Chapter 6 Criss
CRISS
The bell was still swinging when Criss realized he was standing at the counter with his mouth half open and no one to talk to.
That was new.
He closed his mouth. Adjusted his stance. Picked up his coffee from the table behind him and took a sip like he'd planned the whole thing, like getting dismissed mid-sentence by a woman in a muddy tool belt was exactly how he'd wanted his evening to go.
Twyla was watching him with both elbows on the counter with a gleeful expression.
"Don't," he said.
"I didn't say a word."
"You're saying it with your face."
"My face is a vessel of warmth and hospitality, Criss Holt. I can't help what you project onto it." Twyla picked up a rag and started wiping the counter in slow, deliberate circles. "So. That went well."
"It went fine."
"She walked away from you mid-conversation."
"She had somewhere to be."
"She had a tea she hadn't finished." Twyla nodded toward the half-full cup still sitting on the counter where the woman had left it.
Steam curled off the surface. "You know what it means when a woman leaves a cup of my tea unfinished?
It means she wanted out of that conversation more than she wanted the best chamomile blend this side of the Blue Ridge. "
Criss leaned against the counter and summoned his most unbothered expression. It was a good one. He'd practiced it in bathroom mirrors across the Southeast, and it had never failed to convince anyone that nothing in the world could touch him. "She'll come around. They always do."
"Mmhm." Twyla collected the abandoned cup and poured it out. "Or, and I'm just offering this as an alternative theory, she's not interested and you just experienced something called rejection. I'm told it's character-building."
"I wouldn't know. I'm unfamiliar with the concept."
"Clearly."
He finished his coffee and set the mug down, keeping his posture loose and easy even though his body felt tight with tension.
His tiger was doing something strange, a restless attention in a way that he hadn’t ever experienced.
The animal was oriented toward the door where she'd gone.
Locked on a scent that was still caught in the air even though she'd been gone for a solid two minutes.
"Who is she?" he asked, and he kept the question casual enough that it could have been about the weather.
Twyla smirked at him, making him hating that he had even asked.
"Stephanie Ward. Archaeologist. She's been coming to Hollow Oak on and off for years, lectures at the learning center, works with the council on excavation projects.
She's here for a dig out past the eastern ridge.
" Twyla cocked her head. "She's also brilliant, respected, and not remotely the kind of woman who falls for a smile and a lean against the counter. "
"I did not lean against the counter."
"Honey, you leaned. It's your signature move. I've watched you do it to six different women since you got to town."
"Seven," he corrected, because if his reputation was going to precede him, it should at least be accurate.
Twyla laughed, bright and genuine, and shook her head. "Go home, Criss. Eat something that isn't pastry. And maybe, just maybe, consider the possibility that not every woman in the world is waiting to be charmed by a Holt with good cheekbones."
"Great cheekbones."
"Goodnight, Criss."
He left a tip on the counter that was larger than the bill because Twyla's scones deserved it and because it was the kind of gesture that usually made women smile at him, but Twyla just pocketed it without acknowledgment and went back to wiping down tables.
Even the tip couldn't land tonight. The universe was conspiring.
The walk back to Kieran's cabin sped by as Criss spent every moment trying to figure out why this was bothering him.
Women turned him down sometimes. Rarely, but it happened.
A bartender in Charleston had laughed in his face once, and he'd found it hilarious.
A witch in Asheville had told him she'd rather date a mailbox, and he'd bought her a drink for the creativity.
Rejection wasn't fatal. It was barely inconvenient.
You adjusted your approach, recalibrated the angle, and tried again or moved on. Simple math.
But this one felt oddly personal. And as much as he tried, he wasn’t able to shake it off.
Not the rejection itself, which had been clean and efficient and, if he was being honest, kind of impressive in its precision.
It was the way she'd looked at him. Those hazel eyes with their gold flecks had swept over him and catalogued him in about three seconds flat, and what they'd catalogued was: not worth the time.
Not mean about it. Not cruel. Just factual, the way someone might note that a particular rock formation wasn't relevant to their research and move on to the next sample.
She'd filed him under unremarkable. Him. Criss Holt, who had once made a woman forget her own name in a coat closet in Savannah and who had been told by multiple reliable sources that he was, quote, “dangerously attractive”.
His tiger rumbled low in his chest, not angry, just unsettled. The animal didn't like loose ends, and this woman was a loose end, a voice that had cut through his charm like it was made of tissue paper.
Kieran was on the cabin porch when Criss came up the trail, because of course he was.
His cousin sat in the wooden chair he'd built himself, a mug balanced on his knee and his phone face-down beside him, looking out at the woods with the patient stillness of a man who could sit in one spot for three hours and call it productive.
"You're back early," Kieran said.
"Wasn't much going on." Criss took the porch steps two at a time and dropped into the opposite chair. The night air was cool and clean, and the crickets had started up in the trees. Somewhere across the valley, a nightbird called and another answered.
"How was the Griddle?"
"Twyla's pastries are still unrealistically good and her personality is still unbearably loud."
Kieran's eyes drifted to him with that quiet, assessing look. "You smell different."
Criss went still. "I smell like coffee and galette."
"Under that."
"Cedar soap."
"Under that."
"I'm not doing this, Kieran."
His cousin took a slow sip from his mug, expression unreadable.
As a mated shifter, Kieran's senses were sharper than most, tuned by the bond in ways that Criss found invasive and obnoxious.
The man could probably smell what Criss had for breakfast three days ago, and right now he was clearly picking up on whatever trace of that woman had followed Criss home like a stray.
"I met someone at the Griddle," Criss said, because not saying it would make it a bigger deal than it was. "Archaeologist. She shut me down. End of story."
"Shut you down." Kieran repeated slowly.
"It happens."
"When?"
"Occasionally."
"Name one time."
"Charleston. The bartender."
"The one who gave you her number an hour later?"
"The initial rejection still counts."
Kieran set his mug down with the particular care of a man choosing not to laugh. "What's her name?"
"Doesn't matter. She's not interested and I'm not pursuing. I've got enough complications in my life without chasing some woman who looks at me like I'm a survey anomaly she doesn't have time to investigate."
Crickets and the distant lap of the lake and the wind moving through pines filled the silence as Criss leaned back in his chair and stared up at the sky where stars were punching through the last of the cloud cover, bright and indifferent.
He could still smell her. That was the part that dug at him.
Not the rejection, not the way she'd walked out without a backward glance, not even the surgical efficiency with which she'd dismantled his best opening line.
It was the scent. His tiger kept circling back to it the way animals circle something they don't understand but can't ignore.
"You're quiet," Kieran observed.
"I'm contemplative."
"You're never contemplative."
"Maybe I'm evolving."
Kieran looked at him for a long moment, and Criss could practically see the gears turning, his cousin filing this conversation away in whatever mental cabinet he kept labeled things to watch. Then Kieran picked up his mug and stood.
"Goodnight, Criss."
"Night."
The screen door closed behind Kieran with a soft clap, and Criss sat alone on the porch with the stars and the crickets and the ghost of a scent that didn't belong to him and wouldn't leave him alone.
So what? A beautiful woman, a bruised ego, a tiger acting strange because spring did weird things to shifters.
By tomorrow he'd have forgotten her name and her face and the way she'd said this is where the introduction ends with the calm authority of someone used to drawing lines and enforcing them.
By tomorrow, Stephanie Ward would be irrelevant.