Page 38 of Snowed In

“Yep.”

He didn’t explain any further, so I just focused on my breathing.

“You were slurring and fading in and out for a minute there,” he said, peering into my eyes. “How’s your vision? Does your head hurt? Are you seeing double?”

“Face hurts,” I said, touching my eyebrow.Fuck. “Vision’s good. Slurring ’cause so f-fucking cold.”

“Anything broken?” His hands drifted carefully over my ribs.

I shook my head, then looked down at the new bruises blooming through my tattoos like some fucked-up briar of wild roses. “Nope. I j-just feel like one of those Dam-Dammit Dolls.”

“I bet.” He chuckled as his hands moved up and down my arms,my neck. “Nice to hear you say a full sentence. Here, toe out of your shoes.”

I did what he told me, then made the mistake of looking in the mirror. “That’s...horrifying.”

My eyes looked unnaturally bright against the mask of blood on my face.

“It’s just a bad gash on your eyebrow. I’ll get to it, but we need to get your temperature back up first.”

“Okay,” I said as he knelt to remove my jeans.

After undoing them, he fought against the soaked material. Frustrated, he grabbed my waistband with both hands and yanked, hard. That got both my jeans and my underwear to mid-thigh, nearly pulling me on top of him. Pretty sure my shriveled nuts brushed his cheek, but he just kept tugging until he got everything down to my ankles. I grabbed his broad shoulders as he worked the stubborn material free and removed my socks with everything else.

I stood there, naked and shivering so hard it felt like my teeth were going to rattle out of my head. He repeated the same sort of aggressive rubbing up and down my legs, breathing so hard I could feel his hot breath on my chilled bits.

I chuckled. Maybe it was the hypothermia, but I imagined him warming my shriveled cock with his mouth. Feasting on it as it grew against his tongue.

Going without sex for a year has clearly fucked with my priorities.

The shower started to billow steam behind us, and he gently helped me into the tiny tub, leaving the curtain half open. I cursed as my frozen toes hit the gathering water.

“I’m sorry, but this is probably gonna hurt,” he said as he adjusted the temperature and positioned the sprayer over me.

Gasping, I choked on my own spit as the hot water rained down on me like a million tiny needles. I swayed, then grabbed his arm to steady myself, cursing through the painful thaw as he continued to aggressively rub the goddamn skin off my very bones.

Finally, I began to pink up and the water stopped hurting. I pushed Rafferty off me and he stepped back, his shirt half soaked.

“Better?”

“Fuck yeah.”

“Probably gonna have some bruises from your seat belt,” he said, assessing me. “But you may just be the luckiest guy I know.”

“Oh, I feel lucky,” I snarked.

He was right, though. I was gonna be sore in the morning, but the bone-jarring cold had been the source of most of my pain. The relief was damn near orgasmic. While hypothermia had probably been an overly dramatic assessment, the real luck had been that his cabin wasn’t that far from the accident.

Rafferty reached in and carefully wiped the blood from my face and neck. “Bleeding’s mostly stopped,” he said, examining the cut.

“Thank fuck,” I said, feeling more human than I had in a long, long time.

He didn’t respond, so I raised my eyes to his. His expression had sharpened, and I recognized the bastard who’d calmly dismantled my entire life on that stand. I could make out the shape of his questions before he even opened his mouth.

“You wanna tell me how you ended up at my place?”

I lifted a shoulder. “The safe house was right by the dam.”

“Good to know, but that’s not the question I asked, Jesse.”

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