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“No.” I stood up and headed to put away my cleaning things. “I think she plans to spend every day up until her last taking orders and bantering with those old guys who come in here every morning. They’re going to be disappointed to see me today.”
He snorted. “You ever peek in a mirror? You may not know all the old jokes, but you give them something to look at.”
Since not one of those guys was a day younger than Marva, and none of them had ever said anything rude, I didn’t want to take offense. “They think of me as a granddaughter.”
“Okay. If you say so.” He turned back into the kitchen. “I gotta get the grill going if I’m going to feed those old goats.”
“I need to count in the register.”
The morning started off strong, with the usual suspects as well as one of the tourist busses that guaranteed a rush. Although I was acting as hostess today, I helped the servers when I could. Marva was sharing mind space with the mountain lion I hallucinated earlier. I worried about my old friend’s health as well as her ability to continue to run her business. And I worried about my delusion. I’d been thinking of my mother’s disappearance, and that should have been enough, but to start thinking I saw lions was downright odd.
When I worked afternoons, I never felt like this.
But if I’d come in later, I wouldn’t have seen him.
I was helping clear some tables in anticipation of the next wave when he walked in. Tall, lanky, with sandy hair, a thick five-o’clock shadow, and intense blue eyes, his entrance distracted me from at least a percentage of the angst I’d buried myself in.
Chapter Four
Tom
The town was dark and still at this time of the morning, so I took a chance and let my cat out to play. Emmalise’s cottage was only a few blocks away from my house, making me wonder even more how we’d never run into one another. I’d actually driven, walked, and prowled in lion form past it multiple times and never seen the beauty who dwelled within. If I had, I’d have remembered.
But this time, I didn’t just pass by—I crept up her driveway, low, almost on my belly. No lights were on inside the little building, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t at home. Or that someone else wasn’t there. According to the reports, she lived alone, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t seeing someone or didn’t have a friend overnight. And seeing a full-sized mountain lion outside the window could startle a person who was just getting out of bed. In a rural area like this, it could also lead to shotgun fire. The folks of Duke’s Summit were fiercely independent and determined not to let crime happen. They took every unsolved crime personally, also, and the disappearance of Emmalise’s mother right after I left for the military had been quite a big deal apparently.
Now that I was confronted with it, I remembered seeing some faded banners when I came home the next summer about a missing woman, but they looked so old that I didn’t really put much thought into it. Also, I was probably a little self-absorbed at that age.
If lights were on inside the house, anyone inside probably couldn’t see me well, but dark to dark made me more easily spotted, so I exercised great care as I ducked behind the bushes at the front of the house.
Rising on hind legs, I peeked inside the window but saw no signs of any movement, just a dim living room with a love seat and chair and other furnishings. Carefully dropping into the leaves below, wincing at the crunch under my feet, I then started for the next window, freezing when headlights swept across the front of the house. Still halfway behind the bushes, I hoped that whoever was turning into their driveway next door hadn’t been looking carefully, or they’d be either getting out a gun or calling animal control right now.
A man wearing jeans and a button-up work shirt emerged from the pickup truck that parked less than twenty feet from me. He grabbed a Carhartt canvas lunch box from the seat next to him, leaving the hard hat behind, and trudged toward his front door in heavy work boots. He probably worked at one of the mines that had reopened when the price of silver went up a few years ago. It hadn’t held, but rumor had it they found enough to make it worth the trouble. And judging from the fact they were running twenty-four-hour shifts, it seemed to be true.
I couldn’t think of many other jobs that would have a man getting home at this time, dressed like that, around here. And I was probably lucky he was too tired to notice me—if that was the case. He hadn’t cast as much as a single look in my direction, but that could have been a ruse. As in: don’t attract the huge terrifying claws and teeth. Just let animal control or fish and game handle it. With tranquilizer darts.
My cousin had that experience when he came to visit from Peru. We had to break him out of a cage when the driver “relocating the mountain lion to a better habitat” stopped at the McDonald’s drive-thru in town. It created quite a scene and led to a stern talking-to fromAbuelo. Raul was almost sent home, but he promised not to do it again, to only shift when he was with one of us way outside of town, and he got to stay.
When he did leave, it was with a suitcase filled with the edition of the local paper featuring his lion on the front headlines. I asked what he thought customs would say about it, and he laughed and said he would explain it was a big event in the town he visited and everyone gave him copies as a keepsake.
But, since I had no desire to make the front page of the Duke’s Summit Times, I waited until the door to the house next door shut behind the neighbor before I continued my prowl around the cottage. If anyone was home, I saw no sign of it, and no car was parked in the garage in the back. Not that one would fit, since its open door revealed what looked like a houseful of worn furnishings and boxes.
I’d spent enough time here; if I wanted to get to the diner before daylight, I would need to move. The night shift getting off reminded me how soon the day shifts would be starting up. As I made my way the half mile or so between here and the Off-Main, I kept to the shadows and ducked behind parked cars when I saw lights come on in houses. Our town rose early, which was most likely the reason the Off-Main opened at six. The tourist trade would come much later. By the time I crossed the street at the corner directly before the diner, the sky was brightening at the horizon. Lights were on in my destination, but only toward the back of the dining room, and that was likely how I missed seeing the woman in the booth right inside the window, wiping something with a rag and studying it, as if removing whatever spot she was cleaning was critical to the future of the planet.
I was right in front of the window when I saw her, and damned if she hadn’t seen me first. Her eyes were wide, the color less vivid in my cat’s vision. In the instant before she jerked back, her lips parted, forming an O, and my lion set up a purr so loud, I feared she could hear it.
Before she could return to get a better look or call someone else to come and see the big kitty, I darted into the shadows beside the building and from there, it was only two big bounds into the hedge separating the diner from the bicycle shop next door.
Most humans would, as I’d worried about at her home, be calling for help, but not my mate. No, she was not my mate.
Mate. Mate. Mate.The purring had become a mantra, one I could not allow to influence me. But when this was all over, when my lion realized we were not going to den up happily ever after with this stunning human, he would make me pay.
For now, I needed to get home and change before the sun revealed me and someone gathered a posse.
But I’d be back and watch her from a distance. Not making contact until I had time to read every word of the dossier and make sure I was following my assignment to the letter. I wanted this job. Although we had generational wealth, we were not a family to lie around and be lazy. Abuelo insisted we all serve in some way, contributing to a better world for human and shifter. And anyone else who might need us because I’d learned recently how many other types of people there were out there. Abuelo had been a mountain guide, once upon a time. My tia was a teacher. Social workers, doctors, nurses, any job where you could help people was blessed by my family. One cousin wanted to be a philanthropist—in his case, that meant he played video games all day and donated to charity every so often—but while he was perfectly free to give money away, my tia, his mother, boxed his ears and told him to get a job. By being of service, we justified our presence on this rock so far from the sun.
I parked down the block a bit and across the street in a lot half filled by the cars employees of businesses in a small office building. From here, I had a clear view of the diner and the people inside.
Customers arrived, starting with a group of old men who bustled in and settled down in a booth way in the back. They ate breakfast and lingered over coffee while other diners came in and ate and left. I had the impression the oldsters were regulars, and that’s why nobody asked them to free up the table.
