Chapter 33
Morgan
By the time I get home from my shift Rory’s in bed with the lights out.
She and her grandmother stayed at the bar for a couple of hours, Rory eventually leaving Mrs. Patterson talking with the women while she sat back at the bar near me.
Apparently, they found some common ground—Rory said a shared enemy, whoever that might be.
She shifts when I crawl in beside her after brushing my teeth and showering.
“Aren’t you exhausted?” she asks after a big yawn.
“Bone-dead.” Sunday Fundays are long ones, but I wouldn’t give up that time with my friends for anything. “What did your grandma think of the bar?”
“She called it a dive.” I hear amusement in Rory’s voice, her words clearer as she sloughs off her drowsiness.
Well, if she’s awake now . . .
I lean in and capture her lips with mine. She makes a noise of surprise but responds quickly, deepening the kiss. I’m too tired to go further, but her lips taste sweet and her body is soft and pliant right now.
We lie facing each other, just like the first night we shared this bed, but the inches between us have shrunk enough that with a tilt of my chin, I can kiss her again.
“Did you drink one of your beers?” I ask.
She smiles against my lips. “No, not yet.”
“I’m jealous,” I say. “I’ve never even had one of those. Jared and his dad guard them like the Crown Jewels.”
Rory rears back. “Huh. I thought you were going to try to win them for me.”
“Oh I totally was.”
“If you’d won you could have had them all yourself.”
“Eh, I would have shared it with you.” I pause. “Maybe.”
She chuckles. “Well, lucky for you I’m in a sharing mood.”
“A sharing mood, eh?” I laugh into another kiss and slide her leg up my hip. Her skin is hot and soft, and my fingers trace lazy circles while we make out.
When we finally break apart enough to talk again, Rory continues. “Do you have to work tomorrow?”
I sigh. With leaves approaching peak fall colors, the rentals are fully booked out over the weekends. “Yeah. Another early morning with Kit. Three houses to clean, but I’ll be done in the afternoon.”
“Well.” Her lips shift down and she kisses my chin before burrowing into my arms. “What if we had a picnic tomorrow night?”
Of course, I know exactly where I’m going to take her. I call in Hunter to run the lift again for us—“Sure, it’s not like I have a life,” he teases—and we take Rory’s hard-won beers and a couple bags of food up to the top.
I got home after working with Kit and showered before taking Princess out to the backyard with me. We played for a while, leaving Rory alone to get her work done. Then I took a nap on the couch and woke up to Barty loafing on my chest and Rory gazing at me with a mixture of amusement and fondness.
When she wrapped up around five I had everything packed up and ready to go. Hunter ran the lift for us while we rode up to the top.
“Huh, look at that; the view’s still gorgeous,” she says as we stand by the picnic table and gaze down at the valley.
We’ve made it up quickly enough that there’s still an hour till sunset, and the weather is on the warm side for October, though we’re both wearing jeans and light jackets.
I’ve got blankets and a heavier coat so we can stay as long as possible.
“Your domain, my queen,” I tease. For a moment on the chairlift, I wondered if I should take her somewhere different.
But Sirens is clearly the best place around.
There’s no view like it, and there will be no one else up here but us.
Down in town the leaf peepers—or at least, the ones willing to visit on the weekdays—will be walking the trails, eating in the few restaurants that are open, and keeping the town in a brief blaze of busyness for another week or so, although there’s a rainstorm in the forecast for Friday, and it’s likely that the leaves will be mostly blown down before the weekend.
We don’t sit at the table; instead I spread a blanket down even closer to the edge of the run and pull out the beers. “My queen?” I offer, and Rory deadpans a royal nod.
I settle in beside her and crack each beer open. She takes one from me and I tip my bottle toward her. “You’ve won the game, won your crown, and won my friends.” And won my heart, I think. “Congratulations.”
We clink and take a long pull from our beers. The pilsner is crisp and hoppy, and Rory moans in pleasure.
“Holy shit,” she says.
“Hell yeah,” I agree. “Jared and his dad know their beers.”
Rory takes another swallow. “How involved is Jared in the brewery?”
“Very,” I say. “His old man’s getting up in years and Jared runs things now.”
“Is he single?” Rory asks. She’s sitting cross-legged, her dark hair tumbling around her shoulders and outlining her face against the sky.
“What? One sip of his beer and you’re ready to jump ship on me?” I tease.
Rory laughs and nudges me. “I meant the dad. For Grandma.”
I roll down to my side and prop my head up on one hand. “Nah, still happily married. I didn’t realize you were matchmaking.”
Rory rolls her eyes. “She says that I need to get laid, which—”
“Check. Done. Mission accomplished. We can keep the orgasm supply rolling.”
“—which is no longer the case, and I wonder if she’s been projecting all this time.” Rory and I both drop our laughter. “She always says she wants a younger man who can keep up with her, but I wonder sometimes if that’s really what she wants. Or if . . .”
Rory goes quiet. I take another sip of my beer—god, it’s good—and let her gather her thoughts.
“I wonder if what she really means is that she wants someone younger so that maybe they’ll outlive her and won’t have to face being left again.”
I peer up at Rory. She’s looking out over the view, the miles and miles of reds, oranges, and golds stretching out below us.
I put a hand on her knee and squeeze. It pulls her out enough that she glances at me, attempts a weak smile, and changes the subject.
“Hey, I was wondering; why is it called Sirens Valley?”
“Ah, good question.” I sit up and cross my ankles before dragging the paper bag close and pulling out the food. “What do you know of sirens?”
“Evil mermaids?”
I grin. “That’s what most people think of.
But the original sirens were winged creatures.
Original, as in, Homer’s Odyssey and before,” I add, opening up a container of mixed olives.
“Back in ‘ye olden times’ here, hunters and trappers in this region would swear that they heard women singing. The ghost stories were all vague and varied until 1842, when the town was all about lumber and a young, strapping bachelor went missing. Then the story turned to sirens, because who else would snatch up a handsome man? But two days later his body floated down the river, and it turns out he was holding a girl hostage in his cabin. And then people started to wonder if maybe it really was sirens, saving the girl’s life.
Scary, lethal, beautiful . . . but ultimately, saviors. The legend stuck.”
“So the legend is that sirens inhabit these woods and rescue fair maidens?” The corner of her mouth tips up in a smirk.
“Well, I have heard the song.”
Rory’s smirk fades as she realizes I’m serious. Then it shifts to skepticism. “You believe in sirens?”
I shrug. “Sometimes I think there’s something about the shape of the valley and the way the wind blows through it.
But I’ve heard—or maybe felt is a better word—the song of this place.
” I pause, a tub of hummus in my hands, and look out over the valley.
“There’s something that calls to people here.
It might be a song. Something we can’t really hear, but feel. ”
I take the lid off the hummus and set it down on the blanket. Then I fish out a bag of pita chips and tear it open. “Anyway, the lodge was opened in the sixties as an attempt to revive tourism in the Catskills, and the legends persisted enough to stick it with the name.”
Rory raises an eyebrow. “And the rest is history?”
I grin. “Exactly.”
We eat our meal and watch the way the sun plays over the valley.
I finish my beer, and so does Rory. She cracks open the last two and hands me one.
I pack up the leftovers and crawl around to sit behind her.
She leans against me, my spread knees caging her in.
She rests her left hand on my knee, and the diamond glows in the warm light.
“Where did you get this ring?”
I smile into her hair. I’m surprised it took so long to ask, but Rory hasn’t exactly been as open to me as she is now—or as inquisitive. “It was my grandmother’s.”
Rory’s quiet a beat and then sits bolt upright. “Wait, what? Your grandmother’s?”
I lean back on one hand, smirking at her. “Yeah.”
“Morgan . . .” She stares at me. “Is this diamond real?”
“Yup.”
“You put a family heirloom on the finger of a total stranger? Do I want to know how much this is worth?”
“Yes and no.”
“Morgan. What the hell? You trust me with this?”
The question sobers me, and I give her the brutally honest answer. “I trust you with a lot of things, Rory Fox.” Like my heart.