that someplace private, will ya? Some of us are eating.”
The dog ignored her. Typical.
She picked up her phone and checked her social media apps. There were multiple notifications and messages, none of which she had the energy to respond to currently. She’d put that on the list of to-dos for tomorrow.
She skimmed through the most recent posts as she ate, smiling when she saw a picture of Mia kissing Josh’s cheek while he grinned at the camera. Tabitha turned off her music and watched a clip of today’s news. After only a minute, she decided that was too depressing, so she scrolled on until she found a compilation of cute cat videos, laughing at all their cute, crazy antics.
Tabitha glanced at Dexter, who was lying on the floor at her feet. She gave him a gentle nudge with her toe. “How about it, Dex? should we get a cat?”
He looked up at her with disinterest and huffed. She chuckled.
Once she was done with her sandwich, she stopped the cat video and closed all the apps on her phone, plunging the room into silence. She knew Portland wasn’t the noisiest city in the world, but she hadn’t realized until now just how much background sound there’d been while she lived there. In comparison, this suburb was as quiet as a tomb.
Living alone was going to take a lot of getting used to.
Could always invite the neighbor over…
She recalled Logan’s eyes; they were so intensely, impossibly blue. They’d been focused on her so solidly that for an instant she’d almost made the mistake of thinking he couldn’t see anything else. It had been a moment out of one of the many romance books she loved to read.
And it couldn’t have been anything but her imagination.
“Yeah, because I’m sure he’d love the chance to get peed on again,” she muttered, pushing herself to her feet.
She tossed the empty sandwich bag into the trashcan before walking toward the front door. Her muscles were stiff and sore, and her feet ached, crying out in protest of her every little movement. Apparently, her body had simply waited for her to sit for a few minutes to decide it had been utterly wrecked over the last few days.
Tabitha made sure the door was locked and set about turning off the downstairs lights. “I am so ready for that bath.”
Just as she’d flicked off the kitchen light, motion from outside caught her attention. Brows furrowing, Tabitha walked to the window behind the sink and leaned toward it to get a better look.
A tall, dark figure was walking down Logan’s driveway in long strides. Tabitha’s heart fluttered in panic, but she quickly realized that it was Logan himself. The exterior lights of his home were off, leaving his property blanketed in shadow save for the tiny points of reflected light on his windows and truck that only seemed to deepen the surrounding darkness.
She shifted along the window to keep him in view as he reached the end of his driveway. He turned his head from side to side, and half his face was briefly illuminated by light from the lamppost in a neighboring yard. His eyes looked just as dark as the night sky now.
He had something tucked under his arm like he was a linebacker carrying a football, but the object was too large to be a ball, and he held a gun-like item in his other hand.
Tabitha found herself holding her breath as Logan crouched. Between the lighting, the angle, and his back being toward her, she had difficulty telling what he was doing, but he was definitely putting out a weird vibe. If he were behaving this way in his back yard, it totally would have screamed, I’m about to bury a dead body.
He placed the larger of the two objects on the ground, and only then did she realize what it was—his dented, deformed mailbox. He seemed to be examining something around the bent post upon which his mailbox had been seated until Grayson Brothers Movers had introduced themselves to it.
Those movers had really done a number on it. Logan had every right to be furious; based on Tabitha’s experience with the movers, she wouldn’t doubt that they’d been trying to destroy his mailbox just for kicks.
Logan shifted, taking the gun-like object—some sort of power drill, maybe—to the base of the post. She couldn’t tell what he was doing, but there were a few sparks that cast brief, bright flashes and made after images creep