He Watches From the Pines

He has watched my window every night since October.

So he knows who else has a key to my door.

NELL

I'm thirty-one. I mend old books, and I have spent eleven years telling one person's handwriting from another's, twice in a courtroom. In May I opened a used bookshop at the end of Main Street in Fallow, Oregon, a mountain town where everybody knows everything and agrees not to say it. I had eleven thousand books and a note due in January.

The woman who ran the shop before me went away six years ago, in December. Everyone in Fallow told me she moved to Tucson. The man who delivered my firewood told me she hated heat.

Six nights after he brought my wood, someone came into my house while I slept and changed the lock on my back door. He left me both keys and a note in pencil capitals: YOUR BACK DOOR HAD A COPY OUT THERE. THIS ONE DOESN'T.

It took me one morning with a loupe to match it to my firewood receipt. Asa Brekke. Six foot four, an assault conviction, four words at a time. He had been sitting under a grand fir forty yards above my back porch every night since the day he brought my wood.

My sister bought me a plane ticket. A deputy offered me a motel. I taped a sign in my kitchen window instead: IF YOU'RE GOING TO WATCH, COME TO THE DOOR. RULES FIRST.

Porch light on, he could come to the door. Off, he stayed in the trees. He never came in unless I opened it. If I said colophon, he stopped, whatever it was. And he told me the truth when I asked.

He said every rule back to me.

Somebody else had been leaving me messages all along, one underlined word at a time, in books that turned up in my shop. Fine black ink. A ruler. The first one said I have watched you.

It wasn't Asa's hand.

ASA

You pay in cash, and you ask my name so you can write it down.

You give me a book that has waited 6 years on a hold shelf with my name in it. That night I go down the slope to check your flue. The flue is fine. I stay.

I know what the State of Oregon would call a man with a record under a tree behind a woman's house at midnight. I stay anyway.

The first night there are boot prints under your bedroom window. They are not mine.

At 1:52 one morning a man comes up your back steps with his own key, and I watch him stand beside your bed for 11 minutes while you sleep. He does not touch you. I made a rule in a cell: I do not put a hand on a man who has not put a hand on someone who could not stop him. He has not touched you.

The next night I change your lock.

You ask me on your porch who had the copy. The answer is in my coat, in pencil, against my ribs. I tell you I will not lie to you. I tell you I will not say it yet.

I was done the day you handed me that book.

The snow line on Kettle Butte comes down a little every day, and when it gets to town, the pass closes.

Colophon, I stop. Light off, the trees. Once I start, you are mine to watch.

Until you say stop.

Inside: Stalker romance · He watched her first, and then she told him he could · Her rules: the porch light, the door, and a safe word he honors · Quiet, dangerous ex-con hero who falls first · Bookseller heroine who reads handwriting and solves it herself · A second watcher in town, with a key to her door · Try her door at night and he puts you face down in the frost · Small mountain town in Oregon · Dual POV · No cheating, no other woman · Guaranteed happily ever after

Watchers of Fallow, Book One. Every book follows a different couple, each romance complete in its own book; the town's older disappearances run through the series. Steamy and open-door, between adults, every scene asked and answered out loud, and a safe word he honors: when she says it, he stops. HEA guaranteed. Content warnings inside. 18+.