AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Oh, it pays. It’s just sometimes the money isn’t accepted here on Earth,” Cassidy conceded. “Well, we’ll have to find something for you. How about I show you around town and we can see if anyone’s hiring.”
“That sounds perfect.”
The day had started off bad, but it looked like she was going to make some real progress.
When breakfast came, she even tried the beet pancake. It was delicious.
Chapter Eight
“You are more morose than usual, my friend.”
Hale didn’t look up from his work, simply continued inspecting the water lines. He should have locked the door. Or checked to make sure Van locked the door when he’d slammed out of it. “What do you need, Max?”
It was early afternoon, and he couldn’t get the morning out of his head. He was a roiling ball of emotions he didn’t like to feel, and the last thing he needed was a Max lecture.
He hadn’t talked to Van since the moment he’d closed the door to the passenger side of the SUV. Van had tried to talk but Hale couldn’t handle it. They were in this situation because Van was an asshole. He was a fucking asshole who had ruined the only chance he might have had to have a relationship with a woman he cared about. He was an asshole who was going to leave and then Hale would be alone and none of it mattered. Nothing fucking mattered except the look on her face when she’d told him to leave.
“Well, I wanted to see if you survived your sasquatch encounter.”
That was weird enough to get his attention. “What?”
Max was wearing his usual uniform of jeans and a dark T-shirt, boots on his feet and a hat on his head. He’d probably taken off his coat when he’d let himself into the cabin without even knocking, which was presumptuous of the man. He leaned against the door that led from the primary bedroom into the ensuite. “There is a wide-spread rumor making the rounds that the new girl was attacked early this morning by sasquatches looking for cinnamon rolls, and the only reason she wasn’t carried off was you and Van’s quick thinking. Although there was a lesser rumor that you and Van were involved in ritual combat, with the new girl as the prize for whoever won. Now Nell’s gotten hold of that one, so you should expect a protest.”
There had been absolutely no quick thinking at all. “What?”
“Yeah, you already asked that, buddy,” Max pointed out. “You know how the Bliss rumor mill goes. I take it whatever happened this morning is the reason for that scowl on your face and it involved neither cryptids nor medieval mating rituals. It’s why I decided to come over and check on you. If you—the quietest dude I know—is being talked about, something went wrong.”
“It was nothing like that. Although Van and I did get into an argument. How did that story get around?” He asked the question but the answer was clear. “Gene. He was there. He probably called Stella, who called Callie, and so on and so on.”
If he needed to get the word out quickly, all he had to do was whisper something to one of those three and everyone in town would know in an hour. Of course, they wouldn’t know what he wanted them to know because after the rumor had filtered through a couple of layers, it would evolve into something outrageous.
He loved the Bliss rumor mill right up until the moment he was trapped in it.
“I suspect so.” Max glanced around the bathroom. “Do not let my wife see this. She’ll want a tub like that. I would never get her out.”
The tub truly was a thing of beauty. “It’s not as expensive as you think it would be.”
“Only because you don’t charge as much as you should.”
He shrugged. It was probably true. He could charge two or three times what he did if he was in an urban area. “I charge enough to get by. I don’t need much.”
He never had. Since he’d gone into foster care, everything he’d owned had fit into a backpack. Well, and a tool kit. Lately he’d been thinking about how nice it would be to have a permanent shop where he could make custom furniture. Right now if he needed to do some woodwork, he used Henry Flanders’s shop. It would be nice to have something like that. Henry could work in peace and still be close enough for his wife to call him in for dinner. He would make the short walk to the cabin and be immediately greeted with his baby girl’s smiling face.
Hale was never going to have that.
“Or you don’t know your own value.” Max waved that off. “So things didn’t go well? They looked like they were going well last night.”
