At least the knocking had stopped.
The child sniffled, wiped her nose on her forearm, leaving a shiny trail up and down her arm
(urgh)
and still wouldn’t look up.
“Look, it’s okay. We’ll figure this out—uh, whatever this is—and get you home. Wherever home is. And by ‘we,’ I mean someone in authority. Maybe a bunch of them.” She rooted around in a box marked Who the hell knows? Maybe the living room?, found a blanket, and draped it over the cowering kiddo. “There’s nothing to be scared of.” Most likely. But what the hell did she know? Maybe Lilydale was crawling with bear hunters. Maybe it was Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” only with bears. “It’s gonna be okay.”
No sooner had she run out of platitudes than she heard the rear porch door twang (the hinges were old and stretchy), followed by the sound of wood splintering, followed by the slam of the door against the wall as two kids or a politician or a pizza delivery person or a bear came in without an invitation.
Chapter 3
There was a swinging door between the kitchen and living room, and Lila blessed it. Which was a switch from earlier, when she’d been carrying boxes and mistimed the swing (“Ow, God damn it!”).
But now the contrary thing concealed her for a crucial few seconds, and when whoever-it-was pushed at the door and came through, she had the barrel up behind his ear before he was all the way in.
“Jesus, you Domino’s guys are persistent,” she hissed. “I told you. I. Don’t. Want. Any. Pizza. Jackass.”
“Please. If I was delivering pizza, it’d be Green Mill.”
That startled a laugh out of her. She had to give it to him, he didn’t sound rattled in the slightest. And he was distractingly good-looking. Not every guy could pull off the classic Caesar haircut. Or had eyes the color of forest moss.
Forest moss? Time to get laid. Not by this guy, though. Most likely.
His looks made up for his clothes: He was wearing scruffy slacks, a shirt he hadn’t bothered buttoning up all the way (which revealed the shoulders and abs of a swimmer, which was even more irritating), he didn’t have a coat, and…was that blood on his shirt cuff?
“Trespassing,” she prompted. “That’s you. That’s what you’re doing for some ungodly reason. Right now. In my house.” She started to walk him back into the kitchen. Once he’d kicked the door in, she hadn’t heard anything but footsteps, so hopefully her half-assed plan was going to work. She wasn’t afraid of him—not exactly—but there was the cub to think about. And he had just broken in. But she had no sense of real danger from him, and her gut instinct about people had yet to let her down. Still, precautions had to be taken. “Also, you noticed the gun, right?”
“The one you’re aggressively cleaning my ear with?” He tried to move his head away; she followed the movement with the barrel. “Yeah, that didn’t escape my attention.”
“You want to see aggressive cleaning? Break in again.”
He rolled those green, green eyes at her and scoffed. Scoffed. She should have been irked but had to give it to him: The guy had some plums. “Aw, c’mon. This is America. This isn’t the first time I’ve had a gun in my face this month. Which is a huge problem, by the way. How many hoops did you even have to jump through to get that thing? Not very many, I bet.”
Seriously with this? “Yeah, let’s leave your personal politics out of it, okay?”
“Plus, it’s not loaded—Jesus!”
She used that moment of inattention to drive her toes—clad in her second-favorite pair of steel-toed shoes—straight and hard into his ankle and, when he reflexively bent, Lila dropped the (empty) .380 and shoved him with both hands, hard. He toppled backward through the open basement door
(shouldn’t have been in such a rush to get into the living room, pal)
and she slammed it shut. And shot the bolt. It wouldn’t hold him for long, which was fine.
She rushed into the living room, intent on her phone, only to pull up short when she realized
“God damn it!”
the girl–cub was gone.
Chapter 4
His own goddamned fault. He’d taken it easy on her. He’d been too interested in how she looked and smelled to pay attention to business. “I deserved to be pitched into a dark spooky basement,” Oz Adway announced to the air, then sat up and stifled a groan. “Ass first.”
And everything had been going so…so…what was the opposite of “well”?
After he tamped down his suddenly raging hormones and shifted, he’d tracked the cub and the yummy Stable to the wrong house, of course, and it was the Curs(ed) House, of course, and time wasn’t on his side, of course, so he had to drop everything (literally—the box of files had landed on his foot in his rush to strip) to rescue the cub and contain the situation.
Plus his shoulder hurt from where she’d clipped him with the ambulance she drove for some reason.
(Also she now smelled like honey and gun oil. Sweet and lethal. She’d take such good care of his cubs! Which wasn’t relevant to anything, so you’d think he could focus on the cub.)
And he had to do all of it without scaring the Stable in question more than she already was, because Oz would sooner take on a raging werebear than a Stable backed into a corner. When Stables got scared, they thought up A-bombs and poisonous gas and reality TV. (To be fair, if he couldn’t shift, he’d probably be scared and grumpy and want to watch terrible people get kicked off a terrible island all the time, too.) So scaring a Stable in general was a terrible idea, never mind one who smelled like high summer in the country.
Needless to say, in keeping with the entire goddamned day, nothing had gone right from the moment she’d nailed him like roadkill. More alarming/interesting, when he broke in, this particular Stable hadn’t been afraid, she’d been pissed. She hadn’t lost her head, she’d followed through on her plan. She hadn’t run, she’d met him in the doorway with a gun.
Fantastic.
Then he got a closer look at her.
Fantastic. Curves, curls, glasses showcasing blue eyes that were lovely even when they were narrowed into slits. Short-sleeved red T-shirt and black denim shorts, though it was spring. Sharks on her socks. No shoes.
Her curly hair had been his downfall. Not wavy. Curls that if you took one (gently!) and stretched it out (gently!) it would spring right back: pa-toing! And he’d been imagining exactly that when she introduced him to her basement. Ass first. With her foot. All he could do was watch the stairwell flip a one-eighty around him and then the cement floor jumped up and slammed into his back, which woke up his bad shoulder that hadn’t shut up since.