I woke groggily at least twice, certain I’d heard something moving in the cabin or right outside, but my eyes refused to stay open and my brain stayed shut down. The final time, several things colluded to roust me out of bed. Rumbling trucks or construction equipment close by stole whatever ability I might have had to go back to sleep, mostly because I had no idea why anything like that would be within spitting distance of my cabin. Which meant trouble.
The smell of coffee drifted into my room, and someone bumped around in another part of the cabin. My heart leapt. Betsy? Maybe she forgave me or at least wanted to talk. I held my breath and shoved to my feet, swaying and almost toppling over when I forgot about my cast. I didn’t bother to change out of my pajamas and just threw on a zipping sweatshirt before hobbling toward the kitchen.
“Betsy, I didn’t…” I trailed off when the broad-shouldered figure standing near the sink turned, and my stomach plummeted. “Archer. You came back? Or… you didn’t leave?”
He studied me from head-to-toe and I flushed. His attention made me hyper aware of being barefoot and wearing bagging pajama pants, a hole-y T-shirt, and the old sweatshirt. Archer looked impeccable in comparison, even wearing the same Henley as last night. The flannel shirt hung on the back of a chair near the table. Somehow his hair and beard stayed neat, too, unless he happened to carry grooming supplies with him everywhere.
Archer sipped from a mug to hide his smile. “I stayed and slept on the couch. I tried to wake you up but you were completely out.”
Holy crap. My eyes widened. He’d been in my room? Or did he just mean knocking on the door? “But… uh… I mean, why did you stay? I thought you headed back after the fire went out.”
“I put the fire out,” he said. Archer poured another cup of coffee and offered it to me in the ‘Notorious RBG’ mug. “But when I got ready to leave, I thought I saw someone standing outside your cabin and looking through your windows.”
“That seems…” I cleared my throat a few times. Had it been Dragomir? Was he looking for me with news about Jamie? “That seems unlikely, this far from the road.”
He made a thoughtful noise, then gestured for me to walk with him to the porch. “That’s what I thought, but when I came out to check and it ran away, I found a lot of footprints out here. Way more than just us and different sizes. Some big paw prints, too.”
I frowned at him. “Paw prints? What kind of paw prints?”
Hopefully a cougar wasn’t hanging out around the cabin, or feral dogs. There had been a pack of strays terrorizing the town dump, but I hadn’t heard of them getting close to people by choice.
Archer showed me a picture he’d taken on his phone in watery sunlight with his boot in the picture to show the scale. My eyebrows rose as I took the phone, shivering at the brush of his fingers against mine, and adjusting the zoom. “Huh. Those look like canine prints, but way too big. Probably some of the town kids screwing with me. For a while they tried to make Bigfoot prints where they thought I would find them. Couldn’t get the pressure right on the heel indentation and didn’t account for length of stride and speed. Idiots.”
His eyebrows rose but he didn’t look away from the dinner plate-sized paw prints. “I don’t think these are fake.”
I didn’t either. But off the top of my head, I couldn’t think of any cryptids that would have left that kind of print. Maybe a radioactive wolf pack ventured away from all the nuclear material in Oak Ridge. The lingering exhaustion from the vampire blood hangover, lack of caffeine, and the banging around outside made it tough to care about anything. I “hmm’d” under my breath and drank more coffee. Maybe a solution would present itself if I just stood there long enough.
“Are there many wolf or bear attacks around here? Do you remember many from when you were younger?”
“I haven’t paid much attention,” I said slowly. I handed his phone back after successfully resisting the temptation to scroll through the rest of his photos, and leaned my head back to study the ceiling. “Maybe one or two attacks at campsites where tourists didn’t put their food away in bear bags. I don’t think there’s been a wolf sighting in ages, at least not that I’ve seen.”
He made a thoughtful noise and shrugged. “Just curious. You should keep an eye out, though. Do you have a shotgun or rifle in case a wild animal shows up?”
“I need to get a new rifle to replace the one I lost,” I said, shaking my head. “But there’s a Benelli over there.” I nodded toward the kitchen, since I usually stashed the shotgun near the knives and the rifle in my bedroom.
He nodded. “Good. Make sure you pick up that rifle soon. A shotgun might dissuade an intruder but it might not stop a bear before he’s right on top of you.”
“Right.” I meandered outside and sipped the coffee, even though he’d filled it too much to add all the cream I liked, but stopped in my tracks when I finally saw what was making all the noise in my yard.
A flatbed had somehow maneuvered itself down the bumpy unpaved road to the cabin and then across the gravel parking area, followed by two pickup trucks. I struggled not to react, knowing Archer watched me closely, and hobbled off the porch to get a better look at what they unloaded.
Masses of crates and boxes and bins came off the flatbed, some by forklift, and stacked up near the cabin. What the hell was it? Archer watched it all with polite interest, but he didn’t ask about it, which was a damn good thing. I hadn’t had enough caffeine to come up with a good excuse. Could it have been camera and sound equipment for the documentary? I shook my head and dismissed the idea. Highly unlikely.
One of the workers approached with a clipboard and an envelope under his arm. “You Montgomery?”
“That’s me,” I said. I wanted to thank the man for looking at me instead of assuming Archer would be the one in charge. I cleared my throat and searched for a way to figure out what they were doing without straight-out asking what the hell they were doing. “You guys got started early.”
“Yes ma’am,” he said, busy with his clipboard and flipping through papers on the clipboard. “Lot to deliver and get set up. Inventory sheet is here. If you tell me where you want it all, we can start hauling it inside and setting up.”
I gazed at three sheets – three sheets! – of various devices and systems. My heart sped up when I finally looked at the list. Minicentrifuges: three. An ultracentrifuge. Biosafety cabinet. Incubators and CO2 incubators. Autoclave. Full lab’s worth of glassware. Inverted light microscope and fluorescent light microscope with photography. Growth media and reagents. Everything I’d had on my list of dream equipment and more.
Both men looked at me when I finally dragged my attention away from the million dollar Christmas list I’d given to a vampiric Santa to fulfill. “Uh, right. Sorry. Forgot you’d been scheduled for this morning. I can show you inside where it can all go.”
Not that I had a damn clue where that was. I should have asked Dragomir for an empty shipping container to set up outside the house as an actual lab. I’d need better ventilation and some air purification for sure once I got into the tricky stuff with any isolated viral samples. It definitely wouldn’t be good to accidentally turn myself into a vampire. I shuddered at the thought but played it off as the cold, huddling in my sweatshirt, and hobbled back into the cabin.
I hesitated outside the door of my bedroom, gazing down the hall to the back of the cabin. Jamie’s room stood empty, waiting for him to return, without much more than a twin bed and mattress. The cabin had always been bare-bones for furnishings. And yet I hesitated in telling the delivery guy from putting everything in there. It was Jamie’s room. If I filled it with lab equipment to run experiments for someone else, what would Jamie think when he came back?
I blinked as my vision blurred. When Jamie came back, we could return all the equipment because I wouldn’t need to help Dragomir anymore. My voice cracked as I opened the door to his room and stepped aside. It hurt to do. It hurt to even look at the empty space. “In here. If you could set it up around the perimeter, that would be best.”
He leaned through the door and eyed it dubiously, doing quick math under his breath as he assessed and did a brief sketch in the air. He grimaced and glanced back at me. “We’ll probably need another room this size, maybe a shed. There’s a bench with a ventilation hood, too, and that’ll take up almost that whole wall. And we’ll need to vent it and put in the purification as well.”
My jaw went slack. Jesus. Had Dragomir just bought an entire biomedical equipment catalogue? Just did an eeny-meeny-miney-moe on each page? Who the hell knew. But I forced myself to nod. “Okay. Start with this room and let me look at the other ones.”
I turned and almost ran into Archer. He steadied me and arched his eyebrows. “That’s quite a lot of stuff. You sure you need to do reality TV for a paycheck?”
“It’s on loan,” I blurted out, too loud. I wrangled my hair back into something like a ponytail, and headed for the kitchen to get more coffee. Shit. I would have to move my stuff out of my bedroom so they could use that, since it shared a wall with Jamie’s. “Just… from the university for some research.”
“And they’re going to drill holes in your walls for ventilation?”
I squeezed my eyes shut. It was way too early in the morning for this kind of conversation. “Apparently. Nothing a little putty and spackle can’t fix, right?”
His eyebrows climbed higher, and he caught my elbow to draw me out of the way as the delivery guys carted in the first load of stuff on dollies. Concern grew in his eyes. “I’ll stick around for a bit and help deal with this. Why don’t you sit down, take your pain meds, and get breakfast?”
Good grief, how could one guy be that nice? What was his angle? What did he really want from me? It wasn’t my looks, obviously, since the mirror proved I looked more like a cadaver than a person. As tempting as his offer was, I couldn’t keep up the charade of knowing what the hell was going on. I just didn’t have the mental bandwidth. “No, that’s okay. Once I show them where to put everything, they’ll be fine to set up. I’m sure your pals are wondering where you got off to.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “I’m sure they have some idea.”
I frowned, head tilted, and almost asked what he meant. And then I realized what he meant and snapped my mouth shut. Heat suffused my whole face. “They absolutely do not know you slept over.”
His smile spread.
I groaned and covered my face. “Seriously, isn’t that a conflict of interest? You’re really going to let them think you talked your way into my pants?”
“We’re not investigative reporters,” he said, chuckling. “I’m not sure what interests would conflict, but I’ll agree with whatever you tee up. They won’t assume anything.”
“Yes they will, otherwise you wouldn’t be grinning like a dead pig in the sun.”
“Like a what? Did you just call me a pig?”
I huffed in exasperation and made my way toward the master bedroom to gauge whether I could emotionally deal with moving in there. “A dead pig in the sun. The skin shrinks and pulls the lips back, makes it look like it’s smiling. Like you’re smiling right now.”
Archer snorted, drinking his coffee like this was a perfectly normal conversation to have. Like it was perfectly normal for him to have stayed the night uninvited. “That’s good to know. I told them we were doing some background work and an initial interview. I’ll just say you tried to get me drunk so you could get into my pants, and I couldn’t drive by the time you were done with me. And there we go.”
I stumbled and cracked my shoulder against the door jamb as I swung around to stare at him. “But… I mean, why do you possibly think that… What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I’m joking, Ada.” He held my shoulders, laughing, and something shone in his eyes that made my chest warm and expand. Archer chuckled and pulled me in for a hug. “Maybe I need a sign to hold up when I’m joking so you’ll know for sure. Might ruin the punchlines, but I wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself being outraged.”
I wanted to fume and give him a piece of my mind, but it felt too good to just lean against him and rest my forehead against the side of his neck. “It’s not my fault you’re inscrutable.”
“Now, there’s something no one’s ever called me before. Inscrutable. I like it.” Archer rubbed my back, squeezed me, and then moved me so he could see my face. “Now. You go sit down and put your leg up, and I’ll deal with these guys.”
So tempting. So very, very tempting, especially if he did some of the lifting and carrying. And bending over. Maybe squatting.
My cheeks burned as my imagination ran away with me, and I couldn’t even blame Dragomir’s mind-games for putting dirty thoughts in my head. “That’s okay, really. You should get back to your actual work and I’ll get back to mine. I don’t think I’ll be able to film today, so y’all should go out near the campgrounds for some footage. Maybe interview the tourists about what they’ve seen. There’s usually an out-of-towner who swears he saw a sasquatch walking through his campsite.”
“He? Not she?”
“It’s never a woman,” I said. I patted his shoulder as I limped by. Maybe I could cut my cast off soon, since my leg didn’t hurt at all, and then I wouldn’t be weighed down by the plaster. Speed was of the essence. “Trust me. It’s always a guy.”
“I look forward to testing the hypothesis.”
That earned him another dirty look, and earned me another one of those dimpled smiles, and I would have been completely distracted again if the lead delivery guy hadn’t reappeared and said he was ready to do inventory. I went to the kitchen to brew more coffee so everyone could get a cup, and when I turned back, caught Archer conferring with the delivery guy in the doorway and handing over a business card or something. My head tilted. Why would Archer talk to a random guy delivering lab equipment to my cabin?
Archer headed to his truck and I went to the window to peer around the curtain. He turned into a different person entirely as he spoke on his cell phone. The truck and forklift drowned out whatever he said, but his posture turned military and his expression hard as he surveyed the ground around the cabin. He gestured a few times, intense, and finally got in his truck. All business, but not the documentary kind of business. My heart ticked faster. How odd.
I jerked my attention back to the inventory sheets. “Sorry about that. Where were we?”
The rest of the day flew by, crammed with hauling and moving things, watching incredible technology being setup, supervising installs, and staying on my feet long past my endurance. At random times, I found myself looking out the window at where Archer had stood, looking so serious, and studied my cabin like a problem he needed to solve.