She dropped her burden beside the fire, shimmying out from her laden bag strap in a manner that would have boiled Neal’s blood if he were in better shape. She was lit by the cheerfully crackling fire in warm hues that accentuated every gorgeous curve, and there was moonlight giving her a cool halo from behind. Clad only in torn pants and a bra, she was all womanly perfection in shape and grace. Even half-dead, he wanted her to the very core of his being.
“How are you feeling?” she asked, kneeling beside him.
“I’ve been better,” Neal said truthfully. “But I’m not worse.”
If he kept his breaths painfully shallow, he could keep the chest-buckle feeling from reaching excruciating levels, and the worst of the coughs seem to have passed. Maybe he was just getting used to fighting them back.
Mary felt his forehead and Neal willed himself to think cooling thoughts. He could feel her frown through the darkness.
“Neal,” she started.
“I’m not shifting,” he growled at her. At this point, he wasn’t even sure if he could; it had been so long since he’d had a hint of his inner wolf that he wasn’t sure any of it was left. Could a shifter lose his animal self?
“I won’t ask,” Mary said. “But …”
Neal gave a growl, sure that the ‘but’ would involve shifting.
“Remember your promise,” Mary said simply. “Just keep fighting. I love you, and I don’t want to lose you.”
Neal lost a precious breath at her words and had to cough again. Mary held his shoulders while he struggled back to his precarious balance of shallow breathing, dizzy to the bottom of his soul.
She loved him.
Neal knew he ought to say it back, that he ought to confess that the tangled up mess of his heart was all hers, whether she understood everything that entailed or not, but he couldn’t.
She was everything to him already, but when he thought about telling her that, it felt like he was ensnaring her, trapping her in the miserable downward spiral of his life. He couldn’t tell her. He could barely admit it to himself.
He closed his eyes when Mary went to put more wood on the fire, missing her presence beside him as soon as she was gone.
Nothing used to scare him. He took the most dangerous jobs without quailing, faced the most terrible enemies. Now here he was, facing mortality with the woman he was afraid to love, and he was more terrified of admitting to himself that he cared about her than he was of the cold reality of his death drawing near.
He felt Mary return, warm against his side. She shivered and then shifted, laying her gentle deer’s head on his good thigh.
I love you, he thought he heard, like a distant echo, or a memory.
Chapter Twenty-Three
&nbs
p; Mary woke in darkness.
The moon was gone, and the sprinkle of stars in the bottomless sky did little but frost the edges of the shadows.
For a terrible moment, she thought that Neal’s stillness beneath her head was complete, and she shifted to her human form as she sat up.
He was still breathing, but if his breaths had been shallow before, they were almost nothing now. His skin felt clammy and chilled under her fingers.
“Oh, Neal,” she said, her own chest feeling tight and hopeless.
He stirred, but didn’t wake.
Mary got up and went to the fire, which had died down to glowing coals.
Tears blurred her vision, and she nearly put the embers out in her haste to feed in small pieces of driftwood. Finally, though, it was crackling again, flames licking at the rock ring, and Mary had her sobs under some semblance of control.
She knelt by Neal and drew his head gently against her, burying her hands in his ruddy hair.
“You're safe,” she murmured. “You're safe with me.”