Chapter 1 #2
He limped out to the kitchen, where his mother had left coffee.
Bless her, she’d always understood that coffee was non-negotiable.
Pax stood at the counter with his mug wafting the heavenly scent of fresh brew and took stock of the house.
The screen door to the back porch had a hinge that was slightly off.
He’d noticed it the day he arrived, every time it opened and didn’t quite close flush.
There was a gap in the upper corner. He could fix that in twenty minutes with the right hardware.
He looked down at his leg and wondered if it was healed enough to get him to town and back again. His leg looked back at him, metaphorically speaking. It felt like it was mocking him.
Pax’s parents had gone out together for some appointment or other. The healer had told him to take it easy, which he was interpreting as broadly as possible. Driving was fine, right? He could drive his mom’s automatic with his right foot, and the hardware store wasn’t far.
Decision made, Pax finished his coffee and found his mother’s keys.
The drive was fine. Pax’s left leg ached with a low persistent complaint that he was getting better at ignoring.
The familiar desert scenery rolling past the windows helped.
He’d grown up watching this landscape and he loved it.
It was all reddish brown and silver-green, sparse and enormous, with hazy blue mountains in the distance.
He and Ari had run these roads as jaguars on a thousand different nights, chasing jackrabbits, coyotes, and each other.
He missed running. He missed Ari, too. His twin not being there was a constant low-level awareness.
Twelve times a day he thought of something he wanted to say to his brother and turned, but Ari wasn’t there.
It was unsettling in a way he wouldn’t admit to anyone except possibly Ari himself.
They’d always been together, even in the service.
They’d been partners in everything most of their lives.
The small town was quiet when he got there. He parked in the lot behind the hardware store and climbed out carefully, testing his weight on his left leg. The pain was manageable. His leg was doing better. It just didn’t like surprises.
He knew exactly where he was going. Leeland’s Hardware had been on Main Street for as long as Pax could remember.
He and Ari had worked summers there in high school, stocking shelves, delivering bulk orders, and sweating through small renovation jobs that old Mr. Leeland organized for regular customers.
They’d learned more about construction and repair from that sharp-eyed, patient man than from anyone before or since.
They’d also hung out with his daughter. Pax pushed that thought aside before it could form into anything more specific and pushed open the back door of the hardware store.
The smell of the place hit him first. Sawdust and metal, machine oil and something underneath all of it that was uniquely this place, unchanged since he was a kid.
Good smells. Real smells that reminded him of home and the happy times of his childhood.
He inhaled and felt the tension in his shoulders ease.
He knew where the hinges were kept. He made his way to the back corner and found the right aisle by memory, though it took a moment to locate the specific drawer in the old wooden cabinet below the shelves.
He was crouched there, pulling open drawers, when the effort of holding that position on his healing leg started communicating its displeasure quite clearly.
He straightened too fast. The world tilted.
He grabbed the shelf. Stood very still. Breathed.
“Do not pass out in the hardware store,” he told himself sternly. He could survive a great many things, but he didn’t think he could survive that sort of news reaching Ari. He’d never let him live it down.
“Can I help you find anything, sir?” a feminine voice asked from behind him.
Pax turned toward the voice, still gripping the shelf, and time stood still.
Little Briana Leeland had grown up.
He’d known, abstractly, that she would have.
It had been fifteen years since they’d shipped out and the occasional postcard to her father had dwindled to nothing within a few years.
Fifteen years since she’d been the young girl who kept their secret with a steadiness that had humbled both of them. He’d known she’d be different.
He hadn’t been prepared for the reality of her standing in the aisle with her dark hair pulled back and her blue eyes sharp. They went wide with recognition, and something in his chest expanded. He didn’t examine the feelings rushing through him too closely.
“Paxton?” She stepped closer, head tilting.
Those stunning blue eyes moved over him.
Her gaze swept over his face, the scar along his jaw, and then down to the way he was white-knuckling the shelf, hanging onto it for dear life.
He watched her clock everything in about three seconds. She’d always been quick.
“Breelee,” he said, and was surprised by how much steadier his voice was than the rest of him. “You grew up.”
“That’s generally what happens.” The corner of her mouth curved, the same pretty half-smile, unchanged in all the time that had passed since he’d last seen her. “Where’s your other half?”
“Elsewhere.” He shifted his weight and wished he hadn’t. Sweat had gathered along his upper lip and he was fairly sure his face had gone an unhelpful shade of pale.
“You’re hurt,” she said, moving closer, her brows furrowing in concern.
“You’re not going to pass out on me, are you?
Because I have to be honest with you, Pax, I couldn’t lift you when we were kids, and I definitely can’t do it now.
What are they feeding you? You’re even more giant than you were when you left. ”
“I’m not going to pass out,” he said, sounding petulant even to his own ears.
His jaguar, which had been quietly observing the situation, chose that moment to draw his attention to the scent of her.
Warm skin. A clean, faint floral note beneath, and under all of it a warmth that was completely, unmistakably her.
Deep inside, his cat sat up, took one long breath, and said a single word.
Mine.
Pax told the cat, very firmly, to sit back down. The cat did not sit back down. It settled instead into a pleased, proprietary sprawl behind his ribs, and he decided he would let the cat remain inscrutable, while the rest of him focused on staying vertical.
“You don’t look like a man who’s not going to pass out,” she said, and then she was beside him, one of his arms going over her shoulders with efficient practicality.
She was smaller than him by a significant margin.
Of course, most people were. But she was solid, and her grip on his wrist was firm. “Come on. We’re going upstairs.”
“Bree, I’m fine.” He tried to protest, but she was having none of it.
“Sure you are.” She steered him toward the door marked PRIVATE that led to the apartment upstairs. “You can tell me that while you sit down and stop listing to starboard.”
He almost grinned at her words. “Hey, I thought I was the sailor here.”
She chuckled, but didn’t reply, just firmly led him toward the door.
He followed, partly because he was too tired to argue and partly because, he was honest enough to admit privately, her shoulder under his arm was warm and steady and it had been a long eleven days of not having anyone close.
And it had been a long fifteen years of not being near Bree, in particular.