Chapter 8
The Stranger at the Clinic
Phoebe
The morning after the wolf, I throw myself into work.
It’s not difficult. The surgery needs organising, and I’ve barely made a dent in it since I arrived.
Boxes of supplies still line the hallway.
The examination table needs recalibrating.
The autoclave makes a sound like a dying engine every time I run it, and the filing system the previous owners left behind appears to have been arranged by someone who didn’t believe in the alphabet.
I sort instruments into trays. I label drawers.
I scrub the examination room floor on my hands and knees with disinfectant that makes my eyes water, and I do not think about golden eyes or impossible wolves or the strange warmth that settled in my chest when an animal looked at me like it knew my name.
I think about those things constantly.
Between patients, which today amounts to Maggie’s tabby (overweight, unrepentant, hostile to the weighing scales) and a border collie with a torn dew claw, I find myself standing at the window.
The treeline is visible from the surgery, a dark border at the edge of the village where the houses give way to farmland and the farmland gives way to forest. I watch it the way you watch a door you expect someone to walk through, even though you know they won’t.
The wolf won’t come back. It was a hybrid, an escapee, probably halfway to the next county by now.
The clinical notes I wrote yesterday are factual and sufficient, and I don’t need to add to them.
I don’t need to stand at the window. I don’t need to keep remembering the steady thump of its heart beneath my hand.
I go back to scrubbing the floor.
The knock comes just after lunch.
I’m in the back room eating a sandwich over the sink, which is not glamorous but is efficient, and I almost don’t hear it.
The surgery is technically closed for the afternoon, and my appointment book is empty until tomorrow morning.
But old habits from city practice die hard, and an unexpected knock might mean an emergency.
I wipe my hands on a tea towel and open the front door.
The man on my doorstep is tall. That’s the first thing I register.
Tall and broad through the shoulders, with dark hair that looks like he’s run his fingers through it rather than bothered with a comb, and a face that’s all sharp angles softened by an expression of easy, unhurried amusement.
He’s wearing a worn jacket over a dark shirt, jeans, and work boots that have seen actual work.
In his hands, he holds a wicker basket covered with a checked cloth, something you see in photographs of farmers’ markets.
“Dr Clarke?” His voice is deep, with a local accent, easy. Deliberately so. “Maggie sent me. She said you hadn’t had a proper welcome yet, and apparently that’s a criminal offence in Mistwood.”
He holds out the basket. I take it automatically, registering its weight, the smell of fresh bread, and something sweet underneath.
“That’s very kind of her.” I’m aware that I’m standing in my doorway in a jumper with bleach stains on the cuffs, hair scraped back, probably smelling of floor disinfectant. “She didn’t need to do that.”
“Try telling Maggie she doesn’t need to do something.” His smile is crooked, conspiratorial, like we’re already sharing a joke. “I’m Roan.”
He offers his hand. I shift the basket to my hip and take it.
The moment his fingers close around mine, warmth spreads from the point of contact up through my wrist, into my arm, keeps going.
Bypasses my chest entirely. Settles somewhere lower.
Somewhere I haven’t felt warmth in a long time.
It’s not sexual, exactly. It’s pre-sexual.
The body’s advance warning that something is about to matter.
It settles low in my pussy before my brain can make sense of it.
I let go a fraction too quickly and see something flicker across his face. Surprise, maybe. Or satisfaction.
“Phoebe,” I say. “Thank you for bringing this over. Do you want to come in? I can put the kettle on.”
The invitation is out before I’ve thought it through.
I don’t invite strangers into my home. I especially don’t invite large, handsome strangers into my home when I’m alone and still jumpy from finding an apex predator in the woods yesterday morning.
But something about Roan’s presence makes the cottage feel less empty rather than more crowded, and the words come naturally, which unsettles me.
“I wouldn’t say no to a cup of tea.” He steps inside, ducking under the low lintel, and looks around the hallway with the casual interest of someone who’s been in this cottage before. “The place looks different. The Bradfords had it stuffed floor to ceiling with George’s fishing magazines.”
“You knew them?”
“Everyone knows everyone in Mistwood. You’ll get used to it.
” He follows me into the kitchen, and I’m suddenly conscious of how small the room is.
Not because he’s imposing, exactly. He moves with an easy grace that suggests he’s comfortable in tight spaces.
But his presence fills the room in a way I can’t quantify.
The air feels different. Hotter. I’m suddenly, inconveniently aware of exactly how small the kitchen is.
I fill the kettle and busy myself with mugs, grateful for something to do with my hands.
Behind me, I hear him pull out a chair and sit down at the kitchen table, and the domesticity of it catches me off guard.
A man is sitting at my table while I make tea.
It feels ordinary. It shouldn’t, but it does.
“So how are you finding Mistwood?” he asks. “Settling in all right?”
“It’s quiet.” I pour the water, fishing the teabags out at slightly different times because I’ve forgotten to ask how he takes it. “Which is what I wanted.”
“Quiet’s one word for it. Dull is another.”
I turn and hand him a mug. He takes it with a nod of thanks, and I notice his hands. Large, rough-skinned, with calluses that come from physical work rather than the gym. There’s a faint scratch across his right knuckles, pink and nearly healed.
“You find it dull?” I sit down across from him with my own tea, the table between us like a boundary neither of us has acknowledged.
“I find it suffocating. But that’s a different problem.” The honesty of it surprises me, and something in his expression suggests it surprises him too, like he hadn’t meant to say that much. He covers it with a sip of tea. “This is good. Thank you.”
“It’s builder’s tea. Nothing special.”
“Best kind.”
We drink in silence for a moment, and it’s comfortable.
First conversations between strangers shouldn’t be this easy.
I study him over the rim of my mug, trying to work out what it is about this man that feels so disarming.
He’s attractive, obviously. The kind of face that would turn heads in a pub and knows it.
But it’s more than that. There’s something about his presence that puts me at ease when I have no reason to be at ease, and I can’t tell if that’s a good sign or a dangerous one.
“Maggie tells me you’re a vet,” he says, as if Maggie hasn’t already told him everything about me down to my shoe size.
“Large and small animal. Though so far it’s been mostly small. Cats, dogs, the occasional rabbit.”
“No wolves?”
The word drops into the kitchen, and I feel my pulse jump. His gaze holds mine too long, and something hot flickers under my skin.
“No wolves,” I say carefully. “There aren’t any in England.”
“So they say.” His tone is light, but his eyes are on me with an attention that doesn’t match the casual conversation.
I set down my mug. “Why do you ask?”
The shift is instant. His posture doesn’t change, his expression doesn’t change, but something behind his eyes closes like a shutter. “No reason. Just making conversation.”
He isn’t. Nobody asks about wolves as small talk, not the day after I treated one.
But I don’t know him well enough to push, and something about the way he’s looking at me, those unusual eyes, not quite brown, not quite gold, shifting somewhere between the two in the afternoon light, makes me file the question rather than press it.
They remind me of something I can’t reach.
“Have you always lived here?” I ask, steering us onto ground where he seems willing to stand.
“Born and raised. Left for a few years when I was younger, came back, couldn’t seem to leave again.
” He hasn’t taken his eyes off me since he sat down.
It should feel intrusive. It doesn’t. It’s the opposite.
I want to crawl into his lap and take what’s mine.
“My family’s been in Mistwood for a long time. Longer than most.”
“Mistwood,” I repeat the name, connecting it. “As in the village?”
Something crosses his face. A tightening around the jaw, there and gone. “As in the village. It’s a common enough name up here.”
I want to ask more, but I can feel the boundary, the same careful deflection I’ve noticed in other locals when conversations drift towards certain topics.
Mistwood has its secrets. I’ve been here less than a week, and I can already feel the shape of them, the way conversations bend around things left unsaid.
We talk about easier things. The best walking routes that don’t involve getting lost in the forest. The ongoing saga of Maggie’s tabby and its refusal to lose weight despite being on a strict diet that Maggie almost certainly undermines with kitchen scraps.
He’s good company. Funny without effort, attentive without being overbearing.
He asks questions about my work with genuine interest and listens to the answers, which is rarer than it should be.
And he’s relaxed, and it’s contagious. The knot of anxiety I’ve been carrying since yesterday morning loosening by degrees.
When he finishes his tea and stands to leave, I feel something pull tight in my chest. Not disappointment. Something with less of a name than that.
“Thank Maggie for the basket,” I say, following him to the door. “It was thoughtful.”
“I’ll pass it on.” He pauses on the doorstep, hands in his pockets, and turns back to me.
The afternoon light catches his face, and for a moment, he looks like someone working up the nerve to say something important.
Then that crooked smile returns, easier and lighter.
“Listen, there’s a decent café in the village.
The coffee’s not bad, and the owner does a thing with cinnamon rolls that’s probably illegal.
Would you want to go sometime? Tomorrow, maybe? ”
The sensible answer is no. I’ve been in Mistwood for less than a week.
I don’t know this man. I don’t know his surname, his occupation, or why Maggie chose him specifically to deliver a welcome basket instead of bringing it herself.
I don’t know why his presence makes the cottage feel warmer, or why his voice settles something restless in my chest, or why the thought of him leaving makes me want to find a reason for him to stay.
“Tomorrow works,” I say. “What time?”
“Ten? I’ll meet you there. It’s the one with the blue door. You can’t miss it.”
“Roan.” I stop him as he turns to go, and the name feels strange in my mouth, new but not unfamiliar. “What’s your surname?”
That hesitation again. Brief, barely noticeable.
“Mistwood,” he says. And then he’s walking down the garden path, hands still in his pockets, before I can ask the follow-up question that’s already forming.
I stand in the doorway and watch him go and notice two things simultaneously. The cottage feels emptier without him. And he left the moment I asked something personal.
I close the door and lean against it for a moment, pressing my hands to my cheeks. They’re warm. But the warmth doesn’t quite drown out the other thing. The pattern. Ask a question, get a deflection. Push a little further, and he’s already reaching for his jacket.
I tell myself it’s a first meeting. People are allowed boundaries. But I’m trained to observe behaviour. What I’ve observed is a man who’s charming, warm, present right up to the edge of anything real. Then gone.
The welcome basket sits on the kitchen table where I left it.
I unpack it slowly: a loaf of bread, still warm.
A jar of honey from a local farm. A wedge of cheese wrapped in wax paper.
A small bundle of dried herbs tied with twine that smells of lavender and something earthier I don’t recognise.
At the bottom, a handwritten note on thick card.
Welcome to Mistwood, Dr Clarke. You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. M
It’s an odd thing to write on a welcome card. Not “we’re glad to have you” or “hope you settle in well.” You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. As if Maggie knows something I don’t.
I pin the card to the fridge with a magnet and start putting the food away. I tell myself I’m not thinking about Roan Mistwood’s golden-brown eyes, or the warmth that spread up my arm when he shook my hand, or whether I can still spot him from the window.
I’m not a good liar, even to myself.