“Please stay.”
The two words stopped the enormous mountain rancher before he could disappear into the worst blizzard Montana had seen in twenty years.
He stood in the open doorway of a secluded wooden cabin, nearly six and a half feet tall, with broad muscular shoulders, a powerful bare chest beneath an open wolf-fur vest, and long, dark-brown hair tangled with melting snow. A massive quarter of freshly hunted elk rested across his left shoulder, its weight hardly seeming to trouble him despite the exhaustion carved into his weathered face. His leather trousers were stiff with ice, his heavy boots were buried in snow up to the ankles, and the thick black beard covering his jaw glittered with frozen moisture.
Behind him, the mountain wilderness had vanished into a raging curtain of white.
In front of him stood a woman unlike anyone he had ever known.
She was thirty-four years old, extraordinarily beautiful, and weighed nearly eight hundred and eighty pounds, approximately four hundred kilograms. Her enormous figure filled much of the space beside the cabin's reinforced wooden dining table, with exceptionally full arms, a broad waist, massive rounded hips, and a soft, lovely face framed by thick chestnut curls. She wore a deep burgundy prairie dress trimmed with delicate cream lace, its generous folds falling beneath a sturdy linen apron.
Her captivating green eyes were fixed on him.
One hand gripped the edge of her apron.
The other rested against his muscular forearm.
“Please,” she whispered again, her voice trembling. “Don't go back into that storm.”
The rancher looked down at her.
For four years, he had survived alone in the Montana mountains, avoiding companionship as carefully as he avoided thin river ice. He had endured winters so severe that his cattle froze standing in the fields, crossed mountain passes where snow swallowed horses to their shoulders, and slept beneath rocky overhangs while wolves howled somewhere beyond the firelight.
He feared none of those things as much as he feared the tenderness in this woman's eyes.
“I only came to bring you meat,” he answered, his voice rough from cold and disuse.
She glanced toward the elk resting on his shoulder.
“I can see that.”
“Then I've done what I came to do.”
He shifted his weight toward the doorway.
She tightened her hand around his arm.
“You haven't even taken off your boots.”
“Don't need to.”
“Your lips are blue.”
“I've had worse.”
She looked at his face.
“That's what you always say.”
He couldn't argue.