Addison shakes her head. “No. The steps aren’t safe, and the door wouldn’t open.”
“Those steps are a hazard, but they’ll hold. Come on.”
He leads the way to the back of the house, where a rickety old spiral staircase leads them to the attic.
He found this earlier that morning while they were sequestered in the bedroom, and he’d been getting a lay of the land. Took him a good twenty minutes to figure that damn door out, but something that tricky had to be hiding treasure behind it.
Addison tells Emma to wait at the bottom, and he can’t blame her for that. It is spooky as fuck. For all she knows, he’s leading them to some torture chamber. They don’t know yet that it’s the best thing this house has to offer.
He finds the right pressure points on the old door and shoulders it open.
The dark blue paint on the ceiling and all those little stars someone spent forever dotting across it prompt Addison to look up in wonder. She grins like she’s staring at a real night sky, and damn if she ain’t even prettier with a smile on her face.
“Emma, come look,” she calls down.
“It’s something, huh?” he says hopefully when the kid gets that same look at this unexpected reveal. “I dunno. That sorta thing was cool back when I was young. Maybe it’s not anymore.”
“It is.” Addison smiles. “And it’s not at all what I expected to see up here.”
“Not why I brought you up here.” He moves toward the back of the space and kicks a pile of boxes out of the way, shifts a broken mirror, and a crate filled with a weird old doll collection to reveal another door that he wrenches open. “The stash in the basement was a decoy.”
There are cans of food, paper products, and enough dry goods to last a month. More if it were only him, but it’s not anymore.
“Momma, there’s peas!” Emma reaches for a can before her mother pulls her back.
“Ask permission. Be polite.”
“Take the peas. Take whatever you want. We should keep most of it up here, though. Safer.” He pulls a cheap package of ramen soup off a shelf and hands it to Addison. “You won’t find anything saltier than that. Maybe kid number two will let you keep it down.”
She gives him a look he can’t read as she takes the orange packet of pure sodium. Her eyes go all soft, and it makes him uncomfortable. Despite the fact that he’s doing them a kindness, he is also continuously lying by omission. Every time that happens, guilt creeps up his neck and burns.
He blows past them both with a grumbled comment about not taking all day up here. He can’t escape fast enough. Not for the first time, he wishes this house were empty when he got here. At least it’s all temporary.
He told her this place belongs to him, and he meant it, but he left out the part about his residency being short-term. ‘Intending to stay’ is true, just not forever. He’ll ride out the first wave of this disaster, heal from his wounds, and then move on. She found this farm first. It belongs to her now, whether she knows it or not. It doesn’t matter if the actual owner sent him here when those kinda rules don’t apply anymore. The first one to kick in a door gets to keep the structure holding it up.
No, he ain’t staying, but they might, assuming her husband doesn’t come back.
Chapter 3
There’s a little orange cat outside the window, sitting in the rain.
“Think he’s hungry?” Emma asks. “He looks skinny.”
“We don’t have anything for him. There are mice out there. He’ll be okay,” Addison replies.
“Lots of cats around here. I saw a whole colony on my way in,” Wyatt cuts in. “We can give ‘em the leftovers from breakfast tomorrow.”
Emma’s interest doubles. “There are leftovers?”
“Just organ meats and bones, but cats will eat anything.”
“Won’t they choke on the bones?”
“I wouldn’t give it to them if they would.”
Addison hates that her daughter is talking to this stranger, but there isn’t much she can do about it. It would be rude to force Emma to ignore him, and he hasn’t done anything outwardly suspicious yet.
Yet.
