Page 10 of Warrior Security
He studied me. “You sure about that? You don’t know me.”
I held up my phone and showed him Hunter’s text. He read it. His eyebrows lifted a fraction: surprise, or something next to it.
“If Hunter Everett vouches for you,” I said, “that means something around here. And it definitely means something to me.”
He looked at the phone. Looked at me. Nodded once, slow and deliberate.
“Okay,” he said. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll do it.”
“Great. Can you start today?”
“I’ve got a truck and a duffel bag. I can start right now.”
“Even better.” I pulled a pen from the tote bag—three tries, becauseblack hole—and wrote the address and my phone number on the back of one of the flyers. I handed it to him. “Follow the main road south. Left at the fork past the old grain elevator. You’ll see the sign. It’s actually next to Resting Warrior. Seeing as you’ve been there and Warrior Security, you’ve probably seen the outline of the buildings in the distance. We share a property line.”
He took the flyer and folded it in half, precise and even. “Sounds good. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
“Take thirty. I need to warn Clarence that he has competition.”
He turned and walked out of Deja Brew with his coffee in one hand and my flyer in the other, and the bell above the door chimed behind him.
I stood in the middle of the coffee shop with my tote bag hanging off one elbow and my own coffee cold against my ribs.
I’d just hired a stranger to live on my property.
I knew his name. I had Hunter’s word. I had the fact that Beckett Sinclair had been walking around town with him like a friend, and Beckett didn’t do that with people he didn’t trust.
That should have been enough. Itwasenough.
But my hands were shaking. Just slightly, in a way that had nothing to do with Logan Stroud and everything to do with the last man I’d trusted to share my space. I pressed them flat against the stack of flyers and held them there until they stopped.
Lena appeared beside me with a fresh coffee and took my cold one. “So. That was interesting.”
“I hired him for some handyman work.”
“I gathered. He’s handsome, by the way. In a sad, quiet, could-probably-carry-a-refrigerator kind of way.”
“I didn’t notice.”
She nudged my shoulder. “Oh, you noticed.”
I smiled at her because it was easier than saying what I was actually feeling. I’d just invited someone into the one place in the world that was mine. The place I’d built from nothing after everything had been taken from me. The place where I was safe.
It was the right decision. Hunter said so. My gut said so. Every instinct I’d spent six years learning to trust said so.
But, still. It was a man in my personal haven.
I shifted my tote bag again, dumped the extra flyers in the recycling bin by the door, and waved to Lena as I walked out into a morning that was just starting to turn gold along the ridgeline. My truck was parked across the street. I climbed in, put both hands on the wheel, and sat there.
My hands had started shaking again.
I held the wheel until they stopped. Then I turned the key and drove toward home.
Chapter 4
Lark
I pulled into the gravel lot ahead of Logan’s truck and killed the engine.
