2. The Mace Meet-Cute
THE MACE MEET-CUTE
Dean
Ihated three things: surprises, unnecessary expenses, and people who said, “No worries.” How could someone genuinely have no worries? My own head was a casino of worst-case scenarios, the roulette wheel of risk spinning every new problem into a jackpot of disaster.
Was I a half-glass-empty guy? No. I was an is-that-glass-near-important-paperwork guy. A move-that-glass-before-some-idiot-knocks-it-over-and-ruins-the-circuit board guy. And the weather tonight had shifted from potential inconvenience to imminent catastrophe in a matter of an hour.
The sky over the ranch opened up with a biblical storm, the kind that brewed at sea and then thrashed the coast like a bartender shaking a martini.
My boots left craters in the mud as I walked up the drive toward Walter Foster’s porch.
Since Walter moved into the retirement home years ago, I took it upon myself to be the first line of defense against nature, vermin, and humans at his home.
As the Lockhart Most Likely to Be Everyone’s Emergency Contact, I was an all-weather, all-hours problem solver.
The Foster place bordered the ranch and sat on the far edge of the floodplain, just before the land crumpled into the marsh.
The home had survived a hundred years of wind off the Pacific, three actual earthquakes, and at least one party that ended with a hole in the porch roof from a poorly aimed bottle rocket.
There was a time when Walter wouldn’t have let a loose shingle go more than a night, but that was before the cancer.
Now, it was up to me. When Walter moved into a care facility five years ago, he asked if I would, “keep an eye on things.” I agreed.
Now that he was gone, I felt the weight of that responsibility even more acutely.
So far, that meant making sure the pipes didn’t freeze and there were no squatters, but now it found me standing on a rain-slicked porch, staring at a front door that was definitely not supposed to be open.
Inside the doorway was a woman. Not just a woman—a comet, a human exclamation point that made every other thought in my head suddenly sound like white noise.
She was petite but somehow took up the entire foyer.
She held a battered tennis racket in one hand and a small pink can in the other, which on closer inspection appeared to be a can of pepper spray.
Her hair was piled up on top of her head. She wore black-and-white polka-dotted pajama shorts, fluffy pink slippers, and a matching pink shirt, with a faded graphic I’d have to squint to read. The shirt said “Hanuka Matadi,” and the spelling error was aggressive.
That was another pet peeve of mine: bad grammar, which I would classify the misspelled word in that category.
A lot was going on, but the only thing I could focus on was the woman’s face.
Not pretty in the way that made you want to write a poem, but in the way that made you forget what words were for.
She was primed for a fight, defensive, with a wild look in her ocean-blue eyes.
She looked, I realized with a jolt, exactly like the kind of woman who could wield a tennis racket as a deadly weapon and mean it.
I glanced at her left hand holding the racket and noticed there was no ring.
It wasn’t something I’d ever paid any attention to.
Not only did this woman inspire me to check, I felt relieved, happy when I didn’t see a band.
I had to remind myself she could still be married and just not wearing her ring, not that it mattered.
I had no interest in messy, and this woman might be the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, but she was broadcasting messy in HD.
To her left, peeking out behind her leg, was a kid.
Four, maybe five years old, sandy hair stuck up like he’d been electrocuted.
Brown eyes, serious, with the same wary focus as a lion cub considering whether it could take you in a fight.
He wore cowboy pajamas and giant rubber boots that I recognized as Walter’s.
In the kid’s fist was a plastic sword. I’d been in plenty of sketchy situations, but I’d never been threatened by a toy blade and athletic equipment.
I did not, as a rule, enjoy meeting new people.
My idea of a successful social life was not making anyone else’s day worse by my presence.
But the second I saw her—saw them—I felt a cold spike of annoyance that was, if I were being honest, a mask for something I didn’t want to admit.
She was beautiful, stunning, distractingly so, and I was not happy about it.
I wasn’t a fan of being blindsided, and her appearance knocked the wind out of me at the same time it pulled the rug out from under me.
She looked familiar. I couldn’t place her exactly, but something about the shape of her jaw or the way she braced herself in the entryway made me think I’d seen her before, maybe in a photo, maybe on a bad day at the grocery store.
A gust of wind slammed the shutters making her jump and the kid grip his sword tighter. The sound snapped me out of my temporary haze. I cleared my throat in the most neutral way possible, so as not to trigger an escalation to full-blown tennis racket attack.
“Hey,” I said, lifting my hands, in what I hoped was the universal sign for Not Here to Murder You. “Didn’t mean to startle you. I’m Dean. I work next door, at the ranch, and I check in on the place for Walter. With the storm, I just wanted to make sure everything was okay.”
She eyed me with the hard, appraising stare of someone who’d spent too much time in big cities or bad neighborhoods. “You don’t look like a Dean.”
“That’s what I’ve been told.” I heard that a lot, though I never understood what a Dean was supposed to look like. “My mom named me after a character on a TV show.”
She hesitated, just long enough for the kid to jab the sword in my direction. “He’s not a burglar, Mama,” the kid said, his voice high but not scared. “He’s a cowboy, see his hat.”
The woman’s face flickered through a couple of emotions—doubt, calculation, then a kind of resignation. She lowered the tennis racket, but didn’t let go.
“I’m Felicity. Walter’s niece,” she introduced herself as if daring me to say something about it. “And this is my son, Maverick.”
I was so off balance, it didn’t even dawn on me who she might be. Of course, Felicity.
“Oh right, Walter talked about you. A lot.”
She blinked, in genuine surprise. “He did?”
I dipped my chin. “Yeah, he said he never wanted kids, but if he’d had them, he hoped they were half as amazing as you.
More than once.” Walter had been a grump and a hermit, but he’d always spoken about Felicity like she was some rare species of bird that had escaped the family’s collective dysfunction.
He didn’t go into a lot of specifics, but he mentioned her resilience from a difficult childhood where she never had a true support system.
The kid, Maverick, thrust his sword towards me. “Are you here to fix the ceiling and the lights?”
“The ceiling?” I repeated, then noticed that the lights in the house were all off. The ranch still had power when I left a few minutes earlier. I glanced across the field and saw that it looked like it still did, so I wondered if something had tripped the breaker.
“It’s fine. We don’t need help.” Her tone was damn near defensive, as if the mere suggestion was offensive.
“I’m already here, I might as well take a look.”
A war battled behind her sharp sapphire stare. I could practically hear the mental debate she had going on before she resigned herself. “Okay.”
“It’s in the kitchen.” The boy gestured with his sword for me to enter. “Come on.”
I glanced at Felicity for permission, and she stepped aside and held out her hand like a spokesmodel.
Each step I took, closer to her revealed more of Felicity’s beauty.
Her delicate features were like a masterpiece painted by an angel, every curve and angle a work of divine art.
Her presence alone was enough to halt armies in their tracks and inspire songwriters to write love songs in her honor.
But there was also a carnal element to her allure, a magnetic pull that made my thoughts wander to the sinful which had nothing to do with her full, pouty lips and hourglass figure. It was her essence.
She was a living, breathing paradox, simultaneously pure and seductive, a force that could bring peace and also make a man question his own moral code.
My reaction to her was one that I hadn’t felt in…ever. The attraction was so visceral, so all-consuming, it irritated the shit out of me. I liked being in control. It was my natural state of being. This woman inspired feelings and thoughts that were reckless, wild, unpredictable.
I hated it.
Once I was inside, the kid grabbed my hand and ushered me to the kitchen, where he pointed up to a gaping hole above the sink. “Look!”
I pulled out my flashlight from my back pocket and tilted it up.
The ceiling leak was even worse than I’d feared.
It wasn’t sagging drywall, it was the Grand Canyon with a steady stream of water.
The sound of water had always unsettled me, from the time I was a kid and the pipes in our house sang like angry ghosts.
Now, it was a professional concern—I managed the finances for a multimillion-dollar ranch operation, and even the tiniest leak could spiral into disaster if you let it.
I felt my blood pressure spike just being in the same room as the leak.
I could feel Felicity’s eyes on me the entire time I surveyed the damage, her arms folded over her chest, still gripping the saucepan and can, her weapons of choice.
“Is the electricity not turned on yet?” I asked.
“No.” She shook her head. “I mean, yes it is, but it went out just before you got here. The storm knocked it out.”