And a man.
They all went silent.
He was lean and tall—his head brushed the top of the door frame—and something about his posture made Britt glance at his hips. She wouldn’t have been surprised to see a holster slung there, as if they’d all been transported back to the Wild West and he was the fastest gun. He had that sort of presence.
He stood in the doorway a moment, adjusting to the cool dark.
“Any chance you folks serving lunch yet?”
His boots echoed on the floor as he slowly stepped forward into the light. Longish dark hair, nearly to his shoulders, pushed back behind his ears. Pale blue chambray shirt open at the throat and rolled to his elbows, worn loose over faded jeans. Something about the way his clothes fit his body told her he hadn’t bought any of them at Walmart. His stubble-darkened jaw could have been drawn with a protractor, so precise and severe were its lines. It was a face straight out of a daguerreotype. He had a sort of elemental beauty that smacked her in the solar plexus the way her first glimpse of Hellcat Canyon had.
“Maybe.” Giorgio had sized him up asnot one of us, and better-looking than me, anddefaulted to surly.
Britt shot Giorgio a quelling look.
A crashing sound and an oath in the kitchen heralded Glenn’s arrival.
“We serve it all day,” Britt corrected, as Sherrie slipped into the kitchen to see what her husband had knocked over.
The stranger came closer, tilting his head back to study the menu chalked on the board hanging horizontally behind Giorgio.TRYTHEGLENNBURGER!the sign always said.EIGHTSECRETINGREDIENTS!
She and Giorgio watched him in uncertain silence, as if a bear had wandered in. Weeks could go by before someone they didn’t know by at least their first name crossed the threshold of the Misty Cat.
“Can you give me just a hint about the secret ingredients in a Glennburger?”
Giorgio slowly mopped beneath his armpit with a handkerchief. Britt had never seen anyone mop an armpit threateningly before, but it was happening before her eyes.
“Sweat,” he finally answered.
The stranger was regarding Giorgio with mild but unblinking curiosity that made the hair prickle on the back of Britt’s neck. As if nothing anyone did could surprise him, but if they tried, boy, would he be ready.
“That’s funny,” he said. “I was going to guess ‘love.’”
It was a masterpiece of irony.
“It has onions,” Britt volunteered hurriedly. “Spices. Nothing... bodily.”
“Guess it’s one of those things where you have to know the Masonic handshake to get the recipe.”
It was meant to be a joke, but it fell into the vacuum of Giorgio’s hostility.
She suspected the stranger anticipated that it would. And didn’t care.
Britt shot Giorgio another look. She mostly understood his instinct to attempt to drive off interlopers, the way Jet the dog did. Most of the people who lived in Hellcat Canyon liked it the way it was, and strangers were reminders that if things were different elsewhere, they could change here, too.
But unkindness always got her back up.
Sherrie emerged from the kitchen—Glenn behind her—accurately assessed the situation and the stranger with wide, appreciative eyes, and then gave him a little pat, part pity, part motherliness.
“Why don’t you have a seat right over here, hon, and we’ll get the grill going. Britt will bring you something cold or something hot, whatever you need. If you try the Glennburger, you’ll never forget it.”
Enveloped in warm, easy Sherrie-ness, he did what he was told and settled himself beneath a window.
Britt was inclined to like people who flung things like “Masonic handshakes” into jokes. They were few and far between in a small town like Hellcat Canyon, though people here would surprise you. Everyone had their own reason for living here, often very personal or, even, like her own, as secret as the ingredients in a Glennburger. When she’d arrived she’d burrowed into the place like it was a blanket fort, deciding she’d found safety at last.
Though she was smart enough to know that safety was an illusion and that just calling it safety didn’t make it so.
He sat down, leaned back with a sigh, and stretched out those long legs as though he’d been walking on them for miles. His boots were dusty and a bit creased, but gorgeous in their simplicity. They looked as though he’d owned them forever and had probably cost more than the land the Misty Cat Cavern sat on.