"Just two this time?" I asked.

His gaze sharpened on me but he said nothing. I had no idea how to read this except to think he wasn't a big fan of me keeping tabs on how long he stayed.

Which was weird.

And scary.

And thus totally John Priest. A man I'd seen repeatedly. A man I did not see at all when he was in one of my cabins, except seeing his SUV drive up and down my lane when he came and went. And once, I watched him carry groceries into cabin eleven.

That was it.

Therefore, he was a man I did not know. Not even a little bit. Except for the fact I was pretty certain his name was not John Priest, and since he gave a false name and paid in cash, it was likely he was not an upstanding citizen.

"Okay, just two," I muttered.

"Key," he prompted and my body gave a slight jerk in response, seeing as I totally forgot about the key. Mostly because he wasn't there often, months passed in between, but he was the only one who came back time and again and it felt strangely like he should have his own key.

I moved to the cabinet, got him his key, and walked it back, hand out toward him.

He took it as I offered, "Would you like to take some cookies with you? I have plenty."

He gave me that sharp look again and surprised me by saying firmly and extremely rudely, "Absolutely fucking not."

"I...uh, o-okay," I stammered. "You don't like cookies."

He didn't confirm this fact.

He dipped his chin, turned to the door, opened it, and disappeared through it, shutting it behind him.

I stared at it a moment before I moved to it and locked my three locks again.

When I looked out my filmy curtains, I saw nothing but porch lit by my outside light, the gray mounds of snow beyond, and the darkness of night.

No SUV.

John Priest was heading to eleven to do whatever it was he did in my cabin that was none of business.

So I was heading to my kitchen to finish baking.

Which was what I did.

Five months later, I threw open the front door, looked up at John Priest's scary, beautiful face, and declared, "In case you're cataloguing the goodness, my man, we have Wi-Fi!"

He said nothing but he moved to take a step in so I had no choice but to take a step back. I did this heading toward the key cabinet.

He headed to the registration book.

He also moved not speaking.

I didn't return the favor.

"The password to get in is 'snookums321.' But seeing as your badass fingers might implode if you tried to type out the word 'snookums,' you can give it a miss tonight because tomorrow is my normal change day. I'm thinking 'Iloverocknroll999.' That would be 'and' as an 'n' with no hyphens or apostrophes," I shared, nabbing the key and turning to see him bent over the book.

He said nothing. Just kept scribbling.

I moved to stand at his side. "I should also tell you that we had a little incident."

He stayed bent over the book but his long fingers that were wrapped around my pen-fingers that were on a huge hand I hadn't noticed until that moment was that large-went still and his eyes slid to me.

Normally, his eyes focused on me in that intense way would make me a babbling idiot in fear for the safety of my...something.

Instead, all I could think about was what he could do with hands that big. That strong. That obviously powerful.

It was doubtful his touch could be gentle.

And that was not a bad thing.

My dry spell had lasted since Grant with no hope on the horizon it would be ending.

It was becoming clear I needed to get laid.

I also needed to stop gawking at Priest, thinking about his hands, and instead keep talking.

So I did that.

"We, uh...well, I had an, um...patron who was staying. Apparently, she was in a spot of trouble and her trouble followed her here. He assaulted her in her cabin. It was kind of...well, unpleasant considering that's unpleasant in and of itself but he then was shot dead a few days later. Not by her and not here," I hastened to add when his scary look turned downright terrifying even if he didn't move a single muscle, just kept staring at me. "By some other guy who had nothing to do with that guy, but apparently this woman was a magnet for trouble so once the first guy who assaulted her later kidnapped her, the second guy killed the first guy and re-kidnapped her, uh...as it were."

As I was finishing up (lamely), Priest straightened and he did this not taking his eyes from me.

It was then I noted something I already knew but noted it in an entirely different way.

He was really tall.

And really big.

As in really.

For both.

I swallowed.

Then I kept giving him the information he needed.

"Unfortunately, she was ripe to be attacked because she didn't turn on the outside light of her cabin. Also, the parking area was unlit. I found that upsetting so I've had lights installed in the lot. They're not overly bright or anything," I assured him quickly. "But they cut the dark. And all the units have new motion sensor lights outside. This can get a bit annoying, seeing as there are critters out there that set them off," I admitted. "But if it gets too annoying, you can turn them off. I just thought you'd wanna know, uh...that I've lit the parking area. You know, just in case you need to close your curtains or something to keep out the light."

"A woman was assaulted," he said slowly when I finally stopped speaking.

"Uh...yeah."

"In one of your cabins," he continued.

"Uh...yeah," I confirmed.

"Were you here?"

"Um...yeah."

"How badly was she hurt?" he asked.

"Norm and Gladys told me she was beaten up but okay. They saw her the next day. She reported it to the police but Norm and Gladys were the ones who reported it to me. That was, until the police came and asked if I'd seen anything."

"Norm and Gladys?"

I grinned at him. "You and them are in a club. My only returning customers."

John Priest clearly did not find his membership in that particular club as exciting as I did. I knew this when his intense look turned into a scowl.

He was scary all the time.

Scowling, he was downright chilling.

Then he added his voice, which was still rumbling, but it was no longer icy. It was vibrating with something I couldn't read, but what I could read was terrifying.

"A woman was assaulted in one of your cabins while you were here, alone, in this house."

I decided not to repeat my confirmation and be quiet for once, mostly because it was taking a lot of effort not to pee my pants.

He looked over my head and into my house. Two seconds later, in utter fascination, I watched the scowl fade from his face as the mask of indifference slid over his features and his gaze came back to me.

"I'll be here three days. Still one hundred?" he asked as if our very recent word exchange had not transpired.

"Yes," I whispered.

He went for his wallet, gave me four one-hundred-dollar bills, and I gave him his key.

"Have a nice stay," I said softly as he turned to leave.

He aimed a wintry look at me over his shoulder.

My entire body did a quiver.

He closed the door behind him.

I sucked in a calming breath and didn't move in order to give the calming part of that breath opportunity to work.

When I was no longer in danger of screaming in terror and fleeing my own property, it hit me that something just happened.

That something was that John Priest let down his guard with me.

And when he did it, if I wasn't losing my mind, he did it because he was upset at the idea that I might have been in danger.

Nearly two years, half a dozen visits, practically zero conversation, a lot of money exchanging hands, John Priest finally showed a reaction.

And it bore repeating, if I was not mistaken, that reaction was that he was supremely ticked that I had been near danger.

"Whoa," I whispered to the door and heard Priest's big Suburban move down the lane.

That evening I sat on my side porch with my feet up on the top railing, staring at the lights from cabin eleven eking through the trees.

Since he'd shown that afternoon, I'd been thinking about it and there was no way around it.

The dude liked me.

First, he kept coming back, and in the beginning the cabins weren't all that much to write home about.

Now, they needed better insulation and there were ten dozen other things that I wanted to do to improve them. They weren't luxury. They were definitely nice but they weren't terribly exciting.

But he kept coming back.

There were lots of places to stay. It wasn't like the Colorado Mountains were something people avoided.

John Priest stayed at Glacier Lily.

Second, there was no denying the iron control he kept over his emotions slipped that day in my foyer. And he wasn't upset generally about the state of a world where random women were assaulted in mountain cabins.

He was upset that I was there, alone, unprotected, and violence had been perpetrated on my property.

"Yep," I whispered into the waning light. "The dude likes me."

I didn't know what to do with this.

Suddenly, my thoughts turned to Priest's hands.

After that, I thought about the fact my vibrator was constantly on charge, that was how much I used it.

What could I say? I was a twenty-six year old woman without a boyfriend but with a good imagination and a healthy sex drive. That kind of thing happened.

I took my feet from the railing, put them to the deck, and heaved myself out of my Adirondack chair (that seriously needed sanding and paint, not to mention a pad, my butt was aching).

I entered the house and went to the powder room on the first floor.

It needed updating. The wallpaper gave me a headache, it was so flowery. The oval mirror over the sink had once been gilded. Now it looked tawdry. And there were rust stains in the sink from a drip that my dad fixed for me when they visited last Christmas. A drip, from those stains, that had to have been ongoing for perhaps centuries.

I didn't take any of this in.