by Chant, Zoe
Getting sweaty with Sarah Ekstrom was about the best idea Matthew had ever heard. His voice cracked as he said, "I'm up for it, if you are," and hoped it wasn't obvious just how up for it he was.
"Then I'll text Mabs, and if she thinks we should come out we will, but otherwise we'll meet at...the courthouse? At ten? Or is that too early?"
"It's perfect. Can I walk you home in the meantime?" Matthew's stomach suddenly rumbled and he rubbed it. "Or maybe to a dinner made of more than cake? What about the pizza place that does good Italian food?"
"I think I ate enough cake that I don't need to eat again until next week, but I'd love to keep you company, if you don't mind. I know I've been kind of monopolizing you since you got here."
"No, you've been great. I've never felt so welcomed to a new job, or town, and I like spending time with you." The last was an understatement, but he felt it was better than leaning on her like a puppy and gazing at her with soulful adoring eyes. "Honestly, Sarah. Thank you for pulling me into all of this without any hesitation."
She got a shy crooked little smile. "I like spending time with you, too. All right, let me lock up, except no, I already did, so, uh, I guess we can go!"
"No time like the present." They walked over to the restaurant, Matthew fighting the urge to take her hand.
She's your mate, his bear said, baffled. Mates can hold hands.
She's my friend, Matthew emphasized. Friends don't usually just go around holding hands. At least not in this culture.
Go to a culture where they do! Oso clearly thought he'd landed on a solid solution there, and Matthew actually giggled out loud. Sarah's eyebrows rose questioningly and he realized he had to go with something close to the truth, or straight-up lie to her, and he didn't want to do the latter. "I was just thinking I'd like to hold your hand, but that friends don't usually just do that in this culture, so the obvious solution was to sweep you away to another one."
Sarah laughed too, and to Matt's heart-palpitating delight, slipped her hand into his. "There's no rule saying friends can't, but also, I am intrigued by your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter. What cultures do friends hold hands in more casually than ours?"
Matt's mind suddenly went blank. "Oh, no. I can only think of places where men do, now, all of a sudden. Or kids. Oh no. My cunning plan to hold your hand is in ruins."
"Well, that's okay," Sarah said as if she was putting a lot of thought into it. "You can still hold my hand."
"Victory!"
Her laughter soared and she squeezed his hand, making his heart soar the way her laughter had. "Hand-holding is worth a victory cry?"
"Absolutely."
Sarah grinned up at him. "I'm flattered." They got a table a few minutes after arriving at the restaurant, and Sarah ordered a salad after Matt's entree arrived. "Not because I'm doing that thing where women only eat salads in front of men," she warned him. "I just got hungry enough to eat something that wasn't cake."
"So far I've seen you eat a giant bowl of pasta, half a pizza, cake, coffee, and a ham sandwich. I am not laboring under the illusion you're sustained by salad," Matt promised.
"Oh good. So—can I be nosy? So where's home for you? Your resume has you working all over the world, and you said you grew up traveling with your mom."
"The longest I've really ever been anywhere at once was college, first undergrad, then grad school. I got a BA in history in Florida and then an archival science Masters in Madrid, except the semester I spent drawing on old maps in Colombia." Matthew made a face, still horrified by his own memory. "So I guess places where they speak Spanish a lot are home?"
A flash of disappointment crossed Sarah's face so quickly he wasn't sure he'd seen it. "I have four years of high school Spanish. Does that count?"
"Do you want it to?"
Her gaze came up to meet his and Matthew, dizzily, thought, oh, that's what the books mean by 'an electric charge between them.'
All of a sudden, all at once, he wondered how he could have convinced himself, even for a moment, that his bear was wrong. His whole heart belonged to Sarah Ekstrom, obviously, completely, and totally. His whole soul was hers for the taking. From the heat in her gaze, he thought she felt it too. He wanted nothing more than to sweep her into his arms and proclaim her his. His heart, his love, his home.
And, just as suddenly, he realized he had no idea how to make that work. Not with the job he'd spent his whole life working toward waiting for him in New York. He couldn't possibly ask Sarah to leave Virtue, and he could hardly even consider the idea of giving up the new job.
I thought it was supposed to be easy! he cried out, almost desperately, to his oso. I thought you were just supposed to know, that everything would be simple and clear when you met your mate! I didn't think it could be confusing!
For once, his bear didn't have an answer. Maybe it couldn't. Maybe everything was easy, from the bear's point of view. Bears didn't have jobs that they'd dreamed of since they were kids. They just—they just beared, as Sarah had said about the toys in the shop window. Bears were simple.
Humans, and shifters, were more complex.
Sarah drew breath to say something, but Matthew never learned what it was. Instead, a teenage girl appeared at the table and threw herself into Sarah's arms with an emotional cry.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
One second Sarah had Matthew Rojas's heated gaze locked on hers, and the next she had a lap full of emotional Mirielle Thompson, whose tears were fast on the way to soaking Sarah's shoulder. She grunted in surprise, cast Matthew a startled glance over the girl's head, and hugged her. "Hey, Mirielle, what's wrong? You okay, sweetheart?"
"I just wanted to say thank you again," the girl wailed. "I don't know how much of that scholarship drive you were responsible for, but you're always helping with all the good stuff in Virtue, and I keep cry-y-y-ing over how ni-i-ice everybody's been, so tha-a-a-aaaaank yooooouuuu!"
"Oh, my gosh." Sarah tugged the girl into a closer hug, chuckling and patting her black curls. "It was all your friends' idea, Mirielle. All I really did was help with the costumes."
"But you've always encouraged me. And you do do everything nice in Virtue."
"You'll have the chance to pay it forward someday, sweetheart." Sarah bent her head over Mirielle's, smiling, until the young actress got herself more or less under control and stood, still sniffling.
"I'm sorry. I totally interrupted your dinner date."
"I can think of no better reason to be interrupted," Matthew told her with an easy smile. Mirielle looked a little dazzled, which Sarah could not blame her for one little bit. Moments ago she had been dazzled enough to throw herself across the table at him, and thought she would have, if Mirielle hadn't interrupted. Now that she'd had a couple of minutes of clarity, a little time to think...
...she would still absolutely throw herself across the table at him, given the slightest chance. Maybe he wasn't staying forever, but that was no reason to avoid a summer fling. At least, not on her end. And there had been a moment as their gazes met when Sarah had had no doubt that Matthew, too, was all in on the idea of a summer fling.
But then something had changed, as if he'd suddenly become uncertain. To be fair, Sarah understood that. He was only in Virtue for a few weeks. Getting mixed up in any kind of summer romance could add more complications than he wanted. That was totally fair.
Perfectly awful, but totally fair. And she wasn't about to go putting the moves on somebody who didn't seem sure he wanted the moves put on him, even if he had been the one to ask if he could hold her hand. Holding hands and acting on an incredibly intense attraction between them, though, were very different levels of relationship development.
Not that it was a relationship. Not one beyond friendship and coworkers, at least. Not yet, and maybe not ever.
Which was fine, because Sarah was too busy for relationships anyway. It all worked out. No fuss, no muss.
Maybe if she told herself that enough times, she w
ould even start to believe it.
While she wrestled with the unspoken possibilities and impossibilities of a potential romance, Matthew said, "Congratulations," to Mirielle. "You're a terrific performer," he told her. "I can't wait to see you on Broadway. Or will it be in the movies?"
Mirielle smiled brilliantly. "Why not both? Thank you again, Ms. Ekstrom. Sorry for interrupting your dinner."
"That's okay, Mirielle. I'm glad things are working out for you." Sarah waved as Mirielle skipped away again, then met Matthew's eyes with a laugh. "What did I say about small towns and everybody being up in your business?"
"You did warn me," he agreed. "I remember everyone knowing everybody else's business in La Caminata, where I grew up. It was pretty remote." He laughed suddenly. "Remote enough that—do you know what 'la caminata' means? 'The walk,'" he said when Sarah shook her head. "That's what it was called. La Caminata, because you had to walk so long to get there."
"Right! Caminar is to walk. I remember."
"Bueno." Matthew winked. "So there are only about three hundred people in La Caminata, but it has a church built by conquistadores and a parish presence for about five hundred years now. The priests wrote down a lot of local legends and stories, back in the day. Mostly to change them into parables or to send home for the shock value at what 'primitives' believed, but the result was a lot of material that the original stories could be pieced together from, or compared to what grandparents secretly passed down to grandchildren over the generations. Mi mamá loved preserving those old stories."
His accent, which was mostly very faint, had grown stronger as he talked about La Caminata. Sarah thought she might be making actual heart eyes, like a cartoon character. "So that's really home, to you," she guessed.
Matthew shrugged uncertainly. "I haven't been there since I was a child. Mamá might have stayed, pero Papá died when I was only two, and when I was seven mis abuelos died too and I'm switching languages, aren't I. I start thinking in Spanish when I think about La Caminata. Um, I was saying—"
"That your mom might have stayed, but your dad, and then your grandparents, died," Sarah said gently. "I got that much. And I'm sorry."
"Gracias, me too. So Mom was una americana in a small Argentinian mountain village, and she'd done all the research and preservation she could, and I think...I think she missed my father too much to stay, once his parents had also passed on. So we left, and I've been kind of on the road ever since. Ugh," he added, making a face. "That sounds very pathetic and sob-story. Tell me yours."
"My sob story? My great-great grandparents left the South after the Civil War and moved to Virtue, but then my grandfather got a job in the city when my mom was just a little girl, so they moved away. They didn't sell the house, though, and when I was little, Mom decided to move back because she thought Virtue was a better place for a kid to grow up."
"Is she still here?"
Sarah laughed. "No, she moved back to the city while I was in college. Apparently Virtue was a good place to raise a kid, but not a great one to be a single adult woman whose kid had gone off to college."
"But you obviously think it is. You came back after college."
"I guess I'm a home-town girl at heart. I always liked being involved. And my dream job really was working at the library I grew up in, so..." Sarah spread her hands, feeling a little self-conscious. "So here I am. The whole 'never traveled more than a hundred miles from home' package, wrapped up in one. Well. Five hundred."
"I was about to say, I thought you said you went to Brown."
A zing of astonishment went through Sarah. "You really listen, don't you?"
"I try." Matthew sounded so modest she wanted to hug him. Of course, she wanted to hug him anyway, but maybe that wasn't the point. "We make quite a pair, don't we?" Matthew asked. "In dramatic storytelling terms, you're the girl who's never left home and I'm the boy who's never had one."
Sarah dropped her voice into her best approximation of a movie trailer voice over. "Will he give up the world for her...or give her the world? Starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Oscar Isaac—"
Matthew burst out laughing, took his glasses off to clean them, put them back on again, and gazed skeptically at Sarah. "You're very flattering to me."
"I thought I was pretty flattering to me, too! Actually I'd watch that," Sarah added thoughtfully, and Matt grinned.
"Opening night, front row tickets," he agreed. "Well, not for a movie. Front row is too close. IMAX tickets?"
"There you go." They finished dinner, lingering until Sarah's phone suddenly buzzed and she took it out to see a message from Mabs. "Oh, Mabs says Jake called his parents and they don't have a copy of the charter but to start with the Barlows if we're going to be asking other people for it. You remember 'Sir Henry' in the diary entry? That was Sir Henry Barlow. Oldest Virtue family there is. Really stand-offish, though. Their kids didn't even go to school with us." She said, "Thanks," out loud to her phone, then wondered what she was doing, and, embarrassed, typed her response in instead.
"Well, it's too late for that tonight. Maybe tomorrow?"
Sarah wrinkled her face. "After we check the historical society building's attic, maybe. I don't want to bother the Barlows unless I don't have any other choice."
Matthew grimaced. "That bad, huh?"
"They're probably not actually terrifying? But they have the whole house-on-the-hill, closed-gates, old-money disdain for the common people thing. They did the surveys for the original town borders after they settled on their own land here."
"So they don't mingle, huh?"
"Jake's folks said part of the reason they left Virtue—aside from the fact it looked like Jake had left and never intended to come back himself—was the rigid old ways the town still kept to. I always thought that was kind of a weird thing to say, but I also get it. There's a couple other families—the Hartnells and the Todds and I guess the Whelans, although they mix more—who are kind of above it all, you know?"
"They wouldn't be the same few families who are left from the original settlers, would they?"
Sarah wobbled her hand, but nodded. "Mostly, yeah. Jake's family have been around since then too, and others, but mostly they're really small anymore. Those ones I mentioned, they've got money and some numbers still. Can you imagine? Being so dedicated to who you were four hundred years ago that you still keep to yourselves?"
"They sound like exactly the kind of people who would have copies of the town charter."
"They sound like the kind of people who you'd think would be out there making developments go away without anybody even knowing they were doing it!" An awful thought struck Sarah. "Unless they're supporting the developers. Maybe their money's dried up and they've decided to sell Virtue out for their own profit! Ooh, the dirty rats!"
"Have you ever considered writing mystery novels, Sarah?" Matthew, grinning, signaled for the check, and they had a little tête-à-tête over who was going to pay until Matt said, "Last night's pizza doesn't count. I get to get this one."
"All right, but I get the next one." Sarah glanced around the restaurant. "Although this is a step up from the diner, so I guess if I'm going to escalate I'll have to take you to The Water's Edge."
"Is that the nice place that's only open three nights a week?" At Sarah's nod, Matt put on a teasing look of long suffering. "Well, if you must...."
"I probably must." Sarah glanced at the time and sighed. "It's gotten late again. I guess I should head home, if we're getting an early start at the historical society tomorrow."
"I suppose so," Matthew said with what sounded like as much reluctance as she felt. "Thanks for coming out with me."
She smiled. "Thanks for taking me out. I..." She wasn't sure what to say, suddenly remembering the searing gaze they'd shared. She didn't think it had been just her, but they hadn't gone anywhere near the topic of mutual attraction again. Not that they'd said anything in the first place. "I had a good time," she finished firmly, trying to put horny thoughts to bed.
Which was, arguably, exactly where horny thoughts belonged. She grinned and, on impulse, kissed Matthew's cheek as she got up to head out. "I'll see you in the morning."
"I can't wait."
Sarah looked back at the door to see Matthew watching her, and felt herself smiling like an idiot as she walked home in the late summer sunset.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Saturday morning couldn't come early enough, as far as Matthew was concerned. He got up with the sunrise, much to his oso's objection—'why use energy when he could be sleeping' was the bear's general philosophy—went for a run, got back, showered, had breakfast, and was ready to meet Sarah by seven in the morning.
Unfortunately for him, they weren't supposed to meet until ten.
We could take a nap, Oso said hopefully.
"And risk being late? I don't think so. Better idea. I'm going to have a look around town."
You looked while you were running! The bear's opinions on running were left better unsaid, but its tone conveyed everything.
"That wasn't looking, it was marking distances to try to keep myself going." In Oso's defense, Matt's own opinions about running were also maybe better left unsaid. He only did it because it was one of the few kinds of exercise that required nothing but himself.
The bear groaned mightily and put a paw over its eyes, as if blocking out the sunshine so it could sleep. Matthew gave it a fond pat, got a water bottle, and went out to actually have a look at the town he was temporarily—temporarily!—calling home.
One thing he'd noticed while Sarah was dragging him to sheriff departments and outdoors plays was that the town square was legitimately huge. You could play a football game—either American or international—on either side of the green's massive gazebo, which, despite its size, somehow fit the scale of the square. The courthouse was on one side, and the church stood opposite it, both of them impressive edifices that told him a lot about what had been important in Virtue when it was built...and probably still was. Law on one side, spirituality on the other; that's what the layout told him.