“I Haven’t Touched a Woman in 10 Years,” The Mountain Man Growled—Then He Kissed the Bride Like He’d Been Starving

PART 1

The words made Eliza’s stomach turn.

Crane spread one hand toward the three women at the altar. “These dear ladies find themselves in unfortunate circumstances. But circumstances that require the protection of good men.”

He began with the youngest. “Sixteen years old, trained in the domestic arts. Her father’s death left obligations her mother cannot meet.”

A rancher stepped forward, gaze moving over her like a man inspecting a mare. “I’ll take her.”

Not marry. Take.

Eliza’s hands curled at her sides. Nobody objected. The girl could barely answer her vows.

The widow was next — her match less brutal only because both parties understood need.

Then Eliza was alone at the altar.

Crane’s smile deepened. “Miss Hart. Daughter of our late friend. Educated back east. Accomplished in music, literature, watercolor.”

Eliza felt the heat of every stare.

“A rare flower,” Crane continued, “brought low by unfortunate financial realities.”

Unfortunate financial realities. That was what he called the paper he had brought to her boarding house three days after her father’s funeral. Notes with Thomas Hart’s signature. Loans she had never heard of. Interest that multiplied like vermin. A final offer made in Crane’s parlor with the curtains drawn.

Marry me, Eliza. I can make the debts disappear.

She had refused. He had smiled.

“Surely,” Crane said, “there is a man here willing to extend protection to such a woman.”

No one moved.

Eliza knew the silence was part of the plan. Her father’s supposed debts were too large for any ordinary man. Crane wanted her to stand there long enough for humiliation to do its work. Then he would rise, magnanimous and grave, and claim her before everyone.

A rescue, they would call it. A collection, Eliza knew it was.

She closed her eyes. In that darkness she saw her father’s face on the last night of his life, pale and fevered, though no fever had touched him.

Do not trust Crane.

Those were his last clear words.

The church doors slammed open.

A man stood in the doorway, filling it so the spring sunlight seemed unable to pass around him. Six feet four, broad-shouldered, thick with the kind of muscle made by hunger and work. A hunting knife at his belt. A rifle across his back.

Someone whispered, “Hale.”

Cole Hale. The Beast of Burnt Ridge. The man who had killed three men at a property line ten years ago and vanished into the mountains.

He walked down the aisle. Not quickly. Not theatrically. The crowd parted without being asked.

Crane rose halfway. “What is the meaning of this?”

Cole did not look at him. He came straight to Eliza.

Up close, he smelled of pine sap and wood smoke. His beard was rough, but his eyes were not — gray as storm clouds, tired, watchful.

“I haven’t seen a woman in ten years,” he said.

A shocked murmur swept the church. It was an absurd thing to say. Yet there was no mockery in him. Only a loneliness scraped down to bone.

“Mr. Hale, this proceeding is none of your concern,” Crane said.

Cole still did not look away from Eliza. “Are you promised to him?”

“No.”

“Do you want him?”

“No.”

“She owes—” Crane started.

Cole turned. “She owes what?”

“Her father’s estate is indebted to my bank in the amount of three thousand dollars.”

Gasps rippled through the pews.

Cole reached into his coat and drew out a leather pouch. He stepped to the altar, loosened the cord, and poured gold onto the white cloth.

“Count it,” he said.

“You cannot simply—”

“Count it.”

Crane stepped forward, fury tightening his mouth. “Miss Hart cannot be handed from one man to another like—”

“Like what?” Eliza asked.

Her own voice surprised her.

“Like property?”

Cole looked at her again. “You don’t know me. I live hard. I’ve killed men. I don’t know how to be gentle all the time.”

Her hands trembled, but her voice steadied. “Do you know how to be honest?”

“Yes.”

“Then you are ahead of most men in this room.”

Something moved across his face. Not a smile. The beginning of wonder.

“This farce ends now,” Crane said.

Cole stepped closer. He did not touch her. “I came down for flour and cartridges. I walked in because I saw a woman offered to men who did not deserve to speak her name. I have a cabin. Food. A roof that doesn’t leak. I can give you protection from him. I cannot promise comfort. I cannot promise marrying me won’t make this town call you mad.”

“They already call me ruined.”

His eyes softened. “I can promise no man takes you unless you choose to go.”

Eliza looked at Crane, at the white dress, at the women watching with hunger and hope.

Then she looked at the mountain man.

“Ask me properly,” she said.

He removed his hat. For the first time, he looked uncertain.

“Eliza Hart. Will you marry me?”

Not because she was property. Not because she owed him.

“Yes.”

Crane lunged forward. “No.”

Cole placed himself between Eliza and the banker with such authority that Crane stopped as though he’d struck a wall.

The priest looked from one to the other, then at the gold. “Do you, Eliza Hart, take Cole Hale to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

“I do.”

“And do you, Cole Hale, take Eliza Hart to be your lawfully wedded wife?”

“I do.”

The priest’s hands shook as he signed. Eliza Hart became Eliza Hale in black ink still wet enough to smear.

Crane made a sound like a man watching a fortune burn.

Cole turned to her. He lifted his hand, slow enough for refusal. “May I?”

“Yes.”

He cupped her face with hands rough from ax handles and stone, and kissed her — warm, startling, restrained by force of will.

She kissed him back.

He drew away, looking undone. “Mrs. Hale.”

The name struck her hard enough to make her knees weak.

PART 2

The trail rose quickly beyond Millbrook. By the second hour, Eliza’s thighs burned, her fingers ached. Cole rode ahead, leading the pack horse, occasionally glancing back without speaking. Town silence had teeth; mountain silence breathed.

“You’re not what I expected,” she said.

“What did you expect?”

“A monster.”

“Most do.”

“Are you?”

“I’ve done monstrous things. But a man alone too long loses practice being human.”

“Then I suppose we’ll both be learning.”

He looked back. “Both?”

“I have been treated like debt, burden, prize. It may take me time to remember being a woman.”

They stopped at a stream crossing. He dismounted and lifted her down. For one suspended second her body slid against his chest, and heat climbed her throat.

“You’re hurt,” he said, seeing her feet.

He washed her blisters, wrapped them, gave her thick wool socks. “Why did you really come into that church?”

“I saw Crane’s face through the window before I saw yours. I knew that look. Men wear it when they think the world has already agreed with them. Then I saw you. You looked trapped. I know what that does to a person.”

The cabin appeared near sunset — fitted logs, a stone chimney, glass windows, a porch facing the western peaks. It looked lonely. It also looked loved.

“You built this?”

“Yes.”

Inside, a bedroom held a quilt folded in blue and gold rings. “My mother’s wedding quilt,” he said. “She said marriage was like a quilt. Pieces that don’t look like much alone. Takes patience to make them hold.”

“You take the bedroom. I’ll sleep by the fire.”

“We’re married.”

“A vow said under threat doesn’t give me rights over you,” he said. “This roof is yours as long as you want it. Nothing more happens unless you choose it.”

That night, wrapped in a dead woman’s wedding quilt, Eliza felt safer than she had since her father died. That frightened her most of all.

Morning came with the sound of an ax. Clothes lay folded on a chair — his sister’s, practical, with a note: My sister’s. Clean. Coffee’s on.

He taught her to bank coals, read clouds, recognize predator-silence. She taught him to sit through poetry without looking trapped — Tennyson, by firelight, his posture slowly unstiffening.

“You make it sound less foolish,” he said.

“It isn’t foolish.”

“Men in town thought so.”

“Men in town auction women.”

On the eighth day, a grizzly came while Cole checked trap lines. Eliza banged a kettle, shouted, dove inside as it charged, grabbed his rifle and aimed at the door. Gunshots cracked from the trees — Cole’s voice roaring — and the bear crashed away.

Her knees gave when he reached her. She folded into him, shaking.

“You came back.”

“I’d have heard you from hell.”

That afternoon, cleaning the pantry the bear had wrecked, she found a note behind preserved peaches.

J.M., if you are reading this, the evidence is safe. Trust the mountain man.

PART 3

“Jacob Marsh,” Cole said, reading the note three times before speaking. “Night clerk at Crane’s bank. Died six months ago.”

“Crane said it was his heart.”

“Crane says many things.”

They searched until dark. Behind a newer board in the pantry wall, they found a leather satchel full of ledgers, bank drafts, letters, forged notes, and copied deeds. Jacob Marsh had been invisible in Crane’s bank for twenty years, and invisible men heard everything.

By firelight, Cole and Eliza spread the documents across the table.

The truth emerged slowly, then all at once. Crane had stolen from the town emergency fund for fifteen years. He had invented debts, altered interest rates, foreclosed on land that was never in default, and used the bank to trap widows, farmers, and merchants. He had funded the attack that drove Cole into exile because he wanted Hale land and its underground spring. He had ruined Jacob Marsh’s family when Jacob discovered the corruption.

And Thomas Hart had known.

Eliza found the letter near midnight — Crane’s own hand, demanding a meeting at the old mining office. The edge stained dark brown.

Blood. Her father’s blood.

“He didn’t die of fever,” she whispered.

Cole gathered her against his chest while she shook with grief and rage braided together.

“He murdered my father.”

“I know.”

“He made me think Father left me ruined.”

“Your father died fighting him.”

When she lifted her face, her eyes were clear. “We take this to the law.”

“Crane owns half the law within riding distance.”

“Then the half he doesn’t.”

Three days later, the sixteen-year-old — Mara, the girl who had sobbed at the altar — came riding up the trail, alone, exhausted, terrified, and changed from the girl Eliza had seen at the church. Marriage had not broken her, though fear still lived in her eyes. Her husband was not cruel, she said. That was the best she could say, and Eliza heard the sadness in it.

“Crane has posted notices,” Mara told them, hands clenched in her skirt. “Five hundred dollars for your safe return, Eliza. He says Hale kidnapped you. Says you’re being held against your will.”

Eliza laughed once. It sounded like a blade.

Mara’s eyes filled. “My father said if anything happened, there was something hidden somewhere safe. He said the mountain man would know what to do.”

Cole looked away at that, jaw tight with old grief and new responsibility.

Eliza showed Mara the satchel. The girl touched her father’s handwriting and began to cry silently.

“He died for this,” she said.

“No,” Eliza answered. “He died because Crane feared it. That is not the same thing.”

Mara looked at her then, and Eliza saw a spark beneath all that forced obedience.

“What can I do?”

That was how the fight truly began.

Cole trained Eliza harder after that. No more cans lined up for practice. He taught her to reload without looking, to shoot from a window, to move low between trees, to listen for birds going silent. He showed her the three approaches to the cabin: the south trail, the east game path, the west rock scramble. The north side dropped into a ravine.

“If men come,” he said, “they’ll expect a frightened woman and a brute.”

“What will they find?”

“A woman who can shoot and a brute who can think.”

She smiled despite herself.

The first riders came after a storm. A young deputy named Pike led them, decent eyes and uncertain orders, two hired men too interested in the bounty. They stopped in the clearing with rifles low.

Pike called out, “Mrs. Hale, I have a warrant to return you to Millbrook.”

Eliza stood behind the cabin door with a rifle in her hands and Cole beside her.

“I am not a prisoner,” she called.

“Ma’am, Mr. Crane claims—”

“Mr. Crane is a murderer, thief, and liar.”

The clearing went silent. Cole looked at her with sharp admiration.

Eliza stepped onto the porch before he could stop her. She held the rifle correctly. Pike saw that. So did the hired men.

“I married Cole Hale willingly,” she said. “I remain here willingly. I will testify to that before any honest judge. If you try to force me from this mountain on the word of Harold Crane, you will be helping a criminal silence the woman whose father he murdered.”

Pike’s face changed.

One hired man muttered, “That bounty spends whether she talks or not.”

Cole stepped onto the porch. He did not raise his rifle. He did not need to.

Pike glanced at him, then at Eliza. “Do you have proof?”

“Yes.”

“Bring it to Judge Harlan when he arrives.”

“Will he arrive alive if Crane knows he’s coming?”

Pike went pale enough to answer without words. He tipped his hat. “Stay ready.”

The riders left.

Eliza’s hands shook violently after the riders left. She dropped the rifle; Cole caught it before it hit the floor, then took her hands in his.

“You stood in front of armed men.”

“I thought I might faint.”

“You didn’t.”

“I wanted to.”

“That doesn’t count.”

She laughed, breathless and shaky, and he smiled — a real smile this time, small and devastating, changing his face from something carved by hardship to something almost young.

Eliza touched his cheek before she could think better of it.

His smile faded, not from displeasure. From longing.

She started to pull away.

He caught her hand gently. “Don’t. Unless you want to.”

“I don’t want to.”

His thumb brushed over her knuckles. They stood in the cabin with stormlight fading around them, touching only at the hands, and it felt more intimate than the church kiss, more binding than vows spoken under pressure.

“I’m afraid,” Eliza whispered.

“So am I.”

“You?”

His eyes held hers. “Especially me. Because I have something to lose now.”

That night he gave her a ring. He had made it from silver ore found on the south ridge. The band was plain except for a tiny pine cone etched into it. He stood before her like a man approaching a wild animal, holding out the small cloth bundle with hands that had killed, built, mended, and protected.

“We’re already married,” he said. “But that was necessity. This is choice.”

He took her left hand.

“Eliza Hale,” he said, rough voice unsteady, “I choose you. Not because Crane cornered you. Not because I wanted to make a point in a church. Not because you needed saving. I choose you because you are brave, stubborn, sharp-tongued, and stronger than anyone in Millbrook knew how to see.”

He slid the ring onto her finger. It fit.

“I choose you,” he said, “every day I’m given.”

Eliza looked at the ring, then at him.

“I choose you too,” she whispered. “Not because you bought my freedom. Because you never tried to own it.”

Cole closed his eyes.

When she kissed him, it was no public spectacle, no bargain sealed beneath hostile eyes. It was slow and fierce and chosen. His hands cupped her face the way they had in the church, but this time there was no shock, no audience, no desperation except the kind born from wanting something too much and fearing it might vanish.

He pulled back first, breathing hard. “Eliza.”

“I’m not afraid of you.”

“I’m afraid of myself.”

“You shouldn’t be.”

“You don’t know what wanting does to a man after ten years alone.”

“Then show me by staying honorable.”

Pain flashed across his face. Then reverence. He kissed her forehead and held her close.

They became husband and wife in truth only when Eliza chose the moment, days later, after the fear had stopped ruling her body and love had become larger than the danger around them. No force. No debt. No public claim. Only firelight, whispered permission, trembling hands, and Cole looking at her as though tenderness itself had come back from the dead.

Afterward, she lay against him beneath his mother’s quilt and listened to his heart.

“I didn’t think I could be touched without remembering fear,” she said.

His hand moved slowly over her hair. “And now?”

“Now I’ll remember this.”

His breath caught. Outside, the wind moved through the pines. Inside, something wounded began to heal.

But dawn brought hoofprints near the lower trail. Crane’s net was tightening.

They left the cabin before sunrise.

Eliza stood on the porch while Cole tightened the cinch on her saddle and tried not to memorize every detail like a goodbye. The woodpile. The smokehouse. The porch chair where she had read poetry. The pantry wall where Jacob Marsh had hidden the truth. The bed where a forced marriage had become a chosen one.

Cole noticed. “We’ll come back,” he said.

“You don’t know that.”

“No.” He came to her and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear with a gentleness that still had the power to undo her. “But I know I’ll fight like hell for it.”

She put her hand over his. The silver ring caught the morning light.

Morrison’s — Marsh’s — evidence was divided between them, sewn into hidden pockets. Near noon, Cole found fresh tracks. Three riders. Maybe four.

The ambush came at a stream crossing where the trail narrowed between boulders. A shot cracked from the trees and struck Cole’s horse in the flank. The animal screamed and reared. Cole leapt clear, hitting the ground hard. Eliza’s horse shied; she fought the reins, heart slamming, and threw herself behind a fallen log just as another bullet tore bark above her head.

“Mrs. Hale!” a man called from the trees. “We ain’t here to hurt you. Just bringing you home.”

“Wrong home,” Cole’s voice came from behind a rock.

More shots. Eliza pressed her back against the log and breathed the way Cole had taught her. Think. Don’t panic. Count. Three rifles. One west. Two south.

She crawled to the end of the log, lifted her rifle, and fired at the flash of movement between trees. A man cursed and dropped low. Cole fired twice. One rider’s hat flew off. Another stumbled backward, clutching his arm.

The third man circled toward Eliza. She heard him before she saw him: a boot on wet stone. Her hands went cold. She turned as he came around the log, revolver drawn, face flushed with triumph.

“Well now,” he said. “Crane didn’t mention you’d learned tricks.”

Eliza shot him in the thigh.

He fell screaming. Cole appeared an instant later, knife in one hand, pistol in the other. He saw the man down, saw Eliza still aiming, and stopped.

“You hit him.”

“Yes.”

“You all right?”

“No.”

“Good enough.”

They bound the wounded men, took their weapons, and left them with one horse and enough water to survive. Cole’s injured horse had to be put down. He did it himself, one hand on the animal’s neck, murmuring words too low for Eliza to hear.

When the shot came, Eliza turned away and cried.

Not because she had not seen death.

Because tenderness survived in him even when killing was necessary.

They reached Millbrook at dusk and entered through the back lanes.

The town looked smaller than Eliza remembered. Meaner too, but less powerful. She realized then that Crane had seemed enormous only when she had been alone.

Cole led her to Jacob Marsh’s empty house on the edge of town. Dust lay thick inside. Sheets covered furniture. A cracked teacup sat beside a cold stove, abandoned as if Jacob had expected to return.

Mara arrived after dark, with Deputy Pike.

Eliza almost wept with relief.

Pike removed his hat. “Judge Harlan is at the hotel, but Crane’s men watch front and back. I think the judge is honest. I also think he doesn’t know how deep this runs.”

Cole spread documents across Marsh’s table. Pike read in silence, his face growing harder with every page. Mara found her father’s annotations and pressed her hand to her mouth.

“He did all this alone,” she whispered.

“No,” Eliza said. “He left it for us.”

Pike looked up. “If this is real, Crane hangs.”

“If he doesn’t kill us first,” Cole said.

A floorboard creaked outside.

Cole extinguished the lamp. Darkness swallowed the room.

“Eliza.” Crane’s voice, calm and intimate, from the porch. “I know you’re inside. I know Hale is with you. No need to make this uglier than it already is. Do you think he loves you? Men like Hale do not love. They possess.”

Eliza stepped toward the door. Cole caught her wrist. She shook her head free and opened it before fear could stop her.

The porch lanterns lit Crane’s face below the steps. He stood with men behind him, all armed. His expression was composed, but hatred burned in his eyes.

Eliza stepped out with her pistol at her side.

“I would rather be loved by a man who fears his own darkness,” she said, “than owned by one who calls his darkness virtue.”

“You dramatic little fool.”

“My father found out what you were.”

“Your father overestimated the value of truth.”

“And you underestimated the value of clerks.”

The girl stepped onto the porch holding a ledger. “My father saw you. Even when you thought he was invisible.”

For the first time, Crane looked afraid. Then rage replaced it. “Kill Hale. Take the women.”

The night exploded.

Cole fired from the doorway, dropping the first man before he reached the steps. Pike fired through the side window. Eliza ducked behind the porch rail as bullets tore through wood. Mara screamed but did not run; she crawled back inside with the ledger clutched to her chest.

The gunfight moved through Marsh’s house like a storm. Windows shattered. Plaster burst from walls. Pike took a bullet through the shoulder and kept firing. Mara loaded rifles with shaking hands while Eliza covered the back door.

A man came through the kitchen window. Eliza shot the skillet off the stove hook into his face because it was closer than her rifle. He fell backward with a howl. Cole looked at her from across the room.

“What?” she snapped.

“Nothing.”

“Later, you may admire me.”

“If we live, I’ll make a habit of it.”

Smoke curled beneath the back door.

“They’re firing the house,” the deputy said.

“My father’s papers,” Mara said, panic rising in her voice, then ran into the front room before anyone could stop her. A bullet cracked the window. She cried out and fell.

Cole crossed the room under fire and dragged her back. Blood soaked her sleeve, but she was alive, clutching the final ledger.

They escaped together through the cellar door as flames climbed the curtains.

Outside, the town had woken. A widow stepped forward holding a shotgun. “Fire buckets! Jacob Marsh gave his life for this town, and Harold Crane is burning his house to hide why. Move!”

The bucket line formed like courage learning how to walk.

Crane tried to flee through the alley behind the bank. Eliza and Cole chased him to the old mining office at the edge of town, the same place where Thomas Hart had bled on the floorboards.

Eliza knew without being told.

“He should have taken my offer,” Crane said.

“My father was twice the man you are.”

“Your father was weak.”

“My father died with proof in the world. You will die with everyone knowing what you are.”

Boots approached outside — the deputy, men from town, Judge Harlan carrying the first pages of evidence in his own hands.

Crane raised a lantern toward the papers stacked in the office. “I can still burn enough.”

Both Cole and Eliza aimed. Crane aimed his gun at Eliza.

Cole fired first, striking Crane’s wrist. The revolver fell.

Eliza fired next, shattering the lantern before Crane could throw it.

Crane dropped to his knees, clutching his ruined hand, as the door burst open.

“Well,” the judge said grimly, “I believe court is now in session.”

—

By dawn, Millbrook knew. Not rumors. The truth. The judge ordered the bank sealed. Ledgers were read in the town square because Eliza insisted private justice would not be enough. Debts exposed as false. Foreclosures reversed.

Harold Crane stood in irons on the church steps where he had once arranged marriages like auctions.

“You ruined my father’s name,” Eliza said.

“Your father ruined himself.”

“You counted on everyone being too afraid to read the truth. You were wrong.”

One by one, townspeople came forward. Farmers. Widows. Shopkeepers who had kept silent because debt made cowards of fathers.

Cole watched from the edge of the crowd. He had spent ten years being the beast in their stories. Now they looked at him differently, and he seemed more uncomfortable with gratitude than he had ever been with fear.

When Crane was taken away, nobody cheered. Some justice was too heavy for celebration.

That afternoon, Eliza returned to the church. The altar cloth had been replaced, but she could still see where the gold had spilled. The priest met her there, older than three weeks earlier.

“I failed you,” he said.

“Yes.” She did not soften it. “But you can do better for the next girl.”

“I will.”

Outside, Cole waited. “Ready to go home?”

Home. Not the boarding house. Not Millbrook. The mountain. The cabin. Him.

“Almost.” She took his hand and led him back inside the empty church.

“The first vows were made under threat,” she said. “I meant them. But I want to make them again with no banker, no auction, no fear deciding for me. I choose you. Not as escape. Not as shelter. The man who walked into shame and called it wrong. The man who taught me to shoot and to stand and to sleep without fear.”

“Eliza.”

“Because when you touch me, I remember I belong to myself first. And because somehow, in all this ruin, loving you has made me free.”

He removed his hat, voice rough enough to break. “I choose you because you brought light into a house I thought would only ever hold one shadow. I thought the mountain was my punishment. Then you came, and it became home.”

The priest pronounced the blessing with tears on his face.

This time, when Cole kissed her, there was no gasp from a crowd, no banker’s rage. Only choice.

They returned to Burnt Ridge two days later. The girl stayed long enough to testify, then left her forced husband after he admitted he’d known the debts were false. The judge annulled it. The widow took work at the hotel, then bought a share of it with restitution money. The priest opened the church basement to women who had nowhere safe to go. Millbrook did not become good overnight, but its fear had been named, and named things were easier to fight.

Cole recovered his family land by court order. He did not move back.

“The cabin has better light,” he told Eliza.

“And fewer neighbors.”

“That too.”

Spring deepened into summer. Eliza learned to plant beans, mend harness, make biscuits Cole no longer had to lie about. Cole learned poetry before bed eased nightmares better than whiskey ever had. They argued over coffee, over whether she should climb the west ridge alone, over his habit of placing himself between her and every unfamiliar man.

“I am not made of glass,” she told him.

“No. You’re made of trouble.”

“And you adore me.”

“Reckon I do.”

At dusk, they sat on the porch while the mountains turned purple and gold.

“Do you ever regret the church?” he asked.

She thought of the white dress, the sweating priest, the door slamming open, a mountain man filling it like judgment.

“I regret what brought me there,” she said. “Not who took me out.”

Below the porch, wind moved through the pines. The cabin stood solid behind them, built by lonely hands and remade by two people who had chosen to stay.

He had come down from the mountain saying he had not seen a woman in ten years. What he had found was not merely a woman. He had found a wife, a witness, a partner, and a reason to stop mistaking exile for peace.

And Eliza, who had stood at an altar like livestock at market, had found not a rescuer to own her, but a hard, quiet man who would burn the world before letting it chain her again.

Their love had not begun softly. It began with humiliation, gold on an altar, a kiss before enemies, and a ride into the unknown.

But it endured in the ordinary afterward. In bread rising near the stove. In rifles cleaned side by side. In winter wood stacked high. In the blue-and-gold quilt pulled over them against the cold.

“I’m here,” she would whisper.

And Cole, no longer beast, no longer ghost, no longer alone, would cover her hand with his and answer every time.

“I know.”

THE END