Alaskan Mountains✔️

"Who are you?" her voice strained and cracked under her dry throat, "Where am I?" she tried to sit up but groaned from the pain radiating throughout her body. 

"Are you okay miss?" then he remembered her question, "I'm Jamie Mackenzie, I mean you no harm. I found you laying in the snow, your in my cabin right now but we need to take you into town for the doctor to see you as soon as the sun rises."

"No!" she tried to bolt upwards again but failed, "He'll find me please sir, please let me stay here until I'm better. He can't find me again, he can't!" tears welled in her eyes, threatening to spill over.

"Who's he?" he found his voice was urgent although he didn't feel it should have been, "Is he the one who did this to you?" 

For the next two hours he listened to the intriguing woman before him tell the story of her abusive ex-husband, Hades Williams.  But the whole time she did not reveal her name. 

"Excuse me for interrupting you," he cut her off mid sentence, "But what is your name?" 

Her face paled. She'd just told him her life story but she couldn't tell him her name?

But then she started laughing. "How rude of me," she laughed, "My name is Sapphire Calum." 

"Sapphire." he tested the name on his lips, "I'll make a deal with you Sapphire, you can stay here through the winter if you help me out around here." 

She grinned, "like a house keeper? cooking cleaning that sort of thing?" 
"If you wanna think about it like that than yea." he smiled. 

~ ❀ ~

The past three weeks had been amazing for Jamie, he slowly but surly felt himself opening up to Saph, the girl he'd found near dead in the snow had turned out to be a strong independent woman. He hadn't celebrated Christmas in ten years, sense the accident when he was seventeen. 

He hadn't explained that to Saph yet, but he would, that would be his gift to her, part of himself. A measly present for Christmas but all the same a gift, he decided as he trudged up the snowy hill. 'Two days to Christmas' he thought to himself. 
The poaching was getting worse. To the point that he had found a gutted animal less than thirty feet away from his stock shed. He pushed opened the door and an aroma of spices hit his nose prompting him further into his home. 

"Hey Saph," he greeted her with a side hug, the bruises had faded and she'd slowly grown into platonic physical contact, "What smells so good?"

"A pot pie." she smiled knowing that it was his favorite. 

"Your gonna kill me Saph," he smiled, "I'll eat all the left overs and you know that."

"That sounds like a personal problem," she remarked turning around to check the oven.

His smile broadened, two days and she would know everything about him, something that should sound scary but it didn't, not one bit when it came to Sapphire. All those years he'd been cooped up in his home and no one had really known him at all, except for Duke, and he'd considered that okay, but now he wondered how he'd managed without for so long. 

~ ❀ ~

When he was younger Jamie had always loved Christmas, but after the fire he'd had nobody to share it with, he'd lost his joy for holidays. But now sitting around the woodstove with Sapphire drinking hot chocolate, he couldn't think of anywhere else he's rather be, or any other perfect time to finally tell her about his past. 

"Saph, I'm gonna tell you something and it's gonna make you think I'm a horrible person," she scrunched her face in a scowl but nodded anyway for him to continue, "When I was younger, I was, well I was running in with the wrong crowd, we lit bonfires and watched them burn till the early hours of the next morning, skipped school, drank, defied anything anybody told us to do.