Unfinished Hero 04 Deacon (2 page)

Number eleven was the cabin up the hill,
almost fully surrounded by woods, removed from the other cabins.
Secluded.

I stood there, staring at him, thinking I
didn’t want him to rent a cabin. I didn’t want him on my property.
He wasn’t a threat and yet, some part of me knew he was. I didn’t
think he’d harm me or Grant. It wasn’t like I got a serial killer
vibe off him (not that there was such a thing).

It was just that his menace came from
something else. The hurt he could deliver would be the kind of hurt
you’d never recover from. The kind of hurt that didn’t cause scars
to the skin but it was still the kind of hurt that would destroy
you.

The problem with that was Grant was not
entirely wrong. We had limited money that wouldn’t stretch forever,
especially considering how much needed to be done to the
cabins.

We needed to rent the units, even in their
state.

Because of this, I forced myself forward and
said, “Cabins are forty bucks a night.”

His eyes came to me, beautiful tawny eyes,
and my stomach twisted.

It twisted because I didn’t want his
attention.

It also twisted because those eyes, if they
were warm, smiling, affectionate, happy, were eyes you could look
into and immediately feel what he wanted to make you feel. All
those things. The warmth. The smile. The love. The joy. Lose
yourself in them. Lose yourself in
him
.

Just like right then, staring into those eyes
with their dark spiky lashes, I felt precisely what he wanted me to
feel.

Cold down to the bone.

It took effort but I forced my lips to tip
up, stopped by the spindly-legged table where we had our
registration book, and said, “We just need you to sign in. Name.
Address. Telephone. License plate number. And I need to run a
credit card and see your ID.”

He stepped in, pulling out his wallet, his
eyes, thankfully, now on the registration book.

But his lips said, “Cash.”

I looked at Grant who was sizing up the man,
something in his snit he didn’t do before.

I was about to explain why we needed a credit
card on file when Grant said, “Cash’ll be fine. How long you
stayin’?”

The man had picked up the pen lying on top of
the registration book and he didn’t look to Grant when he replied,
“Three days. Maybe four.”

“Works for us,” Grant muttered.

I gave him big eyes.

He narrowed his at me, an indication to keep
my mouth shut.

I didn’t want to keep my mouth shut but I
also didn’t want to say something without Grant taking my back,
which he was making clear he wouldn’t do.

I didn’t mind someone paying in cash.

I did mind that he interrupted his sign-in
when he handed Grant his ID, no credit card, and two hundred
dollars. I hadn’t been in the business very long but I wasn’t sure
this said good things. Credit cards were kind of important for a
variety of reasons, including the fact that they verified ID.

He finished signing in and Grant moved to the
locked cabinet where we kept the cabin keys, saying, “I’ll get your
change.”

“No. What you got should cover tax. We’re
good,” the man replied.

That didn’t bode well either. If he stayed
four days, the cost of his cabin was $160 and tax on top of that
wasn’t an extra forty.

Now, who had forty extra dollars to throw
around? More importantly, why would they throw it at a sub-par
cabin in the middle of nowhere?

I couldn’t think on this too long because I
saw Grant pocket the money as he handed the man his key.

It was then I stopped thinking we weren’t
making such a good decision about renting a cabin to this guy and I
was thinking maybe I hadn’t made such a good decision about
Grant.

The man took the key and turned to leave.

This prompted me to take another step to him
and call out, “You need a receipt?”

He looked over his shoulder at me. Right at
me. Right in my eyes. And instantly, I got another shiver.

He didn’t do a top to toe. He didn’t even
give any indication he understood I was a human being, much less a
female one.

This, too, was unnerving.

I couldn’t say I looked like a pageant queen
but I wasn’t entirely hard on the eyes. I had all the right parts
in relatively right proportions in all the right places. I wasn’t
statuesque and striking. I was five foot five. I had black hair. It
was long and thick, though you couldn’t really tell that right then
as I had it up in a messy bun at the top back of my head.

But I’d lucked out and got my mother’s eyes,
unusual warm brown ones that weren’t dark brown or light, but
something in between. They came to a dip on the inner corner and
flared out large with long lashes that, if I used mascara on them,
it would make my eyes look huge. I always thought they were exotic
and beautiful and felt I could say that because they were my mom’s,
not mine, just a gift she’d given me. I also thought that because
all my boyfriends said my eyes were what made them notice me.

That and my lips, which were very full to
near puffy, and they were all mine, not my mom’s. My sister didn’t
even have my lips, something she informed me sucked. She got Mom’s
eyes too. But she didn’t get my lips (or I didn’t get hers, seeing
as she was older than me).

Last, I had a C-cup and it was my experience
most men appreciated a C-cup.

This man didn’t.

No. Instead, he held my eyes and jerked his
head once in a negative, turned, and walked out of the house.

Grant closed the door after him.

I looked to my boyfriend to share that I
wasn’t entirely comfortable with all that had just transpired but I
didn’t get the chance to say a word.

He lifted his hand and jabbed his finger at
me.

“No fuckin’ microwaves, Cassidy. You buy that
shit,
you
install it. Now I’m goin’ to town and gettin’ a
fuckin’ drink.”

That was when I stood on the faded,
threadbare (but still pretty) circular rug in my foyer in my little
house by a river in the Colorado Mountains and watched as my man
did just that. He grabbed the keys to his truck and walked out the
door.

He grabbed his keys and walked out the door
right in the middle of a discussion about our business, which was a
huge part of our lives.

He grabbed his keys and walked out the door
right after a huge, terrifying man checked in to cabin eleven,
leaving me alone on our property with said huge, terrifying man. A
huge, terrifying man that even Grant couldn’t miss was huge and
terrifying.

He still left me.

Alone.

I stood staring at the door, my stomach
sinking because I knew that I’d taken a massive risk, sinking my
savings into these cabins. Cabins the owners were so desperate to
get rid of, the price was right, as in cheap, as in
scary-cheap
. Cabins they were so desperate to leave, they
left every stick of furniture, every rug, every picture on the
wall, in the cabins and the house. Cabins I took on, moving to
another state where I knew no one. Having to fix them up, knowing
how to paint a room but not much else.

But what I was realizing, too late, was the
biggest risk I took, the risk that looked like it would fail, was
the risk I took on Grant.

* * * * *

Late that night, I sat on my side porch with
my feet up on the top railing, a beer in my hand, the sounds of the
river rushing along the rocks to my left, the night air cool on my
skin, my eyes trained through the thick trees to the dim light I
could just barely see coming from cabin eleven.

It was late and Grant wasn’t back.

But scary guy was awake and doing something
in cabin eleven.

I just hoped he wasn’t building a bomb or
planning to overthrow the government, whereupon he would (again
hopefully) fail spectacularly but I would be dragged in front of
the cameras as the hapless cabin owner who stupidly rented him his
headquarters to plan and carry out his dastardly deeds.

On that unhappy thought, one of a bazillion
I’d had since Grant left, I took my feet from the railing and moved
into the house. It was time for bed. Something I’d been getting
into alone far more frequently the last couple of weeks.

I walked through the quiet house.
My
quiet house. An old, narrow, but somehow spacious, two story,
three-bedroom, two and a half bath Victorian farmhouse that was a
couple shades above dilapidated, but fixed up would be sublime.

I did this trying to think of all the ways I
intended to fix it up (eventually). Something that I’d find
exciting. A project I was raring to take on (after the cabins were
done, of course). Something I preferred to think about rather than
Grant being a jerk or the guy in cabin eleven scaring the crap out
of me.

It was dark. I was alone. And try as I might
(and I tried), I couldn’t stop the pain nagging at my heart that
indications were very strong that things weren’t going to work out
with Grant. We’d been together over a year. I was sure about him.
If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t have dragged him to Colorado. I wouldn’t
even have asked. I would have gone it alone. Maybe not then, at
twenty-four years old with no idea what I was doing, but
eventually.

He’d promised to help. He’d said he was all
in.

To make myself feel better (in other words,
to give Grant excuses), I told myself all of this was new. It was a
change. We’d only been there six weeks. We were both still getting
accustomed to our new home, our new business, our new lives, and
even ourselves, as we hadn’t lived together back home.

Maybe Grant turned into a dick when he was in
an unknown situation and as things settled he’d go back to being my
sweet, affectionate, loving, awesome boyfriend Grant.

I walked through the house, turning out
lights, locking up, but when I went to the foyer to turn on the
light to welcome Grant home (whenever he chose to come home) my
eyes caught on the register.

It was new. Mom had bought it for me and gave
it to me five minutes before Grant and I got in our packed cars and
hauled ourselves up to Colorado. Mom giving it to me had made me
laugh and hug her, and only when I was in my car, following Grant
in his truck, did I let myself cry.

I saw from four feet away that we were still
on the first page and there weren’t many names on the lines.

I moved closer and looked at the name on the
last line.

In black, the writing slanted sharply to the
right and spiky, I saw his name.

John Priest.

The name suited him in a Hollywood
everyday-outrageously-handsome-guy-run-amok-with-vengeance
character type of way.

In the real world, it seemed fake.

Which also didn’t bode well.

But Grant had his two hundred dollars to
drink on and be the big man with his new buddies in town. And
hopefully John Priest wasn’t building a bomb or torturing an
innocent in cabin eleven.

Hopefully everything would be all right.

Hopefully everything would settle down, the
work would get done, the fights would stop, Grant would go back to
being Grant, and he and I could start living the dream.

I went to bed with these hopes in mind.

I went to bed but it took me ages to get to
sleep because my mind knew they were just that.

Hopes.

Just hopes.

And even at my age, having grown up on a big
ranch in Oklahoma with a great dad, a wonderful mom, an older
sister who’d never been sneaky or jealous or mean but sweet and
supportive and awesome, a younger brother who acted like an older
one in the protective and loving departments—in other words, I’d
lived a good life—I still knew hopes were that.

Just hopes.

Not reality.

* * * * *

“Toss pillows?”

I looked from my desk to Grant, who was
standing by the huge bags strewn around the study filled with
comforters, sheets, and toss pillows. He was holding what I thought
was a sweet toss pillow in his hand but he was glaring at me.

I didn’t need this.

Not again.

I’d had eight months of it.

I was done.

“It’s time to decorate the units, Grant,” I
told him something he would know if he was talking to me on a
normal basis. Something he was not doing since he wasn’t around a
lot to talk, mostly because he was hunting, fishing, drinking, and
through the winter months had been off skiing.

All on my dime. His money had run out two
months ago.

He had to ask for it. Luckily, I was smart
enough in the nightmare that had become my life to start this
venture with separate accounts.

Asking for money was something that did not
make him happy. It was something that made me less happy. And it
was something that meant we fought and did it ugly. So ugly I shut
him up by giving him money.

So last, it was something I was getting
really sick of doing.

All of it.

The money.

And especially the fighting.

“I’m getting the website together,” I went
on. “We need photos of the cabins to put on there. Photos that look
good. Photos that would make people want to stay here.”

“Cassidy, for fuck’s sake, we can’t afford
toss pillows, seein’ as you just replaced all the water
heaters.”

I turned fully to him but kept my seat,
looking up at him and pulling up all the patience I had (which
admittedly wasn’t much) to explain, “The heater went out in unit
eight. When the inspection was done, the inspector said all the
water heaters were old and working what he guessed was on a wing
and a prayer. We don’t need to have folks in a unit and their water
heaters break down. I know this because we had folks in a unit,
their water heater broke down, and they didn’t like that much. I
get that. I wouldn’t like it much either. In fact, I
don’t
like it much either. It doesn’t say good things. It doesn’t say
referrals or repeat business. It says check out immediately, don’t
look back, and tell your friends about your nightmare experience in
the crappy cabins you found in the Colorado Mountains.”