Chapter 2
Hunter
Back in my coffee shop, with the door safely shut behind me, I breathed a sigh of relief.
Every interaction with Wesley Darkwood left me feeling tense and dizzy.
Why? Attraction, irritation, confusion—all knotted together.
From his long hair drying into soft curls, to his expressive brown eyes, to that ridiculous pirate goatee beard thing…
he was an irritation and a thorn in my side.
And hot. And cute. So, freaking hot and cute.
“You okay, boss?”
I glanced up and found Jamie behind the counter—tall and rangy, ginger hair sticking out from beneath a battered beanie, freckles scattered across his nose.
He had one of those easy, good-natured smiles only an eighteen-year-old could pull off, as if the world hadn’t yet shown him how hard it could get.
He was in his senior year, balancing classes, hockey, and this job with the kind of restless energy I barely remembered having at his age.
He was my part-time help, steady and reliable, though quieter when I was around—as if I scared the words right out of him.
Maybe I did. Maybe it was my fault, the way I carried myself, all sharp edges and short answers, grumpy as hell because I couldn’t shake the feeling of being stuck.
Stuck in Wishing Tree. Stuck in this coffee shop that had never been my dream.
Some people had it worse, I knew that, but knowing didn’t make the walls feel any less close, or the days any less heavy.
I need out. I need more than this.
Jamie didn’t deserve my moods, though. He worked hard, smiled even when I didn’t, and maybe that was the reason I kept him around—because when I looked at him, I saw the possibility of forward motion.
And I knew Wesley called me some ridiculous name, Grumpy McGrumperson or some shit, but hell, that was me. I hadn’t wanted to be running a coffee shop. I hadn’t wanted my whole life to collapse around me. I hadn’t wanted to be fucking lonely and alone. Of course, I was grumpy.
“Is everything okay, Mr. McCoy?” Jamie asked again, a little nervous and a lot cautious.
“Another damn book delivery to the wrong door.” It was becoming a running joke—though not one I laughed at—that packages meant for The Story Lantern, Wesley’s bookstore, kept ending up in my coffee shop.
Our places sat side by side, divided only by a shared wall.
Once upon a time, it had been a single store until somebody carved it in half back in the seventies.
Now Wes was 29A Main and I was 29B Main, and you’d think that tiny letter would be enough to keep the couriers straight. Apparently not.
“Oh,” Jamie said, sounding puzzled by why it riled me up so much.
I didn’t know why it bothered me that yet again Wesley had left the A off his address; it just did.
Everything bothers me.
“So, you took them over?” he asked as though he really did want me to talk about it.
“Yeah. Can I get a coffee?” I deflected because I needed it.
Stat. We opened at seven-thirty, and after a lack of sleep, I needed caffeine like air now that the morning rush was over.
The voices last night from next door—shouting, laughter, fun—would’ve woken me if I’d been asleep.
But insomnia had had me in its grip this past week, dragging me down until I was running on fumes.
I kept waiting for it to crack so I could refill the tank.
“Sure,” Jamie said, all cheerful, damn him, and got to work on a mug of black coffee, the way I liked it—strong and bitter as a bitter thing wrapped in… I don’t know, maybe another bitter thing. Twice the bitterness, double the misery.
Just like me, a voice in my head sneered. I told the voice to fuck off and retreated into the kitchen.
The timer on the pastries went off the moment I got inside. Jamie would handle the front, and I’d get the next load of pastries on display and pretend I wasn’t obsessing over how Wesley’s damp hair had curled, one stray lock falling over his eye, and how he kept pushing it back with his fingers.
He was an irritating mess, always spinning wild stories that felt reckless. What if someone actually believed them? As a history professor, I had a responsibility to the truth, to facts, to the world. Right?
After the morning rush came the slower rhythm—groups of moms and dads with strollers who lingered over cappuccinos, and the knitting circle that had been turned away from the bookstore next door due to a lack of space.
By the time I escaped to my cramped office on the floor above the café, I dropped into the chair and pulled out the single sheet of paper I updated every day. The single thing worth tracking.
“Five ninety-six done,” I muttered under my breath.
Five hundred and ninety-six days since I’d stepped into this so-called inheritance, with all its provisos and wherefores, and became a coffee shop owner-manager.
One hundred and thirty-four days left, then I would be free.
On Valentine’s Day, next year, I could sell this place to who the fuck ever, walk out of here, my two years done, and get back into a classroom where I belonged.
Back to teaching. Back on track. Back to a life where I meant something to the world.
I slipped the small piece of paper back into the drawer where I kept every page I’d filled since day one—handwritten numbers stacked on top of each other like a tally of survival.
As if making a note each day would somehow make it easier to be here, licking my wounds and enduring the most convoluted inheritance known to man.
Two years, the lawyers said. Two years of running The Real McCoy before I could sell it and pocket the lucrative inheritance from a great-great-something-cousin-uncle-whatever I’d never known.
Harry McCoy had stopped working here but still kept his hand in, according to everyone who came in and liked to remind me about the time Harry did this or that.
What he didn’t do was have children, and that meant I’d been left the lot.
Every number written was a promise to myself that I was one day closer to freedom.
My phone rang, and as soon as I saw the name, I answered without hesitation—the only person who stayed in touch with me from Ashcroft College. Professor Lydia Grant, head of geography, with her booming laugh and endless curiosity, had been my lifeline more than once.
“You won’t believe what he’s done now!” she said without preamble.
I didn’t have to ask who she meant, I knew this would be about my ex-fiancé—the one who’d wrecked my career and my trust at Ashcroft.
Screwed me over personally and professionally, then walked away with both the job and the future I thought I had.
I didn’t enjoy these calls, but I also secretly loved that he was fucking things up for the faculty.
Not the students, I hated that, but the college that believed his lies, yep.
“Hello to you, too, Lydia.”
Lydia didn’t wait for me to respond. “I couldn’t make this up,” she began with a weary sigh.
“He pushed through this flashy digital learning platform, talked the department into shifting a big chunk of the budget to it. Of course, it fell apart halfway through the term, and now they’ve had to scrap it and go back to the system you set up.
The faculty is quietly relieved, but the dean’s embarrassed, and donors are asking questions. ”
“Uh oh,” I said, because that is all she needed to hear from me.
“Yeah.” She chuckled.
“So, other than that, how are things?”
“You heard back from UCLA?”
With its highly ranked and prestigious history department, UCLA was one of the best in the country, boasting a reputation, resources, and a competitive environment that fostered successful careers.
Securing a position there would demonstrate to my former college what they’d lost when they let me leave.
“Not yet.”
“It won’t be long,” she reassured me. “And Seattle?”
Seattle, with a nationally respected program, plus the holy grail of tenure-track. Not as flashy as UCLA, but far more realistic for long-term stability.
“That would be a no as well.”
“Well, shit, I guess you did have eighteen months off.”
Not by choice. If I wanted the money out of The Real McCoy, then it had to be in two years.
“Yeah, there was one thing that happened, a dean from a college near here approached me.”
“Do tell,” I could imagine her leaning into the call.
“Small liberal arts place with a decent history program. The dean cornered me at an event here, so I threw in an application. Not tenure-track, though, and it’s only an hour away, so I worry I’d just end up staying in Wishing Tree.”
“Still,” she said, “sounds like he’s interested. Could be a good fallback.”
“Yeah.” And if I ever ran into someone from my old college, I could always embellish where I’d ended up, make it sound more impressive than it really was.
Yeah, because how it looks to others is what’s important right now.
A knock sounded on the office door, sharp enough to yank me from my thoughts, and I braced for Jamie to have a question for me. I froze when the only thing that appeared was what looked like a thigh bone waving in the open space.
I swallowed a sigh. Wesley. It had to be Wesley.
“I have to go,” I said to Lydia, and she sent me a “later” and ended the call.
“What do you want, Wes?” I tried not to sound too tired of life.
“I come bearing gifts,” he announced, stepping in fully and holding the fake bone aloft like some kind of medieval offering.
“See what I did there? Bearing gifts? Tibia gift?” He grinned as if he’d delivered the best pun in history, and then added, “And I brought you the cookie I offered you, in case you get hungry later.” He placed the cookie on my desk, a pumpkin-shaped one that had crumbled on one side, wrapped in a cellophane packet with the sticker of a lantern on it.
“I make cookies here,” I reminded him.
“As I said, you don’t make Halloween Cookies,” Wesley said, and frowned as if that was the end of the world. “Or Christmas cookies. Or Thanksgiving cookies. Or—”
“I make perfectly normal cookies.”
He pouted at that. Yep, full-on pouted. And god, he had dimples, and these lips I wanted to tug and taste and—
“These are special.”
“How are they ‘special’?” I crossed my arms over my chest—pure defense mechanism.
“I made them with the magic of midnight,” he said, and waggled an eyebrow, then winked.
My stomach did that unwelcome twist again. His damn hair was a riot of waves and curls, damp still and not tied back as usual. Jesus Christ.
I never knew what to say to him when he was teasing me.
He disarmed me every damn time—with his weirdness, his humor, that smile.
I didn’t get it, and it left me floundering.
He often talked about the magic of midnight, and I swear I had no idea what he was talking about, but I would never ask because he’d probably ramble on for hours.
Before I could gather my wits, Wesley came further into the office, eyes wide with excitement. “But that’s not only why I’m here. I don’t want to alarm anyone, but okay, listen, there’s a man in a green suit out there, lurking, watching the town. I swear he’s spying on us all.”
Oh, Jesus, not another conspiracy theory. “Huh?”
“A man lurking by the Gift Emporium, green parka, hood up, all shifty, staring at our stores.”
“It’s raining,” I said, and pointed at the small window to the side. It would soon be snowing, but for now, we had early November sleet, when the clouds couldn’t decide whether to drop rain or snow. “It’s just a man with his hood up because it’s raining.”
“Then why was he staring? Look!”
“No.”
“I swear he’s spying, and he’s taking notes.” He pointed out the window, and God help me, I stood to check on whatever he was pointing at, ending up too close to him for comfort, inhaling the scent of books, cookies, and Wesley. And hell, was that apples? Was that his shampoo?
I found out who he was looking at. “Him?”
He elbowed me. “There’s no one else out there in a green parka.”
“I can see that.”
“He’s part of something bigger, you know,” Wesley added quickly, his voice dropping as if he were sharing state secrets.
“I read this whole thread about government field agents planted in small towns to monitor community patterns. They hide in plain sight, dressed normally, but they’re always watching, always taking notes.
” He leaned closer, eyes alive with excitement.
“It fits, right? He’s casing us, checking where we go, who we talk to. ”
“That’s the fire inspector, Jim Owing. I met him yesterday.”
“Oh,” he said, deflating for just three seconds before grinning again, undeterred. Typical Wesley. “Damn, it would have been exciting to have a ninja spy stalking us.”
Somehow Wesley had upgraded his supposed spy to a ninja; that was what I loved about his imagination… no, not loved. Enjoyed.
No, not enjoyed.
Tolerated.
He squeezed my arm. “Okay then, Mr. Spoiler of Stories, I’ll leave the cookie, and the thigh bone, and I’m out of here.” He left in a flurry of noise and slamming doors.
I watched him exit onto the street and head over to the Emporium opposite our stores, chatting away to the fire inspector. Something he said made the inspector laugh so hard that he bent at the waist.
It made me smile.
Damn my crusty, pissed-off, heartbroken self. Wesley made me smile.