Page 9 of Under The Mountain Man’s Spell

Then reality arrived.

I'd left. I had lain in the dark of his cabin with his heart thudding slow and steady under my cheek and his arm heavy across my back, and I'd waited until his breathing went long and even. Then I slid out from under him an inch at a time, because that was the plan, and the plan was the only thing holding me together. The floorboards were icy under my bare feet and the stove ticked as it cooled. I tucked the blanket around his shoulders and stood in his bedroom doorway with his tabby watching me from the hall, and I wanted to climb back into that bed so much my knees shook. I didn't look back. If I'd looked back, I wouldn't have gone. I dressed in the living room by the last orange glow of the stove, with the couch right there where he'd set my wrists on the armrest and told me not to let go, and I let myself out with my heels in one hand.

I walked down his long gravel drive in the dark with the frost biting my bare feet, every stone sharp, my breath smoking in front of me. The air smelled of pine and wood-smoke and cold earth, and the sky was packed with stars. I'd known where his cabin was for two years, and I'd never once been up that drive until last night, and now I was walking down it in a devil costume with my shoes in my hand. The car I'd booked was waiting at the bottom of the road exactly on time. The driver was a stranger from Devil's Rest, and he never asked me a thing. His car smelled of peppermint gum and old coffee, and the heater rattled the whole way. He left me in the festival lot beside my own car, frost glittering on its windshield under the lamp, and I drove home barefoot with the heater roaring and my whole body still humming. I made it all the way to my own kitchen before I sat down on the linoleum with my back against the cabinets and cried like something had died. It was ridiculous, because nothing had died. I'd gotten exactly what I planned for. He had called me beautiful in the truck. He'd told me I was perfect with his hands in my hair, and he'd said it like he meant it, and nobody had ever said that to the woman who actually lived in my body. He'd said it to a stranger, and the stranger was me, and I couldn't make that sentence come out even. One perfect night, and now I had to get up and live the morning after it.

In the shower I found the evidence. Whisker burn along my throat and between my breasts, stinging under the hot water. A deep, sore tenderness in muscles I didn't use for large-animal work. At each hip, the faint blue-green start of fingerprint bruises, five on each side. I had told him I wanted to feel him tomorrow, and I did, in every step I'd taken across the bathroom. I pressed my thumb into one of the bruises, hard, and the sound I made wasn't grief and it wasn't triumph. My body remembered before my head did. Heat pulled low in my belly, and I could feel exactly where he'd been, the stretch of it, the weight of him, the way he'd told me I was taking him so well. I braced one hand on the tile and shut my eyes and let it roll through me in the steam until I had to turn the water colder.

Then I washed my hair with the same honey scented shampoo I always used and braided it wet and pulled the braid tight enough to feel it at my temples, heavy and cold against my neck. I put on my work clothes and my glasses, cool on the bridge of my nose, and wiped a clear patch in the fogged mirror and looked at the woman in it. Braid. Glasses. Sensible. The stranger was gone like she'd never been, which had also been the plan. I tried out my own voice, just to hear it. "Good morning." Flat, dry, mine. All night I'd held it pitched low and warm, and that voice had been the best disguise I owned, and now I was back to the one that sounded like a woman who had never done anything reckless in her life. It didn't fit the way it used to.

Trip sat on the bathmat with his tail curled over his one front foot, watching me, and I pointed at him before he could start. "Not a word."

Clinic rounds saved me the way they always did. You cannot spiral while expressing a Labrador's anal glands. It isn't physically possible. A rancher with a limping heifer asked if Lyle's young assistant could take a look, and I said yes, same as I had every time for two years, because correcting it would have meant explaining myself to a man who just wanted his cow looked at. By ten I was at the festival gates with a crate of feed cups and my professional face on. The morning was cold and bright, the frost melting off the pumpkin rows, and the air smelled of cider and fried dough and wet hay. It was the big Saturday, the maze's first full day, and half the county came through in costume. I checked water troughs and pried a toddler off the sheep and let the pot-bellied pig be adored, and I was almost, almost okay.

Then I looked up, and Grayson was standing by the coffee stand.

He was supposed to be off until the finale tomorrow, with his second in command running the grounds. He was there anyway at half past ten, no clipboard, in a flannel with the sleeves shoved to his elbows, his jaw unshaved and shadows under his eyes, a paper cup steaming in his fist. He stood still in the middle of the moving crowd, the sun on the side of his face. My stomach dropped like I'd missed a stair. He looked tired and rumpled and so good that my hands went weak on the feed scoop, the pellets rattling in it, and for a second all I could think was that I'd had my mouth on that throat last night.

And he was looking. It wasn't the fire-inspection scan I knew, up at the wiring and down at the extinguishers. He was reading faces. Women's faces. He tracked a dark-haired woman in a witch hat for three long seconds and then dismissed her and kept moving, patient and methodical, and I stood in the petting zoo pen with a feed scoop in my hand and understood what I was watching.

He was looking for her. For me. He'd woken up to an empty pillow and gotten dressed and come to find me, and for a moment I couldn't breathe. Joy and horror hit me at the same time, so close together I couldn't tell where one stopped.

Then I made myself put it down. On Thursday I had told a pumpkin vendor I wasn't interested in anyone, with Grayson standing four feet away, and he hadn't said a word. Now he was combing a festival for the one version of me who was interested. He wanted her, the red dress and the low voice and the woman who begged for him in bed. But the real me, the Molly without the mask, was somebody he'd never once looked for.

A search wasn't a promise. Maybe he wanted an explanation. Maybe he wanted to make sure the strange woman from the tent wasn't going to become a problem. Maybe the night had been good enough to chase for a day, and by Monday some blonde from the resort would laugh at something he said and that would be the end of it. A man who looked like him never stayed unclaimed longer than he chose to. I went through every explanation the way I'd go through a dosing schedule, one after another, and none of them took. He was unshaven and drinking coffee he wasn't enjoying, hunting a ghost through a pumpkin festival, and my idiot heart kept insisting that had to mean something.

A few hours later, Grayson was still looking. He hadn't given up, moving through the grounds in slow passes that came a little nearer the petting zoo each time, and whenever his eyes swept toward me they kept going. That saved me, and it took something out of me, both at once. By early afternoon I'd stopped pretending not to track him. The sun had gone thin and gold, and the festival smelled of wood-smoke and caramel apples. I watched him stop a red-haired woman by the hayride with one polite question. I watched her shake her head, and I watched him nod his thanks, stiff about it, and I stood among my goats with my chest aching.

You did this to him, I thought, with the flat clarity I usually saved for lab results. You could end it with one sentence, and you're not going to, because then he'll look at you the way he just looked at that woman. Kindly. That was the fear, standing there in my work boots. It wasn't that he'd never want me. It was that he'd be kind about it. He'd be warm and decent and sorry, and he'd pour my coffee at the next meeting and I'd take the chair beside him knowing exactly what the answer was, for the rest of my life.

At three the firehouse kids' program came through, eleven seven-year-olds in squeaking plastic helmets, sticky-handed and smelling of sugar and cold air, two harried parent volunteers, and Grayson. He'd been drafted at the gate, by the look of it, and hadn't fought it. The kids hit the petting zoo all at once. I did my rounds with them, this is how you hold a rabbit, no, we don't ride the sheep, and he stood at the rail not ten feet from me, close enough that I could smell his soap over the hay, the same soap I'd had my face in last night. I kept my eyes on the animals and my voice in its clinic register and my whole body turned away from him like a compass needle, and I thought I was going to survive it.

Then the brown goat, the delinquent, the one who tested everybody, reached over the rail and got a mouthful of Grayson's sleeve. I heard the soft rasp of teeth on flannel, and I snapped my fingers once.

"We don't bite our friends," I said.

It was autopilot, and I jerked upright in horror. The exact thing I'd said to his cat last night with her teeth in my shoulder. I heard it leave my mouth the way you hear a glass hit tile, that half-second where it's out and falling and nothing on earth can put it back.

Grayson went still.

The goat let go. The kids shrieked at something by the rabbit hutch, the pig grunted, and the whole loud, gold afternoon carried on around us, and he turned his head, slow, and looked at me. He actually looked, the way he hadn't in two years, his eyes moving over my face, my mouth, my jaw, my braid, my hands frozen on the metal of the feed scoop. I watched it happen. Heat came up my throat and over my face and burned all the way to my ears, right there in front of him and half the county. I had no mask to hide behind now.

His lips parted, and he said nothing. It looked like horror. It looked like a man who had just found out what he'd done and wished he could take it back.

I set the feed scoop down on the rail with tremendous care, and then I turned and hurried through the service gate and into the corn while kids clambered over him to get to the feed station.

The maze swallowed the festival noise in three turns. The cold shade closed over me, smelling of dry husks and dirt, and cornstalks rattled over my head, dry and loud, whipping at my arms, rows of them blurring past. I was running by the second turn with my braid thumping my spine and my breath sawing in the green-gold dark. There was no plan now. I put my head down and ran, with the voice in my head screaming he knows, he knows, he knows.

Chapter 6

Grayson

Molly. It was fucking Molly.

The goat let go of my sleeve immediately. My hand had closed on the rail so hard the wood creaked as the realization hit. We don't bite our friends. Same words, same snap of the fingers. Last night that laugh hadn't matched the rest of her, and I'd let it go. I couldn't let it go now.

I'd felt like a bastard in the middle of it, thinking about Molly with another woman in my arms. There was no other woman.

The woman last night had blushed. It had spread down her bare chest in the firelight while she rode me. Fuck. I went hot all over again, standing at a petting-zoo rail with seven-year-olds climbing my legs. I could feel the weight of her in my lap, her nails in my shoulders, the whole damn night in my skin. Right behind the heat came relief so big my knees went, and I locked them and hung on to the rail. It was her. The woman I'd wanted for two years and the woman I couldn't get out of my head were the same damn woman, and I'd spent the whole day hunting for her while she stood forty feet away watching me do it. What a fool I was.