Mountain Wild (Harlequin Historical Series) Read Online Free

since. His gaze had been hard and focused as he had stood between her and the riled citizens of Bitterroot Springs.
    He’d defended her. Her. Mad Mag, the local lunatic.
    I can’t just leave him here to freeze. Unlike those who’d betrayed her, Garret Daines wasn’t a man who’d stand by while harm befell another. He’d do as Ira had done, taking on a burden he didn’t want to save the life of a stranger. She’d also been small enough for a grown man to toss over his shoulder and cart off into the woods. She couldn’t carry Garret Daines five feet, much less up this mountain through the snow. She had to get him up.
    “Help me, Garret,” she said in her best damsel voice. “It’s so cold. I need to get home. Can you help me?”
    He nodded, muscles bunching beneath his thick coat. He tried to push up, and groaned, his stiff body rebelling against the movement. She gripped his arms and helped to tug himup. Snow clung to his thick coat and buffalo-hide chaps—clothes that should have kept him warm. His hat lay crumpled in the top of the outline of his fallen form. She noted the creases pressed into his left cheek. His dog and his hat had protected those handsome features from hours of exposure. But the icy weather had taken a toll on his mind. He stared blankly at the ground before him.
    He swayed, his eyelids drooping.
    She reached for him, her arms sliding into his open coat. His shirt crinkled like a sheet of ice.
    Alarm squeezed her chest. His clothes had gotten wet.
    The rain from yesterday, before the heavy snowstorm had set in. No wonder his coat and woolly chaps weren’t holding heat—they were likely keeping him as chilled as an icebox.
    “Come on, Garret,” she urged, trying to guide him toward her sled. “Stay with me.”
    His expression contorted with pain. His boots barely moved in the deep powder. With a rumbling groan, he fell from her grasp and landed face-first into the snow.
    Boots yapped at him and nudged his tangled hair with his nose.
    “It’s no use, dog. We’ll have to get him on the sled.”
    Working quickly, she pushed her supplies and the frozen meat wrapped in deerskin aside and rolled Garret onto the wooden slats. After shoving her supplies beneath his legs to keep his boots from dragging on the ground, she bound a strip of rope across his middle, pinning his arms against his sides. Finished, she fetched his hat, shook off the snow and tugged the dark felt over his white hair.
    She glanced at his dog standing up to its chest in snow. She’d seen the cow dog jump onto the back of Garret’s horse more than once while roaming through the lower hills, settling in a spot behind the saddle as though curling up on a porch rug—one of the oddest sights she’d ever witnessed.
    “Come on, Boots,” she said, patting his master’s coat.
    That was all it took. The hound curled up on Garret’s chest and laid its head on his white paws, his two-toned eyes watching her as she grabbed the sled rope and slipped it over her shoulder. Using all of her weight, her leg muscles burned as she began to haul her heavy load toward home. She’d be drenched in sweat before she reached her cabin, creating a nice layer of ice between her skin and her clothes. Risking her life for a stranger only to catch her death with pneumonia.
    She glanced back.
    Bound and unmoving, Garret looked like a big prize buck strapped to her sled. The ache in her gut intensified.
    “You better not die.”
     
    By the time she spotted the gap in the stone leading to a secluded meadow, every muscle in her body burned despite the increasing chill in her skin. A freezing wind whipped at her back as snow swirled around her in a flurry of white. She clenched her jaw to keep her teeth from chattering. She hadn’t slowed to check on her cargo, but kept her focus on the mountainside rising beyond the trees.
    She always missed her horse over winter, never so much as the past two hours. But she had no way to house and feed Star once