Page 33 of Hide My Heart
Nate must have found me at the door of the cabin. He must have peeled off my wet clothing and put me under the goose down to warm me up.
The scent of a wood-burning stove and the sound of coffee brewing makes me want to luxuriate under the covers a little while longer before wrapping myself and Beck in a woolen blanket and streaking into the kitchen in search of food.
As if summoned by a magic lamp, Nate peeks into the homespun room, decorated with local team pennants: the Idaho Vandals, the EWU Eagles, and of course the Denver Broncos.
“Hey, Amber, you’re up. How are you feeling?”
“I’m great, but I don’t know how I got here.” I shift Beck from one breast to the other.
He twists his hands together and shrugs. He looks uneasy, one side of his mouth hooks up with a half a grin. “I, uh, had to get you, uh, warmed up. Your, uh, clothes were soaked through. You were, uh, turning blue.”
My face grows hot, but it had to be done. I thought I was dead and my body was shutting down. In the novels I’ve read, putting someone about to freeze to death under a blanket wasn’t enough. Someone needed to supply body heat and the only way would be if he also got naked and took me into his arms.
“Well, I’m alive,” I say. “Thanks to you. And Beck’s here.”
“Yes, Beck’s here,” Nate repeats, his voice still strained. “And I have a fire going. Uncle Joe always has wood piled up. The weather’s bad out there. Temperature went up and down, so everything turned into ice. We have food. I stocked up and I have your suitcase and that bag of furs. I put it in the shed so it’ll stay frozen and not rot. Uh, I can’t get back to Hunter’s truck. Too slippery.”
I sit up in the bed, keeping the comforter over my breasts and make a time-out sign. “Nate, it’s okay. You had to save my life.”
Somehow the thought of Nate and his warm body, his big arms, and his legs wrapped around me, rubbing the life back into me makes me feel protected and cared for.
“Right. I had to heat you up. You were so cold. You were incoherent,” he says, coming closer, but approaching me like I’m a rattlesnake. “And Beck, wow, he was hungry.”
I peek under the comforter and smile. “He’s all snuggly warm and clean. You even changed his diaper. Nate, I don’t know how to thank you.”
“I’m your friend. That’s what friends do.” He shrugs and backs away. “What do you want for breakfast? I grabbed a bunch of food on the way out, and Uncle Joe has a lot of canned food and dried meat. We have enough for a few days before I have to go grocery shopping.”
“I’ll need my suitcase. I packed it over a year ago, so I don’t even remember what’s in it.”
“A year ago?” Nate asks, scratching his head.
Right. He never heard the whole story, so I tell him when he returns with the suitcase.
“I wanted to leave him then and there, because he wanted me to abort Beck.”
I cringe at even speaking the words. Beck is so precious to me. I don’t know what I would have done had I gone through with it.
“Wow.” Nate takes several steps forward and puts the suitcase on a chair next to the bed. “He sounds like a scary guy.”
“Except, what if he’s dead?” The horror of throwing him off the truck slams me, and I rock back and forth under the covers, cradling Beck. “What if I left him lying on the driveway, and he bled to death?”
“Give me the address,” Nate says. “I’ll call in an anonymous tip for the police to go check it out. If Hunter’s okay, he’ll just laugh it off as a prank.”
I reach for a pen and pad from the nightstand and scribble the address. “He’ll tell the police I stole his truck and his cell phone.”
“He won’t say a thing,” Nate says, taking the slip of paper. “Because the Drop-In Stop has him on video shooting a gun at the clerk. I bet he won’t even answer the door. The deputies will see no body on the driveway and forget about it.”
“How will we know if he’s okay?” I lift my stubby fingertips to my mouth and bite on my nails.
Nate shrugs. “I suppose we keep our eyes on the news. Once the roads clear up, we need to drive his truck somewhere and abandon it, so it doesn’t point back to us.”
“We can’t go back to Divine.” I shudder, remembering the lie I told Hunter about my breast cancer. “He knows Grandma has cancer. He knows too much.”
Nate’s brows darken into a frown, and his fists clench. “I have a feeling he’s been hanging around Divine. Awfully convenient how he found you at the Drop-In Stop. Almost like he followed us out of Divine.”
“But he doesn’t know about Beck.” I grasp at straws. “I mean, he thinks the baby is yours. He accused me of caring about the bartender’s baby more than about him.”
Nate’s mouth elongates into an oval, and he clasps his hand over his chest. “How could he know? I only told my mom about Beck and the entire Sharon Williams story two nights ago.”
