by Holley Trent
She slipped around Chris, muttering, “Unbelievable,” and took off at a brisk pace down the sidewalk—head throbbing and heart stuttering.
And then she stopped, because her little girl was at the bakery and Dan was too close. There was a chance he’d be able to sense her there. Marty doubted he’d do anything to his granddaughter, but all the same, she didn’t want him to breathe the same air as her.
He was still standing near the bakery door with Chris and Nadia when she returned. Near, but not inside, because Nadia was less than subtly blocking the doorway as she gripped her big bag, and solemnly sipping coffee.
Chris pulled Marty back to his side and gave her a squeeze that even without his psychic admonition would have been readable as, “Don’t do that again.”
She wasn’t acting like herself. Marty wasn’t a woman who’d run. She was a woman who’d yell and argue when she had to, and she’d had to so much in the past few years to get anything done for Shani.
Dan looked from Marty to Nadia, and he cleared his throat. “That wouldn’t happen to be the regular Sunday order for the mansion, would it be?”
Nadia’s grunt was even growlier.
“I could take it for you.”
She shook her head. “Nah, I’m good. I thought you were off today, anyway.” She sipped her coffee and kept her stare steady on him.
His thoughts were blocked off to Marty, but she didn’t need to be a psychic to sense his agitation. He grated his teeth the same way he used to when her mother asked him tough questions, like when she and the girls would see him again, or why he hadn’t contributed to the household finances in ages. Mama had been stretched to her absolute limit providing for the girls in the too-large house Dan had insisted they buy. They’d moved. He’d been pissed about them downsizing, too.
He forced an exhalation through his nose and shifted the empty market basket he carried to his other arm. “No, I don’t work on weekends anymore, but I still have oversight of the kitchen. I need to make sure things are getting done.”
Nadia took another sip of coffee. “Cool. Well, you can go home. I didn’t mind picking up the order for Mrs. Carbone. I needed the fresh air, anyway. I asked to come, and she wanted me out of her hair for a few minutes. I was hungry and begging.”
“I would have had brunch ready already.”
“Mrs. Carbone makes brunch at the time Nan asks her to. She moved it back an hour because we Gen X and Millennial assholes can’t get up and properly dressed in time.” Nadia’s smile was serene.
“A master at work,” Marty mused idly.
“She’s a royal. She’s better at manipulating a conversation than almost anyone, once you get her warmed up.”
“I’ll remember that for the future.”
“Don’t worry. She doesn’t use the ability on people she likes. I think you’re safe.”
Nadia shrugged. “I couldn’t wait, though,” she said to Dan. “I don’t know if you heard, but I’m the fated mate of a fairy with a bottomless appetite, and I think I’m probably misinterpreting some of his hunger as my own. If I start piling on the pounds, feel free to slip a salad under my nose.” She wriggled her brows.
Marty doubted the woman had ever found a salad satisfying. She must have thought it too loudly, because Chris returned, “Keep in mind that she’s a trained cook and was a pastry chef before she moved back to the community. She’s a friend to bread and all its close relatives.”
“Anyhoo,” Nadia said loftily, indiscreetly nudging Dan away from the bakery door. “See ya tomorrow. Go home and take a load off.”
“Maybe I’ll come to brunch,” he said ominously. “I haven’t yet sampled the famous Mrs. Carbone’s cooking. She was hired on my day off.”
“Huh. Ain’t that some shit? Gods, I’d hate if someone did that to me, but I guess Lora saw an opportunity to fill in a hole in the staff and grabbed it. She’s always so good at knowing when to hire folks.”
She kept him moving and tossed her empty coffee into the nearby trash receptacle. She put her free hand on her hip and gave her head a shake. “You know, we haven’t been fully staffed since way back after Tess was kidnapped and Nan had to clean house.”
If Marty hadn’t been watching her father so closely and looking for his usual tells of lies, she wouldn’t have caught the minute clenching of his jaw or the way his lip curled a little.
Marty gripped Chris’s wrist. “He’s hiding something about that. I thought he didn’t have anything to do with that.”
“Supposedly he didn’t. Hold that thought, okay?”
She understood his hesitation at discussing the topic right in front of the man. She didn’t have Chris’s refined ability to shield her thoughts, or even keep her emotions off her face.
“Having the mansion fully staffed again and running efficiently is going to be a wonderful treat,” Nadia said.
Dan turned the full bore of his attention to Marty, and although her initial compulsion was to lower hear head and stare at her feet, Chris’s gentle press to her back reminded her to keep her spine straight and chin up.
“You should be careful what sort of company you keep here.” Her father’s voice seeped into her mind with the silkiness of French chocolate—the same voice that had once delivered to her and Mallory bedtime stories. The same voice with which he’d made so many promises to their mother—promises he’d obviously had no intention of making good on.
His voice had come to represent lies to her.
She forced a swallow down her tight throat and slipped an arm around Chris’s waist.
Her father didn’t deserve a response. He didn’t deserve to know her business, and she wasn’t going to let him keep her away from the place she obviously belonged.
She licked her lips and looked at Nadia. “What time did you say brunch was?”
“Eh.” Nadia wriggled her cell phone out of her pocket and squinted at the screen. “Probably in about forty minutes.”
“Can I bring anything?”
“Sure!” Nadia started walking away. “Champagne for the mimosas. We’re running low for some reason. Probably forgot to restock it after Tess’s ball, and that was ages ago.” She shrugged and crossed the street, only to call back, “I guess we’ve only been drinking hard stuff since then. Can you blame us?”
“We’ll be there after eleven, then,” Chris said. “You know how the Sunday liquor laws are in this state.”
Nadia threw up a hand, and Marty could just barely make out her groan.
Chris started nudging Marty down the sidewalk without another word to Dan.
“Just talk. Ignore him,” he projected.
Marty let out a dry titter and somehow managed to squash the impulse to look back at her father. She could almost feel him behind her, his gaze boring into her. His scowl was seared into her brain, and the note of warning in his words clung to her.
“He tried to warn me.” Like a fool, Marty did look back.
He was still standing in front of the bakery wearing that hard look on his face and watching them walk.
Chris guided her across the street, cursing quietly as they went.
“Did you hear me?” she asked.
“Mm-hmm.”
“Do you care?”
“Of course I do. I’m keeping you moving because that’s the best thing for you, isn’t it?”
“How can you possibly know that?”
“Because I plowed through your memories last night. Have you forgotten that already? Have you forgotten that I lived your life in a few hours and I know that man almost as well as you do?”
“He doesn’t know that. He doesn’t know, does he?”
“No.”
“Why not? I mean, he doesn’t feel the same way in my head as Mallory. Mallory sort of slips in casually and sits there, whereas he’s like—”
“The elephant in the room.” Chris swiped his key card at the apartment building’s outer door.
The lock clicked.
“Honey, right no
w, he’s the elephant stomping through this entire community. I thought too late to put up a mental block for you so he couldn’t catch what you couldn’t tamp down. Honestly, I don’t have much practice doing that for other people.”
“You were blocking him?”
“Tried to, but someone got there first. I didn’t have to.”
“Who? Nadia?”
“No, actually.” He pulled her toward the stairs. “My mother. She hates that motherfucker. See what I told you about our women and magic? I had no clue she even knew how to do that.”
CHAPTER TEN
Even without the psychic shit, Chris would have been able to tell that Marty was overwhelmed and entertaining thoughts of bolting at her first opportunity. Naturally, he wasn’t going to let that happen. He was already prepared to take a few days off from work to help her get her and Shani’s rental home packed up. He’d follow them down to Florida and help them box every tchotchke and every piece of lint, and then he’d see them both onto a plane back to New Mexico.
He understood why she was anxious. Anyone would have been in her situation, and she lacked her sister’s optimism. His job was to make sure Marty, in spite of her hesitation, got to where she was supposed to be.
Queen Tess moved slowly from the dining room door to Marty’s side.
The gravid queen pulled back the chair beside her, lowered herself into the seat while sighing pitifully, and then slid a bottle of Excedrin to Marty.
Marty pushed her sunglasses up her nose and her eyebrows darted up. “Can everyone tell?”
Queen Tess shrugged and rested her hands atop her belly. “Nan can. That’s her job, remember? To be everyone’s grandma? She can’t do shit for my aching back, but she can tell me who to sling pills at.”
“I think the headache is getting worse.” Marty put her head down on the table.
Reflexively, Chris rubbed the back of her neck, hating that she was in pain and that he was sort of the cause.
“Take the pills,” Queen Tess said. “Then have a nice cup of coffee and something salty.”
Marty lifted her head. “Trust me. Nothing is saltier than I am right now.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“No, not especially. I don’t understand how Erin and Mallory can just…walk around here like…like him being nearby isn’t a big deal. As if they don’t know that he knows that they suspect what he’s been up to. That takes some mental gymnastics I’m not sure I’m capable of, to be perfectly honest. How do they…” She scoffed and flicked open the lid of the Excedrin. “How do they fucking do that?”
“I felt a psychic nudge like someone was talking about me.” Mallory settled into the chair across from Marty.
She was so much like her sister, but so different. There was always a smile in her eyes, and her optimism seemed, to Chris, infectious. Marty didn’t appear to be affected by her sister’s charms one way or another, though. She may have become immune to them after thirty years of the sisters being joined at the hip.
“Hmm,” Tess started. “We were just discussing your gleeful nonchalance regarding a certain blood relative.”
Mallory rolled her eyes. “Look, I’ve been doing the ‘fake it till I make it’ song and dance since my husband was killed. If this seems easy for me, remember that I have more to gain than I have to lose by being here. My kids are happy. They’re fitting in and making friends. I like my job. I’m not stressed out about the commute to work anymore, even if I do have to take the back stairway into the mansion on occasion so I don’t walk past the kitchen when Dan’s there. I refuse to bear the punishment for the shitty things he did. That’s not fair to us, Marty, and that’s not fair for the kids.”
“And when shit hits the fan, then what?” Marty asked. “Are we going to act like what he did won’t impact us? People are going to form judgments, and they’re entitled to. I mean, come on, hon. Put Pollyanna in the closet for a moment and really think this through.”
“You think I haven’t already? You think I haven’t considered time and time again that people look at me and think, ‘Well, shit, what rock has she been hidden under all these years?’ and ‘Why did she come out now?’”
“I don’t tolerate those kinds of questions,” Queen Tess said. “I invited you here. I remind people of that whenever your name is dragged into a conversation, and they get right off the subject.”
“Of course they’re not going to question you,” Marty said. “That would be reckless.”
“They can question me all they want to, but I’m not going to allow people to malign the characters of women they don’t know anything about. Everyone I’ve spoken with agrees that your place is here.”
“Because they don’t know what my father did yet. If anything, they only know that he cheated.”
“And by the time shit hits the fan, the lines will be firmly drawn. He’ll be standing in the pile of shit of his own making, and everyone will think of you separate of his mess.”
“You can’t possibly know that.”
“You’re right.” The queen shrugged. “But I’m hopeful. And trust me, Marty, hopeful isn’t my baseline temperature. I work hard at being that way with a lot of help from my chieftains. They have a knack for keeping me tuned in to what matters, and they make me push the rest of the silliness aside.” She grabbed Marty’s hand and squeezed. “Don’t be afraid to draw on Chris for help.”
“How do you—”
“I can tell when the web has reconfigured—when the links have changed. I’m the queen, remember?”
“Easy to forget,” Marty whispered.
Queen Tess shrugged. “That seems to be the general consensus. But, listen, don’t let pride get in the way of peace. That’s a habit I happen to own, too, so I recognize the tendency when I see it.”
“You’re asking me to take a huge leap of faith.”
“What’s the leap?” Chris asked.
He hadn’t wanted to interrupt Marty’s conversation with the queen—no one was better at putting people at ease than Queen Tess—but if there was something Marty was clinging to that she needed to let go of before she could move on, he would help. He saw that as part of his job, and his was a job any person of Afótama descent would be honored to have. The Viking gods didn’t give men their matches without equipping them with the tools to care for them, and Chris was ready, and had been ready for ten months.
Marty tossed a couple of pills into her mouth and pulled her glass of water closer. “There’s this saying my mother used to repeat—”
“That people should sweep around their own front doors,” Mallory finished. “Yeah. I never understood what that meant until I was around twenty.”
“Call me naïve, but what does it mean?” Chris asked.
“Dr. Naïve.” Grimacing, Queen Tess put her spine against the chair back. “It means she can’t concern herself with anyone else’s problems when she has so many of her own. She sees her problems as disqualifiers—that she can’t get involved with the ones here because she can’t fix her own.”
“What problems, Marty?”
“You were in my head, Chris. You should know every one.”
“Perhaps our views are out of sync, and we’re not agreeing on what’s actually a problem.”
She nodded and slowly pulled off her sunglasses. Her eyes were still a little red, but at least they’d lost the wateriness they’d had earlier in the morning. “And you don’t see that in and of itself as a problem?”
“You’re creating problems that don’t exist so you can come up with some convincing—to you—reason not to get yourself too entwined here.”
She furrowed her brow and opened her mouth as if to rebut, but he wasn’t going to let her get a word out until he’d said his piece.
“You’re looking for reasons to check out. For any reason to cling to your own life, which wasn’t all that great, but was at the very least predictable, right? You need things to be predictable don’t you?”
“Don’t lie, Ma
rty,” Mallory said softly.
Marty cut her sister an incendiary side-eyed glare and then fixed her gaze back on Chris.
“That probably works on a bunch of folks,” he said flatly. “The hard look. You shutting them down in that harsh way and making them feel like you don’t give a shit about them or what they’re saying. Might even work on your ex-husband.”
“Don’t you dare—”
He pressed his thumb gently over her lips. “Don’t what? Don’t evoke his name and remind you of what a loser he is? Because he is.”
She leaned away from his hand, but he pulled her chair closer.
“You want me to diagnose you like you’re one of my patients?”
“No.”
“You sure? My advice is free for you, so I’ll give it to you anyway. You’re so close to digesting something substantial, but you don’t like the feeling of it because it’s too heavy or too filling, so you’re trying to vomit it out. Maybe other men are afraid of you, but I’m not.”
Her eyebrows crept up and her cheeks darkened, but it was Chris’s heart that stuttered with an ache.
“That still surprises you?” He took both of her hands and squeezed them tight. “Do I need to touch you constantly until you understand how this works?”
“Maybe,” she whispered.
“Marty, I’m not judging your circumstances using secondhand information. I’m judging them based on your memories and the feelings you had when they were made. I’m judging them based on the things you’re hiding from me. Maybe I can’t tell specifically what they are, but they reek of him, and I hate him.”
“You haven’t even met him.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Tess said softly.
“Obviously, I’m not some idiot teenager who doesn’t understand biases and that situations are colored by the past experiences of the participants. But I can be objective enough to put the pieces together the right way. You think I’m going to be just like them, right? Your ex? Your father? You think I’m in this scheme to sweep you off your feet for a little while—just until you become an inconvenience. And you think then I’ll start to lie. Little lies at first, and then bigger and bigger ones so I can cover my ass. You’ll be suspicious but you won’t say anything because you don’t have proof, right? And then you’ll realize that the proof doesn’t matter because I’ve already broken your trust and that I’ll never get it back.”