by Chant, Zoe
There was a rustic building up ahead of her, one that somehow looked like a small, friendly barn. An equally friendly-looking yellow neon sign on the side proclaimed: DRINKS. FOOD. MUSIC.
Not a barn. A bar. And there was a car out in front, so they might even still be open even at this time of night. Maybe that one car belonged to someone who could give her a jump—saving her the cost of getting the towing company out here.
Whoever was still at the bar-barn could be a total creep, of course. But whoever was operating the tow truck could be too. Either way, she was taking her chances with someone who just happened to have a job in the vicinity of her needing a helping hand. And—for whatever reason, something about the bar-barn looked trustworthy. It was the kind of ridiculous logic that led to giving your car pep talks, sure, it was the logic of the cursed, but it had gotten her this far. She was just going to go with it.
She slipped her cell back in her pocket and got out of the car.
At the same time, someone strode out of the bar.
It was too dark for her to make out many of the details, but whoever it was was tall and lean. Like a cowboy, specifically chosen to go along with the barn. He was headed straight for his car, so if she was going to catch him, she had to hustle.
She broke into a jog. “Hey! Sorry, I have a problem! Do you think you could help me?”
The cowboy stopped, frozen for a second—almost like it wasn’t typical for yelling women to run at him from the shadows!—and then did something that completely surprised her. He took a couple steps to his left so he’d be standing under one of the lights. It would make it even harder for him to see her, at least until she’d caught up with him, but it made it easier for her to see him.
Anita had honestly never seen anything exactly like it. Sure, she’d known people who empathized with others and thought about how to put them more at ease—she hoped she was one of those people. But she’d never seen anyone do it so quickly in such a weird situation. Here was a guy who thought on his feet really, really well—and what he’d thought about was that she might feel better if she knew exactly who she was running towards.
And he looked good. Even in the crappy yellow sodium-arc lighting. He had the build she had already sort of seen, lean and rangy, and he was dressed like a cowboy, too, in a plaid shirt and worn denim jeans and honest-to-God cowboy boots that she instantly adored. No hat, though, which let her see how his dark hair was shot through with bright silver at his temples.
She slowed down to a walk as she reached him, acutely aware that her own appearance was probably a dead giveaway that she’d spent most of the last twenty-four hours in a tiny car on the world’s cheapest road trip. Her clothes were all rumpled from the seatbelt, her hair was a mess, and she smelled like the sickeningly artificial pina colada air freshener the garage back home had thrown in with her last set of repairs. Just because she’d gotten so used to it that she couldn’t smell it anymore didn’t mean it wasn’t there.
“Hi,” Anita said. “I’m sorry to show up right when you’re probably trying to get home, but my car broke down. Right over there?” She pointed, like there were a ton of other cars around for him to confuse it with. “I don’t even know for sure that the battery is the problem, honestly. It’s kind of on its last legs. But I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind giving me a jump, just in case?”
“Sure, I’d be happy to.” He said it immediately, and then a pained expression crossed his face. “There’s just one problem, though.” He gestured at his own car.
It took Anita a second to realize what she was looking at. The car was slumped at an odd angle, like it was exhausted after a long day. Flat tire. No, actually—not one flat tire but three. They were shredded.
“Oh, wow. Did somebody slash these?”
“Sort of.” The cowboy sounded resigned. When he met her eyes, he added hastily, “It’s not a dangerous area, really. It’s just sort of a weird prank a, um, friend of mine seems to think is funny.”
Some friend. She hoped this joker was prepared to pay for the cowboy’s new tires, otherwise he was a real asshole.
“But I think I can drive on the flats at least long enough to get to your car,” he said, eyeing the distance between the two vehicles. “I’ve heard you can do that for a couple hundred yards without hurting the car too much.”
“I can’t ask you to risk that.”
He shook his head and gave her a smile that instantly made her knees feel weak. “You’re not. I’m offering.” He held out his hand. “I’m Russ, by the way. Russ Wynn.”
Shit. She had been in this situation thousands of times in her life, but it somehow never stopped feeling awkward.
She had two choices here: go for the “I’m germophobic” lie that had saved her before—but also clearly hurt some people’s feelings—or just take the pain.
He was going so far out of his way to help her. She didn’t want to seem like a jerk who wouldn’t shake his hand, and she didn’t want him to feel like she thought he was contaminated. This was the kind of situation her family had always bent over backwards to protect her from—and it was the kind of situation she’d decided was worth the risk.
“Anita Sanchez.” She shook.
The pain was immediate, intense, and blinding, like she was pressing her hand down on a stove burner. The invisible fire lashed up her fingers and palm, coiling around her wrist and sinking rusty teeth into her—
Wait.
It didn’t do any of that.
It didn’t hurt.
A lifetime of experience meant that Anita was used to hiding the agony that stabbed through her whenever someone touched her, but she’d never had to deal with human touch that just felt—normal. Nice.
Russ’s skin was warm against hers; his long fingers were lightly callused. His grip was strong and easy at the same time.
The sensation floored her. She felt her lips part as she had to gasp—partly in surprise, partly just to get more air because she felt like she might faint. Her hand tightened spasmodically around Russ’s, and she pulled him closer to her, stepping in at the same time. She had no idea what she was doing, but any conscious thoughts in her head had been wiped out by the desire to just drown in this, in the only human contact she’d had in years that didn’t hurt.
Her head tilted up, his tilted down, and the parking lot light shone between them, illuminating his face as their eyes met.
He was gorgeous.
And he was looking at her with an expression of horrified alarm, because she was acting like a complete nutcase.
Shit.
3
This couldn’t be happening.
Not to him. Not now. Not like this.
Russ had heard of shifters who had true mates, people they were intrinsically and automatically connected to. Your inner animal gave you a jump-start on the usually messy and often agonizing start-and-stop process of falling in love. Its instincts were so sharply honed—and, if he had to admit the weirdness of it all, magical—that it could identify your one true love at first sight. All you had to do was meet the right person’s eyes, and you knew that this was it.
Anita was it.
Anita was it, and he was going to screw it up. There was no way around it. His hellhound had blazed back to life when it had seen the answering spark in her eyes, and it was now howling in his head, long and somehow heart-rending howls of victory and celebration, a joy purer than anything Russ had ever felt before.
It was happy right now. But it was a hellhound, and it wouldn’t be happy forever. Sooner or later, it would turn on his life and tear it up just like it had torn up his tires. It would turn on Anita, and he would drag her into his country song vortex of bad luck.
Suddenly she was pulling away from him, embarrassed. “Sorry—I’m so, so sorry. I just, um, tripped. My legs are still a little asleep from being in the car for so long. I guess I’m just kind of clumsy right now.”
What? Oh, right: she had sort of dragged the two of them together. T
hat was why they’d finally been able to see each other so well in the first place. He’d barely even registered that while he was being flattened by the wave of IT’S HER, IT’S HER, IT’S HER.
“Oh, no problem,” Russ said quickly. He wasn’t sure why it would ever have been a problem to suddenly have someone like Anita so close to him, but her brain was probably working better than his right now, so he was happy to just go along with it. He struggled to remember what he was doing.
Lick her face, his hellhound suggested. No—do the human thing where you lick each other’s mouths.
That’s not what that is!
That’s what it looks like, his hellhound said defensively. At least do something! Either you do something or I will. The last few words ended in a growl.
You can’t mess things up for her, Russ snarled back. I won’t let you.
He said, “So I’ll... drive over to your car and jump it, then?”
“Sure!” Anita said in a strangely high-pitched chirp. “Great! Thanks!”
He was probably weirding her out, and no wonder: who knew how long he must have been staring at her before she had pulled away from him? He should just jump-start her car and get out of her life, and he should just ignore the way even thinking that felt like a thorn was being slowly pushed through his heart.
He carefully drove his flat-footed car over to Anita’s, and then they started hooking up their batteries. They worked in easy silence—a way easier silence than he would have expected after he had made things so awkward before.
But just because things were easy between them didn’t mean they were easy between their cars, which had apparently decided to not be on speaking terms. Anita did get hers to start up again, but the noise it was making was so ominous that Russ was relieved when she immediately shut it off. She leaned back in her seat, her head thrown back against the headrest; he could see her bottling up her exhaustion and frustration until she could smile at him. She climbed out of the car and leaned back against the closed door.
“Well, at least we tried. I’m sorry I bothered you, but—” She hesitated, like she was trying to figure out how to put something into words, but all that followed was silence.
“Listen,” Russ said, so quickly that he could keep himself from thinking about it, “I don’t think we have a twenty-four hour towing company. You’d have to get somebody in from the nearest big city if you wanted this moved tonight, and it could be kind of pricy. If you can leave it until the morning, you can get someone local to move it, and if you have it towed to George Beeker’s garage, he’ll give you a really good price. He’s a regular of mine.”
“Really?” Her eyes looked positively starry, like he had just offered her a million dollars. “That would be amazing. Waiting until morning won’t be a problem, either. No matter who tows my car, I don’t think I’m going to be leaving in it anytime soon, do you?”
“No,” Russ admitted. He took in the flapping plastic sheeting that was taped over one of the back windows in place of the missing glass and made a mental note to slip George his own contribution to the car’s rehabilitation fund so Anita could get it in the best possible shape before she...
Slipped out of his life forever.
His hellhound growled, but Russ shoved it away as firmly as he’d ever done anything.
Shut up. This isn’t about you, it’s about whether or not it’s a good idea to get her tangled up in my country song life.
“Maybe the tow truck could even give us a two-for-one special,” Anita said.
He had almost forgotten about his own car.
“Maybe.” He took out his phone. “You might not find anything on Lyft or Uber, but we have one night owl who runs her own independent cab service. I have to call her sometimes when someone looks a little too wobbly to get home safe. She can give us a ride, if that sounds good. There’s a little bed and breakfast you can go to. The owners will probably be in bed by now—sorry, it’s just that kind of town—but they’re good people, and they won’t mind you waking them up.”
He thought it sounded like a pretty good plan, so it worried him that Anita’s teeth met her lower lip.
“Or not,” he added. He didn’t want to rush in and make all the decisions for her; he just knew from firsthand experience that Heaven’s Limits, with all its independent operators, could be a hard place to navigate alone when you were new, confused, and exhausted. It didn’t have a lot of things that were immediately familiar.
“No, that sounds great. It’s just... how much is the bed and breakfast? Do you know?”
No, he didn’t, but he could guess that it wasn’t as cheap as she would need it to be. He should have thought of that before, given the fact that she was obviously making do with a car that had seen better days. Elise and Melinda were great, but they mostly catered to well-off tourists who thought of their cute little inn as an attraction in its own right, full of little luxuries like enormous homemade breakfasts and cute little handcrafted soaps. It all might come with luxury rates, too.
But there wasn’t any other place in town, and they were kind of in the middle of nowhere.
On any other night, he could have asked Luann if she might be willing to put Anita up for the night, but he had an all-too-clear mental picture of what he would be interrupting if he tried that now.
On any other night, with anyone else, he would have said she could stay with him. He would have understood if she wasn’t comfortable with it, but he would have made the offer and let her decide.
But he was acutely, painfully aware of what proximity to her was doing to him. Every second he spent with her, it would be harder to make himself do the right thing and let her go. If they spent the night together—even with one of them out on the couch—it was just adding a whole new complication. And.... he wasn’t sure one of them would be on the couch. There was an electricity between them, even aside from his internal mate alarm going off, and he was pretty sure she felt it too. If they slept together, would he really be able to watch her walk away?
But making himself do the right thing was his problem, and even if he wasn’t sure he could rise to the occasion, he was sure that it would be a lousy thing to do to leave Anita without any good options for where to spend the night.
He opened his mouth to offer to pay for her stay at the bed and breakfast, but at the last second, he realized that it might seem like too much; she might not feel comfortable taking him up on it when they barely knew each other. Somehow he didn’t think that it’s okay, you’re actually the love of my life, the talking hellhound in my head told me so would be very reassuring.
It certainly wasn’t very reassuring to him.
So instead, he heard himself saying, “There’s a kind of studio apartment space above the bar. It’s furnished. You could stay there if you wanted.”
Anita looked back over her shoulder, taking in the sight of the two-story building.
“You don’t live there?”
He shook his head. “It wasn’t completely fixed up when I first bought the bar, so I already had a place in town. I had a waitress who used to live there, but she moved away a couple weeks ago. I haven’t gotten around to renting it out to anyone yet. You could crash there if you wanted.”
“Really? That would be amazing.” She grabbed his hand.
For some reason, he had the sense that it wasn’t a completely natural gesture, like maybe she wasn’t usually this ready to touch people. Russ had known plenty of people who felt awkward about things like hugging casual acquaintances, so he thought he understood. But her hand on his felt incredible, so he couldn’t help being glad that she had made the effort.
Her skin was smooth and soft, almost satiny against his, and he was suddenly and acutely aware of the up-close heat of her body.
Yes, his hellhound whispered.
That was the only thing that made him let go, and he tried not to notice the flicker of disappointment in Anita’s eyes.
“You’ll need sheets and towels—”
> “It’s okay,” Anita said quickly. “I’ve got a towel and a sleeping bag. And a pillow.” She gestured at her car, and he noticed a cute, daisy-patterned suitcase resting on the backseat. “I was going to be staying with my cousin. Um, sort of. I was going to sleep on the floor of a house she’s refurbishing. Trust me, an actual bed is a huge step up, even if I’m still in a sleeping bag. You are the absolute best person I could have ever run into tonight.”
Tell her you’re meant to be together! his hellhound insisted.
“Except for a mechanic, I guess,” Russ said. He made himself smile, like the thought of having missed her tonight while she ran into a mechanic instead didn’t make him want to die inside.
“It would have to be a mechanic with a spare apartment,” Anita said with an adorable little shrug that made her ponytail bounce. “Seriously, thank you so much for this. This is going to sound awful, and I’ve definitely never said this to anyone before, but I’m glad your friend slashed your tires.”
“Me too.” He knew he should have tried to distance himself from her, but he couldn’t resist the way that made her smile. “I’ll just show you the apartment.”
BACK WHEN THE ROADHOUSE bar had just been an ordinary barn, the upper-floor apartment had been a hayloft, and to Russ’s amped-up hellhound sense of smell, it still had the pleasant, sunny scent of drying hay. It wasn’t much, but he had done his best to make it cozy. After Suzy Lynn had hit the road, Russ had toyed with the idea of moving into the loft himself. He liked it a lot, and he had to admit that he hoped Anita would like it too.
She did. Her eyes went huge and round as she came inside. “Oh, Russ, it’s fantastic.”
His inner hellhound let out a rumbling sound that was close to a purr. Russ tried his best to banish it to some kind of imaginary doghouse.
She’s just being polite, he told it, even though he hoped that wasn’t true. She needs a place to sleep. A broom closet would probably seem fantastic right now.
But as he watched Anita float around the little apartment, touching the partitions he’d made out of old barn doors and the coffee table that was part wagon wheel, he thought that it was a little more than her just being happy she had a warm, safe place to sleep. She was admiring all the little details he had liked best, like the cheerily painted shutters and the wrought iron headboard.