Chapter 4
SCONES AND SUSPICIONS
Rhys
The Bee & Nugget coffee shop, as I understand it, is an institution in Snaggletooth Creek.
It’s a corner building at the end of the main drag in downtown, with a large fiberglass bee hung over the door on the outside.
Inside, there’s a massive central wood fireplace, a smattering of tables and booths, one large picture window overlooking the mountains and the lake in the valley below, and another window made of bee hives between glass.
And people.
So fucking many people today.
I hate crowds.
They’re where problems always started on the job.
While the bells on the door jingle behind me as I step inside and into the crowd, I scan over everyone’s heads until I spot Decker waving at me from the bar.
Dude’s in his normal hiking pants, long-sleeved performance tee, and puffy vest. His brown hair is shaggy and his face is its normal scruffy.
The only thing different is the horrified way his eyes go round when I get closer to him. “Dude. The fuck happened to your hair? And your face?”
I take the stool beside him, wishing the damn thing faced the door instead of putting my back to it. I hate having my back to the door. “My unexpected roommate booby-trapped the place because someone failed to tell her she wasn’t the only one borrowing your cabin and she’s…paranoid. Clearly.”
He stares at me briefly, then looks past me.
I turn to look at whatever he’s looking at too, but he grabs my arm. “Don’t look,” he hisses. “Do not look.”
“Is she here?” I mutter.
I want a cup of coffee and one of those scones he’s always talking about. And to figure out why Margie feels familiar.
There’s something nagging the back of my brain about her, and I can’t decide if it’s irritation that she got the better of me or if it’s something else.
Like we’ve met before.
“Yes. No. Not her. Other her,” Decker says. “We need to—”
“Morning, Decker,” a short, curly red-haired woman says on the other side of the bar. “Who’s your friend?”
“Shit,” Decker whispers.
And one more thing about this place clicks.
Bee & Nugget is his cousin’s coffee shop and kombucha bar.
His cousin.
Sabrina.
Gossip.
Knows all. Learns all. Decides when and where to tell all.
And I’m sitting here with an uneven dye job in my hair and faded purple smears all over my face and in my fucking eyeballs.
The mirror and I had a conversation this morning.
I lost.
It’s still laughing.
No idea what my roommate thinks of my face. I saw her just long enough in the kitchen to grunt something that she might have interpreted as good morning before I left the house.
I was halfway to town before I realized why the cabin felt weird.
It was because the entryway barely had any evidence left of the way she ambushed me.
I’m fucking slipping.
A year off of daily private security, doing random-ass shit for friends here and there while trying to replan my life after it imploded, and I failed to notice that she’d mopped up all of the flour and removed the rug.
“He’s not my friend,” Decker says to the redhead. “I don’t know him. There’s nothing interesting about him and no reason for you to know him.”
I reach across the bar, holding out a hand despite Decker’s nowhere-near-subtle warning. “Rhys O’Malley. And you’re Sabrina?”
Her green eyes sparkle with the kind of mischief you’d expect of someone who’s cousins with the Sullivan triplets, even if biologically, they don’t share any genes.
“You’ve been here before,” she says to me while she shakes my hand.
“Time or two.” Decker used me as inspiration for a popular main character in one of his early novels, and insisted I come visit not long after he got out of the Marines. Said thank you for letting him use me by treating me to a mountain getaway.
Most guys leave the Marines with a bestie who saved their life.
I left the Marines with a friend who’d immortalized me in a litRPG novel and who still sends me a case of my favorite beer every year on the anniversary of its publication.
“Kombucha’s new, isn’t it?” I say to Sabrina.
“We’ve had it a few years now. My husband and his best friend make it. What happened to your face?”
“It learned the hard way not to piss off a hairdresser.”
“My mom’s a hairdresser, and she takes her dye responsibility very seriously. She would never.”
“If only they all did.”
“Coffee?”
“And a lemon scone, please.”
“Fresh batch is in the oven. I’ll get you one as soon as they’re done.”
“Why are you working on a Saturday?” Decker asks her.
She grins. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were disappointed to see me.”
“Always happy to see you,” he grits out.
“You’re a worse liar than Lucky. So, Rhys, what brings you back to the Tooth?”
“Work,” I tell her, my brain catching up and remembering that the locals call Snaggletooth Creek, the town, the Tooth for short.
“That’s so specific.”
“Leave him alone, Sabrina,” Decker says. “He’s doing security for Spruce Creek.”
“Permanently or just for the big event?”
I don’t call her out on the lack of specificity on the big event because I’m glad she’s not specific.
The fewer people who know the purpose and guest list for the upcoming private conference at the new center, the better.
“To be determined,” is the only answer I’m willing to give her.
If I have my facts right, she’s married to one of the guys who invested in turning a nearby formerly private ski retreat for some old billionaire into Spruce Creek Retreats, so she could technically be one of my bosses, but she’s not on any of the paperwork I’ve filled out for the retreat center, so I don’t offer any more information.
The doorbell jingles, making me instinctively glance around for a mirror or reflective surface to see who just came in.
Can’t find one.
Don’t like it. Dealing with crowds was—is—part of my job, and I dislike both having my back to the door and not having any way beyond obviously turning around to keep track of what’s happening behind me.
Sabrina looks past us, her brows drawing together the slightest bit as the two customers next to me side-slide off their stools. “Who’s that with Lucky?”
“You weren’t supposed to be working today,” Decker says again.
I don’t need to turn around to know who’s here with Lucky.
It’ll be Margie.
Probably. My body’s as tense as it would be if it’s Margie, and it makes sense that they’d be hanging out together.
Selling her cover story about being a failed nursing major who needed a housekeeping job in the mountains.
Sabrina snorts at Decker. “You know I was going to hear that you showed up for breakfast with a guy whose face had a fight with hair dye and that Lucky showed up for breakfast with a woman, so what difference does it make if I’m here to see it myself or if I hear about it later?”
“All the difference,” Decker tells her. “It makes all the difference.”
Understandable.
The best, most reliable information comes from the nuance, and you don’t get the nuance if you don’t see it.
From what Decker’s told me, Sabrina gets the nuance. And that will make her my new best friend.
I want to know everything. Helps me do my job better.
“Lucky, look who’s here,” Sabrina calls. She points to the empty seats beside me. “And look! I saved you a space.”
Decker sighs and rubs a hand over his face.
Not like I have much to report to him yet other than that Margie’s freakishly strong to be able to wield a twelve-inch cast-iron skillet—and yeah, I have a bruise, but I don’t think any cracked ribs—and that she’s definitely related to him if her idea of the best way to jerry-rig home defense is to use hair dye, flour, and a recording of various people threatening to kill you.
That’s a Sullivan-triplet-level security system.
“Oh, hey, you two meet in the daylight yet?” Lucky Sullivan asks me as he drops into the seat beside me, Margie at his side.
The triplets are identical except for the way their personalities shine through and their style choices. Decker’s a scruffy-faced hiker type, whereas Lucky’s vibe is best described as former high school golden boy.
Brown hair short and styled, beard neatly trimmed, shirt a button-down, and his jeans look like they were pressed.
“We’ve met,” I tell him while Margie gives me a lopsided grin and says, “Not really.”
“Meet in the daylight?” Sabrina asks. “What does that mean?”
Lucky hooks a thumb at his half sister, who has curly dark brown hair, glasses that she wasn’t wearing last night, and is dressed in jeans and a green flannel open over a simple T-shirt bearing a smiley face.
She’s familiar.
And pretty. Her blue eyes have a glimmer of a sparkle, and her skin reminds me of a peach.
But the familiar part is what I need to concentrate on.
Why the fuck is she familiar?
“This is Margie,” he says. “Old friend from nursing school. She needed a job, so I hooked her up doing housekeeping at the retreat center and staying at our cabin. And Decker offered Rhys here a place to stay in our cabin while getting him a job in security at the retreat center, so they’re accidental housemates as well as coworkers for a bit, and since Decker’s an asshole who didn’t fucking tell us, Margie had a bad scare when Rhys showed up last night. ”
Sabrina nods. “I’d be terrified too if a streaky-faced mountain of a man showed up at my house in the middle of the night.”
“You live with a mountain of a man,” Decker reminds her. “Married him. Had his mountain-sized baby who loves to cuddle with your mountain-sized dog. Ring a bell?”