“After your ordeal, you needed the rest. You should not have risked me finding you naked, however. Perhaps your soul secretly wanted me to.”

“It certainly did not.”

“I wonder. All the same, I covered you some. That was generous of me.”

Covered her some, but not much. Generous, but not too generous. The implications of what he had done made her heart beat faster.

He had not only left her like this so that he could look at her. He had also done it so that she would feel vulnerable when she woke. Vulnerable, and alert to their isolation, and sensitive to the sensuality already thickening the air.

She found the mantle and tugged it around her as she sat up. In the process she revealed more than she wanted, but there was nothing else to do. He did not move, but he watched. That alone made her skin prickle, and the nap of the fur felt even more luxurious on her enlivened skin.

She reached for the water with a nonchalance she hardly felt. From her neck to her thighs, her body was in turmoil. “How long have you been back from tending the horses?”

“A good while.”

I have been watching you lying there naked a long time.

She noticed a pile of blankets and saddlebags that he had dumped near the door. “Did you bring in my sack? There are garments in it, and I can wear one while this gown dries.”

“There was no sack. It must have fallen from your horse before I came upon him, as your cloak did.”

She was almost sure she had noticed the hump of her sack on her horse when he rode up in the snow.

She cast him a suspicious glance. What she saw made her heart jump. Her gaze locked on his warily for a moment, but in that instant a mutual acknowledgment of the craving was nakedly there, just as it had been too often since they had met.

He was going to be trouble. Any man would be in this situation, but this was different, and the ways in which it was different had just been silently spoken. She would be fighting a power that a big part of her did not want to defeat, and he knew that. He counted on it.

She quickly looked to the fire and fussed with the fur, managing to pull it high behind her neck so that it completely swaddled her. She felt outmaneuvered, and he hadn’t even moved. He calmly sat in the shadows, as distant from her as the lodge permitted, but his masculine aura dominated the space. To her annoyance, her whole body sparkled with anticipation in response.

“You are unsettling me,” she admitted with irritation.

“Good. I like you unsettled.”

“I think perhaps you are the enemy, after all.”