Page 10 of Tourist Season

I T MIGHT HAVE BEEN A sleepless night, but it was so fucking worth it to set up my little surprise.

I feel wide awake. Much more lively than Harper, apparently.

I watch through her dining room window as she trudges down the stairs, a loose bun askew on the top of her head, her bangs and wayward strands of hair framing her face.

She turns off the lights she left on while she slept as she goes.

Odd, that even the lamps in her bedroom stayed on all night.

Her gray sleep shorts hug the contours of muscle in her ass, her defined legs bare, tapering to a pair of penguin slippers.

Not that it matters to me what her ass or legs look like.

Or that I can see her nipples beneath the thin cotton of her tank top when she turns a little in my direction.

Maybe my cock hardens at the sight of her as she passes into the kitchen and I follow to watch from the next window, but it’s biology .

Just an automatic response to visual stimulus. Nothing more.

Watching her make coffee is a frustrating experience.

Her eyes are half open and watering with a series of yawns.

She manages to complete all the steps to prep a stovetop espresso maker, but only barely.

It’s almost tempting to burst into her kitchen and do it for her just to hurry things along when it takes her more than one try to screw the top section to the reservoir.

Waiting for the water to boil theoretically takes two minutes, but it might as well be two hours.

But I’ve learned something important in these years of waiting.

The anticipation of reaching your goal is sometimes even better than the satisfaction of achieving it.

“Maybe not this time, though,” I whisper as she pours the coffee into a mug with a dash of milk.

She takes it to the door that leads to a patio overlooking the garden, a pastry clutched in her other hand.

It’s a beautiful, sunny morning in Cape Carnage, after all.

Who wouldn’t want to sit outside with a coffee and croissant to watch the birds?

I snicker to myself as I peer around the corner of the cottage and watch.

Harper sets her coffee on the patio table and sits, not looking up, all her attention focused on the liquid in her cup.

She closes her eyes as she takes the first sip, tilting her face toward the sun to savor the simple pleasure of its warmth on her skin.

Even when the croak of a raven interrupts the peace of her sun trap, her eyes don’t open.

The raven croaks again.

“Shush, Morpheus,” she says. She doesn’t look toward the source of the sound, but I do. My heart thunders beneath my sternum. “I’ll feed you in a minute.”

Harper raises the cup to her lips, her eyes still pressed closed. The raven caws more loudly than before.

Everything seems to happen in slow motion. A crease appears between her brows. She takes a sip of coffee as though steeling herself for a fight with the insistent bird. Her head turns toward the feeder.

Coffee sprays from Harper’s lips as she opens her eyes and finally sees .

The raven is standing on the roof of the bird feeder, leaning over the edge to peck Jake Hornell’s eyeball, the other one already gone. The bird pulls a string of ruined flesh from the cavity and gulps it down. With a flutter of his wings, he croaks at Harper, clearly pleased with himself.

“Jake …?” she whispers.

Glee races through my veins. I back out of sight behind the corner of the cottage just as Harper’s eyes dart across the grounds.

Maybe she’ll let out a terrified shriek.

A dramatic fall to her knees with her head in her hands.

Maybe she’ll shake her guilty fists at the sky.

Surely there will be tears, at the very least. Any second now …

I peer around the corner. Harper is standing motionless, her head tilted to one side. Though her back is to me and I can’t see her expression, everything else about her seems to have stalled.

The meltdown is coming. I’m sure of it.

Harper takes a step closer to the bird feeder.

Another. A fly passes her in a slow, curling arc to land on Jake’s cheek before crawling into the empty eye socket.

As accustomed as I am to the grotesque indignity of death, it’s still fucking disgusting.

Surely she thinks so too. She’s going to puke.

I know it. Coffee and croissant will be everywhere .

Harper looks down at the phone in her hand and presses a contact before placing the call on speaker. Two rings later, I hear the quiet but gruff “hello” of an elderly man’s voice.

“Did you find your shoes?” Harper asks.

There’s a pause. “What?”

“Your shoes. The Christina Riccis or whatever.”

“ Stefano ,” the man barks. “ Stefano Riccis, you heathen.”

Though I can’t see her face, she raises a hand to suppress a laugh, as though this is both an expected and amusing reply. “ Stefano Riccis, of course. Did you find them? Did you happen to take them for a … wander …?”

“Why would I wander in Stefano Riccis?”

“I dunno, maybe you wanted to take them on a little test drive …? Last night …?”

“Be specific, Harper. I’m nearly at the part where Alicia steals the wine cellar key in Notorious .”

Harper turns just enough that I catch her eye roll before her gaze skates across the garden.

I barely manage to keep my “What the fuck?” whisper to inaudible levels as confusion and disappointment swirl in my blood.

“Fine. Did you take those Stefano Riccis over to a certain Jake Hornell’s place and chop off his head to bring back as a souvenir? Is that specific enough for you?”

There’s a pause. The raven caws from the roof of the bird feeder before he leans over the edge to poke at the eye socket. The buzz of the disturbed fly is muffled in the cavernous dark.

“No,” the man finally says.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“You know your memory sucks, right?”

“Harper, I did not kill Mr. Hornell. If this is some horrible practical joke like the time you convinced me you were finally going to let me kill that pretentious old windbag Simon McCarthy but took me to Irene Kennedy’s seventy-seventh birthday party instead, I will never forgive you.”

“You had a great night. You have the hots for Irene, admit it.” The man grumbles a string of arguments to the contrary that sounds entirely forced and untrue as Harper chews on one of her nails.

She puts her weight on one foot to rub the back of her calf with the top of the other, as though the caress of the penguin slipper is soothing.

She seems to stew on his answer, but after a deep sigh, she finally says, “Okay. I’d better run. ”

“Wait … go back for a moment. Jake’s head ?”

“Gotta go. I’ll see you at lunch.”

“Harper—”

She hangs up and stuffs the phone into the front of her shirt to perch between her breasts on the flimsy elastic of her top’s built-in shelf bra, then stares at the decapitated head, her hands on her hips as though this is merely an inconvenience. “Well,” she says. “This is … weird.”

Weird …?

I nearly ask it out loud, slipping into the shadow of the cottage as Harper pivots a slow turn as though hunting through the garden for clues.

She walks back inside and I retreat to the kitchen window to watch as she trades her penguin slippers for a set of Dakota work boots.

The contrast of the beat-up leather against her bare legs and those ridiculous shorts has me shifting as another erection starts.

I try to think my way out of that fucking biological response.

She killed your brother , I tell myself.

She almost killed you. She is absolutely not sexy.

She turns her back to me as she heads out the door.

I catch a glimpse of her round ass in those napkin-sized shorts and drag a hand down my face as though I can swipe the image clean from my brain.

“Chrissakes,” I hiss, my cock not receiving the message as the door slams behind her in a stamp of sound.

I press my back to the cold stone as Harper marches past me toward a garden shed that sits adjacent to the low garden wall.

It’s not far from where I killed Jake last night.

If she were to lean over the wall, she might see the blood that stains the grass just past the hydrangeas.

But she doesn’t. Instead, she disappears into the shed and, a moment later, she strides with purpose from the building with a pair of gardening gloves in one hand and a spray bottle in the other.

She returns to the bird feeder and sets the orange bottle at her feet before she pulls the gloves on, and then she’s reaching into the bird feeder to yank the head free from between the roof and the platform.

What.

The.

Fuck …?

When I lean farther around the corner, she’s gripping his ears, trying to tug the head free.

I wedged it between the roof and the platform pretty good last night, to be fair.

I was a little worried about a raccoon climbing up there to run off with all my hard work while I jogged back to the inn for more supplies.

It took me several hours and multiple trips to chop up the rest of Jake Hornell and run his body to the shallow burial site next to the Ballantyne River that I picked out months ago from topographic maps, the place I intended to use to dispose of Harper’s body.

I don’t think packing dismembered limbs and a collapsible shovel into a backpack to run them for two miles was really what my firefighter and SAR training was meant for, but at least I got a good workout in last night.

And I’m not the only one getting a workout.