Page 22 of Angel's Smoke

“Didn’t. Grabbed it from home before I left to come here. Also brought with me a few more gas cans and some fresh motor oil. Checked the pilot light on your stove, too. All good there.”

A strained emotion worked its way into her throat that she had to swallow several times to dislodge. “I, um. This is all?—”

Iron lifted the tea kettle from the stove and filled it with water, then pulled out a box of matches he’d also included with the goods and, while cranking the dial, lit the burner. Then he grabbed an apple, shined it on his flannel, and handed it to her before selecting an instant oatmeal variety from the tower he’d stacked.

“Apple cinnamon,” she said, smiling. “How appropriate.”

He returned her smile, winked at her, and then got to work pulling out two pieces of bread.

A cold chill whipped through Anna as she clutched the apple tighter to her chest. Woodenly, she walked back to the living room and sank into the first soft surface she could find.

Her tongue had gone as dry as desert sand, and new waves of tension froze her limbs.

In the light of the snowy morning, Anna had finally gotten a good look at Iron’s face.

A face that stunned her with bicolored eyes, with its stark hazel one winking at her beside its brown fraternal twin.

Chapter11

Anna’s stomach cartwheeled at the prospect of realizing two very different things about herself that she’d previously not thought possible. The first was a newly discovered ability to wolf down three apples in a row, being sure to gnaw the juicy flesh from each core like a picked-over chicken wing. The second, and this one was a bit more disturbing, was grappling with the fact that key components of her dreams had somehow manifested into her very real and very untidy kitchen.

Scratch that. Aformerlyuntidy kitchen, as the mountain of dishes that had been overflowing in her sink for an indiscriminate amount of time had miraculously disappeared.

Iron slid out of the small space holding two mugs whose handles were gripped together in one hand, along with a plate of various breakfast offerings in the other. He set the food and one mug down on the end table next to her armchair and took the remaining mug with him across the living room where he plopped down on the couch.

Coffee. The man had brought her coffee. And not the putrid decaf garbage she’d had to endure lately but, judging by the smoky chocolate notes singing their siren’s song at her elbow, real honest-to-godcoffee. Next to the mug and her battlefield of mutilated apple cores was a plate serving as an altar to her instant oatmeal topped with, hot damn, more apples and two slices of cinnamon toast.

“Didn’t know how you took your coffee,” he remarked, taking a careful sip of his own.

“I don’t, usually. It’s more of a special treat these days. Thank you.”

The warm mug was in her hands and feeding its heat into her stiff fingers in searing waves. Anna brought it to her lips and used the curtain of steam fogging her glasses to piece together what she could about the man on her couch.

The light from the windows certainly took no time doting on the shocks of auburn that ran, woven and blended, through his russet hair, now pulled back tight into a bun at the back of his head. It would take no work at all to imagine those locks running wild and free around the bulges of his shoulders, capping off at his collarbones. The sharp blade of his nose twitched slightly before disappearing behind the mug, drawing Anna’s attention to features previously obscured by the mists of her mind.

Anna charted a course across Iron’s broad forehead before her eyes were pulled southward to slope around a jaw nestled beneath his thick beard. She knew that slope, knew the stony grimness it often took on. It perfectly matched the image of the mouth in her mind, one that had danced on the backs of her eyelids night after night as she’d tried to envision what those lips might look like forming words meant only for her.

That dangerous slope continued, carving out the strong shoulders and craggy cliffs of a frame that made her worn leather couch bow down in submission and crafted a true statue of a mountain man that, were it in a museum, would keep docents batting away women for decades.

Days without her nightly visitor could never erase the months she’d spent with him, but she wasn’t willing to take that verifiably insane leap just yet.

Pregnancy brain. Just chalk this whole thing up to pregnancy brain, like the time you went looking for rubber bands in the refrigerator.

Anna swallowed another sip of unapologetically black coffee, relishing the burn for the distraction it offered.

Iron made a soft noise of approval. “You take it black. Wasn’t sure.”

“I take it any way I can get it.” When Iron halted his mug’s trajectory to his mouth, she quickly added, “Coffee, I mean.”

His smile relieved just enough of her embarrassment to keep the burners currently firing up her heated cheeks to a low simmer.

Not wanting to risk an opportunity to put her foot into an otherwise vacant mouth, Anna got on right quick with the rambling. “Since we’re stuck here for a bit, maybe we can backtrack on information usually shared between two strangers. We can start with full names, occupations, hobbies, you know, all the stuff that I probably should have asked you before I let you sleep in my house.”

She’d hoped the shot at levity would calm her nerves since it never seemed to occur to them to decompress on their own, but the lack of even a soft chuckle from Iron kept her adrenaline right on spiking.

“You don’t need to do that, you know.”

“Do what?”

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