by Zoe Chant
Shaun had lost two years of Trevor’s life. He’d gone away a toddler and stood before him now as a little boy. He could almost see the shape of the man he was going to grow up to be in the steady gaze and the set of the chin.
Trevor reached up and began to pick his nose.
“I’ll sign,” Shaun said quietly.
“Are we going back to Green Valley now?” Trevor asked in concern, looking from Harriette to Shaun. “I don’t want to miss preschool.”
“You’re going back to Green Valley,” Harriette said dismissively. “I’ll be happy never to set foot in it.”
She watched in triumph as Shaun read over the contract and signed it. He wasn’t a lawyer, but it was a simple document compared to their divorce, and it said what he most wanted to see: full custody. No strings.
Harriette smirked.
“I saw the part about the settlement payment,” Shaun growled. “So there’s no need to feel smug. I’ll have the secretary write you a check on your way out.”
It would have been worth twice as much, to have Trevor back.
“What about preschool?” Trevor asked again. “I don’t want to miss it. On Monday we’re making Easter baskets.”
“I... guess we’re going to Green Valley, then,” Shaun said in bemusement. “We’ll check out the house and get it ready to sell and then we can move back here to the city together.”
Harriette took her copy of the contract. “Whatever you want,” she said dismissively. She gave Trevor a cursory hug. “Don’t muss my hair,” she warned the boy.
Trevor, realizing something was going terribly wrong, began to cry and cling to her. “I don’t want you to go, Mummy. I don’t want to live in the city. I want to go to preschool and stay in Green Valley.”
Harriette peeled him carefully off. “You’re going to live with your daddy now. We talked about this, remember? Be a brave, good boy and say goodbye now.”
Trevor, chin trembling, let her go.
And then she was gone, leaving the best thing she’d ever done behind.
Chapter 2
“Can I get a refill?”
Andrea jotted down notes as fast as she could, cursing the fading pen and the textured napkin as she tried to remember the sequence of events she’d figured out while she was waiting for Stanley to pick from the menu that hadn’t changed in twenty years.
“Order up!”
Damn. What had she figured out for the villain’s motivation? She’d thought of a way to bring the cat back into the plot, hadn’t she? She added a few question marks and a scrawl that might have been “cat” and “motivation for villain?” That would hopefully be enough to jog her memory later.
“Order UP!”
Andrea startled. Old George rarely repeated anything he didn’t have to. Andrea tucked the pen and napkin into her apron, hoping that it would be readable later.
She swept the food from the kitchen window onto her tray, grabbed the water pitcher with her other hand, and nearly delivered the order to the wrong table.
“Patricia is a better waitress,” Marta told her with the candor of someone who was past thinking what people thought of her as she accepted the plate of hash and eggs. “Doesn’t this come with toast?”
“Patricia is a much better waitress,” Andrea agreed with return frankness. “But she rolled her car and sprained her ankle, and Gran doesn’t have much of a hiring pool to draw on, so you’re stuck with me for a few weeks.” She refilled Marta’s water glass without sloshing too much of it onto the laminated tabletop.
Marta laughed with appreciation. “Probably more than a few weeks,” she said speculatively. “With her new billionaire boyfriend, she doesn’t have to wait tables for us commoners.”
“Oh, you know Patricia,” Andrea laughed. “She’s not suited to being a kept woman. She’ll be back at Gran’s Grits before you know it, making me look bad again.”
Marta kindly did not mention that Andrea was doing a perfectly fine job of looking bad without Patricia’s comparison, and Andrea didn’t add that she really needed the paycheck and hoped that Lee would convince Patricia to stay off the ankle as long as possible.
Andrea pretended not to see Devon wave his empty glass at her as she scooted back to the window.
“Marta needs toast,” she reminded the short order cook.
“Waitress is supposed to do that.” George wasn’t actually that old, but he shaved his head and had a short, grizzled beard in salt and pepper, and since no one could remember a time without him around, he wore the nickname well. “Did Stanley ever decide?”
“Oh, crap,” Andrea said, fishing into her apron pocket. She found two crumpled napkins of notes and an order ticket. “The fish lunch special,” she said triumphantly, putting it into George’s hand. “No salt on the fries.”
“Go give Devon a refill, here’s the toast you were supposed to make.” George didn’t sound happy about it, but Andrea gave him her best ‘I’m-an-airhead-please-don’t-fire-me’ smile and cheerfully marched the toast back to Marta’s table.
“What were you drinking?” she asked Devon, taking the glass and straw.
Devon looked at her like she was an idiot. “Iced tea.”
“Oh, right. Soda machine’s down.”
“Maybe write that down on a napkin?” Devon suggested caustically.
Andrea blushed as she stalked away. Since she probably wasn’t going to get a tip anyway, she did a second-rate job stirring in the sugar, knowing it would be a gritty sludge at the bottom. Patricia probably stirred it until it was completely dissolved and remembered the lemon every time.
Andrea picked the last, ugly lemon slice from the bowl and tried to position it to look its most hideous.
When she went to refill glasses of water throughout the small, dated diner, the regulars smiled and shook their heads at her.
“How’s the book going?” Stanley asked her as she put his fish down in front of him.
“Oh, you know. I’ve got some ideas. Working away at it.” Andrea didn’t want to admit that the book was still mostly napkins and notes.
Somehow, when she started writing, tired from a day working at the preschool and an afternoon waiting tables, it didn’t seem as captivating as she imagined it would be while she was otherwise busy. And at home, there were dirty dishes waiting for her to wash, and laundry in a heap by the washer, and spring was starting to melt the snow and expose all the things in her yard that needed to be picked up.
Somehow, she managed to instead spend an hour writing instructions to her aunt about unclogging her toilet, with pictures and diagrams, instead of adding actual chapters.
And there was the sky, begging for flight.
“Well, you just remember us, when you’re a famous writer,” Stanley told her warmly. “You remember Green Valley and all of us who cheered you on.”
Andrea smiled and patted his hand, to be rewarded with a largely-toothless smile. “I could never forget,” she promised.
Chapter 3
Pulling up in front of the house in Green Valley, Shaun vowed to sell the place at whatever loss it took as soon as he could settle the back payments with the bank.
They arrived too late for Trevor to get to preschool, which had resulted in broken-hearted weeping that cut Shaun to the bone, leaving him ill-disposed to like anything about the sleepy little town.
It was an old building, like almost everything in Green Valley, with nothing particularly graceful to recommend it. It was grand, compared to the other, smaller houses, but needed a coat of paint and new windows. The yard might have been nice once, but was badly overgrown, and the swing set in one corner was rusty and looked like a good source of tetanus.
The house was offset on the property, so close to the neighboring house that you could undoubtedly see straight into their rooms.
Indeed, the whole neighborhood lacked anything resembling privacy. The narrow, waist-high hedge between these two was as much of as any of them had; most of the lawns simply ran into
each other, occasionally with a line of decorative rocks or a flowerbed to designate the boundary. The proverbial white picket fence that ran along the sidewalk was more of a statement than a notion of separation.
Several of the neighbors were out, surreptitiously eyeing him as they planted flowers and raked up last year’s leaves.
No space to run, his tiger told him sadly.
“We’re probably not going to stay long,” Shaun warned Trevor.
Trevor had exhausted himself crying on the long trip once Shaun had told him they wouldn’t be able to make it to preschool, and he only shrugged miserably now.
“We’ll stay the night, maybe two,” Shaun tried to explain gently. “Then we’ll pack up all of your stuff and go back to Minneapolis.”
Trevor looked at him with big, broken eyes and didn’t ask about preschool.
“We’ll get you signed up for a great school there,” Shaun said anyway. “With lots of kids your age that you can make friends with.”
Trevor went back to inspecting his feet and Shaun pulled out the house key and tried to unlock the deadbolt.
The key wouldn’t turn.
He pulled it out and checked the tag. This was the right key.
It went easily back into the lock, but no amount of wiggling it seemed to budge the bolt.
Then Trevor turned at the sound of a creak and began to tug at his hand. “Miss Andrea! Daddy, that’s Miss Andrea! She lives next door!”
Shaun looked down at Trevor first. It was as animated as he’d been since Harriette had first dragged him into his office, and it gave Shaun the first ray of hope since that moment.
He turned to identify the source of Trevor’s excitement, and found a woman standing at the gate next door.
She had long dark hair that made her look even shorter than she actually was, and warm caramel skin. She was wearing a dark tank top that showed off a glorious amount of cleavage, and a lightweight sweater was wrapped around her waist.
Most arresting were her eyes, golden and fierce even across what passed as a lawn at this house.
Inside him, Shaun’s tiger gave a primal growl and Shaun was shocked by the unexpected, instant desire that coursed through him.
He had heard of the mate instinct; it was sometimes romanticized as love at first sight, and Shaun had always dismissed it as a fairy tale out of hand.
Now here he was, feeling helplessly swept up in his tiger’s lust and longing.
This is not convenient timing, he told his tiger. He was keenly aware of the public scrutiny along the block, and of Trevor, who was trying to drag him over to the hedge as Miss Andrea walked towards them in response to his call.
Then they were standing just across the hedge from each other and Shaun was glad of the shrubbery between them, because otherwise he might be compelled to act on his tiger’s strong impulses.
Up close, she was even more gorgeous, and she smelled like wind and just faintly of sweat, which made his tiger roll in ecstasy.
“Hi Miss Andrea,” Trevor said, bouncing on his toes.
“Hi, Trevor,” she answered kindly, and having her look at the little boy for a moment gave Shaun a moment to try to collect himself. “We missed you at preschool today.”
“I missed making Easter baskets,” Trevor said mournfully.
“Don’t worry,” Andrea said cheerfully. “I made an extra one just for you.”
At Trevor’s slow, grateful smile, Shaun might have kissed her even without his tiger’s instincts trying to drive him into inappropriate actions.
Then she returned her gaze to Shaun and extended a hand. “I’m Andrea. I’m the assistant at Hands and Hearts preschool. You must be Trevor’s dad.”
Shaun gave her the swiftest handshake he could manage; the touch of her fingers was absolutely electric, and he wanted to simply cling to her in abject desperation. “Shaun,” he finally remembered to say, once he’d taken his hand back. “Shaun Powell.”
“Shaun,” she repeated, smiling at him. Then she blinked and shook her head as if she were waking from a dream. “So, Shaun. Are you moving in or out?”
Trevor looked up at him sadly.
“In,” Shaun said promptly. “We’re staying through the end of the semester.”
He wasn’t sure whose smile was most rewarding. He held up the deadbolt key. “If I can manage to get into the house.”
Chapter 4
It was swelteringly hot, considering how early it was, the midwestern sun beating down from a cloudless sky. The snow from the week before had melted entirely.
Andrea peeled off her sweater as she walked. The tank top underneath wasn’t preschool appropriate, but it was a lot more comfortable. She tied the sweater around her waist, tugging it as tightly as she could because she knew it was only the matter of a block of walking before it would slither itself loose again.
Fortunately, the preschool was only a few blocks from her house.
Everything in Green Valley was a few blocks from her house.
Andrea squinted into the sky. Heat this early meant the summer was probably going to be brutal.
She was thinking about applying for work at one of the local farms for the summer, but the idea had about as much appeal as asking for more hours at Gran’s Grits. Work at the preschool was her favorite job, by far, of all the opportunities before her, but it barely paid her utilities and insurance during the winter, and there was only another month before it broke off for summer.
If she could just turn her writing into something that could cover those summer months...
Andrea sighed. She loved the idea of being a writer, but if she had to be brutally honest with herself, she knew that she was failing at it, like she’d failed at her dog grooming business, and at landscaping architecture school, and even at being a cashier at the local grocery store.
Fly...
If only it were that easy.
Fly...
When she was feeling most insecure was when she most craved the peace and simplicity of the sky, and the wind under her wings as a hawk. But half of Green Valley was still blissfully ignorant of the shifters that lived among them.
So she trudged along on her own short human legs, getting damp with perspiration at the waist and cleavage, constantly tugging on her sweater to keep it at her waist.
As she finally turned into her front gate, she looked next door to find a car parked in front of Harriette’s house.
It wasn’t Harriette’s ridiculous purple car, but it was an equally ostentatious luxury vehicle.
Andrea’s heart sank. She was hoping that Harriette’s flurry of packing and hasty retreat had been an end to her undesirable neighbor. She would miss having Trevor next door to slip cookies to, but not his aggravating mother.
Now she must be back with some new guy – some guy with lots of money, just the way Harriette liked them.
But there was no sign of Harriette, nor any sound of her strident voice. Trevor was standing dejectedly with a man in an understated suit who was trying to unlock the front door.
The squeak of her gate got Trevor’s attention. His face brightened and he tugged at the man’s hand. “Miss Andrea! Daddy, that’s Miss Andrea! She lives next door!”
After gazing down at Trevor in surprise, the man turned with a scowl and Andrea sucked in her breath as his steel gray eyes met hers from across the yard and her world fell away.
Somehow, she walked in a daze to meet him as Trevor dragged him to the short hedge that separated their property.
Up close, he was even more arresting than he’d been standing on Harriette’s – on his – front step. He filled up his suit deliciously, all broad shoulders and narrow hips and other features that Andrea was already trying to write descriptions for in her head.
He was straight out of a bedside romance novel, with his perfect jaw and neatly trimmed dark blond hair. His eyes were gray and tragic, and when he touched her hand in a perfectly cursory handshake, Andrea felt like she might actually faint.
; “There’s a trick to the lock,” she was able to say, when he confessed his inability to unlock the house. She sounded shrill to her own ears, nervous and juvenile. “I’ll show you.”
For a moment, the hedge confused her, and Andrea had to draw a breath and decide whether to hop over it or walk the long way around back through her gate.
Decorum, she decided, and backtracked around on the sidewalk, hitching her sweater tighter.
Trevor, bouncing in excitement, met her at the property corner and gave her an eager hug. Andrea knelt to give him a full embrace. Trevor was one of the students who drank up affection like a thirsty sponge, constantly seeking approval.
Besides, hugging him gave her a moment to try to collect her thoughts before she stood back up and faced Shaun.
Her hawk was singing non-stop in her head the entire time. Ours, ours, ours, ours.
I can’t think when you do that, Andrea protested.
We don’t need to think. Just knock him down and get him out of those clothes.
There is a 5 year old right here. To say nothing of the gossipy neighbors who were avidly watching all along the block.
Her hawk settled with a flip of wings, but Andrea knew that she wouldn’t be put off for long.
What is wrong with you? Andrea asked silently as she accepted the key from Shaun, with the barest tingling brush of his fingers. “It’s a little sticky, but you also have to pull the key back out the tiniest bit to get it to turn, so don’t just force it.”
He’s ours, he’s ours, he’s our mate! her hawk trilled merrily.
In the middle of demonstrating the trick, keenly aware of how close Shaun was standing in order to observe her, Andrea suddenly froze. Our mate? she echoed incredulously.
Ours, ours, ours, her hawk chortled.
Andrea made herself finish turning the key and the deadbolt shot back. “Nothing to it,” she said weakly. “I babysit Trevor all the time, so I know all the tricks.”
“Thank you,” Shaun said, and even his voice was perfect, musically gruff. It sent little shivers down Andrea’s spine.