by Selena Scott
“How much do you trust me with your house?” he asked her as he steered with one wrist on the top of the steering wheel and his gaze split between her and the road.
She pursed her lips. “Well, I pretty much hate everything we just bought. But what do I care? Go nuts.”
“Great!” he chirped, as if she hadn’t just admitted to hating everything he’d just purchased with her money. “Then one more stop it is.”
He pulled into a hardware store. “I’m gonna wait in the car,” she told him.
“Great!” he chirped again, not in the least bothered by her lack of involvement.
Fifteen minutes later, he came out with a shopping cart and loaded what looked to be about six gallons of paint into the back of his truck.
“Now you’re painting my house?” she asked incredulously as he slammed back into the front seat.
He grinned at her. “The inside, not the outside. Though…” he tapped his chin thoughtfully. “The outside could definitely do with a fresh coat.”
“One thing at a time, you maniac!”
He grinned and pulled back into traffic.
***
He’d fibbed a little, because the hardware store was not the last stop. The last stop was an actual furniture store. When they arrived, she looked at him as if he’d just pulled up to the strip club outside of the airport.
“What in God’s name are we doing here?” she asked him, her voice lowering to a sinister decibel.
He didn’t bother answering her. He jumped out of the truck, came around to the passenger side and yanked the door open, reaching across her to unbuckle her seatbelt. “If you give me half an hour in this store, I’ll immediately buy you a burrito the size of your head. And a beer. A really cold beer.”
It was getting on dinner time and he watched her eyes dilate with the word ‘burrito’ as if it were some kind of magic spell. One thing he really liked about this girl was how much she was into food.
“If we’re not out in thirty minutes on the dot, I’m calling the police,” she muttered.
He laughed and stepped aside for her to jump down. When he’d talked her into going out to buy stuff for her house, he’d asked her for a budget. Because of her prodigious haggling skills, they had plenty of money left over for a few things she desperately needed.
First things first, he took her straight to the bedroom section of the house. The woman was a highly trained athlete. Her body was a finely tuned machine. She deserved a bed to sleep on.
He already knew her well enough to know she wasn’t going to give a rat’s ass about her bed frame, and considering that she was sleeping on a mat on the floor, she might not care about her mattress either, but he wanted her to at least test some out.
“It feels wrong to lay on a bed with my shoes on,” she muttered as she crawled across the first one.
“Can I help you folks—”
Seth clasped the salesman on the shoulder and leaned in. “You are definitely not going to make this sale if you hover. Come back in twenty minutes.”
The salesman nodded briskly, turned on his heel and disappeared back into the belly of the store.
“I can’t tell if I like this one. You try it,” she demanded, rolling off the bed.
Seth did just that, grimacing as soon as he lay down. “Way too soft.”
The next one was deemed too soft as well, and the next.
“I’m beginning to think your bed is made of wooden planks,” Sarah told him as she rolled onto the next bed. Without thinking too much on it, Seth lay down next to her.
He rolled his head to reply but promptly forgot about the store, the salesman, and the entire outside world when he caught sight of her lying on one side, a pillow under her cheek and her eyes on his face.
He was in a bed with his new neighbor and it suddenly hit him just how attractive she was. And he wasn’t talking about her legs this time. He was talking about that blunt-featured face. She wasn’t exactly pretty, but she was very, very attractive.
He just snapped his head up to look at the ceiling and didn’t respond to her statement.
“I like this one, I think,” she muttered, shifting a bit on the mattress and letting her eyes fall closed.
Seth cleared his throat. “It’s no good.”
“Why?”
“Watch.” He shifted his weight on the mattress and it made Sarah bounce a little bit. She raised a skeptical eyebrow. He shifted more, moving from his back to his side to his stomach and the movement made Sarah involuntarily roll toward the dip. They found themselves in a bit of a pile on the mattress, their shoulders pressed together and one of her knees digging into his thigh as she braced herself.
She sat up and so did he.
“Your point being?”
“My point is that if somebody else moves on the mattress, you’re gonna wake up. It’s no good.”
She raised her second eyebrow to match the first. “And who would that somebody be?”
Seth felt himself blush and wracked his brain for an answer. He was pretty sure she was telling him that she didn’t have a person in her life. And maybe she was also telling him that she didn’t do a lot of random hooking up?
He wasn’t exactly sure what she was telling him. But he knew for sure that this was tender ground to be treading on.
He cleared his throat. “Um… dealer’s choice?”
She stared at him for one tense second before she burst out laughing. “Good answer.”
Relieved, Seth slid off the bed, but he kept his eyes on her face. Her face changed shape when she laughed like that. Her cheeks rounding and her eyes getting smaller, her mouth stretching and showing a set of very nice, white teeth. Again, it wasn’t that she was incredibly pretty, she just had an attractive way about her.
The next mattress was a winner and Seth flagged down the salesman, choosing a bed frame on sight as well.
They moved on to couches and Seth made that as painless as possible, bouncing on a few of them and then choosing one that he already knew was going to complement the color he’d chosen to paint her living room. He arranged to have everything delivered next week, after he’d finished painting.
Sarah was waiting in the car when he exited the store, her head resting against the glass and her eyes half-open in a stupor. “Food,” she demanded as soon as he got into the truck. “Burrito. Now.”
Seth laughed and pulled out of the parking lot. He called in their orders and picked up the food and the beer on the way home. Sarah wanted to eat her burrito in the truck, but he was a man with principles and made her wait until they got home.
She practically ran through her house, burritos in hand, and collapsed into a chair on the back deck. He cracked two beers, handed one to her and fished his burrito out of the bag. By the time he’d unwrapped his food, she’d already inhaled a quarter of hers.
She stopped to guzzle down some beer and take some deep breaths before she fell on her food like a carnivorous dinosaur.
Seth had never really paid attention to the way a woman ate her food before, but this right here, was a downright spectacle. He set down his burrito, picked up his beer and just watched her for a minute.
Sarah glanced up, realized he was watching her, and did a double take. “Eyes to yourself, neighbor. You’re being pervy.”
Seth felt himself blush again. “I’m not being pervy! I’ve just never… seen an Olympian eat before.”
He knew it was the wrong thing to say the second he said it. She froze in her tracks. He’d acknowledged earlier that he knew who she was, but he didn’t know her well enough to know whether or not she’d want to talk about her time as an Olympian. The frozen, panicked look in her eyes indicated to him that she would not want to talk about it for a single second.
But then, she unfroze, crossing her eyes at him and taking an even bigger bite than the last. “Most people would pay good money to see this,” she said to him through a humongous bite of food.
He tipped his head back and laughe
d, relieved that the tension was gone from the moment, and dug into his own dinner.
CHAPTER THREE
While one of her sons ate a burrito with a new and interesting woman, Elizabeth was enjoying the echoing silence of her home.
For as long as she could remember, she’d always wanted to be a mother. Raising her three sons was the most fulfilling and most rewarding thing she’d done to date. But that didn’t mean she didn’t truly savor the time she spent alone in the deafening quiet. The noise of three boys was something she’d never quite gotten used to.
Her back porch, screened in by Jackson and Raphael and lovingly furnished by Seth, was her favorite place on earth on an early fall evening. The air was dry and scented, the sky was that deep, glowing blue of twilight. Dinner was still warming in the oven because when she was on her own, she preferred to eat late. She warmed her fingers on a cup of tea and propped her Chuck Taylors up on the railing of the porch. She tipped her head back to close her eyes for a moment and some of her hair fell into her face. She’d been growing her salt and pepper hair out for a while now and she was tempted to go inside and hack it all off again.
She pushed at it impatiently, pulling it up into a bun at the top of her head. It was a style she hadn’t worn in years, and wouldn’t in public. It was too girlish. And at age fifty-five, she was anything but girlish these days.
She’d been only twenty when she got custody of Jackson. He was her best friend’s child. And at two years old, he’d been suddenly and completely orphaned. The only thing that had gotten Elizabeth through the pain of losing Diana was the fact that Jackson had needed her. She figured that if Diana could figure out how to be a mom at age eighteen, Elizabeth could figure it out at twenty.
And she had figured it out. Elizabeth knew she was a great mother. But sometimes she wondered if it had been at the expense of other things. Like dating and dancing and flirting. Because of who her sons were, because of their… special needs, Elizabeth had held the entire world at arm’s length for the last thirty-five years.
Now, with her black and silver bun high on her head and her shoes dancing on the porch railing, she indulged herself in the briefest fantasy that she was young again. That she had somewhere to be on this Saturday night. That she had a man waiting somewhere for her. Ordering a drink for her. Waiting to hold her tight on a dance floor.
Elizabeth sighed. Nat and Kaya had been trying to convince her for years that she didn’t have to forfeit those things any longer. But Elizabeth wasn’t all too sure of that. It wasn’t that she thought of fifty-five as too old. It was just that the romantic part of her brain and heart had been dormant for so long, she wasn’t sure it could be woken up.
Nat had even downloaded some horrible dating app to Elizabeth’s phone and implored her to create a profile.
Elizabeth hadn’t even opened it. But she knew that when she created the profile, she’d be required to upload a photo of some kind.
She picked up her phone and, refusing to do what kids did, she ignored the front facing camera and snapped a picture of her with her phone facing away. She turned the screen back so she could see the picture and laughed at how blurry it was, only her forehead visible.
She tried again. And this time she was actually pleased with the photo. Her hair actually looked kind of nice, sweepy and artsy, like a distinguished author or something. There were shadows on her face, lines that showed her age, but who was she trying to fool? She was fifty-five and looked fifty-five. Actually, she thought she looked rather pretty. But then she imagined posting this image on an app and her stomach iced over.
Yeah. She was not ready for all that.
Elizabeth was just slipping her phone back in her pocket when she heard a stick crack outside her porch. She froze and she was certain that whatever had made the sound froze as well.
Slowly, she reached out to the lamp beside her and clicked it off, letting her eyes get used to the vacuous dark. There were still a few lights on in the house behind her, but for the most part, she could see clearly out into her backyard.
There weren’t more noises as much as there were small, perceptible movements of whatever it was in her backyard. She reached slowly to her side, arming herself with the pellet gun she’d been using to scare the squirrels off of her sunflowers earlier that evening.
Though she’d been raised on the east coast, Elizabeth had been living in Boulder for almost 34 years now. She was extremely familiar with the flora and fauna of the Rocky Mountains. She’d seen bears on her property before, a coyote or two. She’d even come across a mountain lion on a hike many years ago. And whatever was rustling five feet from her porch wasn’t human. And it was big.
She caught a flash of movement, something light in color and quick on its feet. She realized, with a catch in her throat, that the screen door was propped open. A broken hinge often kept the door eight to twelve inches ajar.
She slowly sat up in her chair, the butt of the pellet gun firmly on her shoulder. Her plan was to inch back inside her house and throw the locks, but if the animal charged, she wanted to have the gun at the ready.
The door creaked and Elizabeth was certain that there was something pushing it open. The animal was below the bottom half of the door, which obscured her vision with a wooden panel. She was almost all the way to the door of her house, one foot inside the threshold, when she saw it.
Gray, raised fur, as tall as the bottom half of the door, came into her vision. And then the tops of two pointed ears.
She froze, halfway back into her house, toward safety, when the animal pushed the rest of the way onto her porch.
Elizabeth found herself six feet away from a wiry gray coyote. The coyote found itself on the business end of what appeared to be a cocked and loaded shotgun.
The coyote sat back on its haunches and flattened its ears against its head for a moment.
The painfully familiar scent of animal hide drifted to Elizabeth’s nostrils as her heart jackhammered in her chest.
“It can’t be,” she whispered, staring down at the unfamiliar coyote. “The full moon… it just can’t be.”
But then, even as she watched, even as she pointed the rifle straight at its heart, the coyote bent down, lowering its amber eyes. The coyote touched its muzzle to its front paws. Unmistakably bowing to Elizabeth.
***
The next morning a sleepy-eyed and surly Sarah flung her door open, yawning and scratching at the messy pile of hair on her head. “What in God’s name are you doing ringing my doorbell at the ass crack of dawn?”
She scowled at Seth, glanced over at Raphael, then shook her head, rubbing the heels of her hands into her eyes for a second.
“You’re not seeing double, darling,” Raphael assured her with his trademark grin on his face. “We’re identical.”
“Wow.” Sarah looked back and forth between them, studying the two men in front of her. “Well, not completely identical. He’s built. You’re scrawny.” She pointed to Raphael first and then to Seth. Both brothers burst out laughing.
“I like you,” Raphael said, holding out a hand. “Raphael Durant. At your service. Apparently. Or so says my brother when he kicked me out of his guest room half an hour ago.”
“If you’re gonna crash at my place in the middle of the night, the least you can do is help me with a project.”
“Sarah Moyer.” Sarah shook hands with Raphael and continued to study the brothers. Seth was in casual clothing, for him at least, with blue jogging sweatpants and a crisp white T. Raphael wore torn basketball shorts and old tennis shoes that had probably, at one point, been white. His top half was covered in a John Mayer concert T that had the sleeves ripped off.
“Big John Mayer fan?” Sarah asked wryly, yawning again and using the doorjamb for support.
Raphael looked down at himself, shrugging. “Nah. Just something to talk to girls about. So, I guess the real answer is that I’m not, unless you are.”
Sarah laughed and shook her head at him. She usu
ally steered well clear of sleazeballs, but there was something about Raphael that put her at ease. He was a sloppier version of his brother, but whatever it was that relaxed her around Seth, Raphael had that in spades as well.
“What the hell are you guys doing on my front porch at sunrise?”
“Good lord, you two,” Seth said, shaking his head. “8 am is not sunrise. And we’re here to get started on painting. We have to get cracking if we’re gonna finish before they deliver the furniture this week.”
Sarah gaped at him. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Seth, I don’t expect you to paint my house. I can hire someone to—”
“Waste of money,” Raphael said, cutting her off and surprising her in equal measure. “We’re here. Nothing better to do on a Sunday anyways. All the good girls are in church.” He grinned at her. “Just feed us and we’ll call it even.”
Sarah really was surprised. Even as she stood there, she felt her understanding of Seth reorder itself. He was a neat freak, overly friendly neighbor who had an obsession with home decoration, who was also incredibly generous with his time and labor? She needled her bottom lip while she tried to figure out what exactly it was that he was trying to cash in on.
Her father’s voice played in her head like it was on a recording. He wants something from you, Sarah. Just because you haven’t figured it out yet doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Nobody is that nice.
For a moment, she almost refused the help from the brothers. Her father’s voice rang in her ears, and a lifetime of listening to him was a hard habit to break. But then, in the end, she forced herself to do the exact opposite of what her father would have advised.
Instead of viewing these two people as men who wanted to take something from her, she viewed them as two people who wanted to give something to her.
She stepped back and let them come inside. “My cooking skills extend to protein shakes and hard-boiled eggs. Oh, and I can make a killer sandwich. But beyond that, I’m pretty much a boss at ordering in.”
