Chapter 4: The Man Everyone Fears

The first thing Maya noticed about him was the silence that fell over the hardware store when he walked in.

She'd been standing at the counter, trying to explain to the elderly clerk why she needed three different types of sandpaper, when the bell above the door chimed. The temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees. Conversations died mid-sentence. The clerk's friendly smile vanished, replaced by something that looked almost like fear.

Maya turned to see who commanded that kind of reaction.

He was tall—well over six feet—with shoulders broad enough to fill the doorway. Dark hair, longer than was probably practical, fell across his forehead. A few days' worth of stubble shadowed a jaw that looked like it had been carved from granite. But it was his eyes that made her breath catch. Storm-gray and intense, they swept the room with the wariness of someone who expected trouble and was more than prepared to handle it.

Those eyes landed on her, and Maya felt the impact like a physical touch.

"Didn't mean to interrupt," he said, his voice a low rumble that seemed to vibrate through her chest. "Just need to pick up my order, Tom."

The clerk—Tom—nodded quickly, too quickly, and scurried toward the back room like a man grateful for an excuse to leave. The other customers found sudden interest in paint chips and power tools, their backs deliberately turned.

Maya should have looked away. Should have minded her own business the way everyone else clearly was. But ten years of reading rooms for danger had honed her instincts, and something about this situation felt wrong. This wasn't the reaction people had to someone dangerous.

This was the reaction they had to someone they'd decided was dangerous.

There was a difference.

"You're staring." He didn't look at her when he said it, his attention fixed on a display of drill bits with the kind of focus that suggested he was trying very hard to ignore her.

"Everyone's staring," Maya corrected. "I'm just not pretending I'm not."

The corner of his mouth twitched—not quite a smile, but close. "You must be the new owner of the Tidewater."

"Word travels fast in small towns, I guess."

"Like wildfire." This time he did look at her, and the full force of those gray eyes made her stomach flip in a way that had nothing to do with fear. "I'm Cade Morrison. Your handyman, apparently. Though I'm guessing nobody bothered to mention that part."

Maya's mind raced back through her meeting with Caroline yesterday. The lawyer had mentioned that the inn came with "existing staff arrangements," but she'd glossed over the details, promising to send a full breakdown via email. Maya had been too overwhelmed by everything else—the state of the property, the six-month requirement, the mystery of why her grandmother had left her anything at all—to press for specifics.

"The man everyone fears," she said quietly, pieces clicking into place.

Cade's expression hardened. "So you have heard about me."

"Not about you specifically. Just that there's someone in town people cross the street to avoid. Someone with a reputation." She tilted her head, studying him the way she'd learned to study people. Looking for the signs of violence barely contained. The tightness around the eyes. The hands that clenched into fists at the slightest provocation. The energy that screamed danger.

She saw none of it. What she saw instead was exhaustion. And underneath that, something that looked a lot like resignation.

"Let me guess," Cade said, his voice deliberately flat. "You want to find someone else. Someone the good people of Moonlight Cove won't whisper about. Someone who won't scare away your future guests."

Maya thought about all the times people had whispered about her. The friends who'd seen her bruises and done nothing. The family members who'd decided she'd made her bed and had to lie in it. The strangers who'd looked at her like she was broken, unfixable, a cautionary tale instead of a person.

"Can you fix a busted water heater?" she asked instead.

Cade blinked, clearly thrown by the question. "What?"

"The inn's water heater. It's making a sound like a dying whale, and I'm pretty sure it's one bad day away from flooding the basement. Can you fix it?"

"Yeah, but—"

"Do you know anything about roof repairs? Because there's a leak in the west wing that's turning room 212 into an indoor swimming pool."

"I know roofing, but that's not—"

"Then you're hired. Or still hired. Whatever the arrangement was with my grandmother." Maya stuck out her hand. "I'm Maya Reeves, and I don't give a damn what this town thinks about you. I care whether you can keep a ninety-year-old building from falling apart around my ears."

Cade stared at her outstretched hand like it might be a trap. Around them, the hardware store remained eerily quiet. Maya could feel the weight of collective judgment pressing down on them both.

She kept her hand extended. Steady. Refusing to back down.

"You don't know me," Cade said finally. "You don't know what I did."

"You're right. I don't." Maya met his eyes without flinching. "But I know what it's like when people decide who you are without bothering to ask. I know what it's like to have a past you can't escape. And I know that my grandmother trusted you enough to keep you on her payroll for—how long?"

"Eight years."

"Eight years. That's not nothing." She gestured around the store. "Whatever these people think, Eleanor Reeves didn't scare easily. If she trusts you, that's good enough for me."

Something shifted in Cade's expression—a crack in the armor he wore like a second skin. His large hand engulfed hers, his grip firm but careful, like he was afraid of his own strength.

"Your grandmother was different," he said quietly. "She saw people, not rumors."

"Then I'm in good company." Maya pulled her hand back, ignoring the way her skin tingled where he'd touched her. "Can you start today? I have a list about a mile long, and I'm pretty sure half the inn is held together with duct tape and prayers at this point."

"I can start now." Cade glanced toward the back room where Tom had disappeared. "As soon as I get my order."

"Take your time. I'll be outside." Maya grabbed her bag of sandpaper and headed for the door, feeling the weight of every stare in the store. Let them look. Let them judge. She'd spent ten years caring too much about what other people thought, and where had it gotten her?

She pushed through the door into the bright Maine morning, breathing in salt air and freedom.

Behind her, she heard Cade's voice, low and tinged with something that might have been surprising: "She's either brave as hell or doesn't have the sense God gave a goose."

Tom's nervous reply: "Eleanor's granddaughter, through and through. That woman never did know when to be afraid of the right things."

Maya smiled despite herself. Maybe that was exactly what she needed to be.

She made it halfway to her car before she realized she'd just hired a man the entire town feared, knew absolutely nothing about what he'd supposedly done, and would be spending the next six months alone with him in an isolated inn.

The smart thing would be to call Caroline. To ask questions. To find out why Moonlight Cove treated Cade Morrison like a monster.

But Maya had learned the hard way that monsters didn't always look the part. And sometimes, the people everyone feared were just the ones who'd refused to stay down when life tried to break them.

The hardware store door chimed behind her. She turned to find Cade walking toward her, a box of supplies balanced on one shoulder like it weighed nothing at all. In the morning light, he looked less like the boogeyman everyone seemed to think he was and more like a man who'd been carrying something heavy for far too long.

"The water heater," he said when he reached her. "Want me to take a look at it first, or the roof?"

"Water heater. I'm tired of cold showers."

"Fair enough." He jerked his chin toward a beat-up Ford truck parked at the far end of the lot. "I'll follow you back."

Maya nodded and climbed into her rental car, watching in the rearview mirror as Cade loaded his supplies. She'd made a decision based on instinct and her grandmother's judgment. She hoped to God she was right.

What she didn't know—what she couldn't possibly know as she pulled out of the parking lot with Cade Morrison following behind her—was that hiring him would change everything.

Because Cade Morrison wasn't just the handyman.

He was the last person to see her grandmother alive.