Page 28 of Hot Under the Collar

“Your boyfriend seems like a good guy,” Leo told her.

“He is.”

“Good.”

The fallen leaves crunched under their shoes. She glanced up and realized how clear the night sky was tonight. How filled with stars.

Leo caught her looking and peered up, too.

After a few moments, he said, “You don’t have to walk all the way, Lynne.”

“I know,” she said. But she kept walking.

He stopped abruptly a few doors short of his apartment building, and they turned toward each other. His weight shifted between his feet. “Tell Andrew it was nice meeting him, okay? I’ll see myself the rest of the way there.”

Relief swelled in her chest. “Yeah, of course,” she said. She turned, ready to sprint toward the bar. But then she turned back to him. “Hey, Leo?”

“Yeah?”

“I know you didn’t ask, but…” She gazed past him, toward the dim orange lights threaded through the trees in the park at the end of the road. Rows of little paper bag luminarias with jack-o’-lantern faces stood in a row along the sidewalk. “He used to take the long way home on clear nights like this. Your dad, I mean. Said it helped him think.” She shrugged and pulled a hand through her hair then shoved it back in her coat pocket. “Just thought you’d like to know.”

Leo smiled, soft and crooked with those vampire teeth. “Thanks, Lynne.”

He seemed relieved, too.

She shuffled toward the bar as his footsteps fell behind her, as the crackling of leaves dimmed to a rustle. But when she reached O’Donnell’s back door, something made her stop and turn again.

Far down the alley—hands in pockets, shoulders slightly hunched against the cold—was Leo. She eyed him for a moment.

He was heading toward the park instead of the warmth of his apartment.

Taking the long way home.

12

Lynne (Now)

By the end of the week, her apartment started to feel like a revolving door—for kitten supplies, for friends, for Leo. But, surprisingly, she didn’t mind it. She and Leo knew it would be all-nighters again with feeding and weighing if they didn’t enlist the help of The Nine while he had to work. He bought a whiteboard, and she made a calendar chart for their shared schedules on it.

That first day Leo was back at the station, everyone from The Nine dropped in. Minka and Bastet joined her for the weigh-and-feeds. While others who already knew what they were doing, like Freya and Cali, gave her genuine breaks so she could manage the bar, run errands, or grab a quick nap. Tabitha, a self-identified night owl, supported Lynne through to 2 a.m., and Mrs. Ellery woke early, arrived quietly by 5, and tutted at Lynne to go back to sleep. All the while, Ethan was just a text away, picking up more milk as their supply got low or swinging by with odds-and-ends for Lynne and Leo between his repairs. And so it went every third day and night. Even Mike stopped by unannounced after Leo mentioned it had been a particularly taxing night and offered to give them the morning off.

It really did take a village—except the village now included four a.m. alarms and tiny roommates who screamed for milk and snuggles.

There had been a time she didn’t have a blueprint for this kind of chaos. When her dad died, the bar could easily have gone under with him. For weeks she’d gritted her teeth and told herself she could hold everything together without any help—and then the town quietly refused to let her. Ruby showed up with a stack of revised schedules before Lynne could protest. Minka brought over all her café tips to help her out. Tabitha did the same. During slow times, Chief Bob sent crew members over from the station to see if she needed kegs hauled, bar stools repaired, or the windows cleaned. Mrs. Ellery and Mayor Pennington organized a potluck schedule that kept Lynne and her staff’s freezers full for months. Cali even offered the name and number of a grief therapist she’d used in the past when Lynne pulled her aside after book club one evening.

Letting people in was complicated. It had saved her more than once. But it also hurt like hell when they left. She’d told herself that accepting help was a weakness. Looking back now, it felt like the only reason O’Donnell’s had survived at all. Maybe it would work out the same with this litter.

And then there was Leo. She didn’t want it to mean anything extra, him being here now. Leo standing at her stove. Leo laughing with The Nine when they visited. This was just logistics. Kitten triage. Anything else felt like holding a match over everything she’d done to recover since her dad died.

But on days and nights Leo wasn’t there, she also found herself glancing at the couch between feedings before remembering it would be empty. The apartment seemed louder without him. Floorboards creaking. Refrigerator humming too hard. The Nine were incredible. But Leo was the one who noticed when she’d skipped lunch. The one who checked the heating pad without being asked. The one who made it feel like she was part of a team instead of barely keeping up. And realizing she missed that scared her more than the sleepless nights.

Then Minka texted them both about the socials she’d been posting—how they were going viral and it was time to take it to a livestream. Leo was game. But Lynne was skeptical, resistant to anything that would detract from the fragile balance they’d achieved with the kittens.

“But think of it this way,” Minka told her. “You’re sharing your lived experiences so others can learn. You may even find them homes this way. And,” she stressed, “if this level of engagement keeps up, people are going to start coming to Autumn Ridge just to visit O’Donnell’s. You could name drinks after the kittens. Sell merch.”

“I don’t know, Minka. This is already a lot to juggle.”

“Have you checked how many followers you have? Go on. I’ll wait.”