here was not seduction. It was something else, something he couldn’t begin to name, but he knew, somehow, that it had to be delivered through his hands. That words, which had never been his forte anyway, were not sufficient.
But he would be lying if he said that hitch, that sigh interrupted, hadn’t caused an echo in his own breath. A slight inhalation breaking through the rhythm he’d been weaving. He hadn’t been planning to do anything about it, though, until the thighs he held, one in each hand, fell open.
He stopped the movement of his hands as his pulse kicked up a notch. It was diverging from his slow, measured breathing.