Page 25 of The Winter Husband
A vast shape loomed in the darkness. The world dissolved into terror.
Bear?
Moose?
Lion?
“Marie, stop screaming.”
A voice…a voice. Her teeth clanked as she shut her mouth. The gun was ripped out of her grasp. An immense hand gripped her shoulder and pushed her back into the room. The light of the fire revealed a deerskin-clad Lucas, his frown fierce, his grey eyes glittering. Her blood raced like it had only once before, back in Paris, when she had torn through the dirty streets with danger biting at her heels.
Lucas. A choking pressure rose up in her. She couldn’t help herself. She threw herself against him, gripped handfuls of fringe, and held fast. His heart beat hard against her ear, sounding like,safe, safe, safe. She shook the fringe with her fists as if rattling iron bars.
A warm hand settled in the hollow of her back. His chest rumbled as he spoke.
“What happened?”
“I saw”—she couldn’t catch her breath—“acreature.”
“Where?”
“Inside…inside the cabin.”
Beneath his deerskin shirt, a wall of muscle danced. She sensed him turning his head this way and that, looking around…searching for something.
A fresh wave of panic weakened her. Had the creature she hit been the only one? “I pushed it onto the porch…I think.”
His hand abandoned her back. “Go stand by the hearth.”
Don’t make me leave.He waited tense against her, but she didn’t dare move.
“You’ll be safe by the hearth.” He shifted his grip on the gun. “Night creatures don’t like the light.”
Night creatures.
Inside.
She loosened her grip on the fringe. The doeskin of his shirt clung to her cheek as she separated from his body. She backed up into the light, hardly breathing. Once bathed in the heat of the embers, she added a log to stoke the flames, willing her stomach to stop twisting, her mind spinning.
Lucas made his way across the murky room. As the flames leapt to devour the new log, she saw him, a mountain of a man gripping a rifle, poking things here and there. Moments later, he strode toward her, the rifle pointed down and away. His gray gaze took in her disheveled hair, her stockinged feet, and then passed quickly over the rest of her. Only then did she realize she was standing before him in a thin shift, with the firelight bright behind her.
He asked, “Are you hurt?”
“No.” She clutched her own shoulders. “I got to the…thing, whatever it was, before it got to me.”
“You were screaming.”
She vaguely remembered that. The rawness in her throat attested to the same. She must have been screaming at the top of her lungs if he’d heard her from another building, and over the wind.
“It had teeth,” she said, defenses rising. “I heard its claws clicking on the floor. It was white or light gray.”
“As big as a farm cat?”
She shook her head, remembering teeth and glistening maw, but then paused. In her mind, it had already swelled to the size of an African lion she’d seen once, the day the king had opened his new menagerie outside of Paris. But the creature in this cabin had been small enough to fit under a table.
“Maybe,” she conceded, rubbing one cold toe over another. “Maybe it wasn’t so big.”
He grunted. “Sounds like an opossum.”
