her reaching out to touch him first.
She wasn’t really sure what to think of it either. Hadn’t she just warned herself against contact? Somehow, though, with him it seemed safe.
“You remembered what I taught you?” he finally asked.
Limply, she nodded. But that wasn’t truly how she’d fended off the monster. It had been Gramps. Silently, she apologized to him for all the times she’d shut him out. For everything that had happened before that, too. It had been so easy to dismiss him at the time. She’d been young and hurt. She’d wanted so badly for him to believe her, but instead he had betrayed her. So she’d betrayed him back.
Through hindsight, though, she saw a different picture. He hadn’t really betrayed her. He had truly thought he was helping her. He’d never understood that she wasn’t sick. Cass felt him there at the edge of her consciousness, and this time she reached out to him.
“Cass? Cass, are you okay? Do you need me to leave?”
Her sudden silence must have worried Malcolm as she had given her full attention to her grandfather. She noticed that the contact with him hadn’t hurt her at all. She wondered if Malcolm had something to do with that.
“Do you want me to go?”
“No,” she said quickly but then started coughing as her lungs seized.
“No? Then I’ll stay.”
After a few breaths, she was able to answer his original question. “I did remember. Everything you taught me. But it wasn’t just that. At first I was losing to the monster. It was too strong for me. I could duck one blow, but then there was another after that. Then Chris showed me a picture of him. I saw his face, and suddenly the monster was gone and it was just a man… Then I kicked the crap out of him.”
Malcolm chuckled. “Good girl.”
“It was my room, after all. Nobody messes with me in my room.”
He smiled and reached out to let an undamaged finger brush her cheek.
Her eyes drifted shut, but she tried to fight off sleep. She wasn’t ready to say goodbye to him yet. There were so many things that they still needed to talk about, but she quickly felt the option slipping out of her control.
“You need sleep.”
“My cats,” she murmured. “The vet.”
“I’ll get them.”
It was asking a lot. It was asking more than a simple favor. She wondered if he knew that.
“You don’t have to.”
“You’re right. I don’t.”
With that, she let sleep overtake her without a single worry about her cats. About anything, really.
The next day, Cass was released from the hospital under the instructions that she was to continue to drink lots of water and get plenty of rest. Her lungs would remind her for a while what she had suffered at the hands of a distraught medium, but eventually they would heal.
Eventually, she would heal, too.
Dougie had offered to pick her up, but she had gently declined. Instead, she had asked him how his date went, to which he had groaned loudly.
“Welcome back to dating,” she’d teased.
“This sucks.”
“It does. But sometimes things work out.”
“You and McDonough?” he had asked her.
But she hadn’t really had an answer for that. She’d just wished him luck on his next date and told him she would be in touch when she figured out where she would be staying for the indefinite future.
Her scooter nothing more than twisted metal now, she was forced to hail a cab. She climbed into the backseat and thought for a minute about her options. Her apartment was out of the question, considering it was burned beyond recognition. Her renter’s insurance would cover her for the scooter and the futon and her clothes, but other than that, she hadn’t lost much.
No, there was only one place she really wanted to go. And her cats were already there waiting for her.
“Gladwyne,” she finally told the driver.
The cab pulled into the circular driveway of the address she’d given the driver. Cass hesitated before getting out. Looking at the massive house, she couldn’t fathom calling a place like that home. There were so many complications it brought with it. But her cats were inside. And she suspected her future was inside, too.
She paid the driver and got out. She rang the bell on the front door and waited without having any idea what she was going to say.
When Malcolm opened the door, she could almost see the look of relief on his face.
“I wasn’t sure if you would come.”
“I wasn’t sure either,” she answered honestly. “But I didn’t really have anywhere else to go.”
He shook his head at her. “Sorry. That’s not a good enough answer. You need a place to go? I’ll build a house for you.”
He was dead serious.
“You’re going to make me ask?”
He folded his arms over his chest, careful not to put any pressure on his burns. “I think I have to. I think I need to hear from you that this is what you want.”
It was the best advice her grandfather had ever given her. That and to always buy regular gas.
“I want this. I want…you. I didn’t come here because I didn’t have any other place to go. I came here because this is the place I wanted to be.”
He smiled. “That hurt, didn’t it?”
Cass let out a slow, long breath. “Worse than getting beat up by a monster. But I think it might be worth it.”
Malcolm stepped back, opened the door wide, and Cass bravely stepped through it to the other side.
STEPHANIE DOYLE
a dedicated romance reader, began writing her own romantic stories, some funny, some adventurous, but all delivering the quintessential happy ending, at age fifteen. At eighteen she submitted her first story to Harlequin Books and by twenty-six she was published. Now in her thirties, she struggles between the demands of her “day” job, her writing and trying to find a little romance of her own. She lives in South Jersey with her two cats, Alexandria Hamilton and Theodora Roosevelt. She wants to get a dog, but the cats have outvoted her.
