Page 10 of Dauntless

“But you are probably a slightly better option than a mayor or the lady who runs the post office.”

“Also fair.”

“Will you help me find out who attacked me?”Eddie asked, his worry etched plainly on his face.“Also, I would really like my laptop back.”

Mavis was so right about Eddie.He was nothing but trouble.Earnest, tousled, dark-eyed trouble.

“Yeah,” I said, because apparently I’d never met trouble I didn’t like.“I can try.”

Eddie’s smile was almost worth it.

“You can sleep on the couch,” I told him, getting up to put his mug in the sink.“I’ll get you some blankets.”

“Thanks.Oh, and Joe?”

I turned.

“You look good.”Eddie gestured to my face.“The trimmed beard.It suits you.”

I made a sound that I hoped passed as ambivalent and fled to bed.

* * *

Morning dawned bright and cool.The salt air smelled fresh, holding no trace of last night’s storm.I lay awake for a moment, wondering what felt different about the day.It took me a moment to realise—Hiccup wasn’t pinning my legs down like she usually did.I threw off the blankets, climbed out of bed, and dressed.

I rolled my shoulders to loosen them as I walked down the hallway.I paused at the door to the small living room.Eddie was curled up on the couch, almost hidden under a nest of blankets.Hiccup was burrowed into the space between his bent knees and the back of the couch.She blinked guiltily when she saw me and jumped down onto the floor.

She followed me through to the kitchen, her claws clicking on the stone, and I opened the back door so she could go outside for her morning inspection and peeing ritual.

The morning air was cold on my face, and I thought back to what Eddie had said last night about my clean-shaven look.My flush warmed me soon enough.I shoved my hands into the pockets of my coat and went back inside, leaving the kitchen door propped open for Hiccup.

I checked the fridge for bacon and eggs.I had plenty of bacon thanks to Wednesday’s groceries, but I was down to five eggs.I’d have to visit Katrina Finch and get some more.Amy kept telling me to get some point-of-lay hens sent over from the mainland.It was a good idea, but I hadn’t got around to building a henhouse yet.It’d have to be a solid one, or the hens would get blown away in a storm.The henhouse was a spring project, probably.

The smell of bacon and eggs brought Eddie shuffling into the kitchen, a pair of my sweatpants hanging loosely from his slim hips, one of my shirts slipping off his shoulder.

“How’s your head?”

“Not too bad,” Eddie said.“But I won’t turn down an aspirin if you’ve got one.”

“I think I can manage that.Grab a seat.”

The smell of bacon and eggs also brought Hiccup running, and she sat attentively by the stove in the hope that I’d drop something for her.I did, most mornings, but most mornings I didn’t have a guest to feed as well.

Her mournful gaze followed me as I took the plates to the table.

“This view is amazing.”Eddie’s gaze fixed on the kitchen windows.

I glanced outside.The lighthouse obscured part of the view from here, its white paint weathered, but then there was nothing but grass and, when that dropped away, bright blue sky.

“Have you always lived here?”Eddie dug his fork into his eggs.

“No, I grew up in the village.My cousin lives in that house now.I moved here with my sister when the last lighthouse keeper retired and I got the job.I’ve been here about five years now.”

“You have a sister?”

“Amy.She’s at university on the mainland, in Queensland.”I dug into my eggs.“What about you?Where are you from?”

“I was born in the UK,” Eddie said, “but I don’t remember it.We moved to the Hunter Valley when I was two, where a very boring childhood led me to compensating with other people’s interesting stories, and now I’m at the University of Sydney doing my thesis for my history Honours.”

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