“I’m having dinner at the main house. But thank you.”
“Oh. Right. I guess you’re not really a guest. I mean, you are. But it’s different.”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s different.”
He opened the door and stepped inside the room, and as soon as that barrier was lifted, she scampered off, as if she was uncomfortable at the idea of even being in the doorway of the open bedroom with him.
She definitely felt what he did.
And as he freshened up for dinner, he told himself:She’s too young for you. She’s clearly a little bit skittish. She blushes.
What man had the time for a prudish fling? There was no point to it.
But still, he couldn’t help the fact that he was intrigued by her. And maybe, just maybe, his brain was putting the sexiness of the innkeeper in front of the weirdness of seeing cousins he hadn’t seen for more than a decade.
A lot had happened in that time. A hell of a lot.
The last time he’d seen his cousin Connor, he’d been with his first wife, Jessie.
She had been a nice woman. Pretty. And very in love. In fact, he could remember that at the time it had made him a bit uncomfortable. Coming off his own loss, only a couple of years earlier. And since then... Since then Connor had lost Jessie.
And, had gotten remarried.
It did strange things to his chest.
He put on a fresh shirt, stuck his hat back on his head and headed back down the stairs.
By then the entryway had cleared, and people were off chatting in the living room. Violet was giving a history on the furniture in the place.
He didn’t really get the appeal of the bed-and-breakfast. But then, he didn’t get the appeal of being on top of people like this. Or chatting up strangers. Unless there was potential sex involved. He just wasn’t all that into making friends with random people. Or making friends at all. But people did seem to enjoy it.
And you’re stuck here for the next few weeks.
Lucky him.
Except, his eyes went straight back to Violet.
And in that regard: lucky him indeed.
His eyes met hers as he walked past, and he gave her a nod, went out the front door. Then he walked down the stairs and crossed the driveway, getting back into his truck. He had directions to the main house, and he knew that it wasn’t a very long drive. Just a couple of minutes. The ranch itself was beautiful, very different to Garrett’s Watch. It was so much colder here, just a couple of hours northwest, the dampness from the sea seeming to invade everything. And it was green. Aggressive green. Ferns on the floor of the forest, and moss covering the bark of the trees. The rocks.
It was a serene sort of place. Wolf had an appreciation for moments of serenity. In theory. There were many available to a man who wanted to find them at Four Corners. In spite of the fact that it was heavily populated by family and ranch hands, it was so big it afforded big skies and big quiet to anyone who might need it. But then, maybe he didn’t find as much tranquility in nature as he might because he also knew that in nature lurked danger. Regardless of the beauty. You could never forget that the earth could easily swallow you whole on a whim if it saw fit. It rightly could.
He got out of the truck after parking in front of the main house, a log cabin that had a much more rustic sort of appeal than the bed-and-breakfast tucked back into the other corner of the property. This was the kind of thing he was used to.
His own cabin at Garrett’s Watch was small, just right for one man, and fairly rustic. His brother had gone and updated the main house a bit ago, and he had only ever been able to figure that Sawyer had done that in part to spite their old man, who had been resistant to any change, especially those that could benefit him.
Sawyer was grounded, and a fairly levelheaded sort of guy. But his anger was there, and you definitely didn’t want to provoke it. There was a saying, that one should beware the fury of a patient man.
Wolf was not a patient man.
People should beware of his fury all the same.
After Wolf got out of the truck, the front door opened and two little towheaded children rushed outside screeching, “Wolf! Wolf! Wolf! Is that really your name?” The questions tumbled out of their mouths so quickly, that he couldn’t keep track of who said what. But hell, he wasn’t going to be able to keep the moppets straight, anyway. “That’s not real,” one of them said.
“It’s real,” Wolf said.
He looked behind them, at a slim blonde woman standing in the doorway. She grinned. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Sadie. It’s so good to have you.”