We headed up to the house after that, Dutchie dancing around Jason, tail wagging and tongue lolling as if her long-lost best friend had just come home.

“I hope you’re a dog person,” I told him as we went in the front door.

“I am, actually. There were always a lot of dogs on the pueblo. I didn’t have one of my own, since I was living in an apartment about half the time, but — ” He broke off, pausing a few paces inside the entryway. His expression was so awestruck that at first I thought he was impressed by the house, which didn’t surprise me too much. It was pretty impressive. But then he said, “Is that bread?”

“It is,” I said, adding, “and I hope I haven’t just burned it.”

I jogged into the kitchen, Dutchie tagging along at my heels, since of course the kitchen was her favorite room in the house. Jason followed at a more sedate pace, probably because of the backpack he carried.

But when I peered into the oven, the bread looked perfect, golden brown and with just the right amount of loft. The timer said I had exactly thirty seconds to go. So I grabbed some potholders and pulled out the pan, setting it on the stove top to cool.

By then Jason had shrugged off his backpack and leaned it up against one of the cupboards. “That’s amazing.”

“What is?” I asked, turning to face him.

“The bread. This.” He waved a hand, as if indicating the kitchen and the house beyond. “It’s like — it’s like it never happened.”

Again, I didn’t have to ask what he meant by “it.” “Someone definitely put a lot of work into this house. I was lucky to find it.”

A pause, during which I wondered if he was going to ask again how I had found it…and what the hell I should say in response to such a question. Instead, though, he inquired, “Your family didn’t build it?”

“Oh, no. We could never have afforded something like this.”

My reply appeared to make him relax slightly. Maybe he’d been thinking I was some rich girl from the city or something. There was a joke. But I could see how that might have made things even more awkward between us; I knew most of my state’s Native American residents weren’t exactly rolling in cash.

Well, neither was my family, so I added, “I found some paperwork when I was going through the house. The guy who built it was a real estate developer from Phoenix. I doubt he’s going to be showing up any time soon.”

A nod, although I could see the way Jason was surveying the kitchen, from the gleaming stainless-steel appliances to the custom cupboards and granite countertops. I had no idea what he might be thinking. In that moment, I was only strangely glad that I’d been so careful about keeping the place clean. In the past, I hadn’t been what you might call the world’s greatest housekeeper, but now I found cleaning the house helped to distract me, and used up some of the empty hours.

His next question surprised me. “You came from Albuquerque. We were pretty cut off in Taos. Did you ever hear anything more about the disease…where it started, mortality rates, anything like that?”

That was the last thing I wanted to talk about, but Jace clearly wanted more information than he’d gotten back home. Not that I had a lot to give him. Even so, I thought it best to stall a little while I figured out how much I should say.

“Water?” I asked, and he blinked, clearly startled by the non sequitur, then replied,

“Yes, thanks.”

So I got a glass from the cupboard and filled it up with water from the refrigerator door. When I went to hand it to him, I realized how tall he was, how there were definitely some impressive muscles under the loose-fitting flannel shirt he wore. And even though he had to have been living rough for the past few weeks, I could tell he was clean. In fact, I caught the faintest scent of wood smoke coming from his clothes, and something about the aroma made a little thrill go through me.

I definitely needed to get it together.

Stepping away from him, pretending that I needed to go check on the bread, I said, “Things fell apart pretty quickly in Albuquerque, too. We never got a straight story about where it started or anything like that. Afterward….” I let the words trail off as I flashed back to that dark Walgreens, and the man I had confronted there. “I did meet someone who said he’d worked for emergency management downtown. He said the mortality rate was 99.8 percent.”

“Shit.” With his brown skin, Jace couldn’t exactly go pale, but I still saw the blood appear to drain from his face. Then his dark eyes seemed to go sharp as he focused on what I’d just said. “Wait — you met another survivor? Where is he?”

Shit was right. I’d just met Jace. Was I supposed to tell him that I’d murdered a man?

I didn’t see much of a way around it. If we were really going to be sharing this house, I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep that big a secret from him. He needed to know, so he could decide if it was worth the risk to stay.

“He’s dead,” I said, my voice flat, harsh. “He tried to take my vehicle away from me, all the supplies I’d put together. He pulled a gun on me. So I shot him.”

Silence. Jace stared at me, obviously trying to process what I’d just said. When he spoke, his tone was a lot gentler than I’d expected. “Because he was trying to steal from you, and you would’ve been dead without that vehicle and those supplies.”

The question was, would I have been? I could have gone foraging all over again if necessary, could’ve found one of the abandoned vehicles and hot-wired it, another skill my father had taught me. I wasn’t sure what happened to car keys if they were actually on a victim of the Heat, in a pocket or something, when they went to dust. All their clothes and jewelry seemed to disappear, so obviously the heat in their bodies was so extreme that it could destroy everything around them. Or was the explanation that simple? I hadn’t actually stopped to puzzle it out, mostly because I knew in the end it didn’t really matter. Those people were gone, and so were the belongings they had on them.

“I thought so at the time,” I said slowly. As Jason kept looking at me with that concerned expression on his face, I felt something give way inside, the words flowing out, even though I hadn’t meant to mention anything else of what had happened. “And he had this look on his face, and the night before that, crazy Chris Bowman had broken into my house and attacked me, and — ”

I couldn’t go on, because out of nowhere tears were streaming down my face, and, to my dismay, I’d begun to sob, the horror of it all coming back to me, something dark and terrible that had only been lurking in the murky sediment at the bottom of my mind, just waiting to return and overwhelm me.

Jason crossed the kitchen and pulled me against him, his hand smoothing my hair, his warm voice murmuring my name as I wept into his shirt, the flannel soft against my cheek. He smelled of wood smoke and pine needles, and underneath that, clean male sweat, and I breathed him in, reassured beyond measure at the feel of someone so solid, so real.

And then I realized what I was doing, that I was sobbing in the arms of a man I had just met, and I pushed myself away, shaking my head. “I — I’m sorry,” I gasped. “That was just — that came out of nowhere. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he said. His dark eyes seemed alight with compassion, with understanding. “I can’t imagine how rough this must have been for you. And I’m sorry that you…did what you had to do. But I don’t think you can blame yourself for that.”

I went to the paper towel dispenser and tore off a partial sheet, then blotted my eyes. Good thing I hadn’t bothered with makeup since I’d gotten here, except for some gloss to keep my lips from cracking in the dry, cold weather. “Thank you,” I said simply. “But I do blame myself. There had to be something else I could have done — ”

“I don’t know about that,” he said. “Sounds like you were kind of up against a wall.” Again I was struck by the warmth in his expression…but it wasn’t that kind of warmth, more that he was sorry I’d had to go through anything so terrible. “But I’m glad you told me the truth.”

So was I, oddly enough. I’d just told him the worst thing about me, and he hadn’t even blinked. That had to be a good sign.

“I’m glad, too,” I told him, wanting to put the whole thing behind me. Somehow I knew Jace wouldn’t press the issue any further. “Now, how about some of this bread?”

And like that, Jason Little River came to live at the compound. He took over the larger of the secondary bedrooms, putting his meager belongings in the closet there. I noticed that he hadn’t brought any personal items with him, no photographs of family or anything like that, unlike the wedding photo of my parents that now lived on the mantel in the living room, or the shot of all of us at one of Devin’s football games, which was now sitting on the dresser in the master bedroom.

When I asked him about his family, his expression grew shuttered. “All gone now,” he said, and didn’t seem to want to talk about it anymore. Since I understood all too well what it felt like to lose everyone around you, I didn’t press the issue. Although I didn’t know a whole lot about life on the pueblo, I knew it had to be a fairly close-knit community, a sort of huge extended family very unlike what I’d grown up with. His loss was probably even more painful than mine. If he wanted to open up about it later, after he’d had time to work through it in his own way, then I would be there to listen to him.

He was impressed by the compound, by all the lengths its builder had gone to so it would be self-sustaining. Even so, after one morning of walking around and inspecting everything, just a day or two after he moved in, he told me, “We should really be thinking about getting some livestock. This place isn’t big enough for cattle, but maybe some goats?”

“Goats?” I repeated, not bothering to keep the skepticism out of my voice. “You’re not suggesting we eat a goat, are you?”

His teeth flashed in the morning sun as he grinned at me. It was a bright, brisk day, the sky dappled with clouds, but the sunlight still fiercely bright. Despite the glaring sun, I could feel the bite in the wind, the unmistakable signs that winter was coming…and that it was going to be a lot colder than anything I’d experienced down in Albuquerque.

“The original barbacoa was made with goat,” he pointed out. I only raised an eyebrow, and he laughed and went on, “I was thinking more in terms of milk and cheese. The cheese you have now isn’t going to last forever.”

Well, that was true. We had plenty of other staples, but some of the perishables like the cheese and the butter were about on their last legs. “Do you know how to milk a goat?” I asked.

“No, but I’ve milked cows. The technique can’t be all that different.”

The way he said it, halfway arch, halfway teasing, just made me shake my head. “Okay, I’ll let you do it. Assuming we can even find any goats. They weren’t exactly thick on the ground, the last time I checked.”

“Maybe not, but there were probably people on the outskirts of town who kept livestock, and I know I saw animal pens up in Nambe as I came down into town.”

“Oh?” I asked. It was the first time he’d made any mention of his journey here. I hadn’t pressed, because I knew better than anyone else that there were some things people just didn’t want to talk about. Even so, I’d wondered about the long walk from Taos, and what he’d encountered on it.

“Yeah.” He wasn’t looking at me, was instead staring to the north and east, presumably in the direction from which he’d come. “Part of the reason it took me so long to get here was that I took the High Road down from Taos. I figured it might be safer to stay off the main roads.”

“And you walked that whole way?” I asked, staring at him with some incredulity. I’d heard of the High Road, but I’d never been on it. The scenic side trip was one that my family had discussed taking a few times, but those plans had never materialized. My father had always been a Point A to Point B kind of guy and was more intent on the destination than on the road that led to it.

Jace gave me a rueful smile. “Not at first. I had a motorcycle, and I’d ridden it before with my backpack, although I know that’s not really recommended. But I thought I could do it if I kept my speed down. Besides, a motorcycle is a lot easier to maneuver around abandoned vehicles.”

I couldn’t argue with that. But a motorcycle wouldn’t have worked for me. I had too much stuff to bring, and besides, there was Dutchie. Well, maybe a sidecar….

Turning away from me, Jason surveyed the horizon again. The wind picked up, pulling strands of heavy dark hair out of the piece of thin leather he had wrapped around his ponytail. His hair hung a few inches below his shoulders, and so far I hadn’t seen it in anything but that heavy tail down his back. That hadn’t stopped me from wondering what it would look like, sleek and loose over those broad shoulders.

Which was exactly the wrong thing to be thinking. After I’d lost it the day we’d met, and he’d held me and comforted me, we’d maintained a careful distance between us. I hadn’t noted even a flicker of interest from him. Maybe I wasn’t his type, or maybe it was the far more stark fact that he’d lost not just his family, but his people, his entire way of life. He seemed to be bouncing back fairly well, but it was probably a little self-absorbed of me to think he’d be interested in any sort of romantic entanglements so soon after suffering that kind of shock.

Besides, I wasn’t even sure whether I was interested in anything like that. Yes, Jace was extremely good-looking, and he had an easygoing way about him that I appreciated, after some of the high-strung guys I’d dated in the past, but our focus should be on survival first and foremost. Those other sorts of complications were pretty far down my list of priorities.

And anyway, break-ups were bad enough when you had a decent chance of never seeing the other person again. I didn’t exactly have that luxury at the moment.

Jace didn’t seem to have noticed my preoccupation, since he appeared to be absorbed in studying the far-off outlines of the Jemez mountain range. I noticed that he held something in his hand, a leather thong knotted through a hole in a smooth-polished black stone. His thumb moved over it, the motion reminding me of the worry beads sometimes used by Greek men.

Then he said, “But I picked up something in my tire in Placita. I had a patch kit in my backpack, but it wasn’t just a nail that had blown the tire, but a sharp rock. I lost two nights there, trying to fix it, scavenging around to see if I could find anything to replace it with, but that was a no-go.”

“No one there, either?” I asked, although I already knew what the answer would be.

“No. Not a soul. I did some foraging to replenish my supplies, which was what delayed me even more. Or maybe I just wasn’t looking forward to that long, long walk.”

It would have been that. Even with the part of the trip he’d shaved off by riding his motorcycle, he still had to have walked a good forty miles or so. Farther, actually, because it was still about fifteen miles from Nambe to the heart of Santa Fe, and then another five miles to this hidden fold of the hills where the compound was located.

“But you did it anyway.”

He nodded, then shoved the polished stone he’d been holding back into his pocket. “There was nothing left in Taos. I wandered there for about a day and a half — I was at the pueblo when the illness hit, and our healers couldn’t do anything to combat it. No one could. People were being told to stay at home, that the local medical center didn’t have the resources to treat that many victims at once. So…I stayed there and watched everyone die around me.”

“And waited to find out when it would be your turn,” I said quietly.

Finally, he shifted so his gaze fell upon me, rather than that far-off, jagged horizon. Those jet-black eyes, in their fringe of equally black lashes, were startled, but then he nodded in understanding. “Yes. That’s exactly what I did. But then after another day passed, and everyone was gone, leaving behind only dust, I realized I wouldn’t be lucky enough to join all my people in the afterlife. I was doomed to drift here, in a world I hadn’t chosen.”

I probably wouldn’t have phrased it that way, but he was right — that’s exactly what it felt like. Being cast adrift on dark waters, paddling desperately, although you had no idea why you’d been pushed out onto that black ocean in the first place. “So you left then?”

He nodded, and once again his attention moved back to the horizon, to the mountains that blocked his view of the place he had once called home. “Well, I went from the pueblo to my apartment. At least I’d had the motorcycle with me at the pueblo, so the trip didn’t take long. The whole way I didn’t see anyone, just cars left along the side of the road. Same thing at my apartment — it was a small building, only four units, but all the hotels were equally deserted.”

His shoulders lifted under the leather jacket he wore, although I wasn’t quite sure of the reason for the shrug. Dismissing his futile attempts to find any survivors? I didn’t know him well enough to guess.

“Anyway,” he continued. “I could tell that staying in Taos probably wasn’t a good idea. It’s a small town…was, I mean…and the chances of finding anyone who’d lived through the Heat were pretty low. I packed what I could and left. I did see that one woman as I was heading out of town, but, as I said, she took off the second she saw me. Maybe she thought I was a ghost.” He did smile then, but grimly, just the slightest lift at the corners of his mouth.

Or a rapist, I thought, recalling my own experiences. I didn’t say anything aloud, though. Whatever he might be, Jason Little River was clearly not a rapist. “And the wine?” I asked.

“The La Chiripada tasting room was just down the street from where I lived. Since no one was around, I figured it wouldn’t matter if I liberated a couple of bottles. I had a feeling I might need a drink in the near future. Or,” he added, with a real smile this time, his expression warming as he looked over at me, “a peace offering.”

I tried not to blush, but I wasn’t sure how successful I was at it. With any luck, he’d think the flush in my cheeks had come from the brisk wind blowing down from the north, and not the way he’d just looked at me. “Speaking of the wine,” I said, my tone probably too casual, “we should have something special to drink it with. Frozen tamales probably aren’t festive enough.”

“You like rabbit?” Jace asked, a gleam in those black eyes.

“I don’t know,” I replied uncertainly. I had a feeling I knew what he was going to suggest. “I’ve never had it.”

“Well, time to change that.” He glanced over at the house, then back at me. “That is, assuming you have a .22 in that gun safe of yours.”

At least he didn’t ask me to go with him. In the back of my mind, I’d understood that at some point I’d have to start eating game meats, but I wasn’t sure I could handle watching Jace shoot a fluffy little bunny and then expect to roast it or whatever a few hours later.

He did take Dutchie along, saying she might as well start to learn what it meant to be an outdoor dog. I knew he was right; her days as a pampered suburban pooch were long over. Anyway, she was more than happy to go along on the hunting expedition, trotting off at Jace’s side without even a backward glance toward the house. I only hoped she wouldn’t scare off every rabbit in a five-mile radius.

In the meantime, I had to scour the cookbooks that sat on the shelf mounted to the kitchen wall to see if I could find anything about cooking rabbit. Actually, that didn’t take me much time at all, because in addition to the standard Joy of Cooking and Better Homes and Gardens cookbooks, I found several specialty ones, including a title dedicated to cooking all sorts of game meats, starting with rabbit and quail and moving up from there.

After that, it was a matter of poring over the recipes and deciding which sounded best — and one for which I had actually had all the ingredients on hand. I decided that the rabbit with mustard sauce variation sounded good. Since I’d already harvested some onions and garlic from the greenhouse a few days earlier, all I had to do was rescue the onion from the fridge and the garlic from the little terra-cotta keeper that sat on the counter.

While I did that, I couldn’t help worrying that Jace would come back with a couple of rabbit carcasses and expect me to skin and dress them, his work as the he-man hunter done. I didn’t know the first thing about doing any of that. Hell, I could barely cut up a whole chicken properly. My mother showed me how to do it once, but I’d protested the whole time that you could buy already cut-up chicken, so what was the point? Wasting a half hour on that sort of exercise just to save a dollar or so on the price of the meat had hardly seemed worth it to me.

That had annoyed her, I could tell; she was probably flashing back to when she and my father first got married, when she was substitute teaching while trying to get a full-time position, and he was still a rookie right out of the Academy. Money had been tight. I understood that intellectually, but twenty-five years later, it seemed a little extreme to be worrying about a few cents a pound for chicken.

But at least she had taught me to cook — not Cordon Bleu or anything, but how to make a roast and how to prepare a variety of potato dishes and lots of veggies, sauces, that sort of thing. I knew I wouldn’t have to worry about poisoning Jace if he did somehow manage to bring back a rabbit, even with Dutchie’s help.

Until they did return, I wasn’t about to get anything started. I assembled the ingredients on the kitchen counter, went down to the cellar to get some potatoes, and then found a tablecloth and some matching napkins on one of the shelves in the laundry room. This would be the first time we’d sat down at the dining room table, as his first few nights here, Jace had eaten with me at the little breakfast set in the kitchen nook. For some reason, that had felt safer to me. There was a certain ritual associated with sitting down to a real meal at a dining room table.

Maybe I was making too much out of his going rabbit-hunting. It wasn’t as if we wouldn’t be eating a lot of that sort of thing in the future, if it turned out he really was handy with that .22. Then again, making an occasion out of it might make us both feel a little better about our current situation.

That thought seemed to reassure me, so I went ahead and finished setting the table, completing the setup with the long wrought-iron candleholder that had been sitting on the sideboard. It held five pillar candles, and would provide plenty of light.

Candlelit dinners? I asked myself. Boy, you really are asking for trouble.

I decided if Jace asked, I’d say it was a good way to save energy.

He returned an hour or so later, Dutchie bounding along beside him, and a very messy bundle of rabbit dangling from a bag in one hand. So he had done the butchering for me, probably guessing that asking me to handle that particular duty would have damaged my delicate sensibilities.

“Thanks,” I said, taking the bundle from him. “I found a recipe with mustard sauce. Does that sound okay to you?”

“Sounds great,” he replied. He was windblown, but looked far more relaxed and happy than he had when he was telling me about how he had left Taos. Getting out in the fresh air and away from the house seemed to have done him a world of good. “I need to get cleaned up. Can you manage things from here?”

In another world, I might have complained about having to do the typical female thing of cooking, now that he’d bagged his bunnies. Actually, though, I was just grateful that he even had the ability to go out and get us food. He knew how to hunt; I knew how to cook. It seemed a pretty fair division of labor from where I stood.

The bundle of rabbit parts was a little bloodier than something I would have gotten from the supermarket, but I wasn’t so squeamish that I couldn’t handle it. I rinsed everything off and patted it dry, then sprinkled the pieces with salt and pepper while warming up some olive oil in a pan. As the rabbit was browning, Jace returned to the kitchen, face and hands looking freshly scrubbed, and asked if I needed help peeling the potatoes.

Okay, so much for my worry about thinking he was going to sit on his ass and watch a DVD of Die Hard or something while I labored away in the kitchen.

“Yes,” I said. “Thanks.”

He went to work, being sparing with the water, for which I was grateful. So far it seemed as if the well could manage just about anything we threw at it, including daily showers for the two of us, but it never hurt to be careful. I used to take long, hot showers, the kind that would basically kill all the hot water in the place by the time I was done, but once I got here, I retrained myself so the whole procedure only took five minutes. Not the easiest of tasks at first, but things did get sped up when you didn’t have to worry about shaving your legs.

I risked a glance at Jace, thinking I wouldn’t mind having to go back to the whole leg-shaving thing if the situation warranted it. But that day seemed far off — if it ever came at all — so in the meantime, I was pretty sure my five-minute showers were safe.

Neither of us spoke, but it was a companionable sort of silence, him peeling the potatoes, me working away at the sauté pan, following the steps of the recipe. He did stop to ask whether I wanted the potatoes sliced or cut up or whatever, but since I was planning on mashing them, he didn’t have to do much besides quarter them and put them in a pot of cold water.

“Don’t you need milk for mashed potatoes?” he asked.

“There’s evaporated milk in the pantry. It won’t be quite the same, but I think it’ll be okay.”

I could tell by the way his brows drew together that he wasn’t exactly thrilled by the idea of evaporated milk, but he didn’t say anything, only went over to fetch the box and then mix up a batch for me. Well, if it was that big a problem, the next day I’d send him off in search of any stray goats that might be wandering the area, looking for a home. Dutchie would probably be ecstatic at the prospect of that sort of expedition.

The dog had definitely latched on to Jace. Maybe she’d been more bonded with Mr. Munoz, back in Albuquerque. Or maybe Jace was one of those people whom dogs tended to love. I didn’t know, and in the end, it didn’t matter. Jace was Dutchie’s new best friend. It didn’t bother me as much as I thought it might have, simply because Dutchie had proved herself to be a decent judge of character. If she liked Jace, it must mean he was okay.

It was dark by the time dinner was ready. Jace and I carried the various platters and bowls to the dining room table, and I brought out some matches I’d found in the kitchen so I could light the pillars in their wrought-iron holder. Without my asking, Jace turned off the overhead fixture, so all we had was the candlelight. It danced off the heavy glass goblets, the dark bottle of cabernet that sat waiting to be drunk. The walls in this room were a warm parchment yellow, and seemed to reflect the glow of the candles and multiply it.

“Wow,” Jace murmured. “I hadn’t expected to see anything like this ever again.” Then he shook his head. “Wait — I don’t think I’d ever seen anything like this before, either. It looks beautiful, Jessica.”

“Thanks,” I said, my tone almost shy. Now that I was with him in this intimate space, would he take all this for more than I had intended, as some sort of seduction or something?

Well, there wasn’t anything I could do about it now. I pulled ou