by Zoe Lee
“I’m Munn,” he told her.
She held out her hand even though his were covered in traces of paint and probably turpentine. With a somewhat bemused expression, he clasped her hand briefly. “It's nice to meet you, Mr. Munn. I’m Chase. Have a good night if I don't see you later.”
“Thank you,” he said.
She smiled and gathered up her things before following his directions towards her room. She was halfway up the first flight when she heard Munn call, “Chase!” She twisted to look down at him as if she had all the time in the world. “The dining room fills up real quick on a Friday. You ought to come down sooner rather than later,” he suggested.
With another thank-you, she skipped up the stairs.
A PREVIEW OF FIFTEEN NIGHTS
OCTOBER
Leda
“The book about the feisty lady treasure hunter who finds some giant ass diamonds is on my desk in the den upstairs,” Moira told me as I shouldered out of my shitbox hatchback.
“Got it. After all the pre-Halloween bullshit at work and the Oktoberfest at Archer Farms, I really need to spend a night reading in peace,” I complained. “Why do so many women think I give a shit what costume they’re going to put on to try to seduce that guy who never looked twice at them the rest of the year?” I went on cynically as I headed up her driveway.
Moira snickered. “Have you ever worn a mask? You’ll never feel more powerful,” she said so smugly that I groaned, trying not to imagine why she knew that. The background noise on her end got loud, so she must have walked into her pub, The Three Brothers, the most popular restaurant in our adorable tourist-centric county in western Virginia.
“Is your garage code still 3690?” I asked as I reached the keypad.
“Why do you know that?”
“Everyone in Maybelle County knows your garage code,” I told her, putting in the code and ducking under the garage door as it lurched upwards painfully slowly. “Thanks for telling me about the book. It was the only good thing about the Tourist Board meeting this morning.”
Moira chastised, “It’s Halloween tomorrow, so don’t be bitchy. You know everyone was too distracted by that to make any decisions about when to put up the Thanksgiving seasonal decorations.”
“Yeah, okay. Bye, M.”
I ended the call and jogged up the steep stairs towards her den.
But then I stopped sharply on the top step when I noticed a curl of steam making its way through the gap beneath the bathroom door opposite the den.
There were a lot of people who could be in her shower other than serial killers, like any number of her relatives in for the holiday. But I tiptoed right back downstairs as fast as I could, not taking any damn chances, while I called Moira again.
Luckily she picked up on the second ring. “It’s the one with diamonds on the cover—”
“Is there a chance,” I hissed violently, my back against the kitchen sink so that I faced the stairs, “that someone’s maybe taking a shower in your upstairs bathroom?”
She burst out laughing.
“Moira! Is it a criminal, or is it your dumbass brother-in-law?”
She finally caught her breath and said, hardly sounding apologetic at all, “No, the dumbass is out of town. Let me think… Do you see a blue suitcase with an orange bow?”
My eyes darted around until I saw it, sagging in relief. “Yeah,” I said tightly, “I see it.”
“It’s not a criminal,” Moira told me. “That’s Jamie’s suitcase.”
My lips trembled before my mouth fell open. “Jamie’s?” I repeated. It was supposed to sound like an incredulous, annoyed bark, but it splintered just a little on the mie.
Jamie Houston, one of Moira’s brothers. He was two years older than me, the same age as my brother Aden. Now he lived in Lynchburg, which was just under three hours’ drive east, but he came in about once a month to spend the weekend with his three-year-old son Hunter.
“He never stays with us, so I have no clue why he’s in my shower,” Moira blathered on.
In Moira’s shower. Twenty feet diagonally up from me.
“He scared the shit out of me,” I managed to snap out after a slightly-too-long delay.
“You can get him back if you want,” Moira said. “It’s only fair. I would’ve probably run outside screaming and dialing 9-1-1 if I’d gotten home and heard someone in my house!”
“Okay, bye.”
I tapped the toe of one of my boots lightly on Moira’s linoleum floor.
Now that I knew it was Jamie, and not a serial killer with a weird thing about using his future victims’ shower, I was sweating with delayed nerves. Jamie deserved something for scaring the shit out of an unsuspecting, unprepared woman, being where he wasn’t supposed to be. Resolute, I crept up the stairs again and then flung open the door to the bathroom.
“Whoever you are, I’ll flush the toilet and burn your ass, dickwad!” I threatened.
“Please don’t, Leda,” Jamie’s deep voice replied calmly after a long second.
My fingers spasmed around the flusher at hearing him say my name aloud for the first time in almost two years. Hurriedly, I snatched my fingers back. Yeah, I was a bitch, but it would be a fucking crime to burn a single one of Jamie Houston’s skin cells.
“How come I didn’t scare you?” I demanded.
It was all bluster.
Because my eyes had fixated on the big clothes heaped on the tile floor, dark jeans and a hunter green waffle thermal and a fold of the black elastic band of boxer briefs. My ears practically echoed and rang with the sound of water hitting the porcelain tub unevenly as it bounced and sluiced off his giant body. My lungs started to clang against my ribs as I tried not to think about how jarring it was to be near him again, so unexpectedly. I refocused on the garment bag hanging off the closet door, partially unzipped to reveal gray slacks.
“You clomped up here—the first time—like an elephant,” he said, and I couldn’t help but snort at his bluntness. “But I didn’t know you were you until you said hello so memorably.”
I lied to myself, pretending that I was trying really hard not to think about how he could say hello memorably back to me just by pulling the shower curtain aside.
As if I’d accidentally said that out loud, the water shut off.
One of his oversized hands and thick, veiny forearms slid out of the thin gap between the wall and the curtain. “Hand me a towel, will you, please?” he asked.
“Get your own fucking towel!” I practically howled in outrage, then scrambled out of the bathroom, slamming the door shut behind me, and ran across the hall into the den. I frantically rooted around Moira’s messy desk for the book, trying not to think about Jamie across the hall.
Because sometimes when Jamie Houston was in Maybelle, we fell into these long, rambling conversations. I mean the kind that only happened in movies, when people jabbered all night at diners or while they were walking around Paris. It was one thing for that to happen on someone’s balcony at a house party or after trivia night at the pool hall, when there were tons of other people around and it was easy to remember that he had a girlfriend. But I absolutely could not handle one of those profound conversations while we were alone in this house and he was naked. Or in only a towel. Or naked but running the towel over that scorching hot body—
“Oh hey, Leda, it’s possible my brother Jamie is in my shower, ” I imitated Moira sarcastically, “so just ignore almost six and half feet of muscle, somehow, and grab the book.”
A low laugh drifted across the den and buffeted against the shells of my ears.
I finally found the book and clawed it up against my chest, like some bimbo who was about to faint. Forcing my claws to relax even as I gritted my teeth, I closed my eyes and prayed he’d gone bald or fat or shrunk since the last time I’d seen him, and spun to face him.
“Ohmygod,” my lips shaped, though no sound came out.
He was incredibly tall; I had forgotten quite how tall because
I was five-eleven myself. Nothing had changed though. He was as hot and earthy as ever, even dressed for a nice family dinner in gray slacks and a soft cashmere sweater. My retinas were permanently burned with the knowledge of how very… chiseled he was. I glared to cover up the way I was devouring his perfectly muscled body and his perfectly fitted clothes and his perfectly tousled, perfectly wet cherry red curls while my nipples popped against the solid armor of my push-up tee-shirt bra.
There was a cut under a curl on his forehead, and my hand lifted up towards it while I said in surprise, as if I saw him every day, “You’re hurt.”
My hand froze, not because of the unplanned intimacy or because I was closer to him than I’d ever been, but because my gesture was some purely female reflex. My palm twitched, as if snapping out of a doze, and I yanked my hand away, tucking it away in the pocket of my jacket.
“Rugby game last weekend,” he returned, his brows furrowing. He studied me, his silver-green eyes shifting like sunlight sliding over a fish’s scales, way more focused and piercing even than his usual direct, intent manner. The first time he had studied me like this, I had been sixteen and he’d graduated high school the week before, and we had been in his car. Over just a few hours, he’d confirmed all of my secret, girlish fantasies that boys could be hot, listen to me, and not expect that being a Riveau meant that I was an easy, sluttish hellcat.
That memory was eleven years and three hundred miles in the past, and after that drive, I hadn’t seen him for five years. But my nerves didn’t give a shit about the distance; the air got heavy with the speed and force of the chemistry bounding and rebounding between us.
“Of course you play rugby,” I all but groaned. He was nearly six and a half feet tall, his frame big and broad; his muscles were strong, thick and padded with enough fat that he wouldn’t feel like stone to the touch. Back in the day, he’d looked good because he played football, with my older brother and his best friend Dunk. Now he had to get that physique from somewhere else, since he obviously wasn’t playing high school football at almost thirty.
A sort of purring chuckle shook his deep chest, his face lit up with humor just like his dad Emmett’s and his grown nephew Tristan’s did. But Tristan is my friend, I thought as my belly clenched, and he never gets into staring contests with me that go on and on.
The comparison, and the mutual attraction it revealed, rattled me. The intensity was making my breathing shallow and fast.
Before I had any defenses in place against it, my body unlocked with a pop I swore was audible. It was an odd way to think of it, but I felt sweat spring up between my breasts and my uterus convulsed. Everything leading to it pulsed and opened. It was awkward just thinking about it, though I couldn’t deny that it also felt amazing, unlike anything I could remember with my only notable ex, Karl, even at the beginning of our relationship.
Even the offhanded appearance of Karl in my thoughts snapped me back to reality.
“Where’s Gwen?” I asked abruptly. “Shouldn’t she be handing you towels and shit?”
His mouth twisted in a parody of the great big grin I remembered from high school, making me wistful. He’d never been the most social or outgoing kid, but he’d always grinned at a good joke whenever he was around for it. “She broke up with me a couple months ago,” he said, sliding his hands into his pockets, his shoulders, arms and pecs flexing lazily.
“That’s a shame,” I said, trying to sound sorry about it. “Too soon to bring the new girlfriend home to meet the family tonight, huh?” I commented with every ounce of casualness I could scrape together.
His arms crossed and he replied, “There’s no new girlfriend yet.”
My mind helpfully blared, He’s single, you’re single, that hasn’t happened since you were sixteen and you were in his car and he told you his secrets. You’ve been on the hook. Now he can be on your hook.
“What are you doing here, by the way?” he got around to asking. “Is Moira on her way?”
“I’m borrowing this book,” I told him, hefting the book like it was a trophy.
Scintillating, I thought scathingly. But my brain was fully occupied by trying to memorize each and every one of his muscles and calculate how to get the hell out of there. Because the last conversation I’d had with him was a philosophical debate about how happy people were supposed to be before thirty. I couldn’t exactly go from that straight to, Do you want to get out of here and roll around in my sheets before you go to dinner at your parents’?
I refused to flounder, so I went for the simplest excuse. “I need to get on over to Wild Harts. The accountant’s coming next week to do quarterly taxes, and everything’s a mess now.”
It wasn’t any more scintillating than the book line, but it was what I had.
I shouldered around him and some manly essential oil smell clogged up my airways.
I could feel him behind me, pacing me down to the front door, and I wondered if he could feel the heat streaking off of me back towards him as we moved in tandem.
“Anyway,” I said, and it was directed mainly at my hormonal thoughts, “you know it was dumb to come use Moira’s shower when you’re staying at Tristan’s and he has a great shower?”
There was some pause where I could practically hear him thinking about something or other, and I couldn’t help but pivot, shoulder brushing the door, to face him again.
“Probably,” he said with an easy shrug like he didn’t notice or didn’t care that it was a concession. “But Tristan’s at the grocery store with my mom and he actually locks up his house while he’s gone. Besides, to be honest, in the winter I like Moira’s house better. I was going to read under one of the soft knitted blankets she’s got on the couch. Tristan keeps his place cold.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at the idea of a man like him being bothered by a lower thermostat in the mild western Virginian winter. “His house might be locked up, but his thermostat isn’t,” I pointed out, rolling my eyes. “I bet Moira has a key to his place here.”
“You want to open up that book and read with me, share one of those knitted blankets?” he invited, his amused expression darkening. He didn’t bother to ask if I was single first; everyone knew I never had a boyfriend, not since high school had ended almost a decade ago, and not in the three years since I’d moved back to Maybelle County from Nashville.
I shivered minutely at the idea of being under that blanket with him, preferably naked and sweaty. No. My hand shot up, palm towards him like I was about to do some tai chi strike, and I said adamantly, “I have to go into work.” Just because he was single this second—and it would only be a second, because Jamie Houston always had a steady girlfriend—didn’t mean he got to be the star in my fantasies. “ And I have shit to get done before Halloween tomorrow.”
He leaned back against the side of the freezer, possibly the only space in the entire kitchen not covered in Moira’s daughter’s art, and crossed those tree trunk arms loosely. “It’s barely four and you said the tax thing isn’t until next week,” he pointed out and raised one eyebrow. “If you stay, you can keep me from freezing to death.”
“That’s not how I like to read,” I said cockily, not even sure if it was supposed to be innuendo or not by that point, saluting him with the book I was still holding. I opened the door and remembered to call back, “Happy Halloween. I’ll see you around.”
“Bye, Leda Riveau,” his voice rolled laconically after me.
I shot up a hand and cut a jagged zigzag through the air before I got into my hatchback.
As I backed onto the street with a rickety squeak of the axle, I blew out a big breath and barked out a laugh. “Jamie fucking Houston… Forget going to work after all of that.” With a glance at the clock on my dashboard, I proclaimed, “It’s time for some fucking yoga.”
I went over to the Rec Center, one of only two places that offered yoga in Maybelle. The Rec was also the only ugly public building in the county, a squat box whose saving grace was the gla
ss wall that overlooked the back nine of the resort’s golf course. It wasn’t very popular, so I didn’t have to hunt for a locker before I changed into leggings and a racerback tank top.
When I headed into studio four, there were only six women plus the instructor.
Thank God.
I set up near the water fountain, unrolled my mat and redid my ponytail.
My breath was coming in panicky puffs by then. My body was still full to bursting with wanting Jamie, but I needed some fucking yoga to set my mind as right as it ever got.
Given my personality—impatient, not really spiritual or religious, and much more negative than positive—yoga seemed like the last thing I’d enjoy, but I loved it.
Sometimes I needed it, too, and after seeing Jamie Houston and finding out that he was single this hot second…
“Good afternoon,” the instructor said, her voice upbeat but soothing. “I want us to start by sitting on our mats, our hands palms-up on our thighs, relaxed. Focus on your breathing, inhaling in through your nose for three, then exhaling out your mouth for three. Remember to fill your lungs up all the way, open those ribs as far as they go, expand your diaphragm. While you’re centering yourself, think about how cooperative your body is, and how it’s connected to your world—inner and outer—and everyone else’s.”
Anywhere else, under any other circumstances, this kind of talk would make me roll my eyes and mutter, What bullshit. But yoga was an exception, and it worked for me.
Every time I inhaled, I gathered up some of my darker feelings of failure, pieces of the memories driving the feeling, some of my shame and disappointment in myself, my anger and creeping bitterness. With every exhale, I tried to let it go, the way I was supposed to.
“Wonderful. Let your body heat up from your concentrated breathing. We’ll do this six more times, then we’re going to move with our breaths.”
After the six cycles, we stood up slowly and planted our feet with careful deliberation, and I spread my fingers wide until they hyperextended, then let them all go limp.