Chapter One
Zephyr
Of course, it's a very nearly naked city girl disturbing my peace.
She seems to be fighting for her life while also trying to take out our fuzzball of a national treasure with a bottle of perfume.
Also, did I mention she is very nearly naked?
Her underwear, the flimsiest scraps of fabric I've ever seen, does an abysmal job of covering her up.
"It's a girl," Bernie Matter says behind me, shock in his voice as he tries and fails to peer over my shoulder at the spectacle before us. He goes around me instead, and we stand in the doorway of the bedroom of a long-abandoned house, equally stunned.
Bernie was convinced multiple people were being murdered in the old Richards cottage and dragged me from the comfort of my home to check it out.
The last time I got a call about a disturbance was two years ago. Old man Cricket had exceeded his level of drunkenness and fallen into a ditch. He thought he had died and gone to hell, then knocked himself out trying to escape the imaginary flames. I dragged him out. He thought I was God. He never drank again after that.
But this is so fucking different. It's just a girl, the dim light catching the river of her long, dark chocolate-colored hair flyingaround her shoulders as she screams like a banshee, trying to outrun the critter.
What is she doing here in the Richards cottage, in one of the bedrooms, which seems to have clean sheets on what is a new bed and smells like... vanilla and lavender?
The place has been vacant for about a decade now, and not even Candy Creek's teens use it as a make-out spot anymore.
She doesn't look like a squatter; she's too well put together, and there's an air of old money about her that I can sense.
Intermittently, she turns to spray the furry mass with perfume and then also grabs what looks like body oil and tosses it at him. She misses. But for the most part, she is hysterical—dramatically so, but then again, I'm me and I find everyone dramatic.
How that raucous sound is coming out of her mouth, when she's not more than five-foot-two and weighs a handful, is a mystery. But there you go. I sigh deeply, flex my fingers, and get ready to intervene because intervening involves touching her.
"Oh thank God," she cries, spotting me. She leaps off the bed, onto which she had bounded—part of her course for going around the room in circles—and crashes into my arms. "The door was jammed, and I couldn't get out. Then the handle came off—"Don't let the door shut," she shouts.
True, the door had been jammed, and it had taken a few minutes for me to jiggle the handle, turning it back and forth before I was able to get it to open. Too late; in the commotion, the door shuts itself. There's no handle on this side. Great.
And of course, Benjamin Lawrence follows her and seems to want to bite her ass. She shrieks loudly, but she's also feisty andkicks out her legs at the beast. If she would calm down, so would the animal, but she genuinely spooked him now.
"Just wait a minute," I growl under my breath, my arm under her breasts, which are covered in material so light it does nothing to hide the dusky outline of her nipples.
I lift her off the floor and swing her away from Benjamin Lawrence, who thinks she's either playing a game with him or wants to eat him. Buddy, she wants to kill you, I think silently.
Dammit. Her body is so silky; she's slipping from my grasp. Also, she's exceptionally feral now. Between her hysterical sobs of fear, she's not backing down and wants blood.
"Calm down," I breathe into her ear, but the hellfire in my arms doesn't listen. She screams ceaselessly, thrashing and flailing in my hold. I don't understand her. She's petrified of the thing but also wants to fight it with her bare hands.
Also, I don't know what I'm doing, but here I am shielding her near-naked body from Bernie's view. Why the fuck am I doing that? Because the goddamn guy is staring at her with his mouth open, taking in all her glossy bare skin. If her bra served no purpose, her panties were worse—so sheer they did nothing to hide the outline of her most intimate parts.
"Kill it. Kill it. Kill it," she hollers nonstop.
I almost drop her when she makes a grab for my gun—that's what I think she was trying to do—but instead, she grabs my balls. My fucking balls.
"Fuck, Bernie," I roar at him. "Get the damn door and Benjamin out of here." I kick the door handle lying on the floor his way.
Forcefully snapped out of his trance, Bernie drags his eyes away from her and springs into action. He manages to reinsert thehandle and opens the door. The mustelid, for its part, saw a path to safety away from the crazy girl and shot through the doorway, skidding for a moment before it disappeared from sight. I instruct Bernie to follow the creature and make sure it has left the house.
I set her back onto her feet, and she shuts the door again, trapping me inside with her.
"Oh, thank you," she says, out of breath, her body heaving, her cheeks flushed. She bends over, her hands on her bare thighs as she tries to regulate her breathing.
For a second, I have no fucking idea what to do with this woman. But only for a second.
