Page 2 of Moody as a Minotaur

I was a lost cause.

“So, I should probably go to the pub, hey?” I asked Sushi.

I swore Sushi’s buddy Filet bobbed up and down in agreement. At least he was still talking to me. You know, as well as a fish could.

Thinking about getting ready to go out made me as sluggish as the thick milkshakes on our seasonal menu this past summer. Which reminded me, I should have come up with a fall or winter special by now. But not tonight. I was too damn tired after everything that’d happened at the café today.

The Flying Rowan Café was still standing. Miraculously. It’d been touch and go for a bit earlier today. And, even better, all the evening staff showed up, letting me escape. I loved my people. They were amazing, and I was so happy I could trust them to handle the evening rush. And based on the hum of voices and the aroma of pepperoni filtering up to my apartment from below, they were indeed hit with a rush. Or at least the Willow Lake equivalent of a rush.

Let’s face it, I lived in a small town. We didn’t have lines at the door of people waiting for tables. But business was steady and better than I had predicted when I first saw the building for sale online. Thatauspicious moment had stayed with me like it had just happened. My heart warmed every time I thought of it. I’d been scrolling endlessly, hunting for some place to call mine. When I saw it, I knew my search was over. It was as if some cosmic force reached out to me and said, “You belong here.” I hadn’t regretted my decision to move here, not once.

Yes. Life was good. Hiccups happened. A few bumps now and again weren’t going to break me.

But ogling a sexy man like Levi could improve my day by a factor of a ten million.

I loved watching him push his hand through his hair as he worked out his next shot at the pool table. Lately, his dark hair was at the stage where it needed to be cut, and that was always my favorite hairstyle on him. It had the slightest bit of curl to it when it was longer like that, and I liked to imagine what it’d feel like curled around my fingers.

And it might make me sound like a creep, but I also loved it when he bent over the pool table. Because, seriously, no one could resist that. He wasn’t fat, but he was a big, brawny kind of guy, so his pants always stretched deliciously over his… um…assets.

I trudged to my bathroom. My feet ached as I stood in the shower and washed away the lingering smells of the café from my skin. I yawned ten times as I pulled out a fresh set of clothes that weren’t stained by coffee or splattered by tomato sauce. And I contemplated making a cup of coffee to take with me as I shuffled toward the hook holding my car keys. The drive to the pub only took two minutes, but I might need the caffeine to surviveeven that long. Ugh. Nope. Making coffee was too much effort.

“I’ll see you guys later,” I muttered to the fish.

A thunderous knock on my door startled me from my caffeine dreams.

My heart jumped in my chest. People rarely—more like never—came to my apartment. And, truth be told, the only person I wanted to come over was Levi. My heartbeats crashed together.

Could it be? Had Levi finally stopped by? Was he here to ask me for dinner? It had been an aggressive knock, something a big guy like Levi might do.

As I sprinted down the stairs, I pasted on the biggest, most welcoming smile. My heart pounded in my chest like it wanted to break free. This was it. Levi was here. Finally.

I yanked open the door.

You know those record scratching moments in TV shows when everything suddenly goes wrong? This was one of those moments. I froze as icy blue eyes skewered me in place. My brain scrambled to make sense of what I was seeing.

“Nana? What are you doing here?” I glanced past my grandmother’s gunmetal gray hair, which was easy to do since she was at least eight inches shorter than me. “Is that Finley too? What’s going on?”

“Move out of the way, Parker dear. Don’t make an old lady stand on your doorstep all night,” she said, making it sound like she was frail.

I shuffled out of the way obediently, even though she had ignored my questions. She scowled when she saw thestairs leading straight up from the door to my second-floor apartment. My stairs were steep, but they couldn’t have been steeper than the mountain she’d climbed over the summer. Sure, the hike had been up one of the smaller peaks in the range—I forgot all the details because I usually tuned out when my mother whined about my grandmother’s antics—but I remembered Mom sayingMountsomething or other.

“It reeks of pepperoni in here,” Nana complained as she trudged up the stairs.

“My apartment is over the café,” I reminded her. “Pizza is one of our specialties.”

I was about to follow her upstairs to get the answers I wanted, but my cousin Finley called out to me. He jogged over to me, carrying two suitcases and what looked like a tactical case.

Oh, man, I really hoped she was just using that case to carry her shoes or something. But, based on many summers spent with my grandmother when I was young, I knew better. She’d been determined to educate my cousins and me about all the important things schools missed. At least that was what she said when she taught us how to clean guns and pick locks. If anyone else had seen what we’d gotten up to during those summers, they’d have thought she was trying to create her own operatives.

“Here, take these,” Finley said. “I gotta get to the motel and check in still. The guy I spoke to earlier insisted we get over there as soon as possible.”

“You can stay with me,” I said.

“No can do, Pow,” Finley said.

And why was he using the awful nickname? Fin hadn’t even been born when, while trying to learn how to say my name, I came up with Pow Cow instead of Parker. My cousin—and damn near every other member of the family—used it anyway. At least he’d dropped the cow part, but without it, Pow seemed like something straight out of a Batman comic with its own exploding balloon and exclamation mark. I didn’t have the energy to live up to a nickname like Pow on a regular day, and especially not on a day like today.

“Seriously. The apartment is the size of the restaurant, so I have a lot of space and two spare bedrooms.”