The Misfits of Copper County (Copper County #3)
Chapter 1
DELANEY
Let’s get one thing straight: I never meant to burn Brewer Barnum’s home to the ground, okay?
In fact, I’d woken up that morning in my half-renovated house on the shores of beautiful Copper Lake feeling pretty fucking chill.
Optimistic.
Possibly even… cheerful.
I’d stared out at the snow-covered trees and the lake while I’d sipped my coffee, thinking this was the kind of easy Sunday morning I’d signed up for last fall when I’d left the city, moved to this little town in the middle of nowhere, and bought a fixer-upper a few doors down from my sister.
While sipping, I hadn’t felt the urge to glare at the flooring and paint cans stacked where my dining table should be.
I hadn’t cast a single guilty glance at the ripped-out ceiling in the living room.
I hadn’t spent even a moment perseverating on the fact that Brewer Barnum—my unfairly tall, disturbingly sexy nemesis—would be showing up the next morning with his giant tool belt and his long-suffering sighs and his I-know-better-than-you-Delaney attitude.
In fact, for once, I hadn’t thought of Brewer at all.
It had been lovely.
Then a weather alert for Copper County had popped up on my phone with the words WINTER STORM WARNING in big red letters, and my whole day had gone to shit.
There were many scenarios in which a man like me would enjoy “getting 6 to 9 inches” on a Tuesday night.
A blizzard was not one of them.
Especially not when the remains of the last winter storm still lingered in my driveway. And especially-especially not when Brewer’s dry, almost-definitely-judgmental “Guess I’ll just… shovel you out myself, then, if I want a place to unload my truck?” was fresh in my memory.
Just the thought of him using that disapproving tone while looking down at me with those clear blue eyes that crinkled at the corners sent an unwelcome heat through my body.
By which I meant the heat of fury .
Of outrage at the injustice .
Obviously.
As a responsible adult, I owned my mistakes, and I really should have shoveled my driveway or paid someone to do it. But in my defense, shoveling wasn’t a thing I’d had to worry about back in the city. So not-a-thing, in fact, I didn’t own a shovel.
Which, I realized with slow-dawning horror, was something I needed to rectify.
Today.
At the store.
Where the Coppertians were.
I drained my coffee cup and sighed deeply.
Was it more than a little lowering that I, Delaney Monroe, the award-winning journalist who’d once sweet-talked his way into a classified government facility in S?o Paulo without speaking a word of Portuguese, was actively dreading a trip to a small-town hardware store?
Yes, thank you for asking. Yes, it was.
But something about this town made me feel like I was twelve years old again—the runt of the Monroe litter, standing on the sidelines while my hockey-star siblings glided effortlessly through their lives.
I hypothesized that whatever recessive gene manifested in broad shoulders and the ability to see a puck without tripping over it also gave a person the ability to smile at ridiculousness without the need to point it out and correct it. Which meant my siblings had tragically terrible scores on standardized tests but were almost universally beloved.
Meanwhile, I had been blessed with different genes. Genes that made me small and smart and nimble and brilliant at ferreting out a good story… but slightly less competent with things like changing tires and, you know, having interpersonal relationships.
Trade-offs, right?
Despite what some people assumed, I was more than satisfied with the genes I’d gotten… but it did make things tricky, considering the most ridiculous humans in the universe existed in Copper County, New York. And unlike the refugee camps and political hotspots I’d found myself in over the years, where I could deal with whatever conditions I had to in order to get the story, Copper County was home now. The place where I was supposed to feel comfortable.
Repressing a sigh, I rinsed my cup and set it in the drainer, then forced myself to walk directly to my car and drive to town because that was what responsible adults did…
And because I knew if I didn’t get this errand done immediately, I’d spend the rest of the day thinking up compelling reasons to remain snowbound until spring.
But my responsible adultness fizzled once I’d parked my Audi in a diagonal parking spot outside the hardware store. Instead of going inside like a normal human, I tapped my thumbs on the steering wheel and watched the people go by.
My phone buzzed with a text from my editor.
Marjorie
Call tomorrow morning to discuss Empire Ridge story? I have exciting news!
As I typed out an affirmative reply, some of the tension left my shoulders.
At least my career was the one area of my life where I knew exactly what I was doing… mostly because, unlike Brewer Fucking Barnum, Marjorie never “adjusted” my renovation plans without asking. Marjorie would never change the bathroom tile I’d selected or complain that the sliding door I wanted to add to my walk-in closet would compromise the flow of the house, despite having zero evidence beyond “experience” to explain this assertion. And Marjorie never took smug satisfaction in proving me wrong at every turn, nodding at me with a little half smile that screamed, “I’m humoring you,” unlike certain enormous people.
In fact, Marjorie was as excited about this story as I was. Possibly even more excited. She’d called it “career defining” when I’d sent her transcripts of my initial interview with Anthony Harmon and said the corruption whistleblower angle gave it an extra punch publications were looking for.
I stretched my neck from side to side as I watched a child skip happily into one of the snowbanks lining the street while their mother sighed in exasperation and rolled her eyes.
I imagined my sister would have roughly the same reaction if she saw me sitting here now. I could hear her voice in my head saying, Try getting out there and actually talking to your neighbors, Delaney. You’ll fit right in! You’ll see!
Then again, Tam had the aforementioned Broad-Shouldered Gene. She loved the people of this town, and they loved her. Also, she was naive enough to insist that Brewer was just being thorough whenever I voiced a complaint about him and that he treated all of his clients the same way. So, really, what did Tam know?
I could talk to people all day long. Fitting in with them was different.
And, anyway, I was halfway convinced that the people of Copper County—with the possible exceptions of my sister and my friend Jasper, who had, not coincidentally, both grown up far from here—weren’t actually people at all but some sort of mutant golden-retriever-human hybrid. Hyper-friendly and eager and possibly rabid.
The first day I’d ventured to town to run errands last fall, the lady at the Books n’ More had spent fifteen minutes telling me about her nephew who “also didn’t play sports but turned out just fine” while I purchased stamps. Three different people had invited me to join their book clubs. And six people I’d never met had given me unsolicited advice about which contractor—Brewer Barnum, naturally—I should hire for my renovation.
I’d concluded that some people were just meant to live in small towns. They thrived in tight-knit communities that were alllll the way up in each other’s business. They liked talking slow and walking slower. They relished the in-jokes and the weird-as-fuck rituals. They fit .
And then there was me. A man who had to psych himself up to buy a shovel.
So, you might rightly ask, why the hell did I move here? Excellent question, really. Top-notch.
In some ways, it was a little like the story I’d been working on. A simple guy—ambitious, for sure, but earnest enough—had made a choice for what he’d thought were all the right reasons and had instead found himself caught up in something bigger and more complex than he’d imagined.
In my case, the big, complex thing just happened to be this weirdly friendly town.
“Stop being such a baby, Monroe,” I muttered. “And buy a damn shovel.”
I forced myself out of the car, slammed the door, and resolutely headed for the store?—
“Hey, there!” A parka-clad woman popped out at me from behind one of the decorative trees along Weaver Street.
“ Gahh !” I jerked back, bumping my hip against my car’s side mirror.
“You’re Delaney!” Before I recovered my balance, parka-lady waved a stack of flyers in my face that made the crystalline air even colder. “I’m Janice! Janice Plum. Have you heard about the O’Leary-Copper County Council for Historical Happenings’ Candle-Making Symposium and Dipping Demonstration this afternoon?”
My heart thundered in my chest. In Kuala Lumpur two years ago, someone had jumped out at me when I was exiting a vehicle, but that incident had involved a nasty parang with a ten-inch blade and a teenager who’d taken all my money. This ambush—from a middle-aged woman in a knitted hat with pom-poms—should not have triggered the same fight-or-flight response, but my body didn’t seem to understand that.
“Come dip your wick from two to four!” Janice continued, undeterred by my wide-eyed silence.
“No.” Annoyed by the jump scare—mostly annoyed at myself because my pulse was racing—I gave her a wide berth as I headed for the sidewalk. “My wick’s perfectly fine as it is, Janice.”
“But… you didn’t even take a flyer. Everyone takes a flyer.” Her pout was audible. “It’s rude not to.”
I could practically feel Tam judging me from across town. You’re not in the city anymore. Here, you don’t have to lock your doors, but you do need to make an effort to engage.
Fine, then. I’d try to engage.
I turned and looked at parka-woman seriously, trying to ignore how my heart was still hammering in my chest. “Has it occurred to you, Janice, that what’s really rude is accosting a man with the desiccated remains of dead trees…”
She frowned down at her flyers.
“… while he’s running a lifesaving errand to the hardware store?”
Janice blinked. “Lifesaving? Are you okay?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “I am perfectly fine. But I engaged a contractor to renovate my house, Janice. A contractor whose ego is as massive as he is, which is saying something since he’s six-foot-twenty. And he’s already working my very last nerve. My plans for my primary bathroom? Scrapped. My instructions to replace my creaky hardwoods with something modern and sustainable? Ignored. My specific request that the paneling in my office should be painted white since walnut stain would make the space feel like I was working in a freaking catacomb? Literally scoffed at.”
A strong gust of wind whistled down Weaver Street, making the pom-poms on Janice’s hat dance. She clutched her flyers tighter. “But?—”
“And,” I continued, “if I don’t have a shovel on Wednesday morning to clean the snow, the man will sigh at me like I’m incompetent, Janice. He won’t be able to help himself. He will roll his eyes. He’ll give a little snort that’s just low enough to make it seem plausible that he thought I wouldn’t hear it, though he absolutely knows I can hear it. And because I am actually very competent, there will be a murder in this town.” I leaned toward her and lowered my voice. “Do you want there to be a murder, Janice?”
I hadn’t meant to say that much or be quite so abrupt, and I felt a little bad when Janice’s eyes went wide and shiny… until I realized she wasn’t upset so much as awestruck .
“But you… you don’t mean… you can’t be talking about… Brewer?”
I pinched the bridge of my nose with cold fingers. Oh, here we go.
“Because Brewer’s awesome,” Janice breathed. “He’s, like, a renovation genius. He’s never had a single unhappy client. And he’s so handsome! And his voice is so pleasant. And gosh, he’s so nice! When my father’s hot water heater burst while I had the flu, Brewer went to his house and changed it out for him at cost, and?—”
“Yes, yes, and he helps little old ladies cross the street while simultaneously rescuing kittens from mine shafts, ending global famines, and single-handedly saving the environment,” I finished. “I know.”
“Oh, wow.” Janice clasped the flyers to her bosom. “I hadn’t heard that, about the kittens. But I totally believe it.”
A noise not unlike the whistle of a teakettle escaped me.
I might not be able to make Janice see the light about Brewer—if I couldn’t change Tam’s mind, I had zero chance with someone I wasn’t related to—but I could set her right about some things, at least.
“Janice.” I forced a smile. “I bet most of the people who take your flyers don’t actually show up.”
She seemed startled. “Well, people are busy?—”
“People are statistically more likely to do something when they want to do it, when they choose it, rather than when it is foisted upon them. Read ‘The Art of Choosing’ by Sheena Iyengar and thank me later.”
“But—”
“You need to make people come to you, Janice. Maybe make a visual splash of some kind. Wear a historical costume, for example. People are suckers for a hoop skirt, am I right? But for God’s sake, change the name of the event to something you can say in one breath, like…” I tapped my lip. “Wicked Fun Candle-making, for example. That’s a banger.”