by Zoe Chant
"I'm Verity Breslin," she said. "What's your name?"
"Maddox." It came out on a grunt of pain.
"Is that first or last?"
"Murphy. Maddox Murphy." He'd simply gone by Maddox for so long that it sounded strange to hear his full name spoken aloud.
"Irish, is it?"
"Irish and Welsh. My family, not me."
"And what are you doing in our town, Maddox? I don't think you're from around here."
"No, ma'am," he said. The conversation gave him something to focus on other than his pain, which he thought was probably her intent. "I travel around. I'm just hitchhiking through. I stopped and ..."
He paused because he wasn't sure how much he should tell her of what had happened with the kids.
"You got in some kind of trouble," Verity said. "I figured out that much."
"It wasn't his fault," Bailey called out as she clattered down the stairs with a bowl of water; it was an external flight of stairs with a white-painted wooden railing leading up to the second floor. "He saved me and Luke from Sheriff Hawkins and Mr. Ducker's guys."
"And why did you need saving, exactly?" Verity's voice turned tart again. "When I told you that you could have the afternoon to spend with Luke, getting in trouble with the law wasn't what I meant. Did he try to arrest you?"
"He did more than that," Maddox said, grimacing as he made his way carefully onto the back patio. The back door stood open, with the boy, Luke, nervously hovering within. "When I found them, the sheriff and some of his men were beating up Luke here."
"What?" Verity said. "Don't tell me you need a hospital too!"
"They only hit me a couple of times," Luke mumbled. "Mr., uh, Maddox here stopped them."
"I will definitely need to hear this story," Verity said, "but first I need a full accounting of everyone's injuries, if people would be so kind as to tell me the truth this time. Bailey, take the cushions off the couch and spread the blanket over them, please."
A wave of nose-tingling smells hit Maddox with almost physical force as Verity helped him through the back door. Immediately he stumbled into a rack of jars, reeled away from that as Verity tried to steady him, and knocked his elbow into something that clinked and slid off its shelf. Maddox dropped his cane to grab a teapot shaped like an elephant and hastily put it back on its shelf. The cane teetered and started to fall into a brass tree holding a bunch of teacups. Bailey lunged forward and caught it, and for a minute everyone just stood there, afraid to move.
Then Verity said calmly, "Let's take this one step at a time, shall we? Bailey, do you have a place ready for me to put him?"
"Working on it, Aunt Verity." Bailey's voice was meek. She slid the head of the cane underneath Maddox's dangling hand and darted off.
Verity carefully maneuvered him through crowded shelves of jars and packets and bins, to a little coffee-shop corner area with padded furniture and colorful Southwest prints on the wall. As instructed, Bailey had laid out the couch cushions and draped a brightly patterned blanket over them. Verity found it with her foot and helped Maddox sit down on it.
"I'll need water, please," she said.
"Here, Aunt Ver." Bailey placed a damp cloth in her aunt's hand.
"Luke, could you go make sure the front door of the shop is locked and the closed sign is out? Now," Verity said, smiling, "I might need a little guidance here."
"Okay," Maddox managed faintly.
In the better light, he could finally get a good look at her. Her face was gorgeously unique, with a strong jaw and a nose with a bump in the middle, freckles heavily dusting both cheeks, a wide expressive mouth and equally expressive, heavy brows. Gray threaded through her thick brown braids, and her eyes were a clear darker gray that never quite locked gazes with his own.
Bailey hovered, passed items to her aunt, and quietly gave directions ("A little to the left; no, there's some dirt embedded there, you need to get it cleaner") as Verity cleaned up his cuts and scrapes with the wet cloth and iodine. This was clearly something they'd done before, because they were perfectly in sync, with Bailey anticipating Verity's need for clean gauze and fresh water, and Verity needing only slight verbal nudges to know exactly what her niece meant. Maddox wondered if perhaps the usual patient was Bailey herself, providing sighted assistance as her aunt doctored her own childhood injuries.
But mostly he was enthralled by Verity herself, the soft curve of her cheek and downward cast of her dark lashes as she worked on his injuries. She didn't look like any TV blind person he'd ever seen. He had never known anyone in real life who was blind, and the way Verity looked at things, and especially at people, was nothing at all like the vacant, unfocused gaze of blind people on TV. It must just be a way of making seeing actors look blind for the TV audience, Maddox thought, because there was nothing at all vacant about Verity's sharp gray gaze. Her eyes weren't unfocused, but instead seemed to be looking with direction and intent toward something only she could see. When she spoke to someone, she turned and looked toward their face, so that Maddox had to keep reminding himself that she couldn't actually see anyone.
It felt a little weird watching her when she couldn't see him, but he couldn't seem to take his eyes off her. He'd never been this enraptured by anyone before. Even her tiniest movement captivated him, the way she pursed her lips as she focused on taping down a gauze bandage, the flutter of her lashes when she blinked—
"Sorry?" he said, realizing she'd said something to him this time and not to Bailey.
"I'm going to need you to take your shirt off."
"Oh." He wasn't normally shy about his body; shifters typically weren't. But he could feel his cheeks heating at the thought of—
... of what, though? She couldn't see him.
And yet he was oddly disappointed at that.
What's wrong with us? he queried his bull. Is she our mate? He'd always thought you'd just know. Everyone said it was supposed to be that way, that you'd look into another person's eyes and something would happen and you'd know you were meant to be with them forever. He hadn't felt anything like that, and yet right now he felt as if he could happily spend all of eternity just tracing Verity's freckles with his eyes.
I don't know, his bull replied unhelpfully.
Maybe the blow to the head had knocked him silly.
He struggled with his shirt, and in the end, Verity had to help him get it and then his ragged T-shirt off. Bailey turned very pink and averted her eyes as she went to get a clean bowl of water. When she came back, her teenage embarrassment turned to shock. "Crap, mister," she said, and then covered her mouth with her hand.
Maddox looked down at himself. The bruising covered half his side, with a swath of road rash across his stomach. "It's not as bad as it looks," he said, wishing (now that it was too late) that he'd managed to do a better job of hiding the extent of his injuries from the humans. As a shifter, he'd heal faster than they would believe.
"It looks awful," Bailey said. "Does that hurt much?"
"Not much," Maddox lied, trying not to breathe deeply. Then Verity dabbed at the road rash with iodine and he had to clench his teeth on a gasp.
"Mm-hm," Verity hummed noncommittally.
Maddox lowered his arm to try to keep what he was increasingly sure was a sprained wrist out of her sight, before remembering she couldn't see it. Bailey could, but she was too busy boggling at his bruised torso.
And not just at the bruises. She was also staring openly at his tattoos. Maddox had been getting ink for almost twenty years, and he had tattoos all over his torso, upper arms, and neck. An enormous dragon curled over his shoulder with its claws reaching across his chest, nearly meeting the horns of a powerfully muscled bull coming up from his ribs and lower-back area. A small-town girl like Bailey, in spite of her punk hair and attitude, had probably never seen tats like that.
Bailey noticed that he'd noticed her staring. She blushed sunrise-bright and looked away.
"I realize a half-naked man is an unusual sight arou
nd here, but I'd appreciate it if you'd hand me the pot of ginseng salve," Verity said.
"I wasn't looking," Bailey said quickly, taking two tries to pick up the jar by her knee. She darted a quick, anxious glance at her boyfriend. Maddox glanced at Luke, too; he didn't need a jealous teenage boy on top of everything else. But Luke was too busy boggling at the tattoos himself to notice.
Small-town kids, Maddox thought. He suddenly felt a hundred years old.
And he was intensely, vividly aware of Verity's hands on his torso. Her touch was firm but gentle, cleaning his wounds and spreading healing in their wake. The goo she rubbed on his road rash smelled sharp and spicy, tingling and then soothing.
He was also very, very aware that the more she touched him, the more he ... well ... the more glad he was that she couldn't see the effect she was having on him. The teens would have been able to, but they were both too busy trying to pretend they weren't looking at his tattoos to notice anything farther south.
"How's the rest of you?" Verity asked, and his blush flamed so fiercely that he could feel it all the way out to the tips of his ears.
"Fine," he managed.
"I trust that you're telling enough of the truth that you're not going to die in the night from a ruptured spleen."
"Nah," he said, getting a little of his breath back. "I just need to rest." Trying to be subtle about it, he reached for the edge of the blanket with his good hand and pulled it into his lap.
"Speaking of the truth, is anyone going to tell me what happened out there?" Verity asked. She was picking gravel out of his road rash now, which was painful enough to keep him from being too distracted by the way she bit her lip in concentration as she worked. Mostly.
"You're not going to like it," Bailey began hesitantly.
"Oh, trust me, I'm going to like not hearing about it a lot less."
The teenager puffed out her cheeks with a sigh and darted a glance at her boyfriend. "We were trying to help."
"Help whom?" Verity inquired. She reached for a pad of gauze and pressed it to Maddox's abdomen.
"You," Bailey burst out. "It's not fair what they're doing to you, Aunt Ver. What they're doing to this whole town. Luke and I just wanted to let people know what was going on."
Verity let out a long sigh that seemed to come from the bottoms of her feet. "And what exactly was this act of civil disobedience and family loyalty?"
"... Umm." Bailey looked at her boyfriend, but no help was coming from that direction. "We were adding a, um, a message to Sheriff Hawkins's reelection billboards."
"And by adding you mean—"
"Spray-painting," Bailey said in a tiny voice.
"And this message was?"
Bailey's nerve failed her and she looked at her boyfriend.
"One of you had better tell me."
Luke looked like he'd rather face the sheriff at this moment. "We painted, uh, 'The sheriff is a sellout.'"
"Luke misspelled Sheriff," Bailey said.
"Oh, c'mon! I put in the missing F after—"
"Was that all?" Verity interrupted, with an expression of long-suffering patience.
"We also painted 'Ducker plus Hawkins equals pay-offs'," Bailey said. "With, you know, the plus sign and all."
"And 'follow the money,'" Luke said. "Well, actually we used dollar signs because we were running out of billboard."
"And that's the point where we got caught," Bailey put in.
"Yes, of course you did. It's vandalism!"
"We just felt like the people needed to know!" Luke protested.
Maddox had never raised a teenager, but he'd been one, so he recognized Verity's "laugh or scream" expression. After she struggled to control her reaction for a moment, she said, "And that was when the sheriff and his men hit you, Luke?"
"Yes, ma'am," the boy said quietly. "They only hit me a couple of times. Mr. Maddox showed up then."
Both the kids were looking at Maddox with shining, worshipful eyes. He had to look away. If they only knew some of the things he'd done; he was no better than the sheriff's thugs. He wasn't anyone's hero.
"Ms. Breslin, please don't tell Grandma," Luke begged. "I told her I was going out to the lake with some friends. I'll be in so much trouble if she finds out."
"You're in trouble here too," Verity informed him with a sharp edge to her voice. "Bailey!"
"Yes, Aunt Verity?" came the meek response.
Verity plunged a hand into the deep pockets of the long, handmade-looking skirt she wore and came up with a couple of crumpled bills that she passed to her niece. "You two go down the street to the Whistlestop and pick up burgers for all of us. Straight there and back, understand? Do you want anything to drink, like a Coke or something?"
It took Maddox a moment to understand the last question was addressed to him. "No, thank you, ma'am. I could pay—"
"Don't," Verity said. "It's on us. It's the least I can do for you rescuing these two from their own stupidity. Bailey, get the double-decker bacon burger for him, will you? How do you like your burger?"
Bailey took their burger orders without complaint, and she and her boyfriend vanished out the back door. Verity began gathering up discarded gauze wrappings and other supplies, her hands moving swiftly to find them by touch. It was hard not to be distracted by the way she moved, that swift confidence that made him want to feel the assuredness of her hands on him again—
"How do you feel?" Verity asked him, jolting him out of thoughts that were rapidly sliding in a direction he'd hoped to stay away from.
"Better, ma'am. I appreciate you doing this for me."
Verity huffed. "You're the one who did me a favor, a huge one. Those idiot kids ... spray-painting graffiti on the sheriff's signs! What were they thinking?"
She got to her feet and lifted the pan of water. Maddox started to get up to help and sank back with a grunt of pain.
"Don't go anywhere," Verity said sharply. "I know you think I don't know how badly you're hurt. I just hope you're right that you'll be okay without a hospital."
"Just need some sleep to fix me up." With his shifter healing, it was more true than she knew. But he couldn't tell her that.
Instead he watched her move unerringly over to the sink against the wall, find the edge of it with her elbow, and pour out the water. Then she reached beside the sink, found an electric kettle by touch, and began to fill it.
"I expect you could use painkillers," she said. "I'll get you some aspirin when the kids get back with food—it's hell on your stomach otherwise—but in the meantime I'll make you some tea to help, one of my special blends for pain and fever."
Maddox wasn't really a tea drinker, but the lady had just patched up his wounds and was about to feed him; it wasn't like he was going to ask for coffee instead. Instead he said, "Thanks, ma'am," and watched, enraptured, her graceful movement from sink to counter, as she set the teakettle to heat and then turned and began running her fingertips across the jars.
"How can you tell what's in 'em?" Maddox asked.
"They're all labeled." She turned one of the jars toward him. It had a label stuck on the side, with lettering that he couldn't read from here, and fancy little bit of twine tied around the top with a slip of paper on it. "Bailey helps me with the labels for the customers, but this part also has it in Braille." She fingered the paper slip. "Of course, I can also tell by smell. I can recognize nearly ever kind of tea we carry by the way it smells."
Maddox looked around at all the racks of little jars. "Wow. There must be hundreds."
"More like thousands," Verity said absently, reading the labels with quick brushes of her fingertips. "Hmm, the willow blends should be on this shelf—oh, they're on the one under it. I need to talk to Bailey about moving things around." She unscrewed a jar lid, sniffed, nodded, and took it back to the sink.
"That's some nose you've got there," Maddox said, impressed.
"It's just specialized knowledge. Every trade has it. I'm sure there's something you know just as mu
ch about."
The comment was left dangling, inviting a reply, but there was nothing he could say to that. Nothing that wouldn't result in her kicking him out in the street. Yeah, I know everything there is to know about different kinds of guns and how many times you can hit a person before they start to talk.
Not the kind of influence she'd want around her niece.
Not the kind of influence who should be around her niece, for that matter. But he was hurt and he was tired and hungry and ... weak. He wanted to stay here in this cozy, nice-smelling tea shop for a little while longer.
"Is this your place?" he asked instead. "I mean, you run this place, right?"
"Lock, stock, barrel, and teaspoons," Verity said proudly, measuring tea into a small china teapot with flowers on it. "I own the building too. That's why Ducker—" She stopped. "But there's no reason to get into that."
"Who's Ducker?"
"William Ducker." She said it like a curse. "Silvermine's self-appointed land baron. He's buying up all the businesses along Main Street to turn this town into some kind of Ye Olde Weste tourist trap. Half the business owners in town have sold out to him already. If they won't sell ..." She shook her head and concentrated on pouring hot water into the pot. "The sheriff's in his pocket and so is most of the zoning board."
"I think I met him," Maddox said.
Verity, in the act of setting the electric teakettle back on the counter, turned toward him in astonishment. "What? When?"
"Earlier tonight. Older guy, silver hair, looks like he thinks he can snap his fingers and everyone around him is gonna hop to it?"
Verity leaned a hip against the counter and folded her arms. "I couldn't tell you about the silver hair," she said, and Maddox could have kicked himself; he'd forgotten that a visual description would mean nothing to her. "But that certainly sounds like him. Where did you see him?"
"He was there when the sheriff was beating the shi—uh—harassing the kids."
"That bastard," Verity snapped. "Pardon my language, but—oh. He likes to get Sheriff Hawkins to do his dirty work. I know the brick through my window was Hawkins, or one of his men, but threatening teenagers is going too far even for them."