Buyers & Beasts - Midlife Undercover, #2

Meet Attie Nichols. A middle-aged spinster and accountant, her life has never been easy. Now she's ready for change, but how much can she cope with? Midlife Undercover. Regular citizen by day, and monster hunter by night. I should've known better than to think that my luck was changing, especially when it came to real estate. My first real estate agent glossed over what life was like living in a subdivision with an HOA.
She thought I'd love it. She was wrong. So, you would've thought that I'd have been a tad more wary when it came to my second major real estate purchase. For the price, I expected a swamp land. Instead, I found quaint cottages on a lake. I made sure to double check that there was no HOA, no city ordinance that would prevent me from painting every cottage whatever color of the rainbow I desired. Still, even as I handed over the check, I knew something had to be wrong because...when something seemed too good to be true, it usually was.
Sure, the howl that first night in the main cottage gave me pause, but nothing circled my home. I was going to chalk that up to a win. Then I met my long term renter. I hoped to reassure him that the rents weren't increasing. It was a good plan until I looked through the open screen door and watched the big furry mound on the living room morph into a man. A hot naked man. This was nothing I needed to handle before coffee, and without a weapon.
Mental note: apparently, I wasn't going to survive this life without a stockpile of weapons, some research, and a whole lot of actual notes. I'd have to document my kills, track what worked, and hope I survived long enough to record what didn't. So, I made my way into town, saw a disturbing amount of vandalism in the town square, and grabbed breakfast at the diner, office supplies at their version of a dollar store, which was all I could afford given the renovations the resort needed.
I was in the hardware store when I ran into my realtor. She hoped to pop by later with a thank you gift. Standard practice. My first realtor brought a cheese board. The way Esther was smiling, my bet was on a bottle of wine. One of these days, I was going to learn, but not today. Today was all about hard knocks, hard fights, and hard hearts. I once thought myself tough, but I wasn't sure I was tough enough to survive all of this.
The alternative, as far as I was concerned, wasn't an alternative at all.