She hired Decklan Moore for four days of backcountry guiding, and the mountain leaves her with no signal, no other people, and no way down that is not him.
Broad-shouldered, bearded, and nearly silent since the trailhead, he gives short orders about where to step, when to drink, and when to stay behind him, and she follows with a willingness that soon has little to do with safety.
By the second day neither of them is pretending this is only about the mountain.
On a rock shelf at the bottom of a canyon, he admits he is a wolf with no pack, three years of deliberate solitude behind him, and that she is the fated mate his kind names once in a life—a claim he was never supposed to make.
He offers to walk her back to her car before it gets worse, but she refuses, because the belonging she came to find has his low voice and is telling her to stay.
