Open Your Heart (Kings Grove #4) - Delancey Stewart Page 0,5

you know where I am.”

I watched him walk away, his tall lean form sliding through the growing shadows, moving like the predator he’d just warned me about. A chill raced up my spine and I wasn’t sure if it was thanks to thoughts of mountain lions, or because of him.

My huge suitcase left a rutted trail through the dust leading up to the front of the massive house, and it was no easy task hauling it up the five wide steps to the door. That’s what you get when you pack your entire life into a single Samsonite, I guessed.

The massive wooden door swung in to reveal an expansive front room that opened into a shining kitchen in the back, with a set of stairs off to one side next to a little mudroom with coat hooks and cubbies for boots. I took off my shoes, slipped them into a cubby, and stepped into the space. In no way did this place say “cabin.” More like “luxury home” or “too rich for my blood.”

“This is not the Kings Grove I remember,” I said aloud as I wandered between plush couches, past a wall-mounted television and into the gleaming kitchen. The window looked down the slope beyond, where I knew a little creek trickled in the summer time—or it had when I’d been a little kid, when California hadn’t been in the middle of a drought. My dad had told me about the fire up here a couple years ago, and I guessed there was a chance that creek had been dry for a while, though it sounded like there’d been some snow this past winter.

“Why do I even care?” I asked myself. It wasn’t like I’d lived here long enough to want to revisit all my old haunts. I’d been too little when I left to even keep in touch with the few friends I’d had as a kid. I yawned, leaning over the sink until I could see another structure just off to the right. Cameron’s little house. From this window I could see it sitting there quietly in the gathering darkness, little windows gleaming, and I thought about the mysterious dark man inside.

Nope. Not going to do that.

I turned from the window and circled through the bathroom and rooms on this level, then made my way upstairs, leaving the heavy suitcase at the bottom of the stairs. The master bedroom was huge, with a beamed ceiling that formed an A over the bed and a bathroom as big as my New York City apartment. Standing in its center, I closed my eyes, letting the space move around me, doing my best to be curious but not to judge—my yoga teacher would have been so proud.

“Nope,” I said aloud. “Too damned big.”

I padded into one of the smaller bedrooms, comforted by the nearness of the walls beside the bed, the coziness of the space. If I was here alone, I didn’t need an ensuite bathroom, and I was much more at home in a smaller space. This would be my room. I opened dresser drawers and then spent the next fifteen minutes going up and down the stairs, taking my clothes one load at a time instead of trying to manhandle the huge suitcase up the stairs.

At the bottom of the stairs again, I picked up the now-empty luggage and toted it up to the master bedroom, dropping it into an empty spot next to the door before sliding a couple old books from the front pocket. I took these to my bedroom and put them on the nightstand. Most adults probably didn’t lug around copies of The Giving Tree and Where the Wild Things Are, but I’d never been like most people.

Downstairs, the darkness coalescing outside had begun to press itself against the big windows, and I shivered in my solitude. It had been years—maybe my whole life—since I’d been quite this alone. No city noise, no other people shuffling around inside the house. I’d done a good job for a long time of filling the spaces around me, keeping the silence at bay. But after everything that had happened, I was back as I’d begun. Just me, alone in a huge house on the top of a mountain. Just me, starting over once again.

I dug though the cabinets in the kitchen, but didn’t find any tea bags, so my idea to settle in with a nice cup of tea dissolved almost as soon as I’d had it.