“That’s very kind of her.” I’m aware that I’m standing in my doorway in a jumper with bleach stains on the cuffs, hair scraped back, probably smelling of floor disinfectant. “She didn’t need to do that.”
“Try telling Maggie she doesn’t need to do something.” His smile is crooked, conspiratorial, like we’re already sharing a joke. “I’m Roan.”
He offers his hand. I shift the basket to my hip and take it.
The moment his fingers close around mine, warmth spreads from the point of contact up through my wrist, into my arm, keeps going. Bypasses my chest entirely. Settles somewhere lower. Somewhere I haven’t felt warmth in a long time. It’s not sexual, exactly. It’s pre-sexual. The body’s advance warning that something is about to matter. It settles low in my pussy before my brain can make sense of it.
I let go a fraction too quickly and see something flicker across his face. Surprise, maybe. Or satisfaction.
“Phoebe,” I say. “Thank you for bringing this over. Do you want to come in? I can put the kettle on.”
The invitation is out before I’ve thought it through. I don’t invite strangers into my home. I especially don’t invite large, handsome strangers into my home when I’m alone and still jumpy from finding an apex predator in the woods yesterday morning. But something about Roan’s presence makes the cottage feel less empty rather than more crowded, and the words come naturally, which unsettles me.
“I wouldn’t say no to a cup of tea.” He steps inside, ducking under the low lintel, and looks around the hallway with the casual interest of someone who’s been in this cottage before. “The place looks different. TheBradfords had it stuffed floor to ceiling with George’s fishing magazines.”
“You knew them?”
“Everyone knows everyone in Mistwood. You’ll get used to it.” He follows me into the kitchen, and I’m suddenly conscious of how small the room is. Not because he’s imposing, exactly. He moves with an easy grace that suggests he’s comfortable in tight spaces. But his presence fills the room in a way I can’t quantify. The air feels different. Hotter. I’m suddenly, inconveniently aware of exactly how small the kitchen is.
I fill the kettle and busy myself with mugs, grateful for something to do with my hands. Behind me, I hear him pull out a chair and sit down at the kitchen table, and the domesticity of it catches me off guard. A man is sitting at my table while I make tea. It feels ordinary. It shouldn’t, but it does.
“So how are you finding Mistwood?” he asks. “Settling in all right?”
“It’s quiet.” I pour the water, fishing the teabags out at slightly different times because I’ve forgotten to ask how he takes it. “Which is what I wanted.”
“Quiet’s one word for it. Dull is another.”
I turn and hand him a mug. He takes it with a nod of thanks, and I notice his hands. Large, rough-skinned, with calluses that come from physical work rather thanthe gym. There’s a faint scratch across his right knuckles, pink and nearly healed.
“You find it dull?” I sit down across from him with my own tea, the table between us like a boundary neither of us has acknowledged.
“I find it suffocating. But that’s a different problem.” The honesty of it surprises me, and something in his expression suggests it surprises him too, like he hadn’t meant to say that much. He covers it with a sip of tea. “This is good. Thank you.”
“It’s builder’s tea. Nothing special.”
“Best kind.”
We drink in silence for a moment, and it’s comfortable. First conversations between strangers shouldn’t be this easy. I study him over the rim of my mug, trying to work out what it is about this man that feels so disarming. He’s attractive, obviously. The kind of face that would turn heads in a pub and knows it. But it’s more than that. There’s something about his presence that puts me at ease when I have no reason to be at ease, and I can’t tell if that’s a good sign or a dangerous one.
“Maggie tells me you’re a vet,” he says, as if Maggie hasn’t already told him everything about me down to my shoe size.
“Large and small animal. Though so far it’s been mostly small. Cats, dogs, the occasional rabbit.”
“No wolves?”
The word drops into the kitchen, and I feel my pulse jump. His gaze holds mine too long, and something hot flickers under my skin.
“No wolves,” I say carefully. “There aren’t any in England.”
“So they say.” His tone is light, but his eyes are on me with an attention that doesn’t match the casual conversation.
I set down my mug. “Why do you ask?”
The shift is instant. His posture doesn’t change, his expression doesn’t change, but something behind his eyes closes like a shutter. “No reason. Just making conversation.”
He isn’t. Nobody asks about wolves as small talk, not the day after I treated one. But I don’t know him well enough to push, and something about the way he’s looking at me, those unusual eyes, not quite brown, not quite gold, shifting somewhere between the two in the afternoon light, makes me file the question rather than press it. They remind me of something I can’t reach.
“Have you always lived here?” I ask, steering us onto ground where he seems willing to stand.
