Discover Me & You, A Devil's Kettle Romance: Book 2

by Susan Sey

  “It’s just a theory.”

  He thought about it. “I don’t mind mice. Definitely lived with worse.”

  “Me, too.” She touched the brim of her ball cap. “Goodnight, Mr. Walker. I’ll bill the landlord.”

  His grin was a bright, unexpected flash, transforming his face from interesting to compelling. “My landlord is the DNR.”

  “Yep. Should be a fun bit of paperwork.”

  He nodded at the pillowcase. “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Normally I wouldn’t release a snake on state forest property but since I found it here, I’m within my rights to do just that. There’s a place I know that would be perfect for him.”

  “You’re going to take him tonight?”

  “I’d planned to.” She tipped her head, suddenly wary. “Why?”

  “I need to go with you.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Again, why?”

  “Because if I do, then you can count this against the three observed removals you need for your license.”

  She stared. “Oh, hell. You’re a DNR agent?”

  “I’m your DNR agent.”

  CHAPTER 5

  IF YOU’D ASKED him a couple hours ago, Eli would’ve said that the only thing in this world he wanted was to fall face-first into any available bed and sleep for forty-eight hours. That was before Willa Zinc had rescued him from the kind of situation that he’d previously believed existed only on the internet. Before she’d walked into his tumble-down cabin with that cool air of devastating competence. Before she’d quoted Raiders of the Lost Ark unprompted. That was before she’d pulled a dripping nightmare from his toilet and all Eli had been able to see was the delicate curve of her exposed nape, a whisper of fine hair sliding out of the ponytail she’d threaded through the back of a no-nonsense ball cap.

  Which was insane. Eli was finally losing it. His therapist would be thrilled to know it. At least he was making progress, one way or the other. Too bad it was toward crazy town — because what else could you call being seized by lust when there was a forty-foot snake in the room? Those were the breaks, he supposed.

  “You’re my DNR agent?” Willa said. “Last I heard, you were an itinerate bus boy.”

  He tried a winning smile. “Not to mention a potential arsonist. Now there’s a story I’d like to hear.”

  “Explain,” she said, that pixie-pointed jaw of hers at a terse angle that didn’t bode well for the marriage Eli had nearly offered.

  He wished he could explain. The circumstances leading up to his relocation to Devil’s Kettle were a little unclear still even to him but he could give her the broad strokes.

  “I’m actually a Forest Service guy,” he said finally. “US Department of.”

  “I thought you said you were DNR.”

  “I’m on loan.”

  “You can borrow a forest ranger?”

  “Ever heard of the Good Neighbors Act?”

  “Nope.”

  “It pretty much allows just that between state and federal agencies with shared interests.”

  “Like adjoining state and national forest lands?”

  “Exactly. Good neighbors, see?”

  She only stared at him but he felt confident that she saw just fine. She might not be the bubbly sort but Willa Zinc was definitely firing on all cylinders. He suspected she fired on more cylinders than most folks even had.

  “As it happens,” he went on hastily, “the DNR needed a guy up here to do your observed removals—” Or so Ben had insisted when Eli tried to call bullshit. “—and I was available.” Because desperately trying to hike your head straight for the third fire season in a row surely didn’t take up all his time, or so Ben had argued with remarkable efficacy. “So here I am.”

  “I see.” She studied him and he wanted to reach out and nudge that ball cap up a little higher. He wanted to see her eyes with an urgency he didn’t understand and couldn’t have explained. He just did. “And you didn’t mention this when you called for an emergency snake removal because…?”

  “Because I was in a cold sweat about the fifty-foot snake I nearly peed on?” She gazed at him, stone-faced. He sighed. “But even if I weren’t, I’d probably have done the first one blind anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I wanted to see you in action before you knew it counted. Pest removal’s a weird line of work. A lot of cowboys in it, people who shouldn’t be allowed to own a dog, let alone wrangle wild animals.” Her nod was stiff but at least she nodded. “I wanted to see how you treated animals when you didn’t know it mattered.”

  A long pause. “Are you really afraid of snakes?”

  “Straight up.”

  She nodded again, as if she’d known it all along but he’d passed some kind of test by admitting it. She jiggled the shoulder the snake-sack was slung over. “Are you going to be okay riding shotgun with this fella?”

  “Oh, Christ. Do I have to?”

  “It’s not safe for me to drive and be in control of a wild animal,” she said primly. “And it’s afraid. It would really be a lot happier on your warm lap.”

  “Hell, no.” He eyed the sack. “I’ll hold the tied end, and it can sit on the seat next to me.”

  “Fair enough,” she said, and he couldn’t stand it anymore. He reached out and nudged the brim of her cap up. She jerked back like he’d threatened her with a loaded pistol but he only nodded.

  “I thought so,” he murmured.

  “Thought what?” she snapped, snugging her cap back down and glaring at him.

  “You’re laughing at me.” He smiled, unoffended. “I couldn’t tell with that cap pulled so low but I thought as much.”

  “I’m not laughing,” she muttered. She spun and stalked toward the door.

  “Not now.” He fell in behind her, more cheerful than he could remember being in months. Years. “But you were.”

  “I was not.” She glared over her shoulder at him. “I don’t laugh. I’m not a laugher.”

  “Okay.”

  She stalked to the beat-up pickup parked just off the porch. “It’s open,” she said and yanked open the driver’s side door. Eli helped himself to the passenger door and slid onto a worn vinyl bench seat. The truck smelled like sunscreen and night air and wild things. Just like her. Willa dumped a sack full of snake on his lap and said, “Buckle up, Mr. Walker.”

  “Eli,” he managed and obeyed orders.

  “I thought you said we were releasing this beast on state forest land,” Eli said as Willa pulled onto the highway. She didn’t turn to meet his eyes but she felt them on her, just like she had in the cabin. She was starting to get used to it, the whisper-light touch of his attention.

  “We are.”

  “Then why are we leaving the state forest?”

  “The place I have in mind?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You can’t get there from here.”

  “Where can you get there from?”

  She sent him a cool look. “I’m taking you there.”

  He gave a soft laugh. “You’re the first person to tell me to shut up in three years.”

  “I didn’t tell you to shut up.”

  This time the cool look was his, and the soft chuckle was hers. Because she totally had told him to shut up. It was to his credit that he understood as much and wasn’t offended. It was even more to his credit that he did indeed shut up. The silence was comfortable and broken-in somehow. Sliding into it was like lacing up her favorite pair of boots, which should’ve freaked her out except that it didn’t. He wasn’t happy about the snake snuggled up to his leg but he was dealing. Aside from that, she was reading him as…content? Yeah, sitting there in the passenger seat of her old truck with the night air swirling through the open windows, all rich earth and sharp pines, fading heat and dark secrets, Eli Walker was content.

  Strangely, so was she.

  She pulled up in front of her own cabin a few minutes later and killed the engine.

&nbs
p; “Where are we?”

  “Other side of the state forest.” She took the snake from him and shouldered open her door. He followed suit and met her at the front bumper.

  “Private property?”

  “Mine.”

  He studied the neat one-and-a-half story building in front of them with grave care and Willa wondered what he saw. She’d replaced the roof and repainted last summer, but otherwise it was identical to hundreds of other cabins planted along the North Shore. The only significant difference was that her foundation was solid as Split Rock lighthouse and she’d put up a bird feeder the day she decided to invite every mouse in the neighborhood into her attic. It wasn’t fancy or even decorated, really, but it was home to Willa. It was her retreat. A stronghold. Safe, solid, secure. It probably just looked grim to him, though. Cold and square and unadorned. Just like her. Just as she’d made herself years and years ago.

  “Yeah,” he said finally. “I can tell. It feels just like you.”

  “Feels like me?” She wanted to bite her tongue off. She really didn’t want to know what he thought she felt like. Did she?

  No, absolutely not. She turned and headed down a path she’d worn into the forest floor decades ago. Eli fell into step behind her, still not remotely offended by her abruptness. Most people were but she was coming to understand that Eli Walker wasn’t like most people.

  “I only meant that it felt very still and serene.” His voice was low and rough in the darkness, like a cat tongue against her skin. It prickled and smoothed all at the same time. A shiver seized her nape and shimmied down her back. “You have such a stillness to you, Willa.”

  Longing was an ache in his voice, a poignant desire that had nothing to do with her and everything to do with that endless sorrow filling his eyes. He’d been broken, she knew suddenly, and badly. She had no objective reason to think so but she knew it nonetheless. She recognized it. She’d lived with it herself, hadn’t she? Lived with grief and shame buzzing relentlessly inside her, filling her skull every day and every night until she thought she’d go mad with it. It had driven her out of her room, out of her home, out of her very self. She’d gone to the woods, to the night, walked for miles among the small creatures that hid from her and the large ones that didn’t. It was there that she’d finally found her measure of that stillness Eli was talking about.

  Her bones ached with his pain but she didn’t know what to say. Didn’t think saying anything would help anyway. So she let the night surround them as they walked to the one place she thought might help.

  Eli lost track of time. He simply followed Willa through the night. He didn’t wonder where they were, didn’t ask where she was taking him. He genuinely didn’t care. He simply put his boots in her tracks and drank in that blessed stillness.

  He didn’t know how she was doing it. Didn’t really care. All he knew was that this woman was like a drug, smoothing out the jagged edges and broken pieces that had been rubbing and ripping inside him for the better part of three years. And for the first time in recent memory, there was quiet inside his head. There was peace.

  Jesus Christ, it had been so long. He would’ve cried if he’d remembered how.

  When she finally stopped, it was to send him an unreadable look over her shoulder. The shoulder over which she carried what must by now be a very confused snake.

  She took the sack from her shoulder, cradled it to her stomach and murmured, “This is it, buddy.”

  He wondered if she was talking to him or to the snake. Decided it didn’t matter because he was at the edge of one of the most beautiful meadows he’d ever seen in his life.

  He looked up and found a star-shattered circle of night framed in spiky pine crowns. He lowered his eyes and saw that the clearing was perfectly circular as well, centered on a massive boulder. It, too, was circular but flat and low, like some whimsical god had wanted a coffee table right here in the woods.

  No, not a coffee table. An altar. Eli had never been much for church — no god worth praying to would allow half the shit that went on down here — but if he’d been inclined that way, this was the kind of place that would drop him to his knees.

  He might end up on his knees anyway.

  Willa crossed to the boulder and he followed her, unable to do otherwise. She knelt by the edge and he knelt beside her. A part of his brain — separate, amused, detached — thought, shit, that was fast. But the bigger part, the part that had turned off everything else in favor of simply being here, now, with her, watched her reach out and place her palm on the rock.

  She smiled and he lost his breath. “Touch,” she said and he almost did. He desperately wanted to. Wanted to put his fingertips to the smooth curve of her cheek, to the sharp edge of that pixie jaw. He wanted to trace the delicate curl of her ear, the clean line of her collar bone. He wanted to touch the deep dip in her upper lip, the one that made a pretty bow of her mouth.

  But he obediently placed his hand beside hers on the smooth surface of the rock and found it warm against his fingers. Warm and something else. Alive, maybe, though not alive in the sense he’d always understood it. Something pulsed there, something more than alive. Something older than time and wiser than knowledge. He hissed in a breath and she sighed.

  “You feel it?” Her eyes were shadowed by the brim of her cap but they were sharp on him, urgent. “You feel how old it is?”

  “Willa,” he said finally. “What is this place?”

  “I don’t know. A fairy ring, maybe. A thinnie?”

  “Holy hell, you’re a Dark Tower fan?”

  “Stephen King is the Shakespeare of our era.”

  “Marry me.” He was more than half-serious.

  She ignored him. He didn’t know if he was relieved or devastated. “I love the idea of a thinnie,” she said. “Of a place where the usual barriers between worlds, between times, are so delicate, so permeable you can almost hear that other time or place singing to you.”

  “Dangerous,” he murmured. “Like sirens singing sailors to their deaths.”

  “Or to their greatest adventure,” she returned. She lifted the pillowcase and placed it on the warm rock between their hands. “Not that anything even slightly paranormal has ever happened here.”

  “It hasn’t?” Again, Eli wasn’t sure if he was relieved or disappointed. “Never?”

  “I’ve never seen so much as a fairy dancing.” She unwound the string and opened the bag, folded back the edges and revealed the snake curled loosely upon itself. The instinctive dread Eli had always felt, that bolt of adrenaline and terror, was still there. It lived in the part of his brain that was as old as this rock, so it was there but it was strangely muted. Present but not overwhelming. He could think over it without any trouble. Could look into the strange flat eyes of the snake flickering its tongue experimentally at this new air, and understand it as nothing more or less than a fellow being. A random spark of life, just like Eli, riding its ticket as long as it lasted. As long as its luck held out.

  The snake uncoiled slowly, glided out of the pillowcase in that unearthly way of snakes, moving without any obvious means of propulsion. Fascination twined with the background hum of fear and Eli reached without thinking to lace his fingers through Willa’s. She let him. Her hand was small and cool even as it was callused and tough. And the horror buzzing at the back of his brain, the relentless shame and guilt and agony, muted down to almost imperceptible. They watched together while the snake curled slowly over the surface of the boulder. It paused once it was free of the pillowcase, seemed to absorb the rock’s warmth, age, strength, whatever. Then it streamed over the far edge in a liquid ribbon of movement, and was gone.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE NEXT MORNING found Willa at the Devil’s Taproom, extricating a box of straws from the jammed-tight supply shelves with the same focus a bomb technician might give an IED. Devil’s Kettle was built on a basalt lava flow several hundred feet thick, which meant basements weren’t a practical option. But lake-view real estat
e wasn’t cheap, so you didn’t complain when you scored some. If that meant storing an entire bar-and-grill’s worth of inventory in what amounted to a broom closet, well, those were the breaks.

  Not that Willa was particularly concerned with the taproom’s straw supply. The day to day running of the family bar was Peter’s responsibility but he’d insisted she take one shift a week. He’d actually written it into that 60/40 ownership deal they’d worked out four years ago when he’d sailed back into town for the circus that had been Diego’s funeral. Peter would run the place — among others, as Peter intended to amass an empire that ranged far and wide in Devil’s Kettle — but she had to vote her shares (she had shares now, for sweet lord’s sake) on any major decisions, and she’d pull one shift every week. To stay in touch with the business, Peter claimed. Not because he was a pretentious jerk with delusions of grandeur. Definitely not because he wanted to sleep in on Saturdays.

  Willa didn’t care. She wasn’t much for sleeping in anyway. Even if she wanted to, she doubted she could. Once the sun was up, the ravens nesting in her yard were loud enough to wake the dead. Plus, if she were being perfectly honest, she had to admit she didn’t actually mind Saturday mornings at the bar that much. The breakfast crowd hit the Wooden Spoon or the Sugar Rush for doughnuts, and the serious drinkers were still sleeping off Friday night. This left Willa alone with the mop bucket, some restocking and her thoughts, which suited her far better than customers.

  Usually. Today was an exception. But if her thoughts weren’t easy company this morning, it was because of last night. It was because Eli Walker had knelt beside her in the woods. It was because he’d given her thinnie the same reverence she did, the reverence nobody else ever had. And when she’d given that poor, frightened snake its freedom, when the snake had trusted her and taken it? He’d held her hand.

  It sent a slow shock rolling through her to even remember it, the way his fingers had threaded through her own. The strength and gentleness in them. The uncompromising masculinity of that broad palm against her own smaller, more feminine one. The way it had made her breathlessly aware of that femininity for the first time in years.