Talon leaned back on his folded legs and jammed a finger at the broken mirror. “Tell me whoever did this is dead.” When he looked at her, his eyes were glowing an impossibly bright gold color.
Rose crossed her arms over her stomach like a shield as she scanned the bathroom. He’d cleaned up the broken glass and all of the blood. He’d even hung the shower curtain back up, and the ruined bathmat was shoved into a trash bag on the ground. “Cassius did this. The girls killed him in the war.”
Talon’s broad shoulders lifted as he inhaled deeply. He blew his breath out slowly, fists clenched on his thighs. “Rose, are you okay?”
She showed him the scar. “Yes, look. All healed. That good sleep benefited me.”
“I don’t mean physically, Rose. Are you okay?”
She swallowed hard. She wouldn’t get away with a lie. Not when Talon seemed so attuned to her already. “I’m better now that I had a good night and you cleaned this room. I’ve been putting it off.”
“Letting it haunt you.”
Clever, clever man. She nodded.
He cast a quick glance at her toes and said, “Red is my favorite color. You look cute.”
Cute? She was sixty-two years young, and yeah, shifters aged well, but she hadn’t been called cute in a couple decades at least. Rose huffed a laugh and wiggled her toes. “Maybe I’ll get my fingernails done the same color. For you. As a thank you for…” She shrugged and looked around. “For this.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not done.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I can’t leave here until this place is a safe home for you again.”
The mention of him leaving felt like someone had punched her right in the stomach. It sucked the air from her lungs, so she waited until she could draw a breath again before she forced a smile. “I’ll be fine.”
“Damn right, you will. I put in some orders for supplies. You gotta truck out back I’m gonna need to borrow to bring the supplies back here. I don’t want to pay extra for shipping it. There’s no point when I can do it myself. I made a list of stuff you need fixed up, Rose. It’s a long one.”
This man had stunned her on so many occasions since he’d come back, and here he was doing it again. “Oh, Talon, you don’t have to do that. It’s a lot of effort and—”
“I assume you aren’t going through some human insurance company because you would have to explain how your house got destroyed like this, and from my time with the Tarian Pride, I remember the rules. No human law to govern us.”
“I’m going to have to fix up the house in sections. I’m a retired florist. I get paid every couple of weeks from my retirement funds, but it mostly covers living expenses, not home repairs.”
Talon snorted. “Woman, you aren’t retired. I saw your greenhouse out back. You’re a worker bee.”
“Yeah, well, did you happen to see it’s destroyed? They wanted to make sure Ronin noticed me missing. They wanted to get to him by taking the only female in his Pride.”
Talon shrugged. “We will rebuild.”
“How?” She frowned and leaned against the open doorframe. “How do you know what to do?”
Talon smiled. “The best job for staying on the move was construction. I got real good at finding teams that needed help for a week, a month, or two months. I learned a lot that way, too, didn’t stay stagnant just hanging sheetrock or laying brick. I learned it all.”
Oooh, he was a fixer. Okay, that was the sexiest thing in the world. She had a huge thing for men who were handy with tools. When her lioness purred, she covered it with a cough.
The smile that curved his lips was nothing shy of wicked, though, so she figured he probably heard it.
“I don’t have the money to tackle it all at once.”
“Let me worry about that. I’ve already been calling in favors on some of the supplies we need.”
Stressed, Rose shook her head. “It still costs money, Talon.”
“Have you told anyone in the Pride how you can’t get your house fixed up?” he asked softly, hands relaxing against his jeans. His eyes were so direct and earnest on hers.
“No.”
“I figured. You’re tough, Rose, but you aren’t alone.”
Felt a little like she would be when he left, but she wasn’t going to utter that little gem out loud.
“I got money just sitting in the bank getting moldy,” he said through a grin. “No material possessions means I saved my earnings. If it bothers you, pay me back in time. But know that I’m not asking you to.”
“Why are you doing this?” she asked.
Talon leaned toward her and tugged her hand until she stepped into the bathroom. He tugged and tugged until he eased her into his lap. “Because, Rose,” he murmured against her hair, “you deserve to feel safe. You deserve to have something good happen to you. That’s how the balance of the world works. You do good, and good comes back to you. There’s gonna be bad patches in a life. What happened in this room was a bad patch. But woman, you can’t have a rainbow without rain, right?”
Okay.
Okay, Rose.
Go ahead and fall a little harder.
He’s catching you.
She slid her arms around his neck and nuzzled her cheek against his shoulder. How could affection feel this good? She hugged the boys and Emerald. She hugged Grim and his crew. But this was different. This was slipping into a warm, safe room where nothing could touch her, nothing could hurt her. She did have a lot of history, a lot of cracks in her story, but Talon was good at pointing to them and then wordlessly accepting them or fixing them without her even asking. He wasn’t just a fixer of houses. He was a fixer of broken pieces.
“I will be sad when you leave,” she admitted softly.
“You’ll miss me?”
With a sigh, she nodded. “Something like that.”
A deep chuckle reverberated through his body and drew a giggle from her. A giggle. Like a school girl again. She’d always believed in magic. She’d seen too much in this life not to. Talon made her believe in it even more. Magic was shaving years off of a person and, right now, sitting in a strong man’s lap, growing a crush, she felt decades lift from her shoulders.
“All right,” she said decidedly.
“All right, what?”
“Let’s fix up the house together. And have fun while you’re here. I’ll pay you back a little at a time. Each month, you send me a postcard, and I’ll send you a check. And that way I don’t lose you all at once. I’ll poke pins in a map for each place you send me a postcard so I can track where you travel. We can be pen pals.”
“Pen pals, huh? I like it.” He lifted her chin and searched her eyes. “You didn’t answer me earlier. I won’t ask again after this, but I need to know for certain. Are. You. Okay?”
Rose smiled then stretched up and pressed her lips against his. It would have to be answer enough for now.
She wasn’t okay yet. Not completely.
But as he slipped his hand behind her neck and moved his mouth against hers, the world melted away, and she knew one thing for certain.
She would be.
Chapter Four
Like the bathroom, Rose needed to face everything that was done to her property. As she stood inside her greenhouse, amid all the shattered glass and her precious plants that had been hacked to pieces, her heart ached. This had been the place she’d found sanctuary when the loneliness made her feel empty. This greenhouse had been her sanctuary, and the Old Tarian Pride had shattered it just to hurt her. Most of the dead plants were dried floral carcasses on the ground or brown splintered twigs sticking out of toppled pots. This place wasn’t her sanctuary anymore. It was a cemetery for old happy moments instead.
Talon had spent the morning hauling the splintered wood of the destroyed porch to a burn pile in the side yard. It was freezing out, and she could hear his boots in the snow as he approached the greenhouse. She turned, not even trying to hide the hurt on her face through the open doorway. He strode straight for her through the snow with only old work gloves on, a black T-shirt, his silver hair mussed, and a worried look in his dark eyes.
Voice hoarse and thick, she said, “Nothing survived them.”
“The Old Tarian Pride?” he asked, bumping his clenched fist on the splintered door frame. “That’s not true, Rose. You survived and I survived. Emerald, Grim, Ronin, Kannon—”
“Okay, okay,” she muttered with a sigh. He wasn’t one to let her dwell.
Talon chuckled and patted her backside as he walked by.
Rose made a little squeak and clenched her butt cheeks in shock. “Did you just spank me?”
“Woman,” he murmured, turning around and walking backward a few steps as he arched one dark eyebrow. “When I spank you, you’ll know it.”
Hells bells. Spanking was for young, wild people. Not classy queens. Right? But as she watched Talon kneel down to right a trio of potted plants, the masculine curve of his butt pressing against his jeans, his triceps flexing with each movement, and his tattoos stark against his skin…she was a little curious.
“Hypothetically speaking, would a spanking hurt?” Oh, her cheeks were on fire! She didn’t talk to men like this.