by Katie Cross
Behind the register was a half-opened door, spilling light into a back room. Limited storage space meant their inventory moved quickly. She likely ran across the street to the grocery store for supplies often enough.
Chalkboard menu.
Smudged pastry display case.
A cash register from the eighties. Old enough to certainly be a pain.
The place looked more like an old antique store than a coffee shop. The only thing it had going for it was a chair in the back corner and an impressive assortment of coffee mugs on the wall.
A thrill zipped through me. I couldn’t have planned this better if I’d researched for months.
She deftly avoided meeting my eyes, aided by the bill of the hat she wore to keep her black hair out of her face. She puttered around behind the counter, attempting to right whatever mayhem the guy that had stalked out of here had left behind. Every now and then her gaze flickered my way and she paused, but I always acted engrossed in my screen.
It wasn’t a total lie, but I also didn’t hate watching her work. Most people underestimated how much actions revealed personality. Her disorganization spoke worlds.
She had no idea what she was doing here.
I typed away, relieved to finally have access to the outside world again. A week getting started with renovations of Grandpa’s cabin, while hiding from Mallory and her team, had been enough to make my skin crawl. Getting my hands dirty again felt good, but nothing felt better than Wi-Fi.
One thousand unread emails populated on my screen. Not my problem right now. Might be later, of course. But for now, I closed my eyes, drew in a deep breath, and let the feeling of freedom crawl through me. I navigated away from the inbox.
A text dinged on my phone just as a chat box popped up on the screen from a sales manager in Florida. Questions, questions, questions. They likely didn’t get my memo. Sorry, I replied. I’m on sabbatical for eight weeks. Direct all sales questions to José Martinez.
Thirty other unread text messages awaited me as well. I ignored all of them. An email at the top of my inbox grabbed my eye. The subject said: You’re going down, Mav.
Right below was another email from Mallory that said: Burn in Dante’s fiery inferno.
With a grin, I clicked it.
Mav,
Leave like this again, pig-face, and I will fire you instead of asking you to be my Chief Revenue Officer.
Only because you’re my brother-in-law, have a mind like a whiz, and can guarantee my sales force won’t fail am I allowing this little escapade to . . . wherever you are. Figure your life out, then come back to your promotion and the luxury of a higher pay grade.
I’ll give you the company Bentley, but only if you haggle me for it.
And I plan on telling your mother what you’ve done, you hog. You’ll burn if you don’t come back.
—Mallory
All my considerable control was the only thing that kept me from laughing.
Swine references aside, Mallory usually had a great deal of tact. Things must have been sufficiently bad after my unexpected leave of absence from her multimillion-dollar company. The need to take eight weeks off to disappear into family history and uncover some skeletons—mostly my own—surprised even me. Skeletons named I’m tired of corporate culture and you can’t pay me enough to be your CRO.
Thanks to the Frolicking Moose Coffee Shop, I might never have to go back to corporate. Of course, I could just leave. Say sayonara and figure it out. But that felt worse. If I didn’t take her offer, I’d need to move to something else. Something better.
With a gem like the Frolicking Moose, and its regrettably attractive owner, Operation Maverick on the Loose had just commenced.
Still, I owed Mallory a response. With a roll of my neck, I typed my reply.
Hey Mal,
Sorry, can’t hear you from over here. The connection is bad, and you’re cutting out. Send my regards to Baxter, and tell Mom to save me some bacon.
Mav
Mallory could stew on that. My brother Baxter could deal with the fallout of his rage-filled CEO wife. In the meantime, I had planning to do.
Not only did I have emails to actively ignore, a house to tear apart from the inside out, and beautiful mountain vistas to stare at, but now there was a certain coffee shop owner to research, smooth over, and sweet-talk into changing her own life.
All while she changed mine.
3
Bethany
The sun was fading behind the mountains when I trudged upstairs. A watery palette rippled on the reservoir. The Frolicking Moose might be a collapsing shack, but it had killer views of the lake.
I collapsed onto my bed.
My eyes slammed shut, bloodshot and aching. Everything smelled like coffee, and I hated coffee. For several moments, I lay there, breathing in and out. Scenes from the day passed through my mind like ticker tape. Dad narrated in the background.
That espresso machine is killer sometimes.
Steamer is fickle.
Who doesn’t love a good frappuccino on a hot day?
“Me,” I whispered. “I don’t.”
Bad day? Just think it out. Think it through.
A smile twitched at the edges of my lips. Such a Dad thing to say. He said it about everything, whether I was stuck on homework, having a boy issue, or trying to figure out which college to attend.
Think it out. Think it through.
You could take the man out of the Army, but not the Army out of the man.
When my eyes opened, they stared at a picture of Dad and Pappa on the front porch, coffee cups in hand. Pappa saluted me with his usual three-finger greeting as I took the picture. He died the next day, never waking from his usual afternoon nap. That was five years ago.
Groggy with sleep, I pushed off the bed, kicked off my shoes, and stripped out of my clothes. I ditched them in a pile with the rest of the dirty clothes on the floor. A hot shower relaxed my tense muscles, allowing my thoughts to flow more freely.
Following Dad’s advice, I thought it through.
No employee, which meant more twelve-hour days.
Shorter hours meant less money coming in.
Lunch break shopping.
The next credit card statement would be coming through again soon.
Not a single soul that I really spoke to today.
Where had it all gone wrong?
By the time I finished, my postage stamp-sized bathroom had turned to steam. I emerged into my sticky-warm bedroom. It was always hot above the coffee shop. With my wet towel, I yanked my hair into a turban so it could dry and tried not to think about the unnerving quiet.
The sun sank beyond the distant mountains, coating the sky in burnt orange and carnation pink. I pulled the drapes, yanked on shorts and a tank top, and dragged a comb through my hair.
Signs of a messy life littered the room. Before Dad died eight months ago, it would have been immaculate. Dad always did military corners on his bed as soon as he woke up. Now necklaces, dirty clothes, and old magazines cluttered the space.
The one-room bedroom held what was left of my life. My brighter, happier, less lonely existence had been lost in the months since Dad’s untimely heart attack.
To distract myself from my depressing thoughts, I looked outside. My heart did a double take. Was that . . .?
Yes. Yes, it was.
The Viking had just stepped out of the grocery store and was scanning from left to right. He wore a black T-shirt and work khakis now.
Grateful for the anonymity of my upstairs window, I watched him cross the parking lot in the dusk. He was late twenties, possibly early thirties. Deep lines on his forehead meant he was a thinker, but he’d been easygoing despite my total mess this morning.
I spent so long studying him, lost in my thoughts, that I didn’t realize he was staring right back at me. With a gasp, I jerked back and shoved the curtain closed. My heart slammed in my chest.
When I peeked out again, he’d disappeared.
Acting as if I didn’t see the stack of bills on my desk that had arrived that afternoon, I pushed past the mess, tumbled onto the bed with my hair still wet, and fell into a restless sleep.
The wooden door to the Frolicking Moose Coffee Shop groaned open the next morning. With a quick kick, I propped it open to let cool morning air circulate inside. The OPEN sign flickered to life when I hit the switch behind the counter.
Still half-awake, I shuffled across the wooden floor that desperately needed a refinish and over to the drive-through window. A slight breeze whipped past me. The machines hummed a mellow greeting when I turned them on. After a thorough rinse that left espresso grounds bound into my skin, I’d been able to save the espresso machine from yet another espresso-doctor visit. Not to mention the two-hundred-dollar bill that would have choked off my food supply for the next four months.
My laptop sat on a nearby table, but I ignored it. No, there wouldn’t be an email offer waiting for me. Namely, a scholarship to the online real-estate program I had been hoping to interview for yesterday. Getting my license would help me recover what dropping out of college had done to my life.
Really, what had I been thinking? With the Frolicking Moose this hot of a mess, I wasn’t bound to recover from anything soon. And I wouldn’t give this place up.
I yawned, heading for the bathroom and ignoring the voice of panic that constantly rang in my ears. Dishwasher to run. Inventory to tally. Cups to stock. I really should have prepped last night, but I’d been too tired.
Halfway to the bathroom, a little scritch near the back door caught my attention. I paused, turned an ear toward it, and waited. A shuffling sound followed.
Was that . . . a whisper?
Quiet voices, if they were voices at all, came through the door. I reached into my office, grabbing a baseball bat I kept propped against the wall, and slipped toward the back. It was 4:45 a.m. Fifteen minutes before the rush of people commuting an hour to Jackson City. No one should be outside.
I threw open the door.
Two pairs of human eyes stared at me, startled.
I jumped back, screamed, and lifted the bat. Two girls were huddled on the rickety porch, peering up at me in wide-eyed shock. I’d startled them, too. One of them grabbed the other, shoving her away to safety.
“Don’t hurt us!”
Eternities seemed to pass as the voice registered in my brain, then traveled to my heart and almost stopped it. It happened the very moment I recognized the two faces. Those eyes.
Those emerald eyes.
I sucked in a sharp breath, the bat clattering to the ground behind me.
“Lizbeth?” I whispered. “Ellie?”
“Please,” Lizbeth whispered, her coppery hair limp around a pale, thin face. “Please let us inside.”
She was sixteen but looked closer to twelve right then. Her hair hadn’t been washed in what looked like weeks, and smudges gave her sallow skin a dirty tinge. Her shoulders trembled as she stood in front of her little sister—no, our little sister—Ellie.
Ellie, with her raven-black hair, verdant eyes, and wiry frame, looked so much like me despite being only my half-sister. She would be eleven now, although she acted more like an adult.
In a daze, I stumbled back.
“Yes. Right. Of course. Come on.”
Lizbeth whispered something to Ellie, who straightened. I’d never known Ellie to truly fear anything. Rage snapped like fire in her eyes, simmering into a slow-burning coal. Even when I’d seen her last at seven years old, on the second-worst day of my life, she hadn’t been scared. No, she’d been angry.
Not much had changed.
Lizbeth put an arm around Ellie’s shoulders and rushed past me into the shop. There wasn’t far to go. Right next to the back door were the spiral stairs. The hallway that led to my office emptied right into the main coffee shop. Lizbeth shuffled off to the side, eyes darting around. I shut the door firmly behind us. Not until I locked it did Lizbeth relax. Even then, she reminded me of a frightened rabbit poised to skitter off.
“Can we talk?” she whispered.
“Of course.”
“I . . . I didn’t know if you’d . . .”
Her uncertainty stung, but it wasn’t her fault. Lizbeth, Ellie, and I hadn’t seen each other in years. Not since Mama died. Even now seeing them brought flashes of Mama back, because Ellie looked just like her. The three of us hadn’t parted well after the service.
A thousand questions welled up in my mind, but I bit them all back. A healing split on Ellie’s lower lip didn’t need explanation. Nor did the slight discoloration around Lizbeth’s left eye.
Shoving aside my shock, I said, “Are you hungry? Let me close the shop and get you something to eat. Then you can tell me everything.”
Twenty minutes—and half the dry pastries in my display case—later, their appetite had finally slowed.
Ellie grimaced and held her stomach. Lizbeth hadn’t attacked the food with the same zest and seemed to be in less pain. She stared at me over the rim of her green tea. I picked a cheese stick apart without eating it, satisfied by the way it splintered into fragile strings.
My gaze dropped to the bruise around her left eye. There were probably others. Mama had married Jim when I was seven, but Dad kept me away from him. Something undeniably ugly had always festered in his eyes.
It had clearly broken free.
“We’re a good fit, doll,” Mama had said after first introducing me to Jim. “You don’t need love if you can find a good fit.”
The numbers told the real story. Lizbeth was born seven months after their suspiciously quick wedding. It had never been clear whether Mama loved Jim or a roof over her head more. He was sullen and quiet, like a storm cloud. Maybe Mama’s death four years ago had brought the hideous monster out.
“Jim?” I asked quietly.
A gentle breeze blew through the closed shop, stirring Lizbeth’s dirty copper hair. They smelled like forest and sweat and body odor. An angry scratch marred Ellie’s right cheek.
Lizbeth hesitated.
“What happened?”
Lizbeth and Ellie exchanged a glance. As usual, I couldn’t read Ellie.
“Dad got worse after she died,” Lizbeth said, her voice barely a whisper. “Not right away, but slowly. He just . . .”
“Lost it?”
Lizbeth nodded.
A rush of regret slipped through me. I hadn’t been in contact much, but I hadn’t deserted them, either. Christmas presents. Birthday cards. Occasional phone calls. Lizbeth had my number, and we’d text sometimes. That had slowly faded over the last year. Most of our contact had been obligatory.
“How often did he hit you?” I asked.
Lizbeth chewed on her bottom lip with a shrug of one far-too-skinny shoulder.
“Enough.”
I slowly and carefully reached across the table. She let me touch her chin. I tilted her head back so I could see the bruise in the growing light of day.
My heart cracked.
“This has faded. It must have been worse.”
She swallowed, the muscles in her throat working. Ellie sat next to her like a wooden statue, fixated on one point on the wall. I would have given the Frolicking Moose to know her thoughts right then.
“I don’t have it that bad, to be honest,” Lizbeth rushed to say. “I could have handled it, but . . . it’s Ellie I was worried about.”
Ellie’s jaw tightened. Her nostrils flared. She didn’t say a word.
Jim had always been more distant from Ellie. He hardly spoke to Lizbeth, but Ellie frustrated him constantly. Mom had always defended her, which had only isolated Ellie further.
“He was taking it out on you?” I asked Ellie. By some miracle, my voice remained controlled.
Ellie didn’t answer, but her eyes met mine. The steel I saw there didn’t surprise me. I’d seen it in Mama before. After the divorce. Scrounging for a job. When Jim muttered something rude under his breath about her body as s
he walked by.
Steel core.
Tears welled up in Lizbeth’s eyes and rolled down her freckled cheek. “He was going to kill her, Bethie. He lost it one night. Just snapped. So we ran into the woods. He followed. So . . . we just kept going.”
Her voice cracked. The sound of my childhood nickname carved a fissure deeper into my chest. Bethie. Just the way Mama used to say it.
If possible, Ellie tensed even more.
“He was so angry.” Lizbeth’s voice shook. “Throwing bottles. Screaming. I-I got her out of the barn, and we ran. We just ran. Ellie had ditched some clothes and shoes in a haystack a few weeks before, so we grabbed them and left. We never looked back.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“He hasn’t paid the phone bill in months.”
Another twinge of guilt stabbed me. No wonder I hadn’t heard from her in a while. I had wondered. I just, stupidly, hadn’t pursued it. Hadn’t thought to, either, with the Frolicking Moose occupying all my time.
I too easily recalled the way Jim would scowl at Mama when she got dressed up to go out country dancing with us.
“He’s just jealous, Bethie,” Mama would say as she brushed more mascara on. “Thinks I’m going to take you girls dancing and come home pregnant with another man’s child, or something.”
Lizbeth sank lower in the chair, frowning. “He’s not a bad guy. He’s just . . . he’s going through a lot.”
Ellie tensed when a car drove by. When it didn’t stop, she relaxed.
“Home is four hours from here,” I said, ignoring Lizbeth’s sharp tone. “That’s nearly two hundred miles. How did you get here?”
“Ellie is really good outside.” Lizbeth rubbed her thin, pale arms. “We’ve been walking at night and trying to sleep during the day. She’d start fires if we needed it to stay warm at night. We hitchhiked a couple times, but we mostly just walked.”
My eyes widened almost to the point of pain. “You hitchhiked? Do you know how dangerous that is?”