I grinned at him. “You and them are in a club. My only returning customers.”
John Priest clearly did not find his membership in that particular club as exciting as I did. I knew this when his intense look turned into a scowl.
He was scary all the time.
Scowling, he was downright chilling.
Then he added his voice, which was still rumbling, but it was no longer icy. It was vibrating with something I couldn’t read, but what I could read was terrifying.
“A woman was assaulted in one of your cabins while you were here, alone, in this house.”
I decided not to repeat my confirmation and be quiet for once, mostly because it was taking a lot of effort not to pee my pants.
He looked over my head and into my house. Two seconds later, in utter fascination, I watched the scowl fade from his face as the mask of indifference slid over his features and his gaze came back to me.
“I’ll be here three days. Still one hundred?” he asked as if our very recent word exchange had not transpired.
“Yes,” I whispered.
He went for his wallet, gave me four one-hundred-dollar bills, and I gave him his key.
“Have a nice stay,” I said softly as he turned to leave.
He aimed a wintry look at me over his shoulder.
My entire body did a quiver.
He closed the door behind him.
I sucked in a calming breath and didn’t move in order to give the calming part of that breath opportunity to work.
When I was no longer in danger of screaming in terror and fleeing my own property, it hit me that something just happened.
That something was that John Priest let down his guard with me.
And when he did it, if I wasn’t losing my mind, he did it because he was upset at the idea that I might have been in danger.
Nearly two years, half a dozen visits, practically zero conversation, a lot of money exchanging hands, John Priest finally showed a reaction.
And it bore repeating, if I was not mistaken, that reaction was that he was supremely ticked that I had been near danger.
“Whoa,” I whispered to the door and heard Priest’s big Suburban move down the lane.
* * * * *
That evening I sat on my side porch with my feet up on the top railing, staring at the lights from cabin eleven eking through the trees.
Since he’d shown that afternoon, I’d been thinking about it and there was no way around it.
The dude liked me.
First, he kept coming back, and in the beginning the cabins weren’t all that much to write home about.
Now, they needed better insulation and there were ten dozen other things that I wanted to do to improve them. They weren’t luxury. They were definitely nice but they weren’t terribly exciting.
But he kept coming back.
There were lots of places to stay. It wasn’t like the Colorado Mountains were something people avoided.