Page 2 of Found By the Mountain Man

I catch her just before she hits the forest floor.

Her body is limp and cold, and her clothing drenched. Whoever she is, wherever she came from, she needs my help. I can't abandon her in the forest during a rainstorm.

I slide my arms around her and lift her up. One arm goes around her shoulders and the other goes under her legs.

Her body’s soft with feminine curves, and as I pull her toward my chest, something stirs inside of me.

Mine.

I don’t know who this woman is or where she came from, but I found her, and she’s mine.

She’s still unconscious as I carry her back to my cabin.

2

INDIGO

It doesn’t smell right. There’s no stench of pig shit, no snuffles from the porcine friends I share the sleeping pen with. And the straw is softer. It doesn’t feel like straw at all. It feels like…

My eyes fly open wondering who’s bed I’m in. A man I don't recognize sits with a rifle on his lap.

His eyes are closed, and his chest rises and falls rhythmically. He’s asleep with both hands on the rifle.

The last few days flash before me. The woods, the hunger, my body growing weaker, and then this man. I think I fainted and came to butting against his solid chest as he carried me through the rain.

I study the man as he dozes.

He’s in a sweater that’s pushed up to the elbow, showing off thick, muscular forearms decorated in multicolored tattoos. The tattoos cover his forearms and disappear under the sweater to reappear on his neck. It’s a good look and goes with his scruffy beard and shoulder length curly dark hair.

He’s the kind of guy I might chat up in a bar, back in my old life when I went to bars.

He’s beautiful in a real kind of way, with lines around his eyes and flashes of silver in his hair.

Who is he?

All I remember is the rain coming down and sheltering under a tree thinking this was it. Wondering if I was better off going back to where I’d come from. The thought makes me shudder, and I stick to my conclusion: I'd rather die in the woods than go back there..

But here I am, under guard in a strange mountain man’s cabin. Who knows what his plans are for me. Maybe I’ve jumped from the frying pan into the fire.

Quietly, so as not to make the bed squeak, I sit up and survey my surroundings. I’m in a bedroom of a log cabin. There’s a single window with the curtains half drawn. The rain has stopped, and judging by the light it’s sometime around midday. Behind the man is a door, which is shut, so the window might be my best chance of escape.

My clothes are hanging over a second chair by the window. The rain and mud are washed off, but there’s no hiding the tears in the fabric.

How long have I been here?

And if my clothes are over there, what am I wearing?

I glance down at my chest, and I’m in a black t-shirt with a Metallica emblem on the front. It’s not mine. I pull back the blankets, and the t-shirt is so big on me that it falls to my knees. I peel it off my thighs and oh my god. I’m not wearing any panties.

I gasp. They must be with my freshly laundered clothes.

Did the man undress me?

Heat prickles my skin and creeps up my neck, flushing it pink. A stranger has seen me naked. But what’s more disconcerting is the reaction in my body. The thought that this man saw my body is not entirely unpleasant.

The realization that he undressed me while I was semi-conscious should make my skin crawl, but instead my core tightens and my nipples harden.

I need to get a grip.

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