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My Halloween Keeper

ELI

I have a key to every cabin in this valley. For five years I never used one for anything but a leaking pipe.

Then she arrived, so tired she fell asleep in her car at the turnoff, and I stood in the trees and counted her breaths.

Now I let myself in at midnight. I feed her fire. I sit in her chair in the dark and watch over her while she sleeps.

Nobody has taken care of her in a very long time.

I'm not going to stop.

SLOANE

I'm a nurse. I'm the one who sits up at night with strangers. Nobody sits up with me.

Until him.

I know he's in my cabin. I know he's at the foot of my ladder. I lie up there with my heart pounding, pretending to sleep, and he knows I'm pretending.

He's the most frightening thing that's ever happened to me.

He's also the first man who's ever made me feel safe.

My Halloween Keeper is a scorching standalone instalove with an obsessive older caretaker, a burnt-out heroine who's forgotten how to be looked after, a moonlit corn-maze hunt on Halloween night, and a guaranteed happily ever after. No cliffhangers, no cheating.

Instalove • age gap • obsessive caretaker • stalker hero • he watches her sleep • burnt-out heroine • breeding kink • Halloween night • HEA

1

Sloane

I wake up to a fire I didn't light.

It's roaring. Birch, split small and fed in with care, the stove door left open a crack the way you'd leave it if you wanted to hear it breathe. The loft is warm for the first time since I got here. Grey light in the window. My watch says twenty to three in the afternoon, which means I slept fourteen hours, which I haven't done since nursing school — and which means that for fourteen hours I didn't hear a thing.

I press two fingers to the inside of my wrist without deciding to. One-twelve. Mouth dry, hands cold in spite of the heat. Fourteen years in intensive care and my body still takes its own vitals before it lets me think.

I didn't light that fire. I barely got the thing going last night before I climbed the ladder and passed out in my clothes.

"Hello?"

The fire snaps. Nothing else answers.

I go down the ladder slowly and take the poker off its hook at the bottom and stand in the middle of the room holding it like a bat, feeling ridiculous and not putting it down. The cabin is empty. The door is closed but not locked — I never locked it, I was too tired to remember I had a key — and nothing is gone. My bag is where I dropped it. My phone, which gets no signal here anyway, is on the counter.

But the wine bottle I opened last night and drank a third of in the dark is standing upside down in the drying rack, rinsed clean.

Beside it, on the table, there's a bundle of dried herbs tied with twine, and a folded note in small square capitals.

FOR SLEEP. CHAMOMILE, VALERIAN, LEMON BALM. WATER, NOT WINE.

I read it. Then I put the poker down on the table very gently, because my hands have started to shake, and I don't want to drop it.

Someone stood in this room while I slept above it. Fed my fire. Poured out my wine. Looked at what I'd been using to knock myself unconscious and decided, calmly, that it was wrong, and fixed it.

I know that kind of decision. I make it forty times a shift.