Free Sample
Preview from chapter one
He was built to keep me alive.
I'm Harper Kane. Twenty-nine. Wilderness guide. A flash flood tore through the canyon and slammed me into the rock wall. Athletic build. Dark hair plastered to my neck. A shallow cut on my forehead and bruises blooming down my ribs. Cargo pants torn at the knee, thin tank soaked and stuck to my skin.
Torin is nine feet of plated muscle even half-shifted. Three horns curve forward from his skull and a thick bone frill shields his neck. In full shift the frill becomes a living shield and his horns can punch through stone. Right now he is kneeling in front of me in the overhang, cleaning the cut with careful hands, the frill casting a shadow over both of us. His palm is wide enough to span most of my thigh. The weight of it alone pins me in place. The scales along his jaw catch the low light. His claws are retracted, but I can still feel the hard edge of them when his fingers shift.
"Stay still," he rumbled. Voice low enough to vibrate through the stone and into my sternum. "You are bleeding."
Night One
He cleaned the cut with water from the shallow pool, then tore a strip from the bottom of his own leathers to bind it. The leather was warm from his body and smelled like rain and the mineral dust of the canyon. When he tied it, his claws stayed carefully clear of the skin. He didn't speak while he worked. Outside the overhang the canyon was still running with floodwater, the sound of it loud against the rock. He kept his body between me and the open edge the entire time. Every time I shifted he adjusted, broad chest and plated shoulder blocking the wind before it could reach me.
Later he set me against the rock with the frill angled to block the wind. He checked the bruises along my ribs with the backs of his fingers, slow and methodical, then stopped at the waistband of my pants. His hand stayed there. The hard ridge of him was already pressed against the outside of my thigh, thick and hot even through the leather. He didn't shift away from it. He just held the position while the rain started again, chest rising and falling against my shoulder, the weight of his palm resting over the worst of the bruising until the heat of it sank all the way through and I fell asleep.