Once a Charmer

by Sharla Lovelace

  “What else did he say?” I asked, crossing my arms over my chest.

  Bash’s brow furrowed. “About you?” He shook his head. “What’s going on?”

  Distrust flooded my body, and that very fact made my heart hurt. There was no one on this earth that I trusted more than Bash, and to question that—

  “Why were you having breakfast with him?” I asked, swallowing that thought down.

  Bash studied me for another couple of seconds. “He’s investing in the apiary.”

  I’ve recently made a couple of lucrative investments here in Charmed…

  Nausea swirled in my gut.

  Lange had done his homework. Bash’s business had taken a financial hit since the great summer bee heist, when a third of his bees didn’t reorient. His honey production fell in a big way. With a contract for the new building in the Lucky Charm complex already signed and new customers in the books, the timing could not be worse. I knew Bash had been looking for investors to help out with costs, or even a partner if it got bad enough, but—how did this bottom-feeder find that out?

  “I’m excited about it,” he said. “I’ve been bleeding money for months. Lange’s willing to pour that money back in for a percentage without owning anything?” Bash held out his arms. “It’s a win-win.”

  “Or too good to be true,” I said.

  Bash dropped his arms with a frustrated breath. “Damn it, what’s going on, Allie?”

  I opened my mouth to tell him, but then shook my head slowly. Bash wasn’t plotting against me, and he evidently didn’t know what Lange was up to, so why steal his hope?

  Because his hope was a slimy crook. And Bash was still my friend, even if it didn’t totally feel like it right now.

  “Just watch your back,” I said, brushing leaves off my clothes. “He’s not a nice guy.”

  “Watch—” he laughed. “You’re telling me to watch my back.”

  “Yes,” I said, holding up my chin. “You aren’t so badass that someone can’t fool you.”

  “I don’t need a nice guy, Allie,” Bash said, leaning forward. “I don’t care if he kisses babies or pets dogs. I care if he’s ruthless with money.”

  I scoffed. “That, he is.”

  “How do you know this guy all of a sudden?” Bash said, crossing his arms.

  Why couldn’t I tell him? Why couldn’t I say the words?

  Because the words were horrible, and I couldn’t stand the taste of them in my mouth. And because I hadn’t actually said them out loud yet. Voicing them somehow made it all real and solid and I wasn’t ready for either.

  “How did Angel do?” I asked, in the world’s most unsubtle changes of subject. Luckily it was dark, and he wouldn’t be able to see the fear and panic living in my eyes.

  “Seriously?”

  “Roll with it.”

  Bash ran hands over his face and sighed with irritation. “Okay, in the spirit of that, is Angel allowed to have people over when you aren’t there?”

  I blinked at the flip. “No, why?”

  “Because there were two Coke cans on the bar,” he said. “On either side.”

  I chuckled. “That’s your proof? Coke cans?”

  “Well that,” he said. “And her saying ‘Be cool, Uncle Bash. Don’t tell Mom’ when I asked her about it.”

  I hung my head. “That little shit.”

  “Roll with it,” he said, patting my shoulder in passing.

  Cute.

  “Bash,” I said, cringing as I turned slowly.

  “Yeah?”

  “Thank you,” I said, gesturing upward. “For rescuing me tonight. Being there for Angel.”

  Bash walked a few steps back to me, and my heart skittered in my chest when he reached out and pulled a moldy leaf from my hair. That move probably wouldn’t make the naughty dream files, but it warmed my skin anyway.

  “I told you a long time ago, Al,” he said. “You and Angel are family. I’ll always be there.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  I was shopping.

  Shopping.

  An activity just short of visiting hell in my book. I know most women were somehow predisposed with the shopping gene, but it missed me.

  Carmen had heard through Lanie—who’d promised Nick she wouldn’t tell, but it was Carmen so that didn’t count—about the man-purse guy steamrolling the Blue Banana. Which is exactly how she said it when she called, and I decided from that moment on that Landon Lange would forevermore be referred to as Man Purse Guy. It just seemed right.

  Talking about MPG led to the King and Queen contest disclosure, something Carmen didn’t know about either, and being a proponent of anything that would promote Sully’s project, she was all excited about this. And decided that I needed to take Saturday off and do a little retail therapy.

  I tried to argue that I was supposed to go see my dad that day, but Carmen pointed out that he wouldn’t know what day it was so it could wait. I then countered that shopping was the opposite of therapeutic to me, but she claimed that having girlfriends do it with you trumped that.

  Even Angel opted out, claiming she needed to study. On a Saturday. Which brought me around to Bash’s line about Angel asking him not to tell she had someone over. Angel wouldn’t pick studying over shopping if she had a test in the next two hours and a gun was pointed at her head. Something was up.

  But I went, reluctantly.

  Because—girlfriends. Either Carmen was just really smart, or was incredibly plugged in to exactly what I needed to hear, but I’d never had girlfriends. Ever. Not in more than an acquaintance capacity, anyway. And the thought of a day of that was just enough to make me skip the dad debacle and shake off my dread and see what it was about. Especially if I could maybe pick the brains of two women who may have no kids but had been very active, very sneaky teenagers once. I wasn’t. I was quiet. I wasn’t Angel.

  Two shoe stores and three dress places in, my eyes were crossing and I still hadn’t gotten around to Angel. We’d talked about the contest and how to dress for it and how cute Bash and I would look together until I thought I might implode. I knew how Bash and I would look together in every way. I saw us every night. How we dressed was irrelevant.

  A teenage girl and her boyfriend passed us as we made our way down a sidewalk to a “boutiquey” formal place (Lanie’s word) off the beaten path. The girl had nose rings, the boy had gauges, and both had visible tattoos. Already. They couldn’t have been out of high school yet.

  “So at what age did you start sneaking around?” I asked as Lanie opened the door.

  “I didn’t really sneak till I met Sully,” Carmen said. “And that was seventeen. Granted, I made up for lost time.”

  “And I couldn’t really sneak much in a house with a—with an Aunt Ruby,” Lanie said, referring to her rumored-to-be-psychic late aunt. “I had to be creative.”

  “Why?” Carmen asked. “Is Angel fluffing her feathers a little?”

  “Oh man,” I said as we entered, glancing around the place that was divided equally into men’s and women’s sections with little staging areas that were surrounded by mirrors like tiny amphitheaters. “Fluffing, plucking, grooming, stroking. Mouthing,” I added. “You name the button, she’s pushing it. I was the boring teenager who didn’t push anything, so I’m on foreign territory with her right now.”

  “Um, pregnant isn’t boring, chica,” Carmen said, going straight to a rack of sleek and shiny dresses. “You were doing something.”

  I shook my head. “I had my first boyfriend, and let him in my pants. Nothing sneaky about that, and until then I was squeaky clean. After that—I was suddenly the class whore, like no one else had sex but me.”

  A couple of quiet moments passed, and I guessed they were pondering that. Carmen and I had been friends only in the sense that we both came from the trailer park. She managed
to rise above it a little, whereas I always felt that I had one foot stuck in the muck. And she always had Lanie. I never had a friend like that. Not a girlfriend, anyway. I just had Bash, and that was kind of under the radar.

  “Hi,” said a redheaded lady as she approached us.

  “She’s in the Honey Queen contest,” Lanie said, pointing at me. “And needs a dress to stop time.”

  Red nodded, assessing me from head to toe so thoroughly I could see the math figures whizzing by. “I’m thinking a size five, maybe a seven if it runs small?”

  “Mostly,” I said.

  “Red would be a good color on you,” she said. “Blue. Any deep color would look fabulous with your coloring.”

  “Ooooh, blue,” Lanie said. “You’d look gorgeous in like a deep royal blue.”

  “Black will be fine,” I said. “I like blue, too, but let’s keep this simple. Shoes will be easier that way.”

  “Speaking of shoes,” Red said. “How good are you with heels?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  Her gaze fell to my sneakered feet. “Would you rate that as fine with four inches, or fine with one?”

  I cocked an eyebrow at this lofty chick. “I’m fine with all of it. I do have some girly genes even if I don’t advertise them.”

  Red held out a palm. “Understand.”

  “I’d rather not go too high though,” I said. “Something midway and comfortable.”

  “Comfortable has nothing to do with formal,” Lanie said.

  “Comfortable has nothing to do with this entire fiasco,” I said. “But if the rest of me has to be trotted out like a show monkey, I’m treating my feet to a little love.”

  We were invited to browse as Red zeroed in on a few racks, but my head wasn’t in it.

  “Are there any boys on her horizon?” Carmen asked, smiling knowingly as if she saw my thoughts.

  “Normally I’d say no,” I said, halfheartedly thumbing through dresses that looked like they were made for movie stars. “But I’m hearing of some boy named Aaron Sharp—”

  “Sharp,” Carmen asked, looking up from a rack of purses. “As in Vonda?”

  “What’s a Vonda?” I asked.

  “Vonda Sharp,” she said. “She’s over the promotion for the Lucky Charm. You’ve probably seen her in the diner. Big blonde hair and lots of teeth.”

  “Ah,” I said, pointing. “I have. Can’t miss her. And Angel did say this boy’s mom was in charge of that. She’s the one that came up with this whole crazy King and Queen thing.”

  “So Angel is hanging out with him?” Carmen asked.

  Something in her tone rang a tiny bell of alarm in the back of my mind. “From the two sentences I’ve gleaned, I think so.” I didn’t add the thing about the Coke cans and Angel asking Bash not to tell. Nothing proved that it was a boy there. It could have been a girlfriend. “Why?”

  Carmen’s eyes said that she was weighing her words carefully, and that tiny bell became something Liberty-sized.

  “Carmen,” I said. “What do you know?”

  “Well, I don’t really know anything,” she said. “It’s just an impression I get.”

  “Of?”

  “Of a seventeen—eighteen-year-old kid hitting on grown women like a player,” she said.

  My mind heard the player comment but it put that on hold and hit long loop on—

  “He’s eighteen?” Lanie said, voicing my concern. I was thinking boy, and eighteen was no boy.

  “Well, he’s a senior,” Carmen said. “So he could be. But Angel’s a sophomore so that’s not all that out of line.”

  In theory. It was done all the time. But somehow, from a parental perspective, it sounded like a ten-year gap. A senior was likely to have a lot more experience than a fifteen-year-old girl. Speaking of…

  “Okay, tell me about the player thing,” I said, rubbing at my face.

  Carmen pulled a dress from a rack and draped it over her arm. “I don’t know, it’s just kind of creepy. He’s a good looking guy, and evidently knows it, and he knows how to turn on the charm way past his years. I see some of the women on the design committee turn goofy when he flirts with them at meetings—which is another thing. Why is this kid coming to promotional meetings with his mother? What teenager does that?”

  “One that likes the attention of older women,” Lanie said, pulling a red strapless out and holding it up for me to see.

  I shook my head no. “So what is he doing messing with a fifteen-year-old?” I stopped moving and held up a hand. “Not messing. I didn’t mean messing.”

  “No, I’m sure they aren’t,” Carmen said, grabbing my extended hand and squeezing it to pull me back down to earth.

  “Dear God, she’s not that stupid, is she?” I asked. Really, I was asking God, but I was looking at Carmen. “I know I was. But she’s smarter than me. She’s—”

  “Allie, breathe,” she said. “Don’t go panicking before you know anything.”

  All I could think of was the gut-wrenching despair that had ripped through me when I’d peed on that stick and reality came crashing in. I wouldn’t change having Angel for anything in the world, she was my everything, but she didn’t need an everything right now. I didn’t wish that kind of jolting start to adulthood on her.

  Should I not have left her alone at home? Jesus, if I had to start thinking like that…

  “Allie,” Lanie said, pulling me off the crazy train.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Back it up,” she said. “I can see the wheels turning from here.”

  “One issue at a time. Let’s find you a dress,” Carmen said, handing one over to our saleslady. “Get you ready to blow everyone away for the stupidest contest in history. Then we tackle teenage hormones and man purses.”

  I shook off the worry weighing heavy on my skin.

  “So it’s not just me then, right?” I asked, giving a black halter dress a second look. “That contest is over the top, even for Charmed?”

  “Please,” Lanie said. “It’s so cutesy-corny it makes my teeth hurt. Like we don’t have enough with the Honey Wars and the games and the festival dance.”

  “I don’t understand why there’s such a dog and pony show over it anyway,” I said. “Even with the silly contest, why not just vote by mail or online and voila! We have a king and queen.”

  “With little I Voted stickers,” Carmen said.

  “Exactly,” I said. “What’s with this pageanty crap? That’s what Bash called it the other day.”

  “And who ever heard of a pageant by-the-couple?” Lanie asked, holding up a palm.

  “Which means that you and Bash will need to up the chemistry,” Carmen said, putting a dress she was holding back, and picking up another with much less material. “You need sexy.”

  Sweet God, no we didn’t.

  “No—no sexy,” I said. “We don’t—we’re not like that. We don’t have chemistry like that.” I cleared my throat as last night’s dream came to mind. The one where I was blowing him and having an orgasm at the same time while he stared down into my eyes. Yeah, no chemistry at all. No imagination, either.

  Carmen and Lanie both laughed and exchanged a knowing look.

  “What?” I asked.

  “The hell you don’t,” Carmen said. “You two ought to arc electricity when you pass each other.”

  I waved a dismissive hand at her. “Come on.”

  “Seriously!” Lanie said. “You already have it, you have to know that. Nothing’s ever gone down between you?”

  I opened my mouth and then focused really intently on a silver dress that would look hideous on me.

  “Nope.”

  “Bullshit,” Carmen said giving me a side-eye.

  “What?” I asked, wondering in a rush how she would have found out about our quickie sexc
apade all those years ago.

  “Let’s talk about that kiss,” she said.

  Heat flooded my body and floated on top of my skin as the memory of being lips to lips with him as he caught me and held me tightly against him washed over me in a rush. I’d forgotten that Carmen was there for the whole thing.

  “So—” I subconsciously ran my fingers over my lips in memoriam. “So there was a little panic or something in the chaos and fear,” I said. “He’s my best friend, I was terrified for him when I heard about the gun—”

  “Oh yes, the flare that my ex-husband shot at my head,” Carmen said snidely.

  “And I might have been extraordinarily relieved to see he was okay,” I said, blinking away. “You know, the emotional comedown.”

  “Or the emotional hurdle into a lover’s arms, getting lost in the moment, lost in the embrace,” Lanie said.

  “What she said,” Carmen thumbed behind her. “As cheesy as that sounded, add lost in each other’s lips to that.”

  It was an incredible kiss. Not even a passionate or intimate one, no tongue, no heavy breathing. Just a meeting of mouths that might have been intended to be a quick chaste thing but once it was there, I couldn’t pull away. I melted into him as that arc that Carmen mentioned cemented us together for not just one, but two long and tender kisses before our eyes met and the oh…wait a minute…set in.

  It didn’t have to be passionate. The dreams it kicked off ever since made up for that.

  “I didn’t even see that go down,” Lanie said. “But I’ve never bought the innocent best friend thing. He’s too damn hot to just be any woman’s friend—unless said woman has an equally hot man.”

  Carmen gave a half shrug. “Yes and no. I was friends with him for a long time and even when I didn’t have a man, and we were just friends, but he also never made a play for me, either.”

  I laughed through the need to fan my face. All this Bash talk was making my blood hot.

  “You’re saying if he had made a play for you—” I prompted.

  “I’d have jumped him like a monkey in heat,” she said cooly, talking to the dress she was holding up.