“I don’t date players, Dylan.”
“Who said anything about a date. I said beers. We’re the only singles now. It makes sense that we become friends.”
“We are friends. Friends only,” she reiterated for the third time in as many weeks. Oh, Dylan didn’t like her like that. He liked teasing her.
“Favor, can I hang one of these on your bulletin board?”
She glanced over her shoulder at the full bulletin board right beside the bar. “If you can find room. I really need to go through there and take down the expired ones. Just been busy, you know?” she said, gesturing to her study materials she’d set up near the register.
“Aren’t you almost through?”
“Kind of.”
“Well, you’re a badass,” he said as he yanked a flyer off the top of the pile and headed for the bulletin board.
“I don’t feel like one.”
“Yeah, well, that’s because of the company you keep. You hang out with monsters, you’re going to feel left out.”
“Is that how you feel?” she asked as she began rinsing a glass. She didn’t feel that way at all.
“Sometimes. I still remember Garret before.”
When she looked up from her dish, the giant at the end of the bar top was looking right at her with those strange yellow-hued, glowing eyes.
They shouldn’t be talking about Garret or anyone from Wreck’s Mountains in front of this stranger.
She stood on her tiptoes and leaned over the bar top to look at the flyer. “House for rent?” she asked. “I thought it was filled.”
Dylan made a click sound behind his teeth and stabbed a thumbtack into the flyer on the cork board. “They backed out three days before move-in. Garret gets to keep the deposit, but it’s bad timing. He and Raynah took Breah on a little vacation, so he has me scrambling to cover his shit and mine.”
“Dylan,” she said softly.
He turned and then frowned at the warning he read on her face. “What?” he asked.
She tilted her face toward the stranger at the bar.
Dylan slid a look at him and held. The stranger was looking back at him, unblinking.
Dylan nodded, then looked around the empty bar, and lifted the hem of his shirt to expose the handle of his gun. Oh, she knew he carried the handgun. He always did. Dylan replaced the shirt to hide the weapon again, and sat down on the bar stool one away from the stranger. “This territory is pretty full.”
The stranger canted his head the other direction and looked Dylan up and down, chewing slowly. “I’m just here eating lunch.”
“With your glowing fuckin’ shifter eyes. Why are you here in this town eating lunch?”
The man swallowed and wiped his hands on a napkin. “You know a little about a lot, don’t you?” the stranger said.
Dylan didn’t answer, he was just glaring into that shifter’s soul.
“Where’s the house for rent?” the stranger asked.
Next door to the house Tammy Ray was renting, and hell no to an unfamiliar shifter as a neighbor.
Dylan glanced at her, and she shook her head slightly.
“In a neighborhood you can’t afford.”
“How do you know what I can afford?”
