He ate in silence until his plate was clean, certain that he was red to the ears, and held his tongue. He’d been around plenty of females in his time, but for some reason this one made him feel shy as a kid in knee britches.

She waited a long time before breaking the impasse. “Where will you sleep?”

It was a perfectly reasonable question, given the circumstances, but Scully nearly choked on his last sip of coffee all the same. He had to get a grip on himself, stop acting like a hillbilly at a cotillion, or matters would just keep on getting worse. “There’s a cot out in the lean-to,” he managed, cocking a thumb toward the small room. “I’ll bed down there.”

She nodded, got to her feet, and reached for his plate. “Still hungry? I’ve got more hash on the stove.”

A sensible man didn’t pass up an opportunity for woman-cooked food, not in a place where it could be so scarce, and Scully was still ravenous. For all of that, he didn’t think he’d be able to force so much as a bite past the odd constriction in his throat, so he shook his head, muttered his thanks and surrendered the plate.

He hoped she didn’t think he expected her to wait on him like a—well, like a wife. He was suddenly aware that she was exhausted, that she wanted to turn in for the night, but she couldn’t very well do that with him sitting there at the table, gawking at her as if she were a winter rose, blooming in a bed of ice.

He got up from his chair quickly enough to startle her—he saw her jump almost imperceptibly and she laid a hand to her breast—and he was irritated with himself as he fastened the inside shutters on all the windows and made sure the bolt on the door was secure. Evangeline had dark shadows under her eyes, and her normally regal shoulders sagged ever so slightly. She was surely feeling a lot more uncomfortable than he was, being alone in an isolated ranch house with a total stranger.

With a muttered and hasty good night, Scully fled to the lean-to, where the heat from the stove and fireplace didn’t quite reach, and he could see his breath in the air. Behind the shutters, he knew the window glass would be frosted over with crystals and curlicues.

He stripped to his long-johns and crawled, shivering, under the pile of musty blankets and hides on the cot, certain Evangeline would hear his teeth chattering from the next room. He honestly tried not to imagine her removing her clothes, putting on her nightgown, letting down her hair, but the whole glorious ritual was so clear in his mind that he might as well have been peering at her through a knothole.

Beyond the thin, slanted wall of the lean-to, the wind howled, carrying the mourning song of some forlorn coyote through the night. The imprint of that sound pressed itself onto Scully’s spirit like a bruise, and worn out as he was, he took a long while going to sleep.