Now he had a spacious studio flat above the inn’s converted stable block for a peppercorn rent as a perk of the job, friends throughout the valley from Greenlynn to Portlynn on the coast, and a gig teaching Taekwondo in Barnstaple one evening a week, and whenever he could swing a Saturday afternoon off for a master class. All in all, life was good.

This early in the day no one else was about. Except the large ginger tomcat who sauntered at will in and out of the inn and its gardens. The animal was known to be standoffish with most of the patrons, but it seemed to have decided Hal was all right. Of course, that might be because from their first meeting, Hal had shared odd titbits from his meals.

The cat’s acceptance of him mirrored that of Betty Morris, the formidable landlady, her kitchen and bar staff, and the locals alike. That hadn’t changed when he’d stepped out of the closet with a deliberately throwaway mention of an ex-boyfriend. Hal had been wary about revealing his sexuality at first, unsure how a small rural community would react. Regardless of equality laws, homophobia still existed.

Hal’s concerns had been quickly laid to rest. Will Blake, one of the local policemen, was a frequent visitor, using the inn as a rehydrating stop on his training runs. Hal had already noticed the man—he was lean, fit, and decidedly attractive in his shorts and singlet—but Betty’s greeting of, “‘Morning, dearie, when are you going to bring that man of yours back here?” had taken him by surprise.

“Mike and I have split up,” came the cheerful reply, and Betty had shaken her head.

“Long distance affairs hardly ever work. I’m sorry, though. He was nice. What you need is someone nearer to home.”

“Betty, my love, have a sex change and I’ll carry you off like a shot.” Hal’s ardent declaration, complete with hand on heart, earned him snorts of laughter from the customers and the landlady herself.

“You’ll need a sight more muscle, laddie,” someone had called from the back of the saloon bar, raising more mirth. After that, Hal’s own revelation was something of a non-event, for which he was duly thankful.

For a while Hal had contemplated hooking up with Will, but something held him back from offering anything more than casual friendship. He’d had a few weird dreams that started off with Will’s grey eyes smiling at him. Each time, however, a quiet voice had said, He’s not for you. Grey eyes had morphed to a familiar citrine gold with narrow vertical pupils. Why his hind brain had taken on a feline persona, he didn’t know, but Hal accepted that his subconscious knew something his conscious didn’t. His instincts were vindicated when, a few weeks ago, Will showed up with a mountain of good-natured muscle named Jesse Adams. Not long after, the fact that Will and Jesse were dating had become common knowledge up and down the Lynn Valley.

Hal’s love life wasn’t a complete desert. The occasional casual hook-up in Barnstaple or Ilfracombe was enjoyable enough, but increasingly unsatisfying on an emotional level. He wanted something more, even if he wasn’t sure what that something was. Even so, North Devon was a great place to be, and he could easily see himself settling in the area, especially given the accepting attitude of the Lynn Valley people.

Seeing Will and Jesse together was a bittersweet pleasure, reminding him of what he lacked. The two men were obviously close, without being sentimental or demonstrative. They just seemed to fit together, like pieces in a pattern, complete and perfect in its symmetry. One day, Hal promised himself, he’d have a relationship like theirs.

These days, the closest he came to matching it was with a certain ginger scrounger, who seemed to find his company irresistible. The cat was the latest in a long line of ginger toms to take up uninvited residence at the Black Dog, according to Betty. The animal wasn’t the usual strongly-marked tabby-orange. The patterns of tiger-like stripes were faint along its body, but showed clearly on its face like terracotta war paint. It had a variety of names, from Tom, Marmalade, Tiger, or Ginger. It had answered to all of them, depending, apparently, on a whim.

As far as Hal was concerned, none of them had felt right. Soon after he started work at the inn, he’d decided the cat needed a more distinctive name. Nothing suitable sprang to mind, of course, but his daily crossword puzzle provided one in the clue for Six Down: the colour of a lion’s coat. Tawny was the only word that fitted with the letters he already had, and somehow the word fell into place and became a name.

From then on, the cat was Tawny, and with it came acknowledgement of gender and personality. Betty told Hal he was just plain soft as a bucket of warm tar, but Tawny always acknowledged the new name with either a twitch of his tail or a quiet sound that wasn’t quite a purr or a chirrup. The name caught the regulars’ imaginations, and soon previous names had been forgotten. Tawny still kept an aloof distance from people, with the one exception. Hal had yet to discover how the damned animal got into his studio flat when doors and windows were closed. Not that he minded, since his visitor seemed to be housetrained. Tawny was there most mornings, peering at him from the foot of the bed or the windowsill. Often, if Hal woke in the night, the cat would be a quietly purring presence in the darkness.

He found Tawny’s presence oddly comforting, especially when the dreams began to get really weird and unusually easy to remember in the mornings. Even more peculiar was the number of times Tawny featured in them. Hal had the starring role in the nightly action-adventure entertainment, along with the strangely transformed cat; Tawny had become a huge prehistoric feline, almost the size of a horse. But there was an empty space in those dreams. A hollow place that ached to be filled and left him feeling bereft as he struggled to wake up.