it was Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” only with bears. “It’s gonna be okay.”
No sooner had she run out of platitudes than she heard the rear porch door twang (the hinges were old and stretchy), followed by the sound of wood splintering, followed by the slam of the door against the wall as two kids or a politician or a pizza delivery person or a bear came in without an invitation.
Chapter 3
There was a swinging door between the kitchen and living room, and Lila blessed it. Which was a switch from earlier, when she’d been carrying boxes and mistimed the swing (“Ow, God damn it!”).
But now the contrary thing concealed her for a crucial few seconds, and when whoever-it-was pushed at the door and came through, she had the barrel up behind his ear before he was all the way in.
“Jesus, you Domino’s guys are persistent,” she hissed. “I told you. I. Don’t. Want. Any. Pizza. Jackass.”
“Please. If I was delivering pizza, it’d be Green Mill.”
That startled a laugh out of her. She had to give it to him, he didn’t sound rattled in the slightest. And he was distractingly good-looking. Not every guy could pull off the classic Caesar haircut. Or had eyes the color of forest moss.
Forest moss? Time to get laid. Not by this guy, though. Most likely.
His looks made up for his clothes: He was wearing scruffy slacks, a shirt he hadn’t bothered buttoning up all the way (which revealed the shoulders and abs of a swimmer, which was even more irritating), he didn’t have a coat, and…was that blood on his shirt cuff?
“Trespassing,” she prompted. “That’s you. That’s what you’re doing for some ungodly reason. Right now. In my house.” She started to walk him back into the kitchen. Once he’d kicked the door in, she hadn’t heard anything but footsteps, so hopefully her half-assed plan was going to work. She wasn’t afraid of him—not exactly—but there was the cub to think about. And he had just broken in. But she had no sense of real danger from him, and her gut instinct about people had yet to let her down. Still, precautions had to be taken. “Also, you noticed the gun, right?”
“The one you’re aggressively cleaning my ear with?” He tried to move his head away; she followed the movement with the barrel. “Yeah, that didn’t escape my attention.”
“You want to see aggressive cleaning? Break in again.”
He rolled those green, green eyes at her and scoffed. Scoffed. She should have been irked but had to give it to him: The guy had some plums. “Aw, c’mon. This is America. This isn’t the first time I’ve had a gun in my face this month. Which is a huge problem, by the way. How many hoops did you even have to jump through to get that thing? Not very many, I bet.”
Seriously with this? “Yeah, let’s leave your personal politics out of it, okay?”
“Plus, it’s not loaded—Jesus!”
She used that moment of inattention to drive her toes—clad in her second-favorite pair of steel-toed shoes—straight and hard into his ankle and, when he reflexively bent, Lila dropped the (empty) .380 and shoved him with both hands, hard. He toppled backward through the open basement door
(shouldn’t have been in such a rush to get into the living room, pal)
and she slammed it shut. And shot the bolt. It wouldn’t hold him for long, which was fine.
She rushed into the living room, intent on her phone, only to pull up short when she realized
“God damn it!”
the girl–cub was gone.
Chapter 4
His own goddamned fault. He’d taken it easy on her. He’d been too interested in how she looked and smelled to pay attention to business. “I deserved to be pitched into a dark spooky basement,” Oz Adway announced to the air, then sat up and stifled a groan. “Ass first.”
And everything had been going so…so…what was the opposite of “well”?
After he tamped down his suddenly raging hormones and shifted, he’d tracked the cub and the yummy Stable to the wrong house, of course, and it was the Curs(ed) House, of course, and time wasn’t on his side, of course, so he had to drop everything (literally—the box of files had landed on his foot in his rush to strip) to rescue the cub and contain the situation.
Plus his shoulder hurt from where she’d clipped him with the ambulance she drove for some reason.
(Also she now smelled like honey and gun oil. Sweet and lethal. She’d take such good care of his cubs!