7. Flower Lights

Riggs

It was after dinner.

She made good spaghetti, spiced up the sauce just right, not too hot, not bland by a long shot.

It was excellent.

Riggs had steered the conversation out of the heavy.

He told her about his team, how he took jobs, and they worked them, twelve-hour days, six days a week, until they were done. Then they'd come home for a break that was never less than a week, though the longer the job or string of them, the longer the break before they headed out again.

He also told her his last job started the day after he met her on his run and ended the day before.

She'd asked how long he was in town now, and he'd loved and hated how the little wrinkles around the edges of her lips formed when she was trying not to smile when he told her a month.

On her side, she'd told him shit he knew, but he didn't tell her he knew.

That her husband died of cancer after a short marriage (she didn't dive deep into that, this time, because he guided her out of it). That she was thirty-three years old. And that she'd taken a year's sabbatical from her teaching job to come to Misted Pines to "get away from it all."

He talked more than she did, mostly in an effort to put her at ease.

In fact, he talked more that night than he ever did, with any woman, or man.

Now, they were out on the back porch in her loveseat with the last of the wine, sitting close, both their feet up on the coffee table, and Riggs was studying that view. Her legs shorter than his, and they had a shine to them, showing she'd shaved and recently. Her toes were painted a creamy, pale yellow that he found somehow more feminine and sexier than red. This juxtaposed against his faded jeans and scuffed, brown, lace-up boots.

Straight up, it was a fucking turn on, one of the biggest ones he'd ever experienced, seeing their legs like that, entirely indicative of all that was him, all that was her, and hinting at what it would feel like if his legs were tangled with hers, or hers were wrapped around his ass.

It didn't help he could feel the soft flesh of her hip against his and smell the flowery, powdery, supremely female scent of her perfume.

But that wasn't where this could go.

He'd fucked his way through half the attractive women in this county, so it wasn't like he was above shitting where he lived.

But she was there to escape something brutal and tragic, and she didn't need her neighbor making moves on her.

It was more than that, though.

There was something about her that told him he couldn't take it there. She'd let down her shield that night, the ice queen was gone, and the sometimes shy, all the time sweet, definitely vulnerable woman who had pain shadowing her eyes, was not someone he was the man to wade into.

He was a good-time guy.

He could take her for a ride on his bike so she could feel the wind in her hair. He could cook her an excellent brat, not on his grill, in a skillet filled with brown ale. He could get her drunk and make her laugh hard, then later, make her come harder.

But he'd learned along the way he wasn't the other kind of man for a woman.

You wanted to get loose or get high or get off, Riggs was the guy for you.

You wanted more, he wanted no part of it.

She moved her foot and the side of it skimmed the leg of his jeans.

He didn't feel it, but he felt it.

Jesus, he had to get out of there.

"So, um…I take it your other neighbors were less, we'll say, dedicated to their sleep than me."

He turned his attention from their legs to her face at this comment.

"Sorry?"

"Whoever rented this cabin before me," she explained.

"No one's been in this cabin before you. At least not while I've been in my house."

She was fucking with his head so much, the words were out before he realized he shouldn't have said them.

But it hit him when her expression turned instantly confused, as it would. "How long have you lived in your house?"

Fuck.

"Three years."

Her chin shot into her neck. "No one's been in this cabin for that long? How long did it take to renovate?"

Fuck.

"Six weeks."

"But…I mean, when did you renovate it?"

Fuck!

"Before I moved into my house. Renovating here, I saw my place was on the market. I bought it while I was doing up this pad."

Sluggishly, her head turned to look at the back door, and he knew why, because he'd done the work, and he prided himself on doing solid work. The best. One of the reasons why he was so busy, because that was his reputation.

Brenda's décor might alienate half the population, but it was still nice, and the reno was fantastic, and because it was hard to rent—or hard to keep rented—the rental fees were rock bottom. The same could be said for his house, though he didn't tell her that. But he'd gotten it for a song.

Which would of course make Nadia confused.

When she came back around, she put her wineglass to her lips, but she didn't take a sip.

She spoke into it while staring at the moonlight on the lake. "I haven't spent much time in town, but it looks like a cute place. My understanding is, it's pretty touristy. I don't get it."

Riggs shifted uneasily.

Her gaze went from the lake to him, and she surmised, "There's a reason."

"Nadia—"

Her brows drew down and pinched at the bridge of her nose, "Please tell me you didn't run off all of Dave and Brenda's tenants so you could throw wild parties."

He busted out laughing.

"I'll take that as a no," she said through his laughter.

"I like my lake, Nadia, but I like Dave and Brenda too, and I'm not that much of a dick."

"Well, I should say at this juncture, even though it behooves me to do so…"

Fuck.

She said behooves.

He fought busting out laughing again.

She kept speaking.

"But perhaps I was in a wee bit of a bad mood when I forbade you to run through my yard. And Dave left me your phone number. I could have called and told you how I felt about your party and not, erm…woken you post-in flagrante delicto."

And now she was saying in flagrante delicto.

This woman.

"We were post-coital, not post-in flagrante delicto," he disputed. "Courtney's not taken."

Her eyes moved over his face in a way he both liked and made him feel awkward.

"Your correction is noted, though it's more fun to say in flagrante delicto. And just to say, not a lot of people know the distinction between those two," she said, her voice softer than its normal soft.

"You forget, I'm a genius," he joked. "And I might like a good time, or to mellow out with some good weed, and I work with my hands, but I also know how to read."

She shifted and said swiftly, "I didn't mean to offen?—"

"You didn't, Nadia. I'm teasing you."

"Okay," she whispered.

"And your non-apology apology is accepted," he continued teasing.

She rolled her eyes, looked away, and finally took a sip of her wine.

He smiled into his glass before he took one from his.

"You can run through my yard," she told the lake.

"Obliged," he replied.

"And if you give me a heads-up you're going to have people over and want to let loose, maybe I can, I don't know, check into a spa somewhere."

"Or you could come and join us," he offered a different option.

She made a face at him.

He wanted to find it funny, but that offended him.

"I hope you get from tonight I'm good people, and so are my friends."

"You listen to Tool."

Oh yeah.

He was offended.

"I don't," he shot back. "I lost control of the playlist somewhere along the way."

"Well, that's a relief," she mumbled, attention back to the lake.

"They're not my favorite, but what's wrong with Tool?"

She turned back to him. "I listen to Taylor Swift. And Lizzo. And Sara Bareilles. Pink. Florence and the Machine. Miley Cyrus. Lady Gaga. Adele."

He held his hand in front of her face. "Stop."

She smiled. "I think you're understanding me."

Yeah, he was, and it was good to know she wasn't dogging him, she just wasn't a good-time girl.

At least, not the kind he was used to.

"I think if I let you take over the playlist, my friends would drown us both in the lake."

At that, he got her sweet laughter.

But then she pulled both shoulders forward and said, "I've never been much of a partier. But if you are, I don't want to be a wet blanket. Obviously, I don't want to be checking into spas once a week, something it seems won't happen if you work out of town a lot. But on an occasion, I can figure something out."

"Or seriously, you can join us."

"Well, for now," she looked again to the lake, "I need to do…other things."

He agreed.

He just didn't think those other things should be diving deeper into her head. He knew what a shitshow that could be. He'd lived it a long, fucking time.

And she needed that wisdom.

"I figured out a while ago that the best way to fuck him was to get as much out of life as I can, be as happy as I can, do the things I enjoy as much as I can, without my dad casting a pall over it, which is what the asshole would want." He bumped her thigh with his. "Just to say, you should think on that."

She was watching him closely when she replied, "It's good advice, Riggs, so I will."

"Right," he replied, turning his own attention to the lake because that look on her face made him want to kiss her, and that was not where this was going.

"And what I have to just say is you're not getting out of explaining why no one has been in this cabin for three years."

It wasn't three.

For all intents and purposes, it was fifteen.

And the same thing could be said for his house, but he wasn't going to tell her that either.

"Riggs?" she called.

Goddamn it.

"It's bullshit," he said.

"What's bullshit?" she asked.

He sucked in breath through his nose and looked back to her.

"Do you know who Roosevelt Whitaker is?"

Her brows knit. "Why is that name familiar?"

"Because he's half of the identical twin brother team of thriller writers known as Roosevelt Lincoln. The second half was Lincoln Whitaker."

"Yes." She nodded. "I've heard of them."

"You would. They were John Grisham, Dan Brown, Tom Clancy big. Seriously successful. Three movies were made of the first three books in their flagship series before shit went south."

Her interest was piqued, and she showed that to him with more than her question of, "What was the shit that went south?"

"Roosevelt lived here, year-round," he said, swinging out his glass of wine to indicate the cabin.

"Really?" she asked, her surprise as evident as her interest.

"Yup."

"It's amazing, but it doesn't seem very ‘abode of a big-time author.'"

"True. But he was known as kind of a recluse. Lincoln Whitaker was the opposite. Friendly guy. Social. Everyone knew him even if he lived in Seattle. He'd come out here six months of the year to research and write with his brother. Eventually, he got married to a woman named Sarah, and they had kids. They bought a patch of land from Roosevelt and built my house."

"Ah," she murmured.

"Roosevelt owned the lake and all the land around it," Riggs explained. "Now I own the lake and all the land around it, except the three acres that go with this house."

"Ah," she repeated, but she did it with those wrinkles forming at the corners of her lips.

He ignored how cute that was and got back to the story.

"Sarah would come out with the kids. She'd also leave the kids with her parents and come out alone. She loved it here. Apparently, Lincoln swung both ways. He dug the outdoors, but he also was a city guy. So they kept houses both places. Word was, though, Sarah wanted to move out to Misted Pines full time."

"Right," she said when he paused.

Now, the hard part.

"So, one day, when Sarah was in Misted Pines, Lincoln was out fishing. He got a headache, came home, and found his wife gone. There was no note, and he got worried, because apparently, she didn't take off without telling him she was going or leaving a note. Since Sarah and Roosevelt were close, and Roosevelt lived here, before he started to panic, Lincoln came to see if she was here."

"Oh boy," she whispered, eyes glued to him like he was telling a ghost story, and she liked fake stories about things that went bump in the night, and she kept them glued to him as she took a sip of her wine.

"Yeah," he agreed. "When Lincoln hits this place, the door is open, which isn't unusual, and he checks it out. But she's not here either. Neither is Roosevelt. But he hears music coming from the stables."

That threw her. "The stables?"

He indicated the dark forest at the south side of her property. "There were stables there then. Roosevelt had horses. Three, precisely. His, Lincoln's and Sarah's."

"Mm," she hummed, her eyes dancing, because she'd figured out where this was going.

Though, she couldn't know how it would end.

"I think you've guessed that Lincoln went to the stables, and what he found, and that, honey, was Sarah and Roosevelt in flagrante delicto in the hayloft."

At that, she actually giggled.

It was girlie and hot as all fuck.

Riggs pushed the sight and sound of it into the back of his mind and moved forward with the story.

"What no one could guess was that Lincoln would walk back to his house, get his shotgun, return, shoot them both dead, let the horses loose, run the hose out to the stables and drench the earth and trees all around so a fire wouldn't spread, before he set that fire, burning the stables to the ground."

"Holy cow," she breathed.

"Yeah. It was also him who called the fire department and the cops. He was sitting on this porch when they showed, and he immediately turned himself in for double homicide to the first uniform he clapped eyes on."

"Whoa."

"Mm-hmm," Riggs agreed. "He served seven years in prison, got out, spent a couple days with his kids, then drank a whole bottle of arsenic, I guess as any good thriller writer would, leaving his and his brother's estate in disarray. This caused a bitter family feud that rages to this day between his kids, his extended family, his in-laws, and anyone else who wants to cast their hat into that ring. One of the reasons why no more films were made. No one can agree who owns the rights to the books. The brothers had only sold the first three books to be made into films, Lincoln had other things occupying his mind while he was in prison, so that franchise died when Sarah and Roosevelt did."

When Riggs stopped talking, Nadia pointed out the obvious, "That's a lot."

"Yup," Riggs agreed.

"And it explains the path to nowhere in my yard."

Christ, he loved that she called it her "yard."

It was, but it also wasn't.

"Yup," he repeated.

"It's a terrible story, but it was a long time ago, and the bad stuff didn't happen in the cabin, so I'm not sure I get why no one has rented this place because of it."

That part, he wasn't going to tell her, and he hoped the people of Misted Pines were kind enough to let that nonsense lie when it came to Nadia.

"Shit like that can cast a pall over a place."

"I guess so," she mumbled, but he could tell she wasn't buying it.

That, and considering he'd sucked back the dregs of his wine, gave him indication it was time to go.

He gave her that same indication by standing and teasing, "I think it's about that hour the princess needs to be alone, or her car will turn into a mouse or some shit like that."

It was a blow to watch her get up slowly, not hiding she was disappointed he was leaving.

He put his glass down on the coffee table.

She put hers down too and moved so he could get out.

But he stopped in front of her and warned, "Don't let that story give you shitty dreams."

"I think we both know humanity can get up to some messy stuff, Riggs," she replied.

He did, and it fucked with him to know she did too.

"Yeah," he muttered.

"I'm glad you brought your peace offering," she said.

Damn.

Sweet, but no longer shy, though still vulnerable.

Because of all that, Riggs couldn't stop himself from lifting his hand and wrapping his fingers around the soft skin of her neck. He could feel her pulse against his palm—delicate, alive, defenseless.

Damn.

He shouldn't do what he did next, and he knew that more when she tipped her head and closed her eyes as he bent his.

But he did it, touching his cheek to hers and rubbing his stubble there, because, bottom line, he was an animal, a male one, so it was instinct, and for the life of him, he couldn't stop himself from marking his territory.

When he pulled away, dropped his hand, and she opened her eyes, she didn't hide her disappointment that was all she was going to get either.

"Sleep well, Nadia. Thanks for dinner."

"You too, Riggs. Thanks for the wine."

He jutted out his chin and didn't delay.

He stepped off her porch and walked into the night.

Even so, the vision of Nadia standing in her sundress, illuminated by flower lights and lanterns, was burned in his brain in a way he knew he'd never forget it for the rest of his life.