Chapter 4

Maybe Jayden was the son of the richest guy in town. Back in the city, Kira has seen rich heirs and new money kids racing around with an entourage in tow, behaving as appallingly as they want without a word of criticism from anyone.

Not that Jayden has done anything wrong. Kira just finds it unsettling that someone can hold such authority over a group without saying a word.

Maybe he's done something amazing in the town before and become known as some kind of hero.

Kira keeps imagining different scenarios in her head. Jayden could have rescued a child from a burning building, or identified some terrible flaw in the water supply just in time.

Or maybe he was just the most popular kid at school, and in a town where few people leave, that influence has carried over into adulthood.

"Were you close with your father, Akira?" Noel asks tentatively.

"No."

Noel doesn't take her abrupt response as the end to an

. "Still, it can't have been easy, especially so soon after you lost your mom."

Does everyone here in town know every detail of her business? The thought makes her skin crawl.

It isn't Noel's fault, but she can't help but bristle as she walks beside him.

She sucks in a breath as soon as she undoes the top button of her shirt.

"I know you probably think we're strange," Noel says, undeterred by her silence.

"I get it, the small towns seem weird. But the great thing about this place is that everyone will have your back. We'll all help you back on your feet, with the house and everything. You might not have grown up here, but you're still one of ours."

Kira doesn't have the heart to tell her that she doesn't want to be one of theirs and that she doesn't want any type of connection to her father.

The bar, she discovers when he takes the keys from his back pocket, is Ezra's place. Every store across town has been shut for the day.

One by one, the lights come to life and Kira looks around. Tables, stools, long polished bar, glasses and bottles, some landscape artwork on the walls. It isn't so different from the bars in the city.

"Do you run this place?" She asks, gathering herself from the surprise.

"My mother's family has owned this bar for three generations," Ezra smiles.

"I like to do my bit."

Rather than asking anyone what they would like to drink, he ducks behind the bar and pours everyone a cup of the same dark, syrupy-looking liquor.

"I think we should make a toast to Akira's father."

Kira looks down, praying for the moment that this will end.

"Let's not," says a calm, firm voice, and everyone lowers their cups. The authority in Jayden's tone made a shiver run down her spine.

"I'm sure Akira is sick of all these formalities."

If he senses her discomfort in the air, then his ability to read people is remarkable, because Kira has spent a lifetime learning to put on the most impenetrable mask.

No one questions Jayden's instruction.

Instead, Ezra puts on some music and opens the doors to the bar so that anyone else from the town can drop by as they make their way back.

For the first time, Kira wants to thank Jayden, but she can't bear to look up when she can tell that the other man's eyes are fixed on her.

She focuses on the drink in her hand, swilling it in the glass tumbler before tipping it down her throat in one gulp. It burns, and she is grateful for it.

"So I hear you're going to be a hotshot lawyer?" says Jayden, and when Kira is addressed directly she has no choice but to look at him.

"Maybe." The more she questions it aloud, the more she questions it in her mind.

The last six years of her life, she has been going through the motions. Every step she has taken has been something expected of her, by the teachers who were amazed at her diligence in school, and by herself, as some proof that she could make it out of the circumstances in which she was raised.

"What about you? What do you do for a living?"

Jayden leans back against the bar, rolling the base of his glass around in circles.

"Oh, a bit of this, a bit of that. It's an underrated skill to master odd-jobs."

He looks fit for that kind of work, strong and confident and outdoorsy. Kira can imagine him trying his hand at carpentry or building work or electrics.

"I could help you out by fixing up that old house of yours," Jayden continued.

With a laugh, Kira shakes her head. "Thank you, but I'm not staying. I've got to drive back to the city tomorrow."

"Of course you're staying. You can't come to town, your town, and disappear without even getting to see the place. Stay a while. That house deserves some tender loving care, and you need to see the place where you should have grown up."

Kira shifts in her seat. Everyone seems to do what Jayden says, and bizarrely, she doesn't want to refuse him either.

Like a great orator, it feels easier, more pleasurable even, to lean into what he says than to push away from it.

Never, even among some of the most esteemed law professors who she has worked with over the last couple of years, has she felt such a natural pull to follow someone's instruction.

The path of less resistance feels so smooth when the words are coming from those delicate pink lips, too soft for the rest of his body.

Kira's mind drifts to the house, and the damp books, abandoned forever the old building that ought to have been preserved so much better than this.

She fights to push the thoughts away. She fights to push away the natural urge inside her to say yes.

"I really do have to get back."

"Stay just a while," repeated Jayden.

"It's the full moon next week." What an odd thing to say.

Maybe it's tiredness, but Kira can't quite make sense of it. When she looks around, she sees that the others are all watching her, as if Jayden has just said something very significant.

Noel scratches at a splinter in the bar awkwardly, and Ezra turns around when she notices him looking, but Chris and Frank don't look away.

They stare at her, expressions unreadable.

"Is that supposed to mean something to me?" Kira says with a nervous laugh, looking back at Jayden.

"What happens on the full moon?"

Jayden holds her gaze so directly that Kira feels the instinctive urge to look away, but she fights it.

Tilting his head ever so slightly, like he's examining her, Jayden doesn't answer at once.

After a second, he pushes back up from the bar and shrugs.

"We like to party. You know people get a little weird on the full moon. It's kind of a town tradition."

The last thing in the world that Kira wants to do is attend a party with these strangers, in a town she doesn't know where the people are different from back in the city, but for some reason she can't seem to open her mouth to argue.

There is something about this place, some kind of pollen in the air or gravity in the grass, that keeps her in her seat, feet rooted to the ground.

He wants to say no, but for some reason she doesn't want to say no. So she nods. It would be rude to refuse their hospitality anyway.

"Okay."

"We'll head up to the house tomorrow," Jayden says, with the tone of someone who is used to handing out orders. "You're staying at the inn, right?"

"I am."

"I'll bring my truck and see what we can do. I'd like to see the old place restored to its former glory, and you're going to need somewhere to live."