Page 45 of Snake

Autumn agreed that the project could in fact be broadly transformational; it was the heart of her inspiration for it, and she was the one who’d first planted those claims in Chase’s head. But Chase loved to diminish her ideas with one hand while he funded them with the other. He didn’t do that with any other VP (all of whom were men); only with her. Like he was trying to keep the little lady in her place.

Not like that. Exactly that. Well into the twenty-first century, still women had to fight for every inch of the corporate ladder and smile through daily disregard and diminishment.

Dear sweet goddess above, she absolutely did not want the man to accompany her on a business trip. She’d worked at MWGP for a decade, she’d worked fairly closely with Chase for a several years, and she knew how to manage him, how to keep him balanced on the line between inappropriate and real harassment. But that was in the office. What would he be like out of town? Would he expect her to spend off hours with him as well, acting like a tour guide through Signal Bend? Play cruise director for him? Take him to Marie’s and explain how if you want to get fed at all, you don’t try to order off the menu there?

Oh god. Would he consider dinner a date?

Right now, with her team watching, none of those questions could be answered. Right now, she needed to get him out of this damned conference room so she and her team could get back to work and finish the details of the groundbreaking. And then she needed to sit down and figure out how to dissuade him from this trip or, if she could not, how to set strong boundaries he would recognize and respect without making him so defensive it hurt her career.

She slapped the most anodyne smile she could craft on her face. “Can we talk about that this afternoon? When we finalize the plans here, I’ll be able to share them with you then.”

His brightly whitened teeth gleamed through his sharkish grin as he stared straight at her. “I think that’s a hint I’m supposed to take. What do y’all think?” He looked around the table at people whose names she’d be shocked if he knew. Everyone chuckled politely but nobody offered an opinion.

Slapping his hands on the table, Chase stood. “I guess I’ll take the hint. Carry on, troops—and Autumn, come straight to my office when you’re done.”

Thus reminding everyone that he was the big dog in this junkyard, Charlton Isley III strode from the room, leaving the door standing open.

Autumn went to close it. She turned and, without a single word or look to show even one drop of the fury storming through her blood, she said, “Let’s get back to it.”

Chapter Eleven

As Cox made a turn around an outside corner of Abigail Freeman’s prodigious kitchen garden, he kicked something that chimed faintly. Stepping back and looking over his load of scrap wood, he saw a rounded, weather-burnished edge of metal in the grass and recognized it immediately: a bell from one of her legion of windchimes and whirligigs. Since his arms were full, he nudged it with his boot until it was on the garden soil and no longer hidden by the grass.

Four days after Abigail had come home from spending a week with her goats in Chesterfield and found her property trashed, they were still finding bits of her broken treasures all over the place. The whole club and half the town had started helping her put her life back to rights within hours of her discovering the mess, but even so, it would probably be a week or more before the damage was cleared.

The worst material damage was the goat barn—someone had driven straight through it, and they’d had to pull what was left down. If Abigail hadn’t had her brush herd out on a job, if those goats had been in the barn or the attached enclosure, she might have lost her main source of income.

Half a dozen of her hens and one young cockerel had been killed, most mowed under the wheels of the three trucks—they knew that because of the three distinct patterns of tracks everywhere—that had done a sadistic joy ride through her home. But the cockerel had had its neck broken.

Some things had been broken beyond repair. Cox had never cared enough to pay much attention, but it turned out that Abigail had made most of the silly yard decorations herself, over the course of her whole life, and several had been made by generations before her.

So far, she’d been bearing up cheerfully, warmly thanking everyone who came to help, putting on big meals for the helpers, repeating the refrain It’s all just things, just things. Losing Buster and my girlies is the only part that really hurts.

Cox didn’t believe that she wasn’t grieving her things as well as her chickens, but he admired her brave face, and it made him all the more furious. One of the few truly decent, harmless humans the world had ever made, and some random assholes had done her dirty like this? He wanted to find them and inventory their internal organs. Three trucks meant at least three, and probably more, random assholes.

Nobody, not even Abigail, had a reliable guess about who’d done it or why. It had to be personal, and Cox figured it for teenagers or twenty-something shitheads; the words FAT FREAK had been spray-painted in a huge, Day-Glo orange scrawl across the side wall of her house. That was something immature shitheads did. But who the hell wished Abigail Freeman ill?

She’d left those nasty words right where they’d been sprayed. Instead of painting over them she’d painted around them: a riot of beautiful flowers vined through all the letters, and honey bees and butterflies flitted around them. She’d taken that hate and made a garden.

Inside that pretty garden was, Cox thought, a spicy message for some real pieces of shit. That message was Fuck You, You Lose. It made him like her more to know there was steel inside her soft exterior.

He didn’t care if these assholes were sixteen or sixty. He was going to dismantle them—and if they were sixteen, he’d go for their parents, too.

“I want to get my hands around these bastards’ necks,” Mel growled, coming up to the scrap pile with his own load. “How hard can it be to track ‘em down? They went through the fuckin’ barn—that’s gotta be a broken grille, at least. Should be obvious.” He heaved his load onto the pile with rhetorical force.

“Might have a big guard on the grille,” Cox suggested.

Mel wasn’t satisfied. “Then we track down every damn truck with a guard and check ‘em out for scratches!”

Cox shrugged. Half the trucks in town had grille guards. He didn’t have any interest in detective work, and the only opinion he had about the doers here was what he wanted to do to them when they were found.

“Don’t you fuckin’ care, man?” Mel challenged, looking like he meant to square up.

Cox stood his ground. “I’m here, ain’t I?”

Mel glared at him. Cox was mildly shocked; Mel rarely got fired up like this. He was the kind of guy who always had a grin, whose teasing was always good-natured, who rarely showed worry or anger. When he did get angry, though, he went all the way—and he also got this weird, almost confused look, like he didn’t know what to do with so much bad feeling.

For a second or two, they stared at each other. Cox thought there was a chance Mel might actually throw a punch, which would be remarkable; Mel didn’t even like to fight in the ring.

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