Cage's Claim (Timber Run MC #1)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER

ONE

Addie

The notice was taped to my shop door when I came downstairs at five, and by eight I was on the courthouse steps waving the damn thing at the sheriff of Amberlin Falls, which was probably not the smartest way to be welcomed to town.

Fog hung on the Ridge behind the courthouse, snagged in the pines like the mountain hadn't decided whether to face the day yet. I guess dad decisions keep early hours.

"This notice is wrong," I said. "You've condemned a structure that passed county inspection in March. I have the report, signed, stamped, the whole works.”

Sheriff Roy Hutchens took his time with the paper, reading it over like he hadn't written it himself, and the longer he took, the more I understood that he had.

He was young for a sheriff and dressed like he knew it, pressed khaki, a haircut that belonged on a campaign flyer.

When he finally looked up, he was almost smiling, a handsome face built for smirking that somebody should've slapped at least once a day growing up.

"Nobody condemned your structure, Miss Merritt." He held the notice out until I took it back. "Read it again."

"I've read it almost a dozen times."

"Then you know it's a code violation, not a condemnation."

My stomach dropped clean to my boots, and they don't make a boot tall enough to catch it.

"Access," Hutchens said, patient as a man laying out a hand he'd dealt himself. "The county can't certify a commercial structure a fire truck can't reach. Your lot's got one way in, and it runs across somebody else's ground."

"There’s a right-of-way. My grandmother used that lane for thirty-one years, so how the hell does that not?—"

"Your grandmother had arrangements." He shrugged like that was that. "Arrangements aren't easements. If it ain’t on record, they die with the folks who made them."

I kept my eyes on Hutchens, because you don't look away from a man who's enjoying himself at your expense.

You especially don't cry in front of him.

And Hutchens was giving me a new look now, eyes drifting south and taking their sweet time coming back.

I knew that look. I'm built like the women in my family.

My daddy always told my mama she was built for sin and breeding.

I didn't know what the fuck that meant until I hit seventeen, filled out in all the right places, and boys stopped talking and started looking instead.

My mama's voice floated up. Honey catches more flies than vinegar, baby.

Not today, Mama. Today the sheriff was getting straight vinegar.

"This is bullshit," I said. "Kentucky law has a whole doctrine for exactly this, I looked it up this morning. I'm not done fighting."

"You want to take the county to court, that's your right." His smile finally made it all the way out. "Takes about eighteen months. That notice gives you sixty days."

What I wanted to do would've bought me a night in his jail. The paper crackled in my fist, my pulse slamming hard enough to feel in my back teeth, and I made myself breathe slow, like a woman with all the time in the world.

"Word of advice, since you're new in town.

" Hutchens settled his hat like the conversation was over.

"Your problem's that fence line you share with Locke Garage.

And whatever a Locke offers you to make that problem go away, don't take it.

That family's owned this county's trouble longer than you've been alive. "

He went up the steps past me. The math wouldn't come out any way but broke, and then it landed—a tingle at the back of my neck. That feeling of being watched.

Across the square, in front of the hardware store, a man leaned against the fender of a flatbed tow truck, arms crossed.

Big, dark-headed, sleeves shoved up over forearms that had done actual work that morning, ink winding from wrist to elbow and disappearing under the fabric.

Leather vest over a gray shirt. Too far off to read the patches, close enough that I didn't need to.

Men that size are usually broadcasting something, take a swing or take a look.

This one was just still, and the stillness carried across a hundred feet and pinned me in place.

He didn't look away when I caught him. Just kept on looking, easy as you please, like my fight with the sheriff had been the best show in town all week. Some men look at new women like they're shopping. This one looked like he'd already paid.

My face flamed hot and my spine straightened. I flipped my hair over my shoulder, gave him my back, and stormed off, his stare riding between my shoulder blades the whole way. I'd like to say I hated it.

Three porches tracked me and my fistful of county paper back to Ridge Road, and the women outside the Baptist church quit talking till I'd passed. Small towns don't need a newspaper. By noon half the county would know what I'd said, what I'd worn, and how my ass looked sashaying away.

The shop smelled like sawdust and forty years of my grandmother's dye pots, and stepping into it undid some knot in my chest every time.

Today it smelled like something the county was about to repossess.

I spread the notice on her workbench and read it slow this time, every line of the back-page fine print.

Paragraph four. Buried in the fine fucking print, the thing wrecking my life.

Sole vehicular access to the parcel crosses adjoining parcel 114, Locke Garage & Towing.

No recorded easement exists. The building was fine.

I could live in it, sleep in it, grow old in it.

What I couldn't do was run a business out of it, and a shop that can't open isn't a shop.

It's a very large box full of my grandmother's things.

Twelve feet of gravel, the width of a driveway.

That was the whole fight. My grandmother left me two thousand square feet of shop, an apartment over it, every tool she'd ever sharpened, and a note in her spidery cursive that said you always did have good hands, come finish what I started.

And the county was ready to choke all of it off over a strip of ground that belonged to a man the sheriff had warned me about by name.

I did what I always do when life kicks me around.

Worked. A wingback chair sat stripped to the frame on my bench, some estate-sale casualty Gran never got to, and I pulled jute with the webbing stretcher until my shoulders burned.

Fix the chair and I don't have to call a lawyer I can't afford in a county that already picked its side.

The stretcher slipped and took skin off my knuckle, and the motherfucker I hollered was loud enough to light up the whole Baptist calling tree.

It was almost dark when somebody knocked on the back door, the one facing the fence line.

After the day I'd had, nobody knocking on that door was bringing good news.

My tack hammer went within reach on the bench first. I'd come by that habit honest. I wiped my hands on my jeans, flipped the lock, and pulled the door open.

The man from the square filled most of the frame, and God help me, the view hadn't suffered one bit at close range.

Mid-thirties and rugged, dark stubble a few days past a razor and working for him anyway, shoulders that made my doorway look undersized.

I couldn't work up any spit. The vest from this morning was gone, and the gray shirt had nothing to do but stretch across his chest and show off the ink.

Grease sat deep in the creases of his knuckles, permanent as the tattoos.

All of it was working for me, and that right there was the problem.

Thirty-one years old, and my taste in men had already cost me a career and most of my savings, and it clearly wasn't done spending.

"Name's Locke,” he said. "My garage is on your fence line."

His voice matched the rest of him, low and unhurried, like he rationed it. My heart was beating harder than the situation required. Some distant part of me was filing notes on how much space he took up under damn girl, don't let this become a problem.

"I know who you are," I said. "The sheriff mentioned you this morning, right around when he explained the only way into my shop runs across your land. So if you came over to name a price for keeping that gate open, save your breath. Whatever it is, I'm not paying it."

His eyes changed, quick, there and gone. Approval, if I had to name it, which made no sense and helped nobody. And under it, steady as a pilot light, the same settled thing from the square that morning. This near, it had weight.

"Not here about a price." He just stood there being looked at, like it cost him nothing. "Whatever the county says about that lane, my gate stays open to your lot. It stayed open for your grandmother. Nobody's closing it now."

I didn't know what to do with that. He held the one card that could end me, and he'd just walked over at dusk to say he wasn't going to play it. Nobody gives you something for nothing. I'd learned that one the hard way.

"Why?" It came out flat.

"Because I liked your grandmother. She was good people." A pause, and then, same level voice, "What did Hutchens tell you about me?"

I pulled my chin up and met him square. He was a good-looking man asking a loaded question, the most dangerous combination on God's green earth, but the one thing I still knew how to do was hold my ground.

"Nothing I plan on repeating," I said.

He looked at me a long moment, the floodlight carving him out of the fog behind him. The crickets kept sawing.

"Fair enough," he said.

And he turned to go, and the screen door I'd propped chose that exact moment to swing loose in the evening wind, coming at my shoulder, and his hand shot out to catch it. Fast. Faster than a man that size should move.

I flinched. Whole-body, backed a half-step, hand coming up, a reflex four years in the training and eight months out of practice, and it was done before I could call it back.

He froze, every inch of him, like he knew one more fast move from a man his size would send me right out of my own skin. His hand came off the door slow, like it was the door that had spooked, and he stepped back off my sill, down onto the gravel, opening space between us he didn't comment on.

"Night, ma'am," was all he said.

He walked the fence line back, fog swallowing his boots, and he never once looked back. I stood in my grandmother's doorway more unsettled by his leaving than I'd been by his knock.

He'd said one true-sounding thing and walked back into the dark, and my gut was already typing up his character reference, bless its heart. My gut had vouched for a liar before. My gut didn't get a vote anymore, and neither did the rest of me.

The smart thing was to close the door and stay away from that fence line.

I stood at the window until his floodlight cut out. So much for being fucking smart.