The sky was too big and blue to be real. Trevor Cunningham would swear it was the magic of Hollywood if he wasn’t standing outside in a wind flavored by the Arctic. The chill bit through the thin fleece jacket that was fine for January back home and wholly inadequate for early November in Copper Bluff, Montana.
Home. Trevor shivered, and it wasn’t all the wind’s doing. If home was where the heart was, his home had been pulverized and the fine powder blown to the corners of the world. How else could he explain leaving sunny, smoggy, parched, crowded Los Angeles for the wide open spaces of the Rockies?
At least partly because the heart-stomper had the star power and consequently the income to make the payments on the house in Sherman Oaks, while Trevor was still waiting to be paid for that last film treatment. Antony had pulled up stakes and headed off to party with at least three other well-known pretty faces, leaving Trevor with tears and a mortgage payment eating holes in his reserves. At least he’d left Sabrina with Trevor.
Maybe because even a puggle who adored him was “too much responsibility for me right now.”
And if there wasn’t a book to be written out of that mess, maybe a novel, maybe a thinly disguised tell-all, then Trevor might as well hang up his computer and go dig metals out of the side of the mountain.
Not that he wanted a pickaxe or a bulldozer just now: what he needed was a quiet place to live and write, somewhere he didn’t have to see the pity in people’s faces if he went to a party. Or go to the parties—they cut into his writing. Time to get the smog out of his lungs and go where two hours on the highway put him in the natural wonders of Yellowstone, not Burbank.
Trevor’d shed the whole California scene, selling the house, the furniture, and most of the artwork, and loaded up what was left into his classic Ford Bronco with the custom rims. He headed to where he and that truck would be appreciated. Antony’s taste in art sucked—Trevor wouldn’t miss seeing all those trendy color-block canvases, and his taste in vehicles sucked too: hadn’t he wanted Trevor to ditch the lovingly restored four-wheel drive for a German sedan?
Standing in the chill wind with Sabrina wrapping her leash around his legs in her effort to keep the wind from cutting through her thin coat reminded Trevor he was here to make a new start. He gestured to the one person he knew at all in this town, Megan the real estate agent, to let them into his new digs for the final walkthrough. Last chance to change his mind on signing a mortgage here in the hinterlands, even if it was for less than a new BMW M3.
“We think the knotty pine paneling is original to the house. A hundred years of patina! And the bathroom’s been updated a couple of times, but they kept that huge iron clawfoot tub...”
The pine paneling was a big plus in his choosing this house over the Internet, but Trevor tried to ignore the realtor’s prattle—he was more concerned with the state of the subflooring and the draft coming around the picture window in the living room. A little late to be adding conditions to the term of sale. He’d just spent ten percent of the cost of his California dwelling and didn’t expect perfection for the price: when a six hundred thousand dollar Brentwood house had come with complimentary rats in the basement, what was a little draftiness in his bargain dwelling? Besides cold as outdoors. “Who does windows around here?” Trevor ran his fingers around the framing and noted another pressing issue. “And fencing? Sabrina needs to be able to run around her new yard.” The puggle was a knee-high, tan tripping hazard dashing from corner to corner, investigating all the new sniffs with her pushed-in black nose.
The realtor stopped her rewind of a sales pitch and considered. “Talk to Harper. His first name is Don, but everyone calls him Harper. Talk to him for both projects—he does that sort of work in the off season. He has time for projects until spring, and trust me, in the spring you do not want to need to call Don Harper.” Her laugh was wry.
“Why?” An image grew of a man in a bear skin emerging from a den, ready to eat the nearest meaty creature in a post-hibernation hunger. Not that Trevor had so much meat on his bones, and he could sprint fairly fast... But he wasn’t about to get caught by a man any time soon, and around here, a Don Harper was probably not anyone he wanted to be chased by—his pursuer could be holding a club. Even on a friendlier note, hadn’t he come here planning to not chase or be chased?
“He, ah, has a county job that picks up in the spring. Shaft season, you know.” She knelt at the fireplace, working at a handle set into the brick. “Remember to open the flue before you light a fire, and oh, call Harper for firewood. He’ll stack you a couple of cords for the winter. The last owners didn’t leave any...”
“Shaft season? No, I don’t know. What’s that?” Firewood hadn’t even crossed Trevor’s mind and right now he didn’t care, not when this local phenomenon pinged the Attila the Pun side of his dirty gay mind.
She hurried on to the kitchen, talking a mile a minute. “The previous owners kept a chest freezer in the garage, they hardly had to plug it in in the winter, but it keeps the meat safe. It’s still deer and elk season, do you hunt?”
Not any game she’d approve of, and his own personal hunting season was closed, closed, closed. As far as Bambi went, that was also a big “No.”
“You might get Harper to...”
Trevor wasn’t about to get diverted by a man who could probably load an elk or two into the freezer if he decided he needed to stock up on game meat for the winter. “Shaft season?”
“Just a side effect of Copper Bluff being an old mining town is all,” she admitted while pointing out the self-cleaning oven. “This house hasn’t had any problems in the last hundred and ten years. Shaft season for you mostly means mud in the back yard. Don’t even worry about it.” She pranced upstairs into the master bedroom, singing the praises of Kolette’s Kountry Komfort as a source of draperies.
What, a household need this remarkable Don Harper couldn’t meet? Trevor kept his sarcasm to himself. Shaft season—sounded like any time after ten PM at Antony’s favorite club. Might start earlier now that Antony was officially on the loose. Domesticity had never really taken with him the way it had with Trevor. Well, Trevor’s personal shaft season might take a lot longer than spring to roll around again.
“Hey, Megan?” He caught up with her, agreed to see Kolette (once—the abundance of K’s didn’t fill him with confidence about her tastes and his having any common ground) and asked the question that was really on his mind. “Do I need to do anything special to the furnace? I’ve always had electric baseboard heating, and I don’t know anything about gas forced-air.”
“Oh, electric heat would cost you more than the mortgage around here!” Her eyes grew huge at the thought. “Just change the filters every couple of months. Ask Harper to show you when he brings out the firewood.”
One more thing this remarkable man was supposed to do for him, and Trevor hated the guy already. Probably big and burly, with a beard full of nesting mice, and a pair of steel-toed boots suitable for kicking butts. It wasn’t too late to flee. “Does anyone besides Don Harper do anything in this town?”
“Of course, but...” Her lip quivered a bit, suddenly taking twenty years off her age. “I went to school with him. He’s a nice guy. Do you have a problem with him?”
How to feel like an asshole in one easy step. “No, it’s just you’ve mentioned him four times now? Or five.”
“Because he’s reliable enough to be Uncle Don to my son. And you’re new in town, and you don’t know anybody. You’d be mad if you went and hired some of the guys who put their flyers up on the grocery store bulletin board. One or two of them, you wouldn’t have anything but bare fence posts this time next year. Some of them think a cord of wood is a lot smaller than it is.”
“How big is a cord of wood?” One of a thousand things he’d need to learn if he was going to live in Montana, even if only for the duration of writing a book.
“Four feet high, four feet wide, eight feet long, and that wire mesh cage in the back of the house isn’t a dog run, it’s for the firewood and holds two cords if it’s fully stacked.” Somewhere in reciting the dimensions she found her spark again. “So if you want it filled for the price of two cords, you call Harper, and if you don’t mind paying for three, call someone from the bulletin board. Don won’t take advantage of a Greenie.”
The words were the words of English, the sense was the sense of nonsense... Okay, he’d bite. “What’s a Greenie?”
Megan blushed. “Sorry. You’re from California. Greenies are usually from Colorado and think they know everything about living in the mountains, but it’s kind of inclusive, for someone not from here. Sorry, that was rude of me. You just bought a house, or you’re about to. You’re from here now.”
Might take a while before Trevor felt like he belonged. If ever. Maybe making a friend would be a good start—why hadn’t she recommended Don Harper for that too?
“No offense taken. How else am I going to learn?” Too late, Trevor realized he’d asked another question that could be answered with “Call Don Harper.”
***
Four hours later he had a list of projects, had signed his name twenty or thirty times, and become the proud debtor of a monthly mortgage payment approximately equivalent to what he’d spent on his last spa day.
He could go home, except home was a completely empty hundred-plus year old house, and he had nothing to fill it with except the contents of the U-Haul trailer currently waiting in the parking lot at the Best Western motel. Mostly books, and the bookshelves to hold them—he hadn’t brought anything to Montana that Antony loved, including himself.
Especially himself. Well, that bastard could make amends by dying in a suitably gruesome fashion in Trevor’s new book. It would sit oddly with the gay romances he was already known for, but what the hell, Trevor’s whole life had been shaken up. He could write a different genre this time around.
Plotting cruel demises might advance his plot, but it wouldn’t make a comfortable place to sleep tonight. Shaking Megan’s hand once they’d left the title office, he figured he might as well ask. “Guess I need some furniture. Any thoughts?”
Megan knelt to scratch Sabrina’s ears. Face it, his dog was a knee-high scritch-whore—she’d soak up as much loving as anyone would give her. Her pink tongue lolled out of her black semi-pug muzzle.
“You could try the Rustic Warehouse, or Welch’s if you want something new.”
Not new hadn’t even been on his radar. Build it himself from a box for temporary use, yes, because he really didn’t have much household stuff besides book cases and some kitchen things. Controlling his shudder, Trevor said, “I could swing by, but I was thinking... Where’s the nearest Ikea?”
Megan looked up, and it might have been pity or puzzlement that creased her forehead. “Salt Lake City.”
“Utah?” Trevor had to clarify. What had he gotten himself into?
“Yes. It’s only four hundred and seventy miles away.” She went back to rubbing doggy ears. “A little farther to Portland or Seattle. Or Denver. It’s a weekend trip.”
“A weekend trip,” Trevor agreed faintly, imagining miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles for eight hours each way, only to spend his money outside this isolated hamlet, where the jobs were scarce and the property cheap. “I suppose that would be a Greenie thing to do, wouldn’t it?”
“I didn’t say anything of the sort.” Megan rubbed Sabrina’s ears with her full attention.
She didn’t have to.
“Point me toward my best bet for a new mattress.” Starting over meant a bed nobody’d ever slept in but him.
And in Copper Bluff, Montana, he expected to be sleeping alone for a long, long time.