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wood?”
    “Trying to. I’m pretty shitty at it. I even read a book on it. I bought a chainsaw from Hardware Jack today.”
    When a warning snarl left his throat at the mention of that prick, Nicole’s eyes went wide. “What was that?”
    Link fingered the handle on his mug, unable to look at the horror that would be in her eyes. “I told you I was bad.” He tapped his temple. “Voices.”
    “In your head?”
    I’m here!
    Link gave her an empty smile. “I should go.”
    “I won’t mention that sound again,” she rushed out as he made to stand.
    Link looked down in shock at where her fingertips rested on his knuckles. Where they connected, a sparking sensation shot up his arm in waves. What the hell?
    She’s touching us. Us. She knows she’s ours. Wants us to stay.
    Link relaxed slowly back into the chair.
    “Is that why you live way out here?”
    He nodded once.
    “That makes sense to me. I was confused to why a man who looks like you settled way out here.”
    “A man who looks like me?” he murmured, head canted in confusion.
    Nicole pulled off her scarf completely and mirrored him, head cocked as she looked at him with such a strange expression. “I have a pet wolf.”
    Link froze as if he’d been electrified.
    She knows.
    “I’ve named him Mr. Nibbles.”
    “Ha!” Link barked out a laugh louder than he’d meant too, and inside Wolf snarled his discontent with the name.
    “Don’t laugh. He is very nice and brings me dead things.”
    “Well, he sounds very considerate, but please remember he’s a wild animal. Let him be.”
    “A wolf killed Buck. My dad. I mean a wolf killed my real dad.”
    Link leaned his elbows onto the table and felt like grit. This was the part they would never get past. They couldn’t. He was related to the man who murdered her father. He was here now because of a need to repay her as much as he could for what his cursed lineage had stolen from her. “I know.”
    “Did you know my dad?”
    Link swallowed hard and stared at the tiny bubbles in his mug of hot chocolate. “No, but I know of him. I went to his funeral.”
    “You don’t know him, but you went to his funeral?” she asked in a confused tone.
    “He was buried near his trap line, and I wanted to make sure someone was standing for him.”
    Her breath came shallow as she stared at him, and those beautiful brown eyes of hers rimmed with moisture. “What was it like?”
    She needed closure. He got that. She had an entire biological history with a man she never knew. How did one begin to mourn someone they never knew?
    “I didn’t have to worry about him being buried without someone there. He had thirty people, at least, gathered from all over this strip of the Yukon, from Galena to Kaltag. Three people spoke about how giving he was, how he always made sure the people around him were taken care of. The last one, an older woman, said he often gave more than he had, just to make sure his friends were taken care of.”
    Link raised his gaze to Nicole’s, braving her tears, but he shouldn’t have worried. She’d already blinked them back.
    “If you’re marked up like Buck was, you should be proud of it. You bear the mark of a good man.”
    Nicole let off a tiny heart-wrenching gasp as she pressed her palm to her cheek—the one with the birthmark. “He didn’t cover his birthmark up?”
    “I don’t know for sure. My guess is no. He wouldn’t have a reason to. There was a picture of him at the funeral on display by his casket. He wore a fur hat and a sweater, but nothing to cover up his neck, and no one at the funeral mentioned it. Everyone was used to it. He was smiling in the picture, holding a line of fish at his side.”
    “What did it look like? His mark?”
    “Have you not seen a picture of him?”
    She shook her head. “Not yet.”
    Link leaned forward and brushed the soft skin just under her ear, then traced down her jaw, down the side of her neck, and just barely beneath the collar of her red