T HE FIRST THING THAT HITS me is the number of lights that are on. I stand in the large hallway, noting the timber floors and the large, wide staircase directly in front of me. There is an enormous light fitting that looks as if it’s made of antlers overhead and another one hanging from the vaulted ceiling of the stairwell. Both are glowing brightly. There’s a hall table to my left before a wide opening leads through to a kitchen—that’s when the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck start to stand on end.
It’s as if the wind has been knocked out of me, and I become rooted to the spot. My brain is telling me to move, to get out, but I continue to take in the scene before me in the well-lit kitchen. There’s an empty bottle of bourbon lying on its side. It’s surrounded by beer bottles, some empty, some still full. There are three takeaway pizza boxes on the worktop, one open, two closed.
All of my spidey senses are screaming at me to run. Instinctually, I know that I’m not alone in this house and I need to get out. The house doesn’t even smell like it’s empty. There’s an underlining aroma of a house that’s being lived in; a hint of food, alcohol, smoke, and maybe something like aftershave. Whoever else is here is male, I know it.
I’m in the middle of nowhere on a freezing cold night. I have no method of transport and no clue as to what I should do—other than getting the fuck out of there.
I back out of the front door and close it behind me as quietly as I can. Thankful for the almost one thousand pounds that I’d spent on my three new lightweight suitcases, I wheel them as quietly as I can along the veranda and around to the side of the house, just in case anyone steps out of the front door and sees them.
My heart is pounding so hard that I can hear it in my ears, the fast thump, thump, thump resounding in my head. Despite the cold, I feel hot, as if my skin is on fire, but my blood feels like ice in my veins.
I know that it’s fear that I’m feeling. Maybe even a little bit of shock. I felt it when the doctor told us that my mum had cancer. I felt it the moment she took her last breath, and I felt it when the hearse pulled up outside our house with her body resting inside the casket that we’d chosen together.
I knew fear, and I knew the early signs of going into shock, and I also knew that I had to keep my shit together. I was here alone. If I am in danger, then I’m the only one who can get myself out of it.
I find a set of steps at the side of the house, which I walk down, and then I attempt to hide behind the nearest tree. The snow, which is again falling in thick, fat flakes that catch on my eyelashes and settle on my scorching skin, obscures my view of the house slightly.
I dial 9-1-1 and take a few deep breaths before I hear a woman’s voice ask, “9-1-1, what’s your emergency?”
My leg jerks, I don’t know why, but it jerks, and then both my knees feel as if they’re going to give way. I panic, and my mouth opens, but no sound comes out.
“Hello, do you need assistance?”
“My name’s Grace Elliott, I’ve arrived alone at a cabin I’m renting, and I think someone has broken in and is still inside.”
“Okay, Grace. Are you safely able to leave the building and find somewhere you can talk to me without putting yourself in danger?”
“I’m outside and hiding behind a tree.”
“Okay, good. Can you give me the exact address of the cabin please, Grace.”
Without hesitation, I rattle it off as if it’s my own. No clue where I pull it from, but it’s there.
“Coneflower Cabin, 423 Mountain Drive, Addison Creek, Colorado—I don’t remember the postcode......the......the, I forget, I forget what you call it.”
My words come out in a rush as I begin to feel overwhelmed by the situation I’m in. What the fuck is wrong with me?
“Thanks, Grace, that’s great. I have a local dispatcher listening into your call right now, and he’s sending someone out to you as we speak.”
Her soothing tone calms me down, and I focus on not being a pussy.
“Zip code,” I blurt. “That’s the word. We call it a postcode, you call it a zip code, but I can’t remember it. Will they find me? Do they know where to look?”
Fuck me!
I start to freak out again.
My teeth are chattering, and my entire body is shaking with a combination of fear and the effects of the cold.
“It’s okay, Grace. A car is already on its way. Is there somewhere warm you can wait? Somewhere away from the house?”
I look around and notice a large shed or whatever. It’s a building with a roof and walls, and I start heading towards it.
“There’s a big shed,” I tell the woman on the phone.
“A shed?”
“Barn, stable. There’s a building.” I keep moving towards it as I explain.
“Are you able to reach it without being seen from the house?”
I instantly drop into a squatting position and glance over my shoulder. I hadn’t even thought about the person inside the house seeing me.
I have images of a man with long, dirty hair, a tangled beard, and filthy fingernails chasing me through the woods surrounding the cabin, and I let out a sob as I run, still in a scrunched down position, to the shed.
“Grace, can you talk to me, honey? Are you in the barn safely? The sheriff is nearly there.”
“Yeah,” I puff out. The barn door has a big piece of wood placed across the front to hold it closed, just like every barn door I’d ever seen in old cowboy films. I can’t lift it, so I push it from one end till it slides free, landing on the ground with a muffled thud. I quickly pull at the door, which groans with a creak that could wake the dead. Light floods the entire area and another is flipped on inside the house at the exact same moment a pair of headlights turn onto the drive.
I’m so relieved that I don’t even answer the woman on the phone as she calls my name. I don’t worry about being seen by Burglar Bill, the scary man from the woods who’s broken into my cabin. I run towards the headlights.
I don’t get more than ten feet before someone slams me from behind and knocks me face down into the snow.
Instinct takes over. I pull my knees underneath me and roll from side to side, but the fucker won’t let go, so I use both feet to give a donkey kick out behind me. I make contact and hear a grunt, and Burglar Bill’s grip loosens.
I roll to the side again, getting as far as my back before a bare chest smacks down on me. With everything I have in me, I fight.
I punch, I claw, I bite.
I kick out, but I don’t make much contact, so I reach up to his face, which is slightly above and higher than mine, and grab a handful of his long, dirty hair in one hand and attempt to claw at his face with my other hand. Instead of skin, my fingernails rip into the filthy whiskers of his scraggly beard, so I yank as hard as I can.
The area is flooded with light, and I hear shouting. The words “Police! Hands in the air and step away,” seem to echo against the snow, but I’m too far gone. I keep fighting. I see nothing as I thrash my head from side to side, hoping that if I keep moving, he won’t be able to land a blow.
Suddenly, his weight is lifted from me, and I’m pulled into a warm chest.
“It’s okay, Grace. You’re safe. I’ve got you. You’re safe now.”
I’m beyond crying at this stage and am sobbing so hard that the force makes my whole upper body shudder.
I can hear shouting going on from beside me, but the blood is whooshing so loudly through my ears that I can’t make out what’s being said.
I draw in deep breaths and stutter out a, “Thank you,” to whoever has ahold of me. Their jacket is dark, soft, warm, and smells fantastic—like the cold and fresh air. Of coffee and something earthy. But most of all, it smells like safety.
“It’s okay, honey. You’re okay. I’m Deputy Martinez. You’re safe now. Are you hurt anywhere? The EMTs are on their way.”
“Are you fuckin’ kidding me? She damn near ripped half my face off, and that was after she kicked in me the fuckin’ balls, and you’re asking her if she needs an EMT? I’m the one that needs a fuckin’ EMT.”
I wipe my face and my undoubtedly snotty nose on the back of my gloved hand and turn my head towards my attacker, but another set of headlights, which are moving swiftly towards us, temporarily blind me. I’m mesmerised by the snowflakes falling hard as they are captured in the glare of the vehicle’s full beams.
A car door slams and my attacker starts shouting again. “Thank fuck! Someone else with a brain is finally here. Can you call off your dogs, Nelson, and tell them who fuckin’ owns this place.”
What?
I turn my head slowly and stare at a pair of bare feet that seem to be hopping from one foot to the other. Good, I hope the fucker gets frostbite, and all his toes fall off...and his dick—yeah, definitely his dick, too.
“Let him go, Harris,” the guy I assume is Nelson, orders.
“But, sir, when I arrived on scene, he was attacking the girl.”
“Like fuck was I attacking her. She was breaking into my barn. The door opening triggered the sensor light, I came out the front and caught her trying to run up the driveway.”
More pissed than scared now, I climb out of the arms of the nice-smelling police officer.
I stand on shaky legs, ready to confront the scary, homeless burglar from the woods.
My eyes travel up a pair of jean-clad legs and then hit the naked chest that was lying all over me earlier. It’s not what I would expect from a wild, homeless man who lives in the woods when he’s not squatting in other people’s empty cabins.
His pecs are perfect, solid, a beautiful shade of brown-gold that is covered in a fine layer of dark hair. His abs, which my eyes flick down to and then away from—because fuck me if they're incredible—look like they’ve been carved. He has a six-pack, or maybe even an eight-pack.
There’s a conversation going on around me, but I’ve no clue what anyone is saying. Instead, I’m totally mesmerised by the man I was rolling around in the snow with. The jeans he’s wearing are undone at the waist and hang low, barely covering his hips, and oh my fucking God, he has no boxers on underneath, and I follow the line of dark hair that travels down the length of his body until it disappears inside his lowered zip.
My eyes then follow that same fine line of hair up over those perfectly tanned and toned abs, through the centre of his chest, to his throat, which is hidden behind his dark, but slightly greying, beard. My eyes dart over his plump lips, which are moving at a rapid rate, and then to his eyes, which are a brownish colour.
I think I might actually be nodding as I take in the fact that his beard is not long, straggly, or filthy. It’s trimmed, groomed, and fucking perfect, much like the rest of him.
His head turns suddenly, and he looks at me. I’m instantly hyperaware of how I probably resemble Scary Mary by this stage. I lost my beanie somewhere in the struggle, and my hair, which was in plaits, is possibly sticking up all over the show.
“Are you checking me out?”
My skin heats further. My cheeks take on a Ready Brek glow, and my mouth goes dry.
“What?” I splutter out.
“Stop checking me out, you thieving little bitch.”
What the fuck?
I take a step towards him, but Martinez grabs my elbow.
“Listen, you fucking prick. I’d have to be desperate to be interested in you. I was noting how much bigger you are than I am and how that’s gonna look in front of a judge and jury when I sue your cowboy arse for attacking me.”
“I didn’t attack you.”
“You scared me half to death, then when I ran for my life towards the safety of the Old Bill, you physically assaulted me.”
He looks to me, then to the policemen surrounding us with an incredulous look on his face. One of the officers hands him a pair of boots and a jacket, and I watch, feeling a little sad as he pulls on first the boots and then the jacket, hiding that fine body of his from view.
“You tried to break into my barn. I’m not a cowboy, and neither is my ass and who’s Bill?”
“I was trying to hide from you in the barn.”
He frowns and shakes his head.
“What? You don’t even know me, why would you hide?”
“Because you’re in my cabin.”
His brown eyes widen as he says, “Your cabin?” Then he throws his head back and laughs.
“Yes, my cabin. I’ve rented it for the next six months.”
His laughter cuts off, and his eyes narrow on me. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
I search around in my pockets for my phone, find it, open the saved email from Alma-May, and shove it in his face. He snatches it from my hand and stares at it; I have to hold in a laugh as he moves the phone farther away from his eyes so he can focus better.
“Fuck.”
“Yeah, you can say that again.”
He shoots me a look, well, it’s more of a death glare actually, so I give him one right back.
“We cancelled all the bookings.”
“What?”
I take my phone back from him.
“Guys, can we take this up to the house? I’m kinda freezing my ass off out here,” Nelson asks.
“My pleasure,” the homeless old cowboy, who’s obviously too vain to wear glasses, replies before he turns and walks up the driveway.
Nelson sends the two officers home and walks beside me up to the house as I tell him about my renting the place for the next six months and exactly what happened when I turned up here tonight.
I ENTER THE CABIN BEHIND Sheriff Nelson and follow him into the kitchen. Homeless man is opening a beer, he offers one to the sheriff but ignores me, so I take one anyway.
I don’t look in his direction, but I can feel his eyes burning holes in me.
“Before you both start hootin’ and a-hollerin', you might want to remember that I’m the one with the badge, and I’m telling you both to be quiet unless I ask you a question. Are we clear?”
I feel like a little kid being told off, but I nod as I take a swig from the beer bottle. The beer’s shit and warm, but I’ve made a point of taking it without permission, so there’s no way I’m leaving it.
“Carmichael, why are you here?”
“It’s my house.”
“Yeah, I heard Ms Emily left it to you, but I thought you lived in some big fancy place in Aspen?”
“Well, yeah, I do. But I decided to come down and take a look at the condition of the old place. I was thinking of renovating before deciding whether to sell it or rent it out like Emily’d been doing the last few years.”
I stare at the woodgrain pattern on the timber floors and start to feel sick at what he—Carmichael, the cowboy—is saying.
“Miss Elliott has emails to show that she paid to rent this place out for the next six months. How’d that come about?”
“Well, I don’t know the answer to that, Nelson. After Emily died and I found out she left the place to me, I asked Alma-May at the rental agency that handles the bookings to cancel everything after October. I assumed that it’d been done.”
I watch Nelson rub his chin as both he and I take in what the not-so-homeless cowboy is saying.
Emily—God rest her soul—died and left this cabin to the homeless cowboy who is neither homeless nor a cowboy, but calling him one seems to piss him off, so I’m sticking with it. I rented this place for the next six months, my booking should have been cancelled by the not-so-efficient Almay-May, but somehow wasn’t, and now, here we were.
“I booked this place a while back and paid for the whole six months up front. Nobody contacted me to let me know of any cancellations.”
The sheriff’s radio crackles out what sounds like a voice disguised as static, and he replies, confirming that he’d cancelled the ambulance that had been called for my benefit.
While he’s distracted, I take a sneaky look at the cowboy and get so busted because he’s glaring right at me.
“Is there no way you could put off the renovations, Carmichael? Give Ms Elliott here some time to make alternative arrangements with regard to her accommodation?”
“No!”
“I’m not making alternative arrangements. I paid to stay here.”
We both speak at the same time.
“I’ll refund you. You’re not staying here.”
“Well, I’m not getting out. You’re obviously local; you can find somewhere else to kip. Surely, there’s someone out there willing to put up with your arsehole-ness.”
He moves to step towards me, all six odd foot of him and his very nice body. I put my hands on my hips and stare him down—or up—whatever. He stops when Nelson steps between us.
“Not on my watch, Carmichael. You might be a world-famous hotshot to some, but I remember the skinny kid that had manners and wouldn’t dream of putting his hands on a lady.”
Cowboy flinches at that comment, while I’m left wondering why he’s a world-famous hotshot. I’m pretty clued up on celebrities—it’s kinda my job to be—but I have no idea who this dude is.
Not a Scooby.
“What? I would never...I wasn’t gonna put my hands on her, even though she ripped half my beard out and sure as shit ain’t no lady.”
I stand my ground, hands on hips as I remain staring at him. As much as I’d like to, I don’t say a word. If I get lippy and he decides to kick me out, I have nowhere to go and no car to get there.
His eyes dart over my face and then travel down my body. He leans back against the worktop, crosses his long legs at the ankle, and takes a swig from his beer, never taking his eyes off some part of me.
“Son, it’s late, and I’m tired. It’s freezing cold outside with a snowstorm the size of Texas due to blow in and cause havoc for the next week at least.” Nelson pauses, lets out a long sigh, and takes off his hat before raking his fingers through the grey hair covering his head. He looks between the cowboy and me before continuing. “This is a big house. Surely, you could see your way clear to letting Ms Elliott stay here until she finds somewhere else?”
“I can’t stay here with him—” I bite my lip so hard I taste metal. What I really want to do is tell him to poke his shitty cabin as far up his arse as he can get it.
“You’ll be safe here with Carmichael; I promise you that. He might be an arsehole, as you so eloquently put it, but I’m pretty sure he’s still honourable.” Nelson gives me a wink. “Known him since he was a kid. He pretty much grew up in this house before he went off to college.”
I feel sick with tiredness and frustration. What the fuck am I supposed to do?
My gaze shifts back to the cowboy, and I watch as he chews on the bottom left corner of his lip, still frowning at me.
“Bedroom at the end of the landing, you can lock the door from the inside. The bed isn’t made up, and the room’ll be freezing, but if you open up the vents, it might be warm in about an hour. There are blankets in the closet outside the door, and it has its own bathroom.”
“Well, there ya go. That wasn’t too difficult, now was it?” Nelson points his hat in my direction. “Carmichael has my number, if you have any problems finding somewhere tomorrow, or need a ride to pick up a rental car, you be sure an’ let me know, Ms Elliott, ya hear me?”
“Thanks, I will. Thanks for everything, you’re a diamond.”
“Well, I’m not so sure about that, but it’s my pleasure, sweetheart.” He pauses and turns to the cowboy. “Now, you be nice and remember your damn manners, else you’ll have me to answer to.”
The cowboy gives a curt nod. “Yes, sir.”
Nelson lets himself out, leaving the cowboy and me to stare at each other in silence.
“Thank you for letting me stay.”
He shrugs his big broad shoulders, and I so wish he were skinny, scrawny, and as ugly as his personality, but he isn’t. He’s fit as fuck, and I just have to deal with that fact.
“Wasn’t a lot of choices, was there? Where the fuck were you going to go at this time of night in the middle of a storm?”
“I ain’t actually got a Scooby, that’s why I’m saying thanks.”
He stares at me blankly. I give a quick nod, turn, and head up the stairs.