Page 5 of Warlander Grizzly

“Do you still live with your parents?” she asked.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I heard you, it was just a stupid word combination and I was hoping I misheard you. I moved out when I was eighteen. I rent a house on the edge of Saratoga.”

She hung up again and tossed the phone. The mouse was staring. “What?” she groused, and it disappeared from under the door again.

Her phone vibrated, and she answered the call. “Are you taking a bath?” Landon asked. “I can hear the water running.”

Oh shit. Her water heater in this place wasn’t humongous, and she was going to run out of hot water. Lucia scrambled to the bathtub and turned off the faucet.

“What do you want from me, Landon Fuller?”

There was a long pause on the other end. “A titty pic would be nice, Lucia Novak.”

“You need to stop messing with me. I’m not a good person.” Truth. Even she could hear the truth in her voice. She wasn’t a good person.

There was a straight thirty seconds of silence, and she waited for him to hang up.

But when he broke the silence, it wasn’t the goodbye she had expected.

“I’ll pick you up tomorrow at seven. Wear something slutty.” Click.

Stunned, Lucia set the phone beside her and stared at the screen as it faded to black.

Huh. Landon Fuller had just asked her out. Or…told her she was going out?

Slight problem—she didn’t own anything slutty.

She was going to have to ask Cadence to borrow something.

Chapter Two

“I like her, I like her, I like her,” Landon muttered as he paced in front of the Boarland Mobile Park sign. “And this is normal, it’s not abnormal, this is okay.”

The bear growled inside of him, but for the life of him, Landon couldn’t figure out what that meant. Was the bear agreeing? Was he angry? Was he hungry?

The white Ford Raptor he’d been waiting for crested the hill and bounced up the pothole-riddled gravel road, then came to a stop under the sign. The window rolled down.

“You got an STD or something?” Clinton Fuller asked.

Landon pursed his lips. “No, Dad. Just wanted to talk about something.”

Clinton narrowed his eyes. “Does this thing you want to talk about have boobs?”

Landon cleared his throat and looked off into the woods, then back. He canted his head and refused to answer.

“Shit,” his dad said, and then jutted his chin toward the trailer Landon had grown up in. “You know where the beers are. Let me park.”

Dad was built like a Mack truck, and had sired all sons. His mom was an angel in disguise, but Dad? He was the one Landon had gone to when he was in trouble. Why? Because Clinton Fuller had been born trouble, and he always knew a way to get out of it.

Lucia Novak was trouble.

He strode over to the cooler on the side of the trailer and pulled a couple of frosty beers from the ice. Dad always said beers were the perfect temperature in two-day-old ice, so he had kept this old blue cooler stocked with ice for as long as Landon could remember. Even now, he was coming over with a new bag of gas-station ice. He also had a shovel.

“You burying a body?” he joked as Dad ripped open the ice and poured it into the half-melted ice bath in the cooler.