He wouldn’t have let go of whatever had happened between them.
Before he unbundled her, he kindled a roaring fire in the hearth. Then he wondered what to do with her. Put her in a hot bath? Her head sported a gash and she had small cuts from the impact. Was she injured elsewhere?
As soon as he unzipped the coat and opened it and the blanket, he saw the damned handcuffs confining her wrists again. She was a prisoner. What was she involved in? Instantly, he’d thought the worst. This was why she hadn’t wanted to keep in touch: she was involved in some kind of crime. Was that why she had plans to meet someone in Silver Town?
For business, she had said. Maybe that was why she wouldn’t tell him what the business had to do with. Maybe that was why she had left so suddenly. Maybe she’d met whoever the man was at the airport and hadn’t wanted Tom to learn of it. Then she’d been caught.
He frowned. The men in the plane crash had been the same wolves as at the tavern. What did that mean?
He covered her up again and stalked to the bedroom where he’d left his lockpicks, a typical lupus garou tool of the trade, on the dresser. Grabbing the lockpicks, he returned to the living room where the fire did a good job of keeping the place warm. The bedroom was ice-cold. The bathroom would be, too.
Crouching beside her, he again moved the coat and blanket aside and began to unlock the manacles. After trying three different lockpicks and jiggling the last one, he succeeded: the lock clicked open. He tossed the handcuffs on the floor. He would have ripped through them with his wolf’s canines, had he been trussed up.
Her wrists were red from the metal scraping at her skin. Her legs seemed fine, if her ability to trudge through the snow was any indication. “Are you hurting anywhere—ribs, any sprains?”
She shook her head.
“Good.” He pulled off her wet boots and socks and wrapped a blanket around her feet. Once covered in snow, her clothes now dripped water.
He quickly removed her shredded pants. Then he touched the remnants of her pink cashmere sweater, which was stained with blood.
He wished he could absorb her cuts and bruises and make her feel all better.
“I’ll take this off. Let me know if anything hurts.”
He pulled the sweater over her head and tossed it aside, damned thankful she was okay.
“I’m fine, just… c-cold,” she said through shivers, her teeth chattering.
The fact she was so cold worried him the most. He covered her up as gently and quickly as he could. “I’ll get some warm clothes to put on you and something to bandage these cuts.”
He grabbed some of his warm wool socks, a button-down shirt, and sweatpants out of a bureau drawer in the bedroom. Then he seized a first-aid kit from the bathroom and quickly returned to her side.
He slipped a double pair of the socks onto her ice-cold feet, then rewrapped the blanket around them. “I’ll clean your cuts and then bandage them. They look pretty shallow, no debris, and should heal within a day or so.”
He gently wiped down her wounds and applied antibacterial ointment as she shut her eyes and sucked in her breath. Then he bandaged all of her scrapes.
“I’ll take off your wet bra. If I can’t get it off easily, I’ll cut it off.”
“It’s the only one I have with me,” she gritted out.
“I’ll take care to remove it, but I do have your bra from before.” Tom still had the bra she’d worn the day she arrived in Silver Town.
“I’d meant to wear it the next day.”
He chuckled. “Sorry about that. It’s home safe… waiting for you. You should have come for it.” He glanced up at her to see her response. She wore a smidgen of a smile.
He shook his head. “You wouldn’t have gotten far. I would have made sure of it.” He would have found out just why she’d been upset and why she’d planned to run away. And he wouldn’t have let her.
She might be cold, but the heat of the fire and the anxiety he felt from trying to take care of her and not hurt her further was making him burn up. He slipped off the bra and considered the thin material of the button-down shirt he’d taken out of his bureau.
“Cinderella,” she said.
“Hmm?” He pulled his own sweater off and then unbuttoned his flannel shirt.
Her eyes widened, but she didn’t say anything.
“I’ll help you to sit and dress you in my flannel shirt. It’s warmer than the one I brought for you from the bedroom.”
She nodded.
“Cinderella?” he asked.
“Cinderella left her… glass slipper behind.”
“With the handsome prince. Only Cinderella is a beautiful shifter, and she left behind a sexy, lacy blue bra,” he said.
She smiled a little.
“And of course, she left behind the prince,” he said, arching a brow.
“A wolf.”
“A prince of a wolf,” he qualified.
He couldn’t be more relieved to see her smiling up at him. Once he’d pulled the shirt on her and buttoned it, he said, “Okay, now the panties come off, and I’ll put some sweats on you.”
She raised her brows. “Seems… we’ve been doing this a lot when we’re together.”
“Yeah, and for all the wrong reasons.”
Her teeth chattered, but the shivers had lessened some and the color had returned to her pale lips. “Are you sure we shouldn’t just strip down and lie together so I can warm you up?” He dropped her wet panties on the hearth, then pulled on the sweats.
“I bet you say that to all the girls… you rescue.”
He chuckled. “You think that’s what we do on ski patrol?”
She smiled again.
“How are you really holding up?” He applied some ointment on the scraped skin around her wrists.
She sighed, the shivers lessening. “Better. Thank you.”
He wrapped the blanket around her. Then he zipped his coat up to her throat. “Good,” he said, but he didn’t like how cold she still was.
He began to clean up the gash on her forehead using a damp cloth. “It isn’t too bad. Head wounds bleed a lot, so they can look really awful.”
She grimaced as he wiped the blood away too close to the injury.
“Sorry.” He cleaned her blood-matted hair as much as he could, then bandaged the cut on her forehead. “Nothing needs stitches. Your toes look good. Color’s coming back. The same with your fingers.”