by Zoe Chant
"Well, at least we won't have any trouble telling him apart from the rest of the family once he gets his full size." Cody pushed the door shut with his foot, so he could set the bear cub on the floor. "I'm just here to use your shower, if that's okay. Er, Tara and Axl's shower, I mean."
Saffron gave him a quick peck on the cheek, switching Lexie to her other arm. The little girl stared at Cody with wide, intense blue eyes. She was named after her uncle Alec—Lexie was short for Alexandra—and already it seemed that the name had been somewhat prophetic. Unlike active, friendly Baz, Lexie seemed to take more after her uncle in temperament. She was solemn, quiet, and often seemed to be trying to suss out the actions of the adults around her.
"I wish you wouldn't act so shy about it," Saffron said. "You know you're always welcome in any of our houses. We're all clan, and this was your house first anyway."
"I know, but I still don't want to impose. Everyone needs a little privacy in their den, especially with cubs."
"Family is never an imposition," Saffron said firmly. "Remember, I grew up in a shifter town. I'm used to everyone being all up in everyone else's business all the time."
She'd also had to deal with a dysfunctional clan and an abusive alpha who had tried to force her to marry him. It amazed Cody that she'd come out of it as kind and friendly as she was. But Remy had probably helped with that. Cody's brother, despite his intimidating appearance with a buzz cut and tattoos, was the kindest, sweetest soul that Cody had ever met. He was an adoring father and obviously worshipped the ground that his mate walked on.
As he headed for the bathroom, Cody thought, I wish I knew if that kind of happiness is out there for me.
3. Crystal
Well, Crystal thought, it was a good thing she hadn't managed to find a hired man to help around the place yet, because she was a sweaty, unpleasant mess.
She had been in Pinerock County for two nights now (and at the back of her head, she couldn't help being aware of her ticking clock, measuring off her allotted two weeks of farm exploration). Yesterday she hadn't even managed to make it back to the farm at all. She'd ended up running all over this stupid rural county and its tiny little towns, trying to find the things she needed (camping supplies, cleaning supplies, etc.) and wishing desperately that she'd shopped for them back in St. Louis. At least she had the metal detector already, a nice expensive one that she'd borrowed from a coworker who liked to go hunting for old coins as a hobby. She was pretty sure she'd never have found a store in this whole county that had one of those.
She had looked at some chainsaws, but decided it wouldn't be a good idea to buy one until she figured out whether she could find someone else to clear the road for her. On that front, though, all she'd managed to do was talk to the owner of the feed store in the nearest town, to see if he could put in a word for her with the local ranchers—and then completely forgot about it, until bright and early the next morning, her Fit jolted up to the downed tree across the driveway.
"For crapsakes!" Looked like she'd be carrying all those bags in the backseat up to the house by hand.
She took the cleaning supplies in the first trip. This was her first opportunity to look at the house, and she was hoping to get it livable enough to spend a few nights sleeping there, to save herself the hassle of driving back and forth to town every day.
In the crisp morning sunshine, the old farm felt more abandoned and empty than it had two days ago, when she'd seen it in the warm golden haze of late afternoon. Now, as she walked through the long grass toward the door with shopping bags of detergent and scrub brushes and mousetraps dangling from her hands, the thought occurred to her that she had no idea what she was going to find inside. There could be bears or foxes denning in the house. Maybe vagrants had found it and used it as a crash pad in the years since it was last occupied.
The porch creaked underfoot when she stepped onto it. The downstairs windows had been boarded over, making her add a hammer and nail-puller to her mental list of supplies. There was an old-fashioned rocking chair beside the door, weatherbeaten and timeworn, and a small pile of weathered firewood that had been there so long that moss and a few tiny tree saplings had started to grow up from the cracks.
The door was still firmly locked, which gave her an optimistic feeling. There hadn't been any intruders, of either the two- or four-legged variety.
There were three keys on the key ring her father had left her. With a little jiggling, the lock yielded to the first one she tried. The hinges creaked faintly as she opened the door, and a stifling, musty smell wafted out. Not surprising, if the house had been locked up for 15 years.
The darkness inside the house also made her realize belatedly that another thing she should've brought from town was a flashlight.
"Hello?" she called into the dusty, waiting silence.
She thought she heard something tiny skitter away, but there were no thumps or growls, nothing to indicate the house had become occupied by anything more alarming than a few field mice during the years it had been vacant. As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she saw that most of the furniture was still in the house: big, heavy, durable pieces, possibly handmade. The old-fashioned wallpaper was peeling and cracking.
It was going to take a lot of work to get this place nice again, but it didn't look impossible—
What am I thinking? I'm not going to live here! I'm staying here as long as it takes to figure out whether my grandfather left a buried treasure on this property, and then I'm hitting the road, selling this place, and, assuming there is no treasure, using the cash to pay off my family's medical bills.
That's all.
Before she could do anything, though, she needed light. Experimentally she flipped the switch beside the door, but as she'd suspected, the power had long since been shut off. In the absence of a flashlight, prying the plywood off the windows would have to do, and for that, she'd better hope the barn had a hammer or a nail puller or something along those lines.
She left the shopping bags in the doorway and walked through the long grass toward the barn. She felt bolder now, and didn't even hesitate before unlocking the padlock on the barn door from another of the keys on the key ring. The barn door was large and wide, and she had to struggle to swing it open through the weeds.
Light shafted down into the barn from high, unglazed windows, open to the sky. It looked like the furniture in the house wasn't the only thing that had been left behind; a bunch of farm equipment was still here, too. She peeked under a tarp covering the biggest item and discovered that it was a tractor, beat-up and well-used-looking. There were several pieces of equipment on wheels with big blades and large poky bits that she guessed was for tilling, seeding, haying, and that kind of thing. Smaller pieces of machinery leaned against the walls. The rototiller she recognized, and there was another, similar-sized thing with handles and blades that she hoped was for cutting brush. There were also a bunch of hand tools—hoes, axes, and, aha, a hammer and a nail puller.
As she was getting those, something on a shelf above them caught her eye. Crystal stood on tiptoe and took down an old-fashioned kerosene lantern draped in cobwebs. When she tilted it, fuel sloshed inside. There was a box of matches on the shelf beside it.
She might not have a flashlight, but this would work just fine. Grandpa had been a prepared kind of guy.
With the lantern in one hand and the tools in the other, she looked around the barn. The sheer enormity of her task pressed down on her. There were so many places where something of value might be hidden. Two weeks wasn't enough time to search. Two years might not be enough time.
Especially since I have no idea if there's anything here at all ...
But she had to start somewhere. The house seemed like a reasonable place, since she needed to clean it up anyway.
And so she spent the first part of the day housecleaning. Another thing she hadn't thought about was the lack of water; the house had a fully functional bathroom, but nothing happened when she turned on the ta
ps. However, she found an old-fashioned hand-operated pump in the backyard, the tall green kind with a long handle that had to be pumped up and down, and filled some buckets that she brought over from the barn.
The main thing the house needed was airing out, anyway. Once she got the plywood off the downstairs windows, she opened all the windows, upstairs and down, to let the breeze and sunlight start clearing out the mustiness. The upstairs was divided into several bedrooms. Perfect for a large family, she thought, and then, Oh no, here I go again. I'm not staying. This is only temporary. A few days and I'm gone.
The roof didn't leak, so everything inside the house was dry, but all the bedding would need to be aired and probably washed before it could be used. She dragged as much of the furniture as she could move out onto the porch, and draped mattresses and bedding over the porch railing and anywhere else she could find to drape them on.
The kitchen was the worst disaster. Squirrels had gotten into the cabinets, and they'd torn up or carried off anything that wasn't in a can or a jar. Everything that was in a can or jar was 15 years old, which meant some of it was bulging or leaking suspiciously, and the rest just needed to be tossed.
What am I DOING? she asked herself helplessly as she moved from cabinet to cabinet, putting old jars and cans into a couple of buckets that she'd pressed into service as trash bins. Her tied-back hair was coming out of its ponytail, and her jeans were dusty and covered in cobwebs. I'm just going to be camping here for a few days—aren't I? All I really need is a place to roll out my nice new sleeping bag. It doesn't matter if the kitchen is clean. I can heat up cans of soup in the yard over a campfire.
I'm wasting valuable time that I should be spending metal-detecting around the barn and out in the pasture.
But she'd need to walk all the way back to her car to get the metal detector. It seemed like less effort to just keep working on getting the house cleaned up. Tomorrow she could start bright and early on the metal detecting—
Wait ... what was that?
Crystal set down the clanking bucket half full of old, leaking cans, and pulled back the dusty lace curtain fluttering in the breeze coming in through the kitchen window. She thought she'd heard an engine.
She had heard an engine.
There was a truck pulling around the corner of the house.
It was the sort of truck that might as well have had "farm truck" written all over it: dented and scraped, its red paint half hidden under a layer of dust and mud. The windows were rolled down and she could hear the tinny thumping of classic rock.
Who on Earth ... and how did they get here?
The kitchen door opened into the backyard, where the hand pump was located. She hurried down the steps, dusting off her hands and trying to pat the cobwebs out of her hair, as the truck stopped beside a small woodshed and the engine died. The driver's door creaked slightly as it opened, and a lanky guy in jeans, a plaid shirt, and mud-splattered boots stepped down.
"Ma'am, I'm sorry to bother you, but I thought I'd drive up and see if you could use a hand ..." he began, but then his voice died; he just stared at her.
Crystal stopped in her tracks.
He was ... electric. There was no other word for it.
She'd never seen anyone like him before. Certainly not in the city where she had spent most of her life. He exuded raw sex appeal and masculinity. Powerful shoulders strained against his shirt; the sleeves were rolled up to reveal strong, suntanned forearms. His hair was light brown, bleached almost blond by the sun in erratic streaks, and long enough to be pulled back in a ponytail.
His face ... she almost had to push herself to look into his face; it felt like staring into the sun. He was deeply tanned, with crinkles around the eyes from smiling or squinting, though he wasn't smiling right now. His eyes were a light blue-gray, like the sky on a clear winter day, and focused on her as if she was the most amazing, most important thing in the world.
She had never had anyone look at her like that before.
Certainly not a total stranger when she was standing in front of him covered in dust and cobwebs.
Which might be why he was staring like that, come to think of it.
Except she knew it wasn't, because she could feel it too, the electric sense of connection that had happened as soon as he'd stepped out of his truck. There was a current between them, something almost palpable that quivered in the air.
Crystal cleared her throat and held out her hand. "Hi. I'm Crystal Martinez."
He seemed to shake himself back to reality. "Uh ... Cody. Cody Hayes." Now he did smile, making those fine lines around his eyes crinkle up just as she'd imagined. "I'm sorry, ma'am, I was just ... I—Anyway, I'm your neighbor on the next spread."
His hand engulfed hers, warm and strong and slightly rough from work calluses. She'd never realized that a handshake could be erotic, but she'd never shaken hands with someone who looked like that before, either. This close, she could see all the faint sun-freckles grazing his skin, the wisps of nearly-blond hair curling down around his face, the dusting of stubble on his cheek. His shirt was unbuttoned on the top two buttons, giving her a glimpse of chest hair that was light brown verging on blond.
She wanted to touch it. She wanted to touch him.
Heck, what she really wanted was to have him bend her over against the truck, right here and right now—pull down her jeans and pound into her from behind, covering her with that muscular body—
Her powerful response to him astonished her. And from the way he was still holding her hand, looking into her eyes, she was pretty sure she feeling was mutual.
What the heck is happening?
Cody released her hand and took a step back, catching his breath on a short inhale. "Right," he said, almost to himself. "So, I drove over to see if you needed any help up here, ma'am—uh, Ms. Martinez."
"Call me Crystal," she said, slightly out of breath herself. She was damp inside her jeans. Just a handshake and her panties were soaked right through. She tried to snap herself out of it and concentrate on the business at hand. "Um, how did you get here? I mean—obviously you drove. But how? There's a tree down across the road, and my car is blocking it anyway."
"Oh," he said, and grinned, wide and breathtaking, a flash of white teeth in his tanned face. Crystal's heart skipped a beat and her panties dampened a trifle further. "I drove directly over. There's an old road between our ranch and your farm. Nobody's used it in a long time, since there hasn't been anyone living out here since—say, you said your name's Martinez. Any relation to old Cal Martinez?"
"He was my grandfather." Her heart lurched in a way that, for once, had nothing to do with Cody's eyes or his handshake or her acute awareness of his firm, muscled body almost close enough to touch— "Did you know my grandfather?"
"Not very well. I was just a teenager when he died. But he was friends with my folks. We used to come over and help with the haying in the fall." He glanced around. "Place looked pretty different then."
"I bet it did." She looked where he was looking, and tried to see what he must be seeing: the pasture in hay, with sheep or cattle grazing where now there was nothing but young saplings growing up and turning the pasture back into forest.
"Were you close?" Cody asked. "You and your grandpa."
"I never really knew him at all. We used to come out here for family vacations when I was really small, but then my dad and Grandpa had a fight, and we stopped coming. This is the first time I've been back since I was, I don't know, three or four."
"Long time."
"Yeah. So ..." She took a deep breath and sidled a step away from him, providing enough distance to get her brain back online. "What I could really use—" Is you between my legs, riding me like a—No! "—is someone to help out with the work around the property that I don't know how to do. There's a tree down across the driveway, like I mentioned, and I need to get it cut out of the way so I can drive up to the yard instead of having to carry everything. That kind of thing."
; "Sure, happy to. Do you have a chainsaw around the place? I could go back over to our spread and get one."
"No, I don't think—well ..." She hesitated. "There might be one in the barn. There's a ton of stuff there. It all came with the place. I've hardly had time to look through it yet."
"That barn there?" Cody asked, jerking his thumb at the structure, and Crystal nodded. "Well, let's go take a look."
He matched his long strides to her shorter ones, so she didn't even have to strain to keep up, a courtesy that Crystal added to her rapidly growing List of Reasons to Ride This Man Like a Frigging Racehorse. "So, you just got into town a few days ago, then?" he asked, and she wrenched her mind back from watching the play of muscles under his shirt.
"Yeah, today is actually my first full day out here. I got into cleaning up the house and trying to make it livable again, and I haven't gotten much else done yet. Anyway, here we are."
She wrestled the barn door open again. Cody gave a low whistle as he looked around.
"I know, right? It looks like all my grandpa's tools and machinery are still here. Everything has just been sitting here since he died, but I guess machines don't go bad, do they?"
"Not really," Cody said. He made a beeline for the row of smaller machines against the wall, the rototiller and so forth. "The engines might need some tuning after sitting without being used for so long. Gasoline can settle out and clog stuff up, especially the mixed gas that you use in a two-cycle engine—" He must have sensed her eyes glazing over. "Sorry. The point is, they might need a little work, but I can easily do that, if you want me to."
"Yes, please," she said eagerly. "I'll pay you, of course. You can just tell me what a fair price is."
Cody looked slightly started at this, as if he hadn't even expected to be paid. Of course she wasn't going to expect him to do the work for free; what did he think of her? "Yeah, sure, but we can talk about that later," he said. "Aha, here we go."