Because she was making herself melancholy again, Adeline returned her attention to the bruise covering her shoulder. Interestingly, the array of purplish colors starting to form didn’t seem to affect her scar. It was still the same angry red.
Lifting her hand, she traced a fingertip over one of the branches that extended down her back. Arborescent erythema. Her permanent reminder of the worst day of her life.
The knocking sound caused her to jump, and it took a moment for Adeline to process from where it was coming. And then she realized that it must be the front door.
Which didn’t make it any less disconcerting. She didn’t know anyone here, and it wasn’t like she had a bunch of neighbors. Many of the houses around the lake were occupied seasonally, and that season was over. Sure, there were plenty of locals who lived in Lakemont, but it wasn’t like this was the Florida subdivision where she’d grown up, with houses lined up like stucco soldiers marching in formation. Here, the lots tended to be either large and heavily wooded, or perched on the side of a damn mountain. This cabin, being part of a long-standing fish camp that was built by a group of friends and passed down through their respective families, did have similar structures on either side. But she knew from talking to her uncle, who was half-owner of the cabin, that neither of those places was rented right now. The campgrounds and nearby hotels might be full of hikers and folks who’d come to see the fall foliage before the onset of winter, but November wasn’t exactly prime lake season.
Adeline considered ignoring it. It could be a creep, or a Jehovah’s Witness, or…
The caretaker who looked after the cabins. She’d been informed that she might see him around.
But that didn’t mean she had to answer the door. Even though her car was parked out front, she might have gone for a walk, or… well, hopped into the shower. And really, she didn’t need to fabricate an excuse. Not feeling like talking to anyone was enough.
Except that he had a key.
Would he use it, knowing she was here? Maybe if there was something he needed to check on. And come to think of it, Uncle Bristol – her mother’s twin brother – mentioned something about the caretaker dropping off firewood. For the stove she didn’t know how to use.
So, ask him to show you. Otherwise he might just leave it outside, and she’d still be none the wiser.
Realizing that it was in her best interests to answer the door, Adeline bent over and maneuvered the towel from her mid-section to her still-dripping hair. Giving it a quick rub and shake so that it fell into some semblance of order, she decided that would have to do. And while she would have liked to get dressed in regular clothing before greeting anyone, the bedroom was on the opposite side of the cabin. The bathroom had been added on sometime in the sixties, and since the kitchen plumbing was already there, they’d built the bathroom behind it. It might not be the most practical in terms of household traffic flow, but Adeline was thankful they’d upgraded from the outhouse that had served the cabins for decades.
Grabbing her thick, ankle-length robe from the back of the door, she stabbed her right arm into a sleeve and started to do the same with her left, before a sharp pain reminded her to slow down and move with caution.
Her range of motion was going to be limited for a while.
She’d just tied the belt when the knock sounded again.
“Coming!”
But because Adeline wasn’t stupid, nor the most trusting soul on the planet, she also retrieved her keys – and more importantly, the pepper spray – from the kitchen counter on her way to the door.
The cabin floors were also wood – really what wasn’t? – and she realized she hadn’t done a good job drying her hair, because she was leaving a trail of water droplets as she went. She’d have to wipe them up. She didn’t want to slip and hurt something else…
The thought evaporated as Adeline placed her hand on the doorknob, before yanking it away.
It hadn’t shocked her. That, she was used to. Instead, she felt… what? A sort of vibration beneath her skin was the only way to describe it. She doubted the knob was silver, which consistently gave her trouble. But she’d never had a reaction to any other metals.
Maybe it was just some kind of… nerve thing from her injured shoulder? Sutton had mentioned tingling, hadn’t he? Perhaps it was like when you banged your funny bone, and felt periodic twinges for some time after.
God, she hoped so. She didn’t need any new idiosyncrasies to contend with.
Shaking it off, she slid back the deadbolt.
Shit.
There was a man on the other side of the screen door which still separated her from the porch. It wasn’t fully closed, however, so she assumed he’d recently opened it in order to knock. He was heading down the steps now, presumably giving up on finding her at home.
But it wasn’t the caretaker. And when he turned around, she realized the story she’d have to tell her stepmom was about to get a little bit weirder.
“Hey.” Lifting a hand in a casual wave, Sutton McCloud himself trotted back up the steps. Adeline had mere moments to consider shutting the door on him before they were face to face.
Well, face to screen to face. Or chest, really. Without her boots on, he seemed even taller than before.
“I must have gotten you out of the shower. Sorry about that.”
Adeline was suddenly very aware of her dripping hair, makeup-less visage and fluffy robe. She pulled it a bit tighter. “How did you find me?”
“Ahh.” Sutton ran a hand through his already mussed hair – no hat this time – and had the grace to look sheepish. “I gave my version of events after you left, and when Sam handed me the clipboard to sign it, your statement was beneath it. I happened to make note of your address... which sounds way creepier out loud than I meant it to. Yikes.”
“It’s a little concerning,” Adeline agreed.
“I promise I wasn’t trying to stalk you.” Reaching back, he pulled something from his pocket. “You left this behind, and it looked like it was handmade. Missus Driscoll – the woman who used to live in the house where you fell? She used to make things like this for my family. Anyway, I saw the little tag inside that said From the Needles of Sally Walker, and since it was the same last name as yours, I thought this might be special to you.”
Recognizing the hat that her stepmother had given her, Adeline could only stare. She must have been more rattled than she’d realized to have forgotten it.
“It… actually is.” Quite special. She glanced back up. “It was really thoughtful of you to stalk me.”
His mouth dropped open as he struggled for a response.
“I’m kidding.”
“Right.”
“Seriously though, thank you.”
He shrugged. “It was no trouble. I had to come this direction anyway. Uh, would you like me to lay it on this chair out here?”
“What? Oh.” Realizing that she was still talking to him through the screen, and that he probably thought she didn’t want to open it while he was here, she shook her head at her own cluelessness. Unlatching the door, she kicked the corner, as she’d discovered that it tended to stick.
“You’re not going to mace me, are you?”
Adeline glanced at the pepper spray in her hand, which she’d all but forgotten.
“Sorry about that.” She dropped her keys into the robe’s deep pocket. “I guess I’m a little paranoid. I’m not used to being out here in the boondocks.”
He scratched the back of his head. “You did say you went to school in Gainesville.”
“Yes, I know it has a much higher crime rate. But this place has all these…” she waved a hand toward the landscape.
“Trees?”
“Friday the Thirteenth elements.”
“Come on, now. We haven’t had a good, bloody massacre in at least a few years.”
“Very funny.”
But when he grinned, Adeline found herself smiling. He had an energy about him that was warming. Like
a human ray of sunshine.
And when he handed her the hat, Adeline stared at it a moment. A bit of sunshine to remind you of home. An interesting synchronicity of thought.
“Um…”
Thank him, and let him be on his way.
“Would you like to come in?”
If Adeline were capable of physically grabbing the words and cramming them back into her mouth, she happily would have done so. But since that wasn’t possible, she stood rooted to the spot, hoping Sutton McCloud was as good at reading body language as he was at reading other people’s private information. Although she couldn’t quite bring herself to be upset about that. She really wouldn’t have wanted to go back to that house to search for the hat.
Because something about it felt wrong. She hadn’t been mistaken.
“I wouldn’t want to impose,” Sutton said, but he glanced over her shoulder as he said it. “I’ve always wanted to get a look inside these cabins, though. I’ve seen them from the lake.”
There were multimillion-dollar homes all over the area. Big, beautiful dwellings with spectacular water views. She couldn’t imagine why it would be these somewhat crude cabins, tucked along a narrow cove, that he wanted to see.
But she didn’t sense anything threatening from him, that weird buzz a few moments ago notwithstanding. And he had rescued her this morning, although she liked to think she would have eventually devised a way out of that hole. He’d also returned her hat. Giving him a quick tour of the place was the least she could do.
“There’s not much to see,” Adeline said, stepping back. “But you’re welcome to look around.”
“Are you sure?”
Maybe he could read body language, after all.
“I’m sure.”
He came inside, and the air itself seemed to charge, but Adeline attributed that to her own nerves.
Sutton wandered over toward the spiral stairs that led to the sleeping loft, placing his hand on the… well, she guessed they were actual twisty tree branches that made up the rails.
“Mountain laurel,” he said, confirming her assumption. “They probably cut it right on site, because there’s a bunch of it by the creek that dumps into the cove. It’s so cool.”
Adeline guessed it actually was. She’d been operating in a sort of emotional tunnel vision since she arrived yesterday, and hadn’t paid proper attention.
“My parents have a cabin, but it’s an A-frame that was built in the seventies, and decorated by someone who I’m pretty sure was on LSD. They’ve updated, but back when I was a kid, I had a pet hermit crab that got loose in the red shag carpeting. Couldn’t find it for days. Is that a bear?”
Adeline turned toward the corner. “That’s Barnaby,” she said, of the stuffed black beast, which stood beside the sofa. “I don’t know how he met his end, but he’s been there for as long as I can remember.” It was one of the few things that she did remember, in fact.
“So, you’ve been here before then.”
“Ah, a few times. But not since… since I was a kid.” Because that was a subject upon which she didn’t particularly want to expound, she asked her own question. “I gather you grew up down the street from the woman who lived in that house?”
“More like up the street, but yeah. Missus Driscoll was like an honorary grandma to me and my older brother. Not so much my sister, because she was still just a toddler when she died. Willow – that’s my sister – is eight years younger. My parents like to call her a happy accident, but I remind her that they intended to stop having kids after me, since I was so perfect, as often as I can.”
His smile belied the arrogance of his words, and Adeline could easily picture him as the teasing big brother. An unexpected pain ripped through her, the sharpness of it somehow undulled by time, and she realized she’d missed the window of opportunity to react to his obvious joke. Because she stood there, stone-faced, the moment had grown awkward.
“I’m just going to run and grab some…” She gestured toward the bedroom. “Clothes.”
Sutton cleared his throat. “Right.”
Adeline felt his eyes on her back as she walked away, and her muscles tensed. She’d never been fully comfortable around strangers of the opposite sex, especially ones whom she happened to find attractive. In that respect, she was very much her father’s daughter. Obviously, she hadn’t been around when he’d met her mother, but she was almost nine years old by the time he met Sally. Despite her immaturity and emotional struggles, she hadn’t been blind to what was happening between them. Her dad, bless him, had been a fish out of water when faced with Sally’s flirtation – the perfect metaphor for a romantically hapless marine biologist, she guessed. But while almost nine-year-old Adeline had rolled her eyes at his ineptitude, she’d discovered a half dozen years later that she was equally bumbling. Wiles came naturally to so many women, but not to her. Most of the time she simply clammed up, sitting in awkward silence, or – as she had that morning – she turned sarcastic and insulting. Neither of which had proved effective at communicating interest.
Not that she wanted to communicate interest to the man currently in her living room. But she would love to make small talk and for once not feel like an animated dumpling.
The dumpling comparison was especially apt, Adeline decided as she set down the hat and looked at herself in the mirror over the dresser. The robe was off-white, and for someone who’d lived her entire life in Florida, she bore a distressing resemblance to paste. She’d spent too much time holed up indoors over the past months, and it showed. If it weren’t for the bright spot of color from her dyed hair, she’d look like a human bottle of Whiteout.
Stop. She didn’t need Sally there to point out that she was engaging in negative self-talk. And she knew that it was another fun feature of the grieving process – loss of confidence, loss of direction.
But that was why she was here, wasn’t it? To rebuild… everything.
Again.
Slipping off the robe, Adeline started to open the dresser drawer only to realize that her left arm wasn’t going to cooperate. She tried pulling it with one hand, but it just made the drawer slide out at an angle and get stuck. Bumping it back in with her hip, she tried each of the others in succession, with similar results. The dresser, like the cabin, was old. Easy-glide drawer hardware hadn’t been invented when it was built.
Frustrated, Adeline looked around. The only things she’d hung in the closet so far were outerwear and a single dress. She could either put the robe back on, or walk out into the living room in a rain coat, looking like the opening scene to a cheesy porno.
Unless…
Stalking toward the closet, Adeline pulled open the door. There, in the bottom of the suitcase, were some things she hadn’t found room for in the drawers. Namely, the new, colorful yoga clothes that Sally bought and insisted she bring with her when she discovered that there was a studio not too far from where Adeline was staying. They wouldn’t be her first choice of attire, but they were better than the alternatives. At least most of the shirts did have long sleeves, and would cover her scar. If she could wrangle her bum arm into one, that is.
Pulling the pants up over her still-damp skin required agility and determination, and Adeline realized that Sutton probably wondered why she was taking so long. Either that, or he’d already cased the joint and left. Not that she thought he was a thief. Or that there was anything of value to steal. Her default setting with regards to strangers just happened to be suspicion.
Nevertheless, she felt pressured to hurry, and was happy to discover that the shirt was made from a material that had more give to it than the pants did. Getting her arm through the sleeve wasn’t a cake walk, but it wasn’t as bad as she’d feared. Without worrying about double-checking her appearance in the mirror, Adeline slid her feet back into her fuzzy slippers and went out the door.
“Sorry I took so long,” she said.
Sutton, who was crouched down in an apparent examination of the wood stove, glanced
over his shoulder.
“It’s no…” the sentence ground to a halt as his jaw hinged open. “Problem,” he finally said, before snapping his mouth closed.
Because it was her outfit that seemed to have precipitated the reaction, Adeline glanced down. The pants were pretty obnoxious, as Sally tended to favor bold patterns and vivid colors, whereas she herself was more of a neutrals’ girl. But aside from that, she didn’t think they were that shocking. Maybe he was part of some strict religious order and simply wasn’t used to workout… no, scratch that. Religious order or no, he’d gone to the same university she’d attended. He’d seen plenty of women in athletic clothing before.
“Do you know how to use that?” she asked, since he’d been looking at the stove.
“Ahhhh… yeah. My grandparents had a pot-bellied stove when I was growing up. This baby might be even older than theirs was, but it seems like it’s been kept in good working order.”
“It looks like Freddie Krueger’s furnace.”
He chuckled. “Did you watch a lot of horror movies as a kid?”
Probably more than she should have. But oddly enough, watching them had helped her manage her own anxiety better. She may have had it bad, but at least she wasn’t being chased through her dreams by an undead kiddie killer.
“Would you like me to show you how to get a fire going?”
“That would be fantastic,” Adeline said. “The heater doesn’t seem to work very well, and I’ve been freezing since I got here.”
His lips rolled in. “I can see that.”
She wasn’t sure what he meant by that. Probably some crack about her slippers. “I was going to ask the caretaker when he showed up to drop off some firewood, but… huh. He hasn’t been by yet. I guess that’s going to be a problem, isn’t it?”
“There’s wood on the porch.”
“Really?” He must have come by while Adeline was in the shower.
Slow Burn (Rabun County Book 1) Page 5