Page 13 of Wrong Number, Right Cougar

WILDER

I was an early riser. Always had been. I loved watching the sun come up as I drank my coffee. But today, my cougar was all set with that. He didn’t want to wait till the sun came up. He was ready to go—ready to find our mate. I was too.

My sleep had been terrible, my mind unable to stop thinking about every second we spent together and dissecting it, looking for clues as to how the human felt about me and if I was on the right track. I longed to be with him, to tell him who I was, tell him that he mattered, hold him in my arms as we fell asleep. But I couldn’t do any of that.

Fixing up the resort? That I could do, and that was why it had to be my entire focus.

I grabbed my mug, and instead of watching the awakening of the day, I hiked over there to see my mate. I mean… to fix things up. He wouldn’t be up for hours, probably. Being city folk, I couldn’t imagine that he was an early riser. It was for the best. I could get a lot more done without his scent wrapping around me and holding me close.

Running through the list in my head, I tried to figure out what task would be helpful, quiet, and could be done single-handedly. With a list as long as the one we had, there were plenty of options. I opted to clean out gutters, knowing it would be fairly quick work that would feel like a huge accomplishment.

To my surprise, I’d barely cleaned out the gutters of one of the cabins when he came over.

“What time did you start?” He still had his sleepy face on. I kind of loved it. I didn’t think he was staying here, but maybe he had last night, or possibly he too woke up early and took a quick nap here while waiting for me.

“I wake up early.” I shrugged. “Let me know when you’re ready. We can figure out the best way to tackle this list. I have some ideas. Like… cleaning the rest of these gutters.”

“You didn’t need to start without me.” He shoved his hands in his pockets.

“I was up early and thought I could do it without disturbing you.” I still wasn’t so sure I’d accomplished that part.

“Oh.” He looked down. Was he embarrassed? Nervous? Hopeful? Or was I imagining the blush on his cheeks? “Why don’t you come inside, and we can figure things out. Or, if you prefer, we can go to town, stop at the diner, and eat.”

I was a selfish bastard. I’d rather stay here and eat stale crackers than have a good meal where I had to share my mate. I didn’t know how much time we were going to have together, and I wanted to savor every second.

“Here’s great. We’ll have more room to spread out.” That sounded like a logical reason, right?

He had a box of muffins that he’d picked up from a store I didn’t recognize, and we ate those with some coffee he brewed. The muffins were stale, but I wouldn’t trade them for a corned beef skillet from the diner. Not today.

“I’m gonna be frank with you.” I leaned back, wanting him not to feel pressured. “We’re gonna need at least a dumpster. A full-size one, not like the back of a convenient store size. Because a lot of things just need to be tossed. Construction debris from fixing roofs and replacing rotten drywall, sure—but also, your uncle was a cool guy, but he didn’t know how to throw shit away.”

The odds were great that we were going to need a second one soon enough. But we’d figure that out when the time came.

“I noticed that.” He chuckled. “So yeah. Let’s order a dumpster, and then maybe we could go a few towns up and grab supplies and tools we might need for things we could start working on right away.”

Locally there wasn’t a large enough home supply store to get what we needed, but a few towns up there were a ton. It sounded like a great idea. And it was—until I discovered the torture that was sitting in an enclosed vehicle with my mate.

The shopping was productive—too productive. We realized early on that our “short list” had too many supplies to bring back ourselves and decided to just go all out and pick up everything on the list. Free delivery because we spent gobs of money made that decision a no-brainer.

I grabbed the few things that I’d need for today to bring with us and let them handle the rest.

We stopped at a sandwich place on the way back, grabbing a quick bite for now, but also, bringing some sandwiches home so we didn’t have to worry about it later.

Home. That was a weird way for me to think of the resort, wasn’t it? But really, it wasn’t that physical location I was thinking about—it was Thorn. Thorn was my home. He was mine. He was home. That was all there was to it.

That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to decide to leave and go back to his city life, or that I would ever be his in his eyes. But at the end of the day, he was, and would always be, my home.

It’s funny how quickly everything could change—one minute you don’t even know someone exists, the next minute, your entire world revolves around them.

We hadn’t even fully gotten out of the truck when the dumpster delivery showed up. It came quicker than we thought it would. They said they would do it “as soon as we have an available driver,” which to me meant it could be a week or even a month—but no. It had only taken a few hours.

“Okay. It is time to fill this baby.” I tapped the side of it, and we got to work.

We started with the cabins that needed new roofs, because, well, the inside of them was trashed. They were going to need to be gutted and redone. Thankfully, they were small, and it wouldn’t take much to do that, but we needed to pull all the drywall out, as well as all the furniture and all the carpeting—which was, thankfully, only in the bedroom.

It went remarkably fast with the two of us working in tandem. I was surprised, because, honestly, I had preconceived notions of what a city person would be like in a situation like this. I’d been so wrong. He handled everything that came at us, not once getting the slightest bit grumpy about it.

Thorn didn’t know how to do everything, but he was more than willing to learn. And with the furniture that had been ruined and the drywall, we did a good job filling the dumpster. There was only about a quarter of it left.

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