Chapter 13
Logan
I’d been at Lark’s house since six that morning, crouched on the floor of her utility closet with a flashlight and a multimeter while she hovered behind me in the doorway with a coffee mug in her hand. She’d watched me work with the expression of a woman who’d already written the eulogy.
But the heater wasn’t dead. The tank was solid, no corrosion, no leaks.
The thermocouple had failed, which meant the gas valve thought the pilot light was out and shut everything down.
The heating element was corroded at the base, probably original to the unit.
Two parts and maybe an hour of work once I had them.
Thanks to Uncle Sam for providing me with some actually useful skills.
I’d had to come into town to get the thermocouple. It was a standard part, and Murphy’s had it on the shelf. The heating element took longer. The man behind the counter disappeared into the back room and came back with three boxes before we found the right model.
“Should do it,” he said, setting the element beside the thermocouple. “Anything else?”
“Pipe thread sealant and a roll of Teflon tape.”
He gathered them from the pegboard display while I waited.
Six weeks of barn showers because nobody had looked at the damn thing, including me for the first three weeks I’d been here. That should be a federal crime.
“That’ll be twenty-three fifty,” the man said.
I paid and was putting my wallet away when the front door groaned open behind me.
“I swear that door gets worse every time.” Beckett walked in with a coffee cup and sunglasses pushed up on his forehead. He spotted me, and his face opened up. “Logan. Twice in one month at Murphy’s. You’re basically a local now.”
“Hey, man. Just picking up parts.”
“For what?”
“Water heater out at Lark’s house. It’s been dead for six weeks. Bad thermocouple, shot heating element.” I picked up the bag from the counter. “She’s been showering in the barn the whole time because it went out and she never called anybody to fix it.”
The words came out with more bite than I’d planned.
Or maybe exactly the bite I’d planned. The woman fed sixty animals before she fed herself, trained therapy dogs that changed people’s lives, and she’d been walking to the barn in the dark every morning because her water heater needed two parts that cost twenty-three dollars and fifty cents.
Beckett’s grin dropped. He set his coffee cup on the counter, and his jaw tightened the way it did when something hit close to a nerve he didn’t talk about.
“So what the hell has she been…? The barn,” he said. “She’s been showering in the barn?”
“Yep. Every damned morning.”
He rubbed the back of his neck and stared at the floor for a few seconds. When he looked up, the grin was gone and what was underneath it was harder than most people ever saw from Beckett Sinclair.
“That’s not right,” he said quietly. Then he picked up his coffee cup, and the weight in his face eased back behind the usual warmth but it didn’t disappear.
No, it wasn’t fucking right. “Yeah, I’m working on it.”
He nodded. “Good.”
“What has Warrior Security been up to?” I asked.
“The usual. Lachlan’s keeping us busy.” He shrugged, and the grin came back but didn’t fully commit. “Or you’d know that if you hadn’t ditched us for alpaca duty.”
“Al Pacacino is a demanding boss.”
“I don’t doubt it.” He lifted his coffee cup in my direction. “Good to see you, man. I’ve got to run.”
“Yeah. Good to see you too.”
He went out, and the door groaned shut behind him. I gathered the parts and headed to my truck.
The drive back to Pawsitive took twenty minutes on the road south from town.
I drove with the window cracked and the bag on the passenger seat and a steadiness in my body that had been absent for months.
I’d slept last night. Really slept—Tova beside me, the rest of the night unbroken after she’d pulled me out of the nightmare.
I could feel it in my hands, my shoulders, the way my jaw wasn’t clenched for the first time in weeks.
I had a plan today. A thermocouple, a heating element, and a woman who was going to have hot water in her house by lunch.
I pulled into the lot at Pawsitive and parked close to Lark’s place. I could hear music from inside as I came up the steps—something with fiddles and a woman’s voice I didn’t recognize.
I went in through the side door and found her at the kitchen table with paperwork spread in front of her, a pen behind one ear and another in her hand. She looked up.
“Back already? That was fast.”
“Murphy’s had everything.” I held up the bag. “It’ll take me an hour, maybe less.”
“And then I’ll have hot water? In my actual house? Like a person who lives in the twenty-first century?”
“That’s the goal.”
She pressed both hands flat on the table and closed her eyes for a second. “I might cry. I’m not going to, but I want you to know the option is on the table.”
I didn’t even try to stop my smile. “Duly noted.”
I went to the utility closet and got to work.
The space was barely wider than my shoulders: the water heater on one side, exposed pipes running up the wall on the other, a narrow strip of floor between them.
I shut off the gas supply, disconnected the old thermocouple, and started threading the new one into the bracket.
Lark appeared in the doorway. She leaned against the frame with her coffee and watched me.
“So what was actually wrong with it? In terms a five-year-old can understand.”
“The yucky thermocouple failed.” Did five-year-olds use the word yucky? “It’s a sensor that tells the gas valve the pilot light is on. When it goes bad, the valve shuts down as a safety measure. I’m replacing that and the heating element, which was corroded.”
“And that’s it? Two parts?”
“That’s it.”
“I’ve been showering in a barn for six weeks because of two parts.”
“Twenty-three fifty worth of parts.”
She made a sound that was half laugh and half something else. “If you tell anyone I could’ve bought back my dignity for twenty-three dollars and fifty cents, I will feed you to Clarence.”
“Clarence likes me.”
“Clarence likes anyone who wears buttons. Don’t think that will save you.”
I pulled out the old heating element. Corroded green at the base, just like I’d expected. I held it up so she could see.
“That’s disgusting,” she said.
“And it was your problem. Once the new one’s seated and I refill the tank, you should have hot water in about forty minutes.”
She shifted in the doorway. Her arms were crossed, the coffee cup hooked in one hand. She’d already changed position three times since she’d been standing there.
“You need anything? I feel bad that you’re doing all the work and I’m doing nothing. I can hand you tools. I’m extremely good at tool-handing. It’s basically my only useful skill in this situation.”
“You could hand me the Teflon tape. It’s in the bag.”
“On it, boss!” She gave me a little salute and set her coffee cup on the hallway floor before crouching beside me to dig through the bag.
I immediately realized I should’ve just reached over and gotten it myself. This closet space was not built for two people. Her knee pressed against mine. Her shoulder brushed the doorframe, and when she leaned forward to reach the tape at the bottom of the bag, her hip grazed mine and stayed there.
“Found it.” She held up the roll. “I told you I was excellent at…”
Her voice faded out as she sat up, and we were face-to-face in the tiny closet. Her eyes dropped to my mouth just for a second before she caught herself. Color hit her cheeks, and she started to shift back, already reaching for whatever joke would put the air back between us.
No. Fuck that.
My hand was on her face before the thought finished forming.
I pulled her in and her mouth opened against mine, and the taste of her coffee and the heat of her breath hit me at the same time.
She made a sound low in her throat, and her hand came up and fisted the front of my shirt and pulled me closer, and whatever had been left of my restraint went with it.
We both stood in jerky motions, my hand on her face and hers still fisted in my shirt.
I shifted forward and pressed her back against the doorframe.
No adrenaline this time. No panic, no floodwater, no woman shaking apart in my arms. Just her mouth and my hands and the fact that I wanted this.
We both wanted this. My hand moved from her face to her jaw to the back of her neck, and her other hand found my shoulder and held on.
Two steps and she was against the hallway wall, my body pressed into hers. She dragged her fingers through my hair and pulled, and the groan that came out of me surprised us both. Her mouth opened under mine, and I tasted her deeper, my hands gripping her hips hard enough that she arched into me.
I’d forgotten what it felt like to want something this much. I’d forgotten that my body could do this: reach for someone instead of bracing against the next thing that would go wrong.
This was different from that cave yesterday.
While that had been adrenaline and fear and a woman who needed somewhere to put her pain, this was a hallway on a Tuesday morning and two people who just wanted each other.
No crisis driving it. No flood outside. Just want, clean and simple, and I was done pretending I didn’t feel it.
My hand slid under her shirt, and the sound she made when my fingers hit bare skin almost took out my knees.
We were heading somewhere specific, and both of us knew it.
And the only reason we were still standing was because getting horizontal meant making it to a room, and neither of us was willing to break contact long enough to get there.
Until a truck door slammed outside and all the dogs in the barn began barking. A few seconds later, Beckett’s voice carried through from the front porch with a loud knock. “Yo, Stroud. You in there?”
We both stopped.