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Nick shivered. “She scares me.”
“That’s kind of her job,” Liam pointed out.
“I thought it was to protect and serve,” Nick mumbled.
“And scare, if needed. Lani will listen to you. She’s a good cop.”
Growing up as Forrest Cooper’s younger sister probably helped too. She’d witnessed his shenanigans from the inside, so to speak.
“I’ll think about it.”
He’d think about it and then not do it.Then Liam sideswiped him with another fucking question.
“Have you decided what you want to do about the International Press? Have you looked at their offer?”
Fucking hell. Liam was not his friend.Liam was worse than his mother. Nick immediately took that thought back. Liam meant well. And fine, he probably knew best. But, fuck, Nick didn’t know if he wanted to go back to freelancing for the IP. He’d opened his laptop just once since his return, seen the email, then immediately shut the lid again. And then made the mistake of mentioning it to his best friend.
“Ignore me,” Liam said, heaving himself up off the couch. “You know what you want to do. But I think you need to stop obsessing about the car you’ve seen and go talk to the cops about it.”
The problem was, Nick didn’t have any idea what he wanted to do—beyond the immediate ideas of creating a forest of penises and randomly hanging out with a kitten.
He was stuck in a sort of stasis he couldn’t get himself out of. He kept telling himself it was because he needed more time, but he wasn’t sure that was true any longer.
And he’d never admit it—not even to Liam—but for the past two months, ever since he’d seen Professor Martin Purdy climbing out of his car, Nick understood what it must feel like to be struck by lightning.
Repeatedly struck by lightning.
From where Nick had been lurking that first day—becauseyes,he had heard Xavier’s voice message, he just hadn’t given a damn—he’d watched the awestruck expression spread across Purdy’s face. He’d literally seen the man fall in love with the property. Without having Xavier notify him, Nick had known at that exact moment who the new owner of the resort was going to be.
If Nick was doing any obsessing these days, it was about Professor Martin Purdy. His silver hair, the should-be-illegal t-shirts he wore, those arms that looked like they’d keep all the monsters away. The creepy SUV was fact. The SUV wasnota figment of his imagination. Seeing Martin Purdy again after twelve years, and now wanting the man to look at Nick the same way he’d looked at the cabins, was a fantasy.
As well as a virtual punch in the stomach that left Nick breathless and pissed off.
“Hey, you coming to the thing tomorrow?” Liam asked.
Nick groaned. He’d put Magnus’s annual community celebration out of his mind.
“Not if I don’t have to.”
NICK - FEAST DAY
Fact: Volcanic lightning occurs mostly within the cloud of ash during an eruption. It’s created by the friction of the ash rushing to the earth’s surface. About 200 accounts of this lightning have been witnessed live. One of these times was when Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980.
Disconnecting the power and setting his chainsaw down, Nick eyed the mushroom he’d been working on. He supposed it also looked a little like a penis, but theoretically, it was a morel. But if he squinted hard at it, the mis-formed carving could possibly be a dick. Martin Purdy had no idea what he’d unleashed.
Nick’s mission to create a forest of penis-mushrooms had officially begun.
He only had enough time to carve one penis so far. One was going to have to be enough for today. If he didn’t make an appearance at the pub soon, Magnus would send Rufus over to fetch him. Most people in town steered clear of him—which Nick appreciated—but Magnus, as well as Liam,pushed, and Nick wasn’t sure what to do about that.
After cleaning up his tools and tucking them away in the lean-to he’d built just for that purpose, Nick ducked inside his cabin.
Nothiscabin. Merely the cabin he was lucky enough to call home for a short period of time. He didn’t know what he was going to do at the end of next summer, but there was no point in thinking about that now.
Kitten meowed at him, bored from being forced to stay inside and out of the way of the chainsaw. Or maybe she had opinions about mushroom carvings that she needed to air.
“You’ll live. I’ll leave some food out. I won’t be gone that long.” A man could hope anyway.
Stripping down and leaving his clothes in a messy pile on the floor, Nick stepped into the postage-stamp-sized bathroom with its one-person shower. The water took a long time to warm up—the hot water heater was probably about to go—but Nick had endured colder showers in worse places.
