by Zoe Chant
"Someone threw a brick through your window?" Maddox bristled as inside him, his bull snorted its rage.
"It's not your problem." Verity sniffed the steam coming off the teapot and reached for a cup.
We will trample anyone who dares hurt her! his bull huffed.
Maddox kept his voice level with an effort. "Excuse me, ma'am, but you helped me when you didn't have to. I'd like to repay it if I can. These people shouldn't be bothering you."
"I appreciate the thought, but I'm afraid there's nothing you can do." She bowed her head as she spoke, her braids falling down to frame the cup as she poured hot tea into it. "Ducker is determined to get this piece of land, and he's got the money and clout to make it happen, one way or another. Especially with the sheriff in his pocket. We were hoping at the last election that we could finally get rid of him, but with Ducker's help he couldn't lose. I'm sure it'll go the same way this year. The law's on my side, but ..."
She shrugged, and her hopelessness broke his heart, especially contrasted against her confidence earlier.
But maybe now you have somebody on your side who knows about doing things the not-so-legal way, he thought, but didn't say.
The thought occurred to him that his old boss, Darius, might be able to help her, but he didn't want to ask. Darius had his own life, with a mate and a baby on the way. Maddox couldn't drag him into someone else's problems, in someone else's town.
He was going to help her. He couldn't just walk away, not after she'd helped him. But he meant to do it his way.
"Anyway, listen to me going on and on." Verity forced a smile and turned toward him with the cup of tea. "Here—be careful taking it, it's hot. If you like this, there's more in the pot if you want it—"
As she spoke, she reached down for his shoulder to get his location so she could put the teacup in his hand. But when her warm fingers settled on his bare skin, she froze, and so did he, with one hand in the act of reaching for the teacup. It was like an electric charge tingled through him at the touch of her skin, and for a moment he thought she must have felt it too.
"Oh," she said. "Oh, I can't believe I—your shirt, of course, it must have been dirt and blood all over, and you've just been sitting here—" It was the first time he'd seen her flustered; her cheeks were turning pink.
"It's okay," Maddox said hastily, taking the teacup before she dropped it on him. That was it, she was embarrassed as a hostess, and now he felt bad for her. It wasn't like he was even much of a guest. "I'm not really cold."
"I—I'll find something for you to wear," she said, and retreated toward the back of the store so hastily that she bumped into one of the racks of little jars and had to catch it as it began to teeter.
Left alone, he sipped at the tea. It was flowery and herbal and not at all his kind of thing, but it made him think of her. When he inhaled the steam, it was like breathing in the faint floral scent of her hair.
Sure she's not our mate? he questioned his bull.
Not sure, the bull repeated.
Dumb ox. Never could get a useful answer out of him.
Chapter Four: Verity
What was she thinking? Verity scolded herself. Letting the man sit around catching his death, and she nearly let him sit there half-naked through dinner as well, with her teenage niece in the room. Heavens.
Just the brush of his bare shoulder had sent warm shivers through her. She could still feel the touch of his skin against her hand.
What's the matter with me? He's a guest ... a guest I'm doing a very poor job of hosting.
She started to head for the stairs, but realized there wouldn't be anything in the apartment that would even come close to fitting him, based on what she'd felt of the width of his shoulders and chest. All that was up there was her and Bailey's clothes. Even if Luke had left something at their place (And if he has, I'm having a word with his grandma, she thought grimly), she didn't think a man Maddox's size could wear anything belonging to a teenage boy.
Wait! She had an idea. Rather than going upstairs, she went into the storeroom instead.
The store didn't sell much tourist stuff, but they did have a few souvenirs, including some Silvermine and Arizona T-shirts. Verity brushed her fingers over the boxes, reading the labels. Most of these were labeled using a label maker with raised lettering, so both she and Bailey could read them. Unfortunately, Bailey had done the labeling and hadn't put on anything about what the shirts actually looked like. But they did have the sizes on them. She picked an XXL just to be on the safe side—probably too big, but with his scrapes and bruises, loose was better than tight. And ... there was a box of hoodie sweatshirts around here somewhere too, wasn't there? She found an XXL among those, and went back to the shop with it.
"I'm coming back," she called, just in case he was ... well ... doing whatever men did when left alone in a tea shop. It wasn't like she thought he was up to no good, but ... she had left him alone with all her merchandise, come to think of it, and with the till. Any of her more sensible neighbors would probably say she was being a fool. They'd say he was faking the extent of his injuries, getting her to let her guard down.
But she trusted him, on a level she couldn't even explain. He'd intervened to save two kids from a bully of a sheriff. A man who did that kind of thing wasn't the sort of person who was going to steal money from a blind woman's cash register.
"Hi," he said, from exactly the place she'd left him.
"I brought you something to wear." She deposited the clothes in his lap. "How do you like the tea?"
"It's nice," he said promptly, which probably meant he hated it.
"It's good for you. Drink it all."
"Yes, ma'am," came the meek response, along with little rustles as he got dressed, which she tried not to think too much about, and especially not to think about the slide of the T-shirt's soft folds over the hard planes of his chest and stomach that she'd felt earlier ...
Down, girl.
She was saved by the bell just then, or more accurately by the clatter of the returning teenagers, bringing with them the waft of warm, fragrant smells and a cheerful babble of conversation about the other teenagers they'd run into at the Whistlestop.
She and Bailey usually ate upstairs, in the small kitchen of their shared apartment, but Verity decided that the café corner of the tea shop where she kept the chairs and the couch would do just as well. It wasn't very big; she didn't serve food aside from a few packaged snacks, but she liked to have somewhere that customers could sit down, enjoy a cup of tea, and spend some quality time with a book or a laptop if they wanted to. Bailey had talked her into offering free wifi and helped her set it up.
With the cushions pulled down off the couch, they all sat on the floor and used the burger takeout boxes for plates. Verity put on some water to make more tea, and listened for the little rustles of their guest that let her know if he was calm, or fidgeting and nervous.
Sounded like mostly nervous. But he wolfed down the double-decker bacon burger and fries. Bailey had also brought back at least one chocolate milkshake (Verity could tell by the smell), and from the slurping of straws, it sounded like she'd brought one for Maddox as well.
In Bailey's eyes, it was clear, Maddox was the hero of the day.
And what do I think?
What she thought, or at least what some part of her thought, was that she wanted to get her hands all over that broad chest and lightly scruffy jaw, and find out just exactly how well-muscled and hairy the rest of him was. (Her imagination was happily providing answers to those questions.)
"What was that?" she asked, aware that Bailey had just asked a question.
"I said, Mr. Maddox can sleep in my room if he needs a place to stay."
"What? No!" Verity exclaimed, shocked.
"Not with me in it," Bailey said sulkily.
"You don't need to put me up, ma'am." The pitch of Maddox's quiet voice shifted as he turned toward Verity.
"Of course we will," she declared. "But not in
anyone's bedroom." This was at least partly in response to her own treacherous libido. There's plenty of room in my bed ... "Will sleeping on the couch down here be all right? I can bring down some blankets."
"It'd be wonderful, ma'am. Thank you."
"Enough with this 'ma'am' nonsense. I patched you up, so I think we're on a first-name basis now—if that's all right with you, Maddox."
"Yes, ma'a—" he began, and then she could hear the smile in his voice when he changed it to, "—Miss Verity."
Which made her feel like a schoolmarm in an old Western. She could hear quiet snorting as Bailey and Luke tried not to laugh. "That's enough out of you two. Luke, I think it's about time you should be getting along home. You two didn't run into any trouble on your walk over to the Whistlestop, did you?"
There was a silence just long enough that Verity knew Luke had just responded in some visual way—a headshake, probably—before Bailey said, "No, Aunt Ver. We didn't see the sheriff or a single deputy's car."
"I'll go home the long way by the creek, just in case," Luke said.
"Good. Be careful. Bailey, run upstairs and bring down some blankets and a pillow."
The kids scattered, and Maddox said softly, "I don't want to put you in danger because of me."
"Trust me, you haven't," Verity replied just as quietly. "I was in danger long before you came to town."
She could sense him bristling at this, and his voice was a low growl. "Nobody's gonna hurt you or your family as long as I'm here."
"That's kind of you," was all she could say, overwhelmed by an unexpected surge of emotion. She had been on her own for so long—all her life, really. Her parents had always thought that her sister, Bailey's mother, took care of her since she was the blind one, but it was really more of the other way around, and now the rest of her family was gone and it was just her and Bailey. It had been long, so very long, since she'd had anyone to lean on ...
And you can't get used to it now, she told herself severely, even as her traitorous hands wanted to reach out for him. He was going to move on, if not tomorrow then sometime soon. She didn't need to let herself get attached to someone who was clearly just passing through.
But he was the one who reached for her: a light brush of callused fingertips across the back of her hand. "I'm not just sayin' that. I'll make 'em leave you alone, Miss Verity."
"It's not your problem," Verity protested, struck by the conviction in his voice.
He really sounds like he means it. But he doesn't understand how things work here. What does he think he's going to do, fight the entire sheriff's department and the richest man in town?
"It's my problem now," he said.
His scent was intoxicating, a heady male musk, tinged with hints of dust and iodine. She wanted to lean into it, bury her face in his neck and drink deeply of his smell and the tantalizing warmth of his skin.
Instead she pulled back, freeing her hand from the light touch of his. "I'm going upstairs for the night. There's a small bathroom in the storeroom, just a toilet in a closet, but it'll do for you tonight. Thank you ... Mr. Murphy."
And with that, she fled before she could embarrass herself further.
Upstairs, she went through her nightly routine while waiting for Bailey to come back, aware the entire time of unaccustomed sounds from the floor below: the toilet flushing, water gurgling in the pipes, faint thumps and rustles as Maddox got settled for bed. She stood in her bedroom, unbraiding her hair and brushing it out into a heavy cascade over her shoulders, and thinking the entire time of what it might feel like to have Maddox run those big, sure hands through her hair—brush it back from her face—stroke his callused thumbs along her jawline and draw her in for a kiss—
What is wrong with me?
It had been a long time since she'd had a crush. She'd just been so busy: with the store, with raising Bailey after her sister's drunk-driving accident, and now with this entire business with Ducker and the sheriff. There was no time for a love life, regretful as she might be about her youth passing her by. How was she supposed to go out and meet men, especially in a small town where she already knew most of the eligible bachelors and wasn't interested in any of them ...?
And she never remembered a crush as physically powerful as this one. At least not with someone who was, she had to keep reminding herself, a total stranger. He didn't feel like a stranger, was the thing. It was as if she'd known him before—in her youth, in a past life—and now it was like renewing a beloved old acquaintance rather than getting to know someone she'd never met.
It was like her soul had been pulling toward him for her entire life, except she'd never noticed it, in the way a fish doesn't notice the water around it ... until he was there, the other half of herself clicking into place.
How silly, she thought, brushing out her hair with smooth, regular strokes. I don't believe in soulmates.
But she couldn't help being very aware of every move he made downstairs, each creak of the floor and gurgle of water in the pipes. And when she went to bed that night, instead of putting on one of her usual audiobooks, instead she lay awake and listened to the soft sounds of building at night, its creaking and popping, the murmur of music from Bailey's headphones in her bedroom next door ... and distantly, muffled by the floor, the soft snoring of the stranger downstairs, who felt like no stranger at all.
Chapter Five: Maddox
He woke to the spill of morning sunshine across his face and the creak of footsteps moving about overhead. For a little while, Maddox lay wrapped in unfamiliar blankets, nose tickled by the spicy smells of the shop.
Sleeping on cushions on the floor while beat up black and blue hadn't been the greatest experience, but it felt like he'd actually gotten a pretty good night's sleep. His sore ribs protested when he carefully sat up, but it felt like his shifter healing had made a good start on knitting torn muscles and mending cracked bones. He took a few cautious, limping steps around the shop, trying not to knock into anything (with mixed success), and found that he could walk okay as long as he was careful. It wasn't all that different from normal, he thought with a grimace, or at least his new normal.
Fast shifter healing wasn't an all-around blessing. Sometimes you got things like what had happened with his hip, where the bones knitted into the wrong position. There wasn't really much to be done about it, short of rebreaking his hip and trying to rearrange everything, and he wasn't even sure if that would fix it completely. The muscles and ligaments and all those squishy, stretchy bits had rearranged themselves around his misshapen hip, and it didn't feel like they could ever go back how they'd been.
But his new injuries seemed to be healing straight. He did some cautious stretching. As long as he took it easy and didn't do anything strenuous for a little while, he figured he'd heal up fine.
Nothing strenuous. Like going after a crooked sheriff and the corrupt businessman who had the sheriff in his pocket.
It's none of your business. This woman isn't even your mate.
Or is she?
He still wasn't sure, and it puzzled him that his bull didn't know. He hadn't realized it was possible for a shifter to just ... not know. You either knew or you didn't. At least that was how he'd always thought it worked.
Maybe it was something to do with the fact that she couldn't see him?
Well, he thought, whether she was his mate or not, she had awakened his heart in its cold, lonely prison. He hadn't felt this much, this strongly, for another person since ... forever, probably. He had no intention of going away and leaving her to face this threat alone.
Quick, sure footsteps came creaking down the stairs.
Maddox glanced down at himself quickly, making sure he was decent-ish. The T-shirt she'd given him was bright blue, with an outline of Arizona and the word ARIZONA in brilliant red-and-gold-striped letters. And a cactus.
It wasn't exactly his normal kind of thing, and it was rumpled from being slept in, but at least it looked better than his jeans, which definitely ha
d the look of a pair of jeans that'd been worn while getting hit by a truck and then rolling in a ditch. He had taken off his hiking boots before bed last night, so he had nothing on his feet but a pair of stained socks with a hole in the toe.
And then he remembered: oh right. She couldn't see him.
He was still scruffing a hand through his hair, trying to brush out the sand and get it as smooth as a brush-cut could get, when the back door opened and Verity came in.
Her brown-and-gray hair was done up in a single braid this time, wrapped around the crown of her head and pinned in place. She must have taken her braids out last night, and he wished he could see that—her hair kinked up from the braids, floating around her shoulders in a loose, silky cloud. Her blouse today was cream-colored and embroidered around the cuffs, and she wore a different long skirt, this one striped in wide bands of purple and blue and gold that made him think of a sunset sky deepening into night. She carried a tray with a cup and some other dishes on it.
"Maddox?" she said, tilting her head, and he realized he'd just been standing stupidly in the middle of the shop, not saying anything so she'd know where he was.
"Here," he said, and she turned her head quickly and smiled.
"Hi there. I brought you breakfast." She moved swiftly between the shelves, navigating more deftly in the crowded shop than he could do with two good eyes. But then, she must do it every day, so she knew where everything was.
"Smells good," Maddox said with automatic politeness, before the smell caught up with him and he realized that it really did. There was a bowl of oatmeal, a plate with bacon and eggs and two pieces of toast, and a cup of what he really hoped was coffee.
"We like to eat good breakfasts around here," Verity said, smiling at him. "I won't send Bailey off to school on half a bowl of overly sugared store-brand cereal that'll leave her hungry by the end of first period."