Chapter 6
Lola
I make a list. This is what I do when things get complicated.
It’s not a feelings list, not a pros and cons list, nothing that requires emotional literacy or the acknowledgment that I am currently experiencing something that could be classified as feelings.
A facts list. Concrete, enumerable, actionable.
Facts:
One. I am wanted by law enforcement in three states for a bank heist I did not commit.
Two. My former best friend, Amber O’Connor, who I have known since we were nine years old and who I apparently did not know at all, has framed me with what sounds, from the fragments I’ve managed to piece together from news alerts on a burner phone, like genuinely impressive thoroughness.
Three. I have approximately four hundred dollars in cash, a ‘borrowed’ car with a slow leak in the rear left tire, and no ID that I’m comfortable showing to anyone with a badge.
Four. I am in a small town in the middle of nowhere that has, inexplicably, four of the most compelling men I have ever encountered in my life, all of whom appear to be operating as a unit and directing that unit’s attention at me with a focus that I find —
I cross out four.
Actionable items:
The partial bond. Hound Jack until he finds a solution to get rid of it. Ignore it at all times and certainly don’t make it stronger.
Money. I need more of it, and I need it in cash, and I need it from a source that doesn’t require paperwork or ID because the last thing I need is my name in any system anywhere.
The carnival.
I think about this for approximately ten minutes while sitting on the edge of Doris Harrow’s very reasonable guest bed, looking at my shoes, doing the arithmetic.
A carnival this size needs labor. Not skilled labor, not documented labor.
Bodies, willing and able to carry things and run stalls and smile at the public for hours at a stretch.
Cash in hand, no questions if you don’t make them ask questions.
It is a good plan.
It is a good plan that involves staying in Sweetwater Valley longer than forty-eight hours, which I have told myself I’m not doing, which I am apparently doing anyway, and I am going to make peace with this contradiction by labeling it strategic flexibility and moving on.
I put my shoes on and go find whoever’s hiring carnival labor.
It turns out to be Tristan.
Of course it’s Tristan. Tristan, who makes extraordinary eggs and has forearms that I am not thinking about and who looked at me this morning like I was something he was quietly pleased to have found.
Which is an expression no one has directed at me in long enough that I don’t have a calibrated response to it.
He’s at the carnival grounds when I get there, late-morning, directing two teenagers in the assembly of what will clearly be a substantial food operation.
Burners, a prep table, containers that suggest scale.
He spots me before I get close, which should feel surveillance-adjacent but somehow doesn’t.
He raises a hand in greeting like he expected me back and isn’t making a thing of it.
“Lola,” he says. “Eggs were okay?”
“The eggs were excellent and you know it.”
His mouth does that attractive curve. “What can I do for you?”
“I heard the carnival pays workers cash in hand.”
He tilts his head, a small assessment. “It can. What are you looking to do?”
“Whatever needs doing. I’m not precious about it.”
He looks at me for a moment. Not the threat-assessment look that Archer does, not the everything-is-interesting look that Jack does. Tristan’s look is quieter than both of those. More patient. Like he’s reading something that requires good light and he’s willing to wait for it.
“Can you run a food stall?” he asks.
“I can run anything.”
“That’s either very confident or very true.”
“In this case, both.” I worked a café for eight months when I was twenty, an actual café with actual volume, not a nice small-town operation with one staff member and goodwill carrying the weight.
I know how to manage a rush, how to keep a prep line moving, how to smile at strangers for hours without it touching my actual face.
He nods, once. “Saturday and Sunday, main days. Ten to close. That’s usually around ten at night. Sixty cash a day.”
“Eighty.”
He looks at me. A pause. “Seventy.”
“Seventy-five.”
“Done,” he says, and he’s doing that quiet-pleased thing again, which I refuse to find cute. “Can you do prep work this week while we set up? Half rate, three hours a day.”
This is more days than I planned. This is potentially a full week, which is… fine. This is strategic. I need the money and the carnival is a good cover. Nobody looks for a fugitive who’s cheerfully working a food stall in a small-town festival. Hopefully.
“Fine,” I say.
“Good.” He hands me an apron from a box, that is slightly oversized. I put it on and feel immediately ridiculous and also, somehow, slightly less like I’m about to fly apart. “Do you want to start now?”
“Sure,” I reply.
And that is how I end up elbow-deep in prep work for Tristan’s carnival stall at eleven in the morning, which was not in any version of my plan and which I am categorically fine with.
The work is good.
This surprises me, or… not. It doesn’t surprise me.
Work has always been good. Work is concrete and physical.
It requires your hands and enough of your brain that the rest of it, the part that runs scenarios and tracks threats and replays the moment Amber’s voice said run, has to stand back and wait its turn.
Tristan works beside me, and he talks sometimes and doesn’t talk other times.
He has the rare ability of making silence feel companionable rather than loaded.
He explains the menu. It’s more ambitious than I expected, built around things that smell incredible in the open air and scale well under pressure.
He asks the right questions about my experience and doesn’t make me prove myself, just watches me work and adjusts accordingly.
By the second hour I’ve stopped noticing that he’s there in the way I was noticing it before. He’s just present. Just another Alpha.
I notice when he reaches past me for the stock list.
He’s close—closer than the workspace strictly requires, though it’s not deliberate, the prep table is compact—and he smells like coffee and butter.
Warm. It’s the only word I’ve got for him.
Warm in the way of something that has been warm a long time, not the sharp heat of a fire but the sustained heat of something that doesn’t go out.
My body does something that it does not have permission to do.
Nothing dramatic. Just a shift in awareness, a recalibration of where I am in space relative to where he is, a sudden acute consciousness of the distance between his arm and mine.
My skin is paying attention in a way that skin should not be paying attention to a near-stranger during prep work.
I step slightly left, creating an extra few inches. He doesn’t react because there’s nothing to react to. I am doing prep work. I am fine.
I’m fine. Hear me, universe? I’m fine.
Archer appears at two in the afternoon. He doesn’t announce himself. He’s just there, suddenly, at the edge of the stall, and my body clocks him before my eyes do. I have good situational awareness. I track people in my environment. I do not get surprised by arrivals.
And yet.
He’s carrying something—a hardware item, something for the stall frame—and he stops when he sees me. His expression pivots. He was not expecting me to be here. He is recalculating.
“You’re working the stall,” he comments.
“Evidently.”
He looks at Tristan, who looks back with an expression of complete serenity. “She asked,” Tristan says. “She’s good.”
Archer looks back at me. He has, I’ve noticed, a way of looking at things that is less observation and more occupation. Like his attention has physical weight. “You know how to work with food?” he asks.
“You say that like it’s suspicious.”
“Everything is suspicious until it’s not.”
“That must be exhausting,” I say pleasantly.
Something moves through his eyes. Not quite amusement—Archer is not a man who leads with amusement—but adjacent to it, the thing that happens before amusement in people who’ve trained themselves out of easy reactions.
He sets the hardware down at the frame, crouches to fit it, and gets to work. He doesn’t make conversation. Doesn’t explain his continued presence. He just works, on the frame, within a distance that is close enough to be noticeable and far enough to be defensible.
I am very aware of him too.
This is a physiological reality I’m dealing with at an intellectual distance, which is the only way I know how to deal with it.
He’s big—I knew this, it’s not new information—and he moves with the economy of someone physically capable who has nothing to prove about it.
When he reaches to fix something at the upper frame his shirt rides up and I do not look at the sliver of his muscled abs.
I am absolutely not looking at his muscled abs.
The smell of him has drifted into my space.
Cedar and snow. Plus that underneath thing, the thing I don’t have a category for, except—standing this close, with the afternoon warming up and the work generating heat—I think it’s something like pack.
Like something that registers to some part of me that predates rational thought as safety and home.
I have never in my life scented anything that made those words surface automatically and I cannot deal with that right now.
It has to be because of the partial bond. Surely, it can’t be anything else?
I move to the other end of the prep table.
“Ingredient run?” I say to Tristan, because I need a task that involves being somewhere else.
“List is on the clip,” he replies, not looking up, and hands me a canvas bag.
I take the list and the bag. I don’t look at Archer and leave at a pace that is normal walking speed and is definitely not a retreat.