Open Your Heart (Kings Grove #4) - Delancey Stewart Page 0,2

thrillers he was famous for writing—I wouldn’t want to meet him in a fight. I could hold my own, but there was something about Connor that told me he could too. It made me glad he was with my sister. He could take care of her. Not that she needed it. She was pretty fierce on her own.

“Some woman from New York,” I answered. “Didn’t get a whole lot beyond the deposit and the credit check. Set it up by email.” Pretty much the way I liked it. I didn’t have to talk to her, and if I was lucky, I’d never even see her after handing off the key. I wasn’t anti-social exactly, but people were not my thing. I loved my sister, and I didn’t mind her friends and fiancé. But other people? Kind of unnecessary in my mind. I had bad luck with people.

“Huh, okay.” Maddie shrugged. “Maybe when she gets here I’ll come over and say hi.”

“Suit yourself,” I said. “She’s supposed to get in tomorrow.”

“Good.” Maddie leaned forward and stared into the dying coals in the pit, then surprised me by chucking her fist into my shoulder. “So. Walking me down the aisle, right? To some song besides ‘The Final Countdown.’ And there will be no mist or eerie lighting, thankyouverymuch.” She glared at Connor with this last part and he shrugged and grinned.

“It was just an idea.” He said and then finished his beer.

As Connor put the empty bottle on the table, an eerie shrill squealing sound tore through the fabric of the cooling night, a high-pitched squall that sounded like a cross between grinding machinery gears and a maniacal whistle. Everyone around the dying fire lifted their heads, listening.

“What was that?” Maddie asked, looking around, her voice wary.

Connor glanced at me, and his gaze told me he had a pretty good idea. I shook my head. The squall was something I hadn’t heard in the years I’d been here. “Not sure,” Connor said slowly. “Ranger George did say something about a mountain lion last week. A couple deer killed locally that fit the profile.”

Maddie’s mouth dropped open a bit and she glanced nervously out into the darkness. “Mountain lion?”

There were few real predators in our mountains—part of the reason we’d been allowed to roam freely up here as kids, and certainly a big part of the reason village kids still wandered the hillsides together, blissfully exploring the semi-wild without much to fear. There were black bears and the occasional bobcat, and plenty of deer. But mountain lions were different. The Sierra Nevada was part of their range, definitely, but Connor explained that Ranger George said he suspected the cat that had been around lately might have been driven to a new area by the fires that had reduced their usual range in recent years.

I spent a fair amount of time on my own hiking, and had never seen any evidence of a mountain lion. But the cry we’d just heard had me wondering.

“Nothing to worry about,” Connor assured my sister. “You don’t hike alone, and if you did run into it, you know enough not to run away, right?”

“I do now,” Maddie said, sounding very doubtful. “But I think I’ve got a long night of Googling ahead of me. It’s getting late. Better head home.” Maddie stepped near and hugged me, and I held my breath. Maybe I was superstitious—maybe I was just insane. There was a little part of me that believed people I loved tended to die. But my goal with Maddie was to keep her so close I could stop anything from happening to her. I hadn’t been able to do that with Jess. But maybe I hadn’t tried hard enough. Or maybe I hadn’t loved her enough.

Once they’d gone, I stared into the dying coals in the fire pit for a long time. At first I just sat and listened, wondering if there really was a big cat prowling the hills just on the other side of the little creek below, but soon I just watched the way the coals glowed and dimmed. If I worked hard enough, I could see Jess’s face in the smoldering fire, the outline of her jaw, the gleam of fun that was always in her eyes. I squeezed my eyes shut. If I worked just a little bit harder, I could almost feel her beside me. We’d had issues, that was certain. And maybe, had Jess lived, it wouldn’t have worked out anyway.