smiled into his coffee cup. “Not much. I just told him that in case you said no. I didn’t want Austin to take it personally.”
That made sense, she supposed. She returned her attention to the male question mark beside Gage. “It’s true, but making an exception isn’t a favor. Just the regular rent, please.” Maybe it wasn’t a favor or maybe it was. But it certainly wasn’t a favor to Austin. She owed Gage.
Austin Mendez nodded. “Okay. So what are the house rules?”
She hadn’t really thought about that because she hadn’t exactly needed to make rules before. “Buy your own food, clean up after yourself. That’s all I ask. I’ll give you a key so you can come and go as you like. I’m gone most days all day, so we shouldn’t bother each other.”
He nodded. “Fair enough. And I’m not looking to throw any parties.”
“I’ve survived even a few of those,” she remarked. She was almost grateful when he smiled faintly. Not much of a smile, but she was beginning to get the feeling that whoever this man was, or had been, right now he was very much on edge and uncertain. Since she couldn’t imagine him doing what he had done without at least a fair amount of confidence, it must be the total shift in gears that was bothering him.
Well, she could understand that. She’d spent a lot of her life trying to shift a gear that seemed to be stuck.
She also couldn’t think of another thing to say. She’d never been one for small talk with strangers. So she looked at Gage. “How are the kids? I know how Emma is, I see her often.”
“Ever since you got her into that quilting,” he agreed, his eyes twinkling a bit. “Are there ever too many quilts?”
“Never.” She laughed.
Gage turned to Austin. “Corey here owns the local sewing shop and gives classes in how to do all kinds of stuff from knitting to needlepoint to quilting. Emma’s even talking about learning to make lace, though whatever for I can’t imagine.”
“There’s something soothing about busy hands,” Corey answered. “And when you get done, there’s a sense of achievement.”
“There’s also a lot of kids in this town running around with hand-knitted caps and a lot of beds covered by Emma’s quilts.” His eyes danced. “It’s kind of fun to watch her give one away. People are so overwhelmed by it and go on about how she couldn’t possibly want to part with so much work. They should only see the stack in one corner of our bedroom.”
At that, Corey laughed outright. “She did really get into it.”
“Understatement,” Gage pronounced. “You unleashed an obsession.” He glanced at his watch again. “I gotta run. I know the boys are old enough to be by themselves, but every so often I still have to unplug them from their games and remind them there’s a real world out here.”
“Is there?” Austin’s question fell into the conversation almost like a bomb. As if he realized it, he shook himself visibly. “Sorry.” He stood up. “I need to go to the bank and get your rent. No checking account yet. If I could have that key?”
She rose immediately and went to get it for him. He thanked her and vanished out the front door and into the gloaming.
Gage stood in the kitchen. “Are you going to be okay with this?”
“You seemed to think I would be.”
“That’s no answer.” He sighed. “I swear he’s on the up-and-up. And if you want my guess, you’ll hardly know he’s here. But if you have any doubts, I’ll find another way.”
She hesitated. Part of her definitely wanted to say no. Since her mother’s murder, she had trouble trusting men, especially strangers, even though she couldn’t remember a thing about what had happened. Still... She thought of what Gage had told her about Austin Mendez and figured he’d earned some help with his return to regular life. Someone owed it to him, and she seemed to be the someone available right now.
“It’ll be okay,” she said firmly.
“But if it’s not, let me know?”
“Promise.”
He seemed content with that and took his departure after thanking her for the coffee. It was Saturday night, the classes at her shop were done for the day, and tomorrow she’d be open for only a few hours.
That suddenly seemed like an awfully long time away, before she walked back into the security of the shop her grandmother had left to her. She’d just pretended to a whole lot of confidence she didn’t feel at all. But that pretense was embedded in her life.
She decided there was only one way to survive this evening. She grabbed a sandwich and a glass of milk, along with her e-reader and knitting bag, and headed for her bedroom. Once inside, she locked the door.
There would be a man in the house now, and she was not at all happy about it or comfortable with it.
* * *
Austin returned to the house a couple of hours later. He’d pulled the rent from an ATM, had dinner at the diner, where he noted an astonishing lack of tortillas, then grabbed his suitcase from his old beater and headed inside.
He realized immediately that his landlady had gone to ground. Her car was still in the driveway, but she had vanished. When he caught a glimpse of light from beneath a door at the back of the hall, he figured she had decided to vanish on purpose.
Not that he could blame her. He had a pretty good idea what he looked like, and she didn’t know a thing about him. He could live with it. Right now, he wanted to be scarce, too.
Because only scarcity provided safety, and he’d been working without a net for far too long. He’d been initially relieved when they had pulled him out, but that was before he realized he didn’t fit here as well as he had in the border towns. Here he had to be a different person than there. He had memories of being someone else, but in between lay six years of working himself into a position of familiarity and friendship with people he had never really wanted to know or become friends with.
The irony didn’t escape him.
Nor did the way he had been treated after they’d pulled him out. A thank-you for all the intelligence he had given them, an endless debriefing, a pat on the shoulder, then “Get out of here and take some time for yourself.”
They didn’t know what to do with him, either, now. Hell, he’d been buried so deep that two of his fellow agents had beaten him up once, and another time one had shot at him.
Then when the joint task force rolled up the operation, they’d dragged him in just like all the rest of the bad guys, and the Federales had tap-danced all over him for days, leaving him with some broken ribs and other injuries before his own guys pulled him out in an ostensible “prison transfer.”
Good for his cover, but he was quite sure all of that made his own team uncomfortable.
Well, he hadn’t liked it, either, and frankly he never wanted to do it again. Job completed, time to move on. He just didn’t know where yet.
He was still on payroll. They’d told
