Fleeing famine and heading north, Yun Shuruan collapsed from hunger at the village entrance. Gu Ye, the third son of the Gu family, carried her home.
He was tall, with a defiant look in his eyes, few words, and a hard temper. He watched people like an eagle stalking its prey. Yet when he laid her on the kang, his movements were so gentle, as if he were afraid of breaking a porcelain doll.
“From now on, I’ll take care of you.”
The words were gruff, but they were the wildest promise she had ever heard.
At first, she was afraid of him. He was full of menace, with calloused fingers and a hunting knife at his waist. He was known in the mountains as a lone wolf.
Then she realized: this wolf only wagged his tail for her.
When she was cold, he spread the warmest furs on her kang. When she so much as glanced at a wild fruit, he would cross three mountains to bring it back. If a man in the village looked at her for too long, he would slap his knife down on the table, his glare sharp enough to flay the man alive.
Everyone said Gu the Third had picked up a pampered little thing who couldn’t be kept alive and wouldn’t stay.
But no one knew that on that stormy night, he had held her close and used his chest to shield her from the mountain wind, sharp as a blade.
No one knew that when she secretly used the spring in her palm to heal his wounds, the tough man had red-rimmed eyes as he clumsily clutched her hand. “Don’t go. I’d give you my life if you asked.”
Later, the hunter’s kang grew warm, and the once-quiet courtyard filled with the bustle of daily life.
Gu Ye, once so untamed and defiant, learned to clumsily make her brown sugar water. He even learned to crouch by the stove and ask, blushing, “Could a rough man like me... really be good enough for you?”
Yun Shuruan smiled, her eyes crinkling, and poked his rock-hard chest.
“A wild wolf like you just happens to be the kind that listens only to me.”
