Cover Of Night

* * *

There hadn’t been any point in calling Creed’s cabin when he didn’t expect Creed to be there, but by Saturday morning Cal Harris judged Creed should have sent his client home by now and would be kicked back for some downtime. Old Roy Edward Starkey had judged the client to be a major pain in the ass, and Roy Edward was a good judge of character. That meant Creed would need even more alone time than usual, to reward himself for not choking the son of a bitch to death.

First Cal treated himself to a muffin and cup of coffee at Cate’s house, just to watch her move among the customers and to hear her voice. Her mother had taken the twins home with her for a visit, and he was of two minds about that. On the one hand, he missed the little stinkers. On the other, this was the first time in the three years he’d known Cate that the boys weren’t close at hand, the first real opportunity he’d had for some private conversation – provided he could string two words together without stammering and turning beet red like some idiot.

Cate barely glanced at him as she served his muffin, though when he darted a look at her. he saw that her cheeks were pink and she seemed flustered. lie didn’t know if that was good or bad. He wanted her to be aware of him, but he didn’t want her feeling uncomfortable. That couldn’t be good, could it?

The entire community was aware of, and amused by, his predicament. Everyone was also unfailingly on his side, though he’d warned them to stop deliberately sabotaging Cate’s plumbing, wiring, Explorer, or doing whatever else their fertile brains could concoct to throw the two of them together – as if having his head stuck under her sink with his ass in the air was going to ignite her interest. Besides, all those little "repairs" caused her added stress, and she was tinder enough of that without their help. She was a young widow with four-year-old twins, trying to make a go of an old Victorian bed-and-breakfast in the middle of nowhere, for Cod’s sake.

When he was certain that what he was repairing was one of those little sabotage jobs, like Sherry’s loosening the connection beneath the sink to make it leak, he refused to let Cate pay him. Even when it was a legitimate repair, he cut his charge down to expenses. He wanted Cate to succeed in business; he didn’t want her to close down and move back to Seattle. He wouldn’t have charged her anything at all, except he had to live, too. There was a surprising amount of work for him to do here, considering how small the community was; he’d become the go-to guy for just about any kind of repair work or odd job that needed doing. He’d always been good with his hands, and though his strength was mechanics, he’d found he could repair a windowsill or put up a screen door as well as the next person. Neenah had asked if he could refinish her old cast-iron tub, and he’d been reading up on that, so he guessed next he’d be a tub refinisher, too.

Hell of an occupation for a man who’d spent most of his life with a rifle in his hands.

That thought brought him back to the reason he needed to call Creed.

The two of them were a pair, he thought with amusement. Give them weapons, point them at the enemy, and they functioned like Swiss clockworks. Throw a woman they wanted in front of them, though, and apparently neither of them could find his ass with both hands and a flashlight. Creed was even worse than Cal; at least Cal had a reason for waiting, because Cate had still been shell-shocked from losing her husband. Three years was a long time to wait, but grief took its own sweet time; even after she had recovered from that and could laugh again, she had protected herself by building a wall between her and any eligible man. He understood, and because he’d judged the prize worth the wait, he’d hung in there. His patience had been rewarded; now that wall was showing signs of cracking, and he was ready to help it along with a few nudges.

Creed, though, when it came to the woman he cared about, the toughest man Cal knew had proven himself a coward.

About ten o’clock, figuring Creed could sacrifice a little of his downtime, Cal called. And got the answering machine.

"Major, this is Cal. Give me a call. It’s important." He could picture Creed scowling at the machine as he listened, trying to decide whether or not to pick up. Normally Creed would ignore a call until he was damn good and ready to respond, so Cal had tacked on the "it’s important" to whet his curiosity. Creed knew there was damn little Cal would consider all that important; if he was there, he should call back in a few minutes.

Cal waited for the call. The telephone remained silent.

Well, shit. It was possible, after being on a hunt for five days, Creed had gone into town to restock his supplies so he’d be ready for the next client. Small stuff he would pick up here in Trail Stop, but a full-bore restocking called for more than the community could offer. Hell, he might even be meeting a new client, though Cal doubted it. Creed seldom did back-to-back hunts. He offered guiding trips, at outrageous prices, so he could afford the solitary but small-scale luxurious life he wanted; too many trips would have meant he wouldn’t have time to enjoy that life. The irony of it was, the higher he set his prices, the more he was in demand, Creed was turning down jobs left and right, which in turn made him seem even more requested, and the people doing the asking responded by asking earlier and more often.

As Cal had once told him, success was a vicious circle – to which Creed had replied with a suggestion that Cal do something anatomically impossible. Cal had responded that while Creed’s dick might be floppy enough to do that, his wasn’t, and from there the conversation had disintegrated to the point that even two old battle-hardened former marines had been wincing in disgust.

After waiting as long as he could, Cal left to attend to his current job of replacing the sagging step on old Mrs. Box’s back porch. When that was finished, he helped Walter put up a new shelving unit in the hardware store. He then went back to his place over the feed store to check his answering machine, but Creed still hadn’t returned his call.