“I’ll be able to start a fire in a little bit,” he said after a while.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said against his chest. “You did an excellent job of keeping me warm.”
He smiled and pressed another kiss to the top of her head. Her hair smelled like crushed flowers. “I thought you might like the light, though.”
She nuzzled his chest with her lips, and he felt her small smile. “You did an excellent job of keeping back the darkness, as well.”
Chapter Four
John’s embrace kept the darkness at bay, but she felt it encroaching, slowly and steadily. In the distance she heard the eerie sound of an owl’s screech and then the small, indefinable cry of what she suspected was an animal’s last utterance on this earth. She shivered.
“Are you getting cold?” he asked her as he snuck his hand beneath her jacket and stroked her hip with a large, warm hand.
“No. You’re like a furnace.”
He chuckled. “I won’t stay that way forever.”
She heard several sticks popping and a whine coming from directly above them, then the sound of something dropping several feet away from their heads. It seemed like a bomb going off in Jennifer’s brain. A tiny squeal of alarm escaped her throat, and she flung herself into a rigid sitting position.
“What the hell was that?”
She sensed John stretching next to her. “Don’t worry. That was Enzo.” John chuckled a second later. “He sent us supper.”
“What?”
“Rabbit, from the feel of it. Yeah. Definitely a rabbit. Thanks, Enz,” he called in the direction of the hole above them. Jennifer heard a soft growl. John shifted next to her.
“Why don’t you pull on your jeans and jacket while I build a fire and cook us up some supper?”
She just sat there for a second as the meaning of his last few words soaked into her brain. “You know how to clean and cook a rabbit?” she asked as she fumbled for her jeans.
“Sure. I spent every summer with my father. He taught me all sorts of things about hunting and the woods.”
“What did your father do?”
“Worked in the mines. My mother left him because she didn’t want to see the mines claim him, like they had her brother and father. One of them died in a mine collapse in Pennsylvania and the other from lung cancer. Dad refused to move to St. Louis with her, and she refused to stay here in the hills and watch him slowly fade away.”
“How old were you when she left him?” she asked as she stuck a sock-covered foot into her jeans.
“Three. My mom knew we had to move, anyway. There weren’t any schools for the blind around here.”
“Were you mad at your dad? For refusing to leave and go with you to St. Louis?”
“Not until I was a teenager, but teenagers always feel like they need a reason to be mad at something,” he said mildly. “I got over it quick enough. It never kept me from living with him every summer. It never kept me from loving every minute of being in this forest. I wouldn’t have missed coming to these hills for all the teenage angst in the world.”
She smiled.
There was a pause.
“I’m going to start a fire now, honey.”
“Okay,” she said, sounding a little breathless to her own ears. Something about the way he’d said the last alerted her to his underlying message—he was going to have to leave her in the dark for a bit. She did her best to ignore the building pressure in her chest and came up on her knees. The air in the cave felt cool on her naked skin. Her nipples tightened as she poked around for the armholes of her jacket.
“Were you and your mother all alone when you went to St. Louis?” she asked, eager to hear his voice when he moved away from her.
“We moved to my grandmother’s in St. Louis. That’s where I grew up. My mom went to school too. She got her nursing degree,” he said, the location of his voice informing her that he’d stood and moved several feet to the right of her. She heard the sound of his boots scraping in the soil. She heard a familiar metallic sound and went still when a tiny flame pierced the darkness, illuminating the cave to an amazing degree. John squatted next to the stacked wood he’d prepared earlier, his elbows resting on his spread knees.
Jennifer paused, her opened jacket parenthesizing her bare breasts, and just stared at the unexpected vision of him in wonder.