Chapter 5
She was definitely not going to make anything of the office incident.
Catching her had been reflex on his part, obviously.
Right? He’d reached for her because she was off-balance, and he was the kind of man who helped people.
The warmth of his hands on her hips for approximately two seconds was not something she was going to revisit at night when she should be sleeping.
But, sadly, she was revisiting it. She’d thought of the warmth of his fingers on her body over and over again.
“Stop it,” she told herself, in the voice she reserved for truly counterproductive thoughts. “He’s only here for a few more weeks while he heals and then he and Ari are going to leave again. You have a store to run and a father to look after, and that’s your life now. It’s a good life.”
All of that was true. She believed it. Yet she still stared at the ceiling of her bedroom and thought about Pax’s hands on her body.
The thing was, when he’d caught her, it hadn’t felt like simply a reflex action. It had felt like he’d known exactly what he was doing, at least when he’d caught her. Holding on to her for a few beats seemed to have been as much of a surprise to him as it had been to her.
Or maybe she was just imagining that. She’d had a crush on him since she was a teenager, and her judgment, when it came to him, was not to be trusted.
Either way, she had a slew of new memories of being with Pax to savor.
The time since he’d shown up in the store until Ari had come home had been the first real quality time they’d had alone together, without Ari, in…
well…forever. Usually, the twins traveled as a pair and did almost everything together.
The fact that it had just been Pax here, on his own, had been new and different.
And it had allowed her to spend a lot of time with just him, forming memories of things they’d shared that would see her through the time she knew was coming, when he’d leave again. Now that was a depressing thought.
She turned over, closed her eyes, and thought about the workshop instead. That was safe ground. The look on her father’s face when Emilio had stayed after and asked if he could come back to learn more had been worth everything.
Her dad had been lonely in ways he’d never admitted to her. The knowledge he’d spent a lifetime acquiring had nowhere to go. His friends were all in their seventies and eighties and not interested in learning new things. He needed students. He needed purpose beyond just keeping the shop running.
She’d been trying to give him that for years and hadn’t quite managed it. Pax had come home and managed the impossible in no time at all. Which was either something to be grateful for or something to be cautious about. Possibly both. She fell asleep somewhere in the middle of deciding which.
After seeing the Clan healer again, Pax was cleared to run.
Not in human form yet, though. The healer had gone into detail about ground impact and the stresses of bipedal movement at speed.
Apparently, there was a muscle attachment at the back of his knee that was the last piece to finish regenerating, and until it was fully knit he shouldn’t take unnecessary risks.
But in jaguar form, at an easy pace on easy terrain, yes. He could run. Hallelujah!
He went out before dawn, crossed the flat desert behind his parents’ house, and shifted.
The relief was extraordinary. His jaguar stretched into the open air like a SEAL coming up from a long dive.
Shoulders rolling, paws finding the sand, lungs filling with the desert air that was full of so many familiar scents.
Creosote and juniper and the dry mineral smell of rock and sand.
A jackrabbit was somewhere to the north.
Two coyotes were traveling together about a mile east. The distinct absence of human smell that meant open country, beckoned to him.
He ran. Not fast. Not yet. Not with the healer’s cautionary words in his head.
But he ran steadily, covering ground, letting his jaguar have what it had been denied for weeks.
The leg held beautifully. The rebuilt tissue moved cleanly under the demand of a long, easy stride, and his jaguar’s assessment was that it was fine.
It was more than fine. It was working and working well, and if he’d just let himself push a little—
Sighing inwardly, he kept the pace easy.
An hour out. Then an hour back. He shifted behind the house as the sky was going pale gray in the east. He dressed quickly and went in to find his father already up with coffee.
“You good?” his father asked.
“I’m good,” Pax replied, grinning with satisfaction.
His father poured him a cup of coffee, and they sat in comfortable silence for a while watching the desert light come up slow and golden through the kitchen window.
“I’ve been talking to Rodrigo,” his father said eventually.
Rodrigo Vela was the Clan Alpha. He was older than Herman, which meant he was old indeed, though he wore his years differently than Pax’s father did.
Where Herman had slowed down and settled, Rodrigo had simply become more still.
Like a mountain. “We talked about Mark Pepard’s invitation. ”
Pax set down his cup. “What’s he thinking?”
“He’s thinking he’ll wait for you and Ari to come to him with a recommendation.” His father glanced at him. “He says you two know the wider world better than anyone else in the Clan, and if you say joining Pepard’s Clan is the right move, he’ll take that seriously.”
Pax absorbed this. It was a significant weight to hand to them, and also deeply characteristic of Rodrigo, who had always understood that leadership was knowing when to rely on people who knew more than he did.
“We haven’t really decided either way what to recommend,” Pax said, speaking for his twin, who was apparently still asleep.
“I know.” His father refilled his coffee. “There’s time. Rodrigo’s not in a hurry.” A pause. “He said to tell you that you’ve been a good Beta to this Clan. Both of you.”
Pax didn’t say anything. His father didn’t expect him to. That was how some things worked in this family.
He drank his coffee and watched the desert brighten and thought about what it meant to be home.
He hadn’t spent much time here in a lot of years, though he and his twin had been working for the health of their Clan even as they traveled the world.
They’d been sending money and information back home as often as possible and made short visits when they could.
Maybe it was time to do more. He’d have to talk to Ari about their next moves, but a lot of their future was still up in the air right now.
“You look better,” Bree said when Pax showed up at the hardware store later that afternoon.
“I got cleared to run.” He said it the same way he’d have said he’d been let out of prison, probably, because it felt similar.
She smiled at him and his insides flipped a little. “Good. I know that was probably making you itchy.”
“You’d be right about that,” he muttered for her ears alone.
“Come on then.” She nodded toward the back. “I need someone to help me figure out what’s wrong with the shelving in the back room. I think it’s the mounting brackets, but Dad thinks it’s the wall anchors and I’m not sure either of us is right.”
He followed her to the back and looked at the shelving unit in question. It was a large, industrial metal rack that had developed a pronounced lean toward the left.
It wasn’t the brackets or the anchors. It was the floor.
“Slight slope,” he said, crouching to look at the base. “It’s probably always been there, but this rack is heavy enough now that it’s showing. We’ll need to shim the left-side legs and probably re-anchor.”
“The floor’s not level?” She crouched beside him to look, which brought her shoulder against his arm. He was getting better at not reacting. “How have we never noticed?”
“Floors go out of level slowly. You stop seeing it.” He pointed to the base plate. “See the gap there on the left side? Just a few millimeters. But over enough height, that’s…” he eyeballed the rack, which was about eight feet tall, “…a significant lean at the top.”
She looked where he was pointing and nodded, following the logic. She smelled like the gentle soap she used and something underneath it that was just her. He was aware of this in the same low-level involuntary way he’d been aware of it since he’d first started noticing she was a girl.
“Can you fix it?” she asked.
“Sure, if you’ve got shims.”
“We’re a hardware store.”
“Fair point.” He stood and offered her a hand up. She took it and stood easily.
They were both standing in the small space between the rack and the wall. Close. Not inappropriately close, but close enough that he could see the faint trace of sawdust along her jawline from whatever she’d been doing earlier. He let go of her hand reluctantly.
“I’ll get the shims,” she said, and went out quickly. He stayed where he was and had a brief private word with himself about taking things slow and being careful.
When she returned, he took the shims, leveled the rack, and spent the rest of the afternoon dealing with two other small issues that had caught his eye.
A supply of sandpaper had been stored in the wrong location.
He not only moved it but sorted it into the various grits so it would be easier to find the right grit for whatever job was needed.
He also fixed a light fixture in the corner that had been flickering for, by Bree’s estimate, about two months.
“Two months?” he said in a tone of disbelief.
“I’ve been meaning to get to it,” she replied a bit defensively.
“Get me a replacement bulb. We’ll start with that.” He moved to the light without further comment.
She got him the bulb. He changed it and checked over the wiring in case it was more than just the bulb. The corner of the store lit up properly, and they both stood looking at it with satisfaction.
“Thank you,” she said. “But you don’t have to keep—”
“I’m going to stop you right there,” he said. She looked up at him. “I come here because I want to. Not because I feel obligated. I want to be here, and I like to help out.” He said it plainly, because he was done dancing around it. “That’s all there is to it.”
She held his gaze. He didn’t flinch from her scrutiny. There was something in the air between them that had been building for weeks.
But this wasn’t the time. Her dad was in the front of the store. And judging by the tinkle of the bell over the door, a customer was entering and would likely need help.
“Okay,” she said finally, her tone soft.
She went to help the customer. He went back to the shelving and thought about everything that had gone unsaid and his hopes for the future. With Bree.