Page 10 of His Whispered Witch

Belatedly, she looked down and around him, searching for a pet. She knew he had donkeys, but fortunately, none of them were in evidence.

“If it’s your burros, I also make house calls. I should have mentioned that.”

He said nothing until her eyes met his. “No.”

She glanced down at herself. She was wearing jeans and a plain black t-shirt. Absurdly, she wished she had dressed up for this meeting, but she was used to rolling around on the floor with fractious puppies, and why did it even matter?

“Okay, then.” She gestured behind her to the stairs. “This way.”

He held out a hand for her to precede him. She was about to protest, but she suspected he had the kind of old-school manners that would not allow him to go first, and they’d be stuck at the bottom of the stairs until the twins came out to investigate.She climbed up first, feeling like there was a predator at her back who wanted to eat her alive. Truly, he had the most intense presence of anyone she’d ever met.

She opened the door at the top of the stairs into a tiny square room with pale green walls. The far wall was covered in cabinets for the various practitioners, and a massage table was tilted up and shoved against the left wall. Penn took one of two chairs along the right. A tiny desk covered in yoga mats next to the door completed the room, though how anyone ever did an exercise class in here was beyond her. It was comfortable for one-on-one chats and not much else.

She offered him the other chair, and he sat with both feet on the floor, his knees far above his hips. He was taller than he seemed. The thinness hid that, though he filled out the shirt nicely. There just wasn’t an extra ounce of fat on him anywhere.

No animal presented itself.

She had a whole schtick she did at the beginning of an appointment to figure out the owner and let the animal settle and get used to being heard and understood for the first time in its life by the primates that ruled it, so she was at a loss.

“This is a nice setup,” he said. He seemed to be pulling the words out of himself from some deep well of awkwardness.

“Yeah, when this was a mining town, this was a den of iniquity,” Penn said.

“I’m sorry?”

“A whorehouse,” Penn said. “I suppose it has a more PC name now.” She’d been fascinated by the history of this mining town.

“Right.”

“Can I get you anything? And by anything, I mean water?” She had never gotten used to the amount of water you had to drink living at altitude, nor the sunscreen, nor the fatigue. It was unrelenting, as if you were walking around with lead weights.Everyone said the body adjusted eventually, but she was still waiting.

“No. I’m doin’ fine.”

“Sorry, are you not from around here?” she asked, catching a bit of a drawl in his vowels.

“No, I hail from out east. But I’m staying on some family land south of town. If you’ve ever been by the ranch with the crazy gate?”

It was a vague description, but she immediately knew the one he meant. There was one driveway on the road going down the mountain with a gate made of gigantic tin animals that seemed to move if you weren’t looking at them. Locals said it had just shown up one day a couple of years ago, though it looked like it had been in the woods forever.

“Did you make that?” she asked.

He let out a shout of surprise. “No.”

She waited for an elaboration, but he didn’t say another word.

This was an odd conversation. Everyone knew everything about everybody in this town because every conversation was tacked on with detail after detail. He seemed to be devoid of details.

She took a deep breath. “So, where’s your pet?”

He swallowed. “Maybe you can tell me a little bit more about what you do?”

She was trying to decide if this was a red flag or a green flag that he was so protective of his fur baby that he wanted to meet her first without it. It could go either way.

“Well, I’m an animal psychologist,” she drifted off, fighting the strongest urge to tell him the title was bullshit.

He smiled, and she lost her breath for a second. Laugh lines appeared around his lips, and his eyes crinkled invitingly. “Is there a school for that?”

She cleared her throat. What was wrong with her? “The school of life. The title is bullshit. I’m just very good with animals and have found a career making their lives better.”

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