He sighed and let his arm relax around her. In her sleep, she burrowed closer, and even through two sleeping bags, he could feel the shape of her. He recalled the shadow dance she’d performed against the wall of her tent and almost groaned. She had a gorgeous silhouette. He’d tried not to look, but anchoring his gaze on something else hadn’t been the easiest thing he’d ever done. So, he had looked. Only a couple of peeks, but that had been enough to engrave the sight of her on his brain.

He lay awake for a long while and tried to imagine having the privilege of holding her in his arms every night. As tantalizing as that dream might be, though, Erin was too sweet a person for him to wish himself on her. If he lived to be a hundred, he would never forget that night in Medford with the woman he had violated. When he realized she was trying to get him off of her, he’d leaped from her bed and flipped on the nightstand lamp. She had hugged the sheets to her upper body and shrunk away from him as if he were a monster that might attack her. She’d started crying. Her whole body had been shaking. When she’d grabbed her phone, she messed up dialing 911 three times. He remembered just standing there, knowing she’d called the cops. He could have run. A part of him had wanted to run. But another part of him remembered feeling the vibration of her voice against his chest, and he knew then with dread-filled certainty that she’d asked him to stop and he hadn’t.

Wyatt often wondered if she’d ever completely recovered from the experience. He hadn’t meant to do her any harm. And yet he had. And he worried that she might never get over it. He couldn’t and wouldn’t subject Erin to that risk. Wyatt suspected Slade had sent Erin up here with him as part of a matchmaking scheme. He couldn’t understand what Slade was thinking. Of course, the boss didn’t know about Wyatt’s checkered past, so maybe he thought of it as just trying to hook his niece up with the deaf guy who didn’t have a love life. It burned Wyatt that he’d possibly become a special project. Find Wyatt a woman. Well, Wyatt could find a woman by himself if he wanted to. That wasn’t the problem.

* * *

The following day Wyatt was weary from lack of sleep and in a grumpy mood. The first thing they needed to do now that they had temporary tents was to set up the cook shack. That was no small task. Just getting the tent erected was a bitch with only Erin to help. As Slade had pointed out, she was a quick study and learned how the frame went together fairly fast, but she wasn’t tall enough to hold up ceiling joists without standing on a plastic tub. Wyatt was fearful she might lose her balance and fall. She didn’t, but even with compensation for her lack of height, she took longer to help him than a man might. When he needed assistance in seating the joints, she had to hop off her makeshift stepstool, drag it from one side of the tent to the other, and then climb back up to hold the metal tubing. He got cricks in his shoulders from standing with his arms extended above his head to hold the joists up. It was an awkward position. And watching Erin go up on her tiptoes to stretch as tall as she could was sheer torture for him. Every curve of her body was displayed.