“I can date?” she squeaked, regretting the moment the words spewed from her mouth. “Not that I would. I mean, my life’s a mess. I don’t need any more complications. Who’d want to date a bank robber anyway? Never mind. I just find it so strange—so lax. Parole means structure and rigidity and urine tests once a week. I robbed a bank, for heaven’s sake. There should be harder-core rules for bank robbers, don’t you think?”
Bracing his hands on the shelf above her head, he winced as he stretched in their cramped quarters, making her shrink as far back into the shelving as she could to avoid more touching.
“You want things to be tougher than having to wear those shoes?” he teased, but it was nothing like the catty words Violet had used.
“Are you hurt?”
“Nah. Old injury from high school.”
“I should have known you were a football player.”
“Cheerleader,” he said on a groan of discomfort.
She ducked under his arms and managed to get behind him, affording her the opportunity to hide her grin. ”Did they make you wear the skirt?”
“Duh. It matched the pom-poms.” Ridge moaned when she pressed a flat palm against the middle of his back and pushed.
“I’ll just die if you had the matching little ones to put on your shoelaces,” she joked as she wrapped her arm around his waist.
“You want me to call the funeral home, or can you handle it?”
Now she really did laugh, just as she pushed down with one hand and jerked his enormous frame upward by leveraging her arm firmly around his lean waist.
Ridge bolted upward so fast, he knocked her backward…into the pantry door…which broke…splintering and exploding into many, many pieces.
Leaving Ridge on top of her in the middle of Winnie’s kitchen floor while a bunch of eyes stared down at them, wide open and astonished.
Winnie peered at them from behind a kitchen towel, her cheeks bunched up in a smile. “Sorry about that. Sometimes the pantry door sticks.”
Ridge rolled to his stomach instantly, falling off her. Clearly unfazed by the looks they were getting, he turned his head and gazed over at her. “Wow! That was amazing. Where’d you learn to do that?”
“One-Eyed Lorraine from cellblock C.”
Ridge laughed, and despite herself, despite the scene they’d just made, despite the curious eyes, despite the insinuations, Bernie laughed too.
And it was nice.
Chapter 6
Fee skipped ahead of her, his tiara bouncing on top of his head, bow securely tied around his tail as they wound down the long dirt road from Winnie’s house to Ridge’s farm.
He attempted to vault over the wildflowers in the field lining the road, his dark head disappearing and reappearing as she followed. Winnie always offered her a ride to work but she took solace in these moments alone, when she gathered her armor around her and prepared for a silent battle no one else knew she was waging.
This time, while the sun wasn’t eating a hole in her head and was only just beginning to peek its angry hot face over the horizon, was the time she spent reliving her moments with Ridge.
A week and a half had passed since the party and their encounter in the pantry—ten and a half days where she’d done all but make herself invisible in order to avoid Ridge.
Once the laughter had worn off, and he’d helped her to her feet, Bernie had realized how bad it all looked and made a mad dash for her room. Upon seeing her reflection, she’d groaned. Her ponytail was mussed, her cheeks were a pretty shade of red, and her eyes glowed as though she were consumed by fever. Not to mention, her doily shirt was a little wrinkled.
There’d been a couple of snickers about exactly what they’d been doing in the pantry, snickers she shrank from, scurrying off to hide rather than defend herself.
Though, several of the comments were about how lucky she was to land in a pantry with Ridge Donovan. There was a theme to Ridge and it always revolved around batches of women fanning themselves while they clutched their proverbial pearls.
Regardless, she didn’t care what Ridge said about the rules, if Baba got wind of their tryst in the pantry, surely there’d be more trouble than some spilled Fruity-Os. She wasn’t here to flirt with her hotter-than-lava boss—she’d have to get in line to do that anyway. She was simply finishing out her time.
While she did that, she spent a good deal of her off-work hours scouring the Internet on Winnie’s laptop for any information on her parents and Eddie, other than what she already knew about their lives. Any small hint about what was happening to her would be more than she had at this point.
Eddie was a no-go. There was absolutely nothing online about him. It was as if he’d disappeared after the bank robbery and fallen off the edge of the earth.
“Penny for them,” Fee said, his words soft on the warming breeze.
“If only we had a penny between us,” she joked. Baba Yaga had informed her that her banking accounts had all been frozen during her incarceration, and would remain so until her parole was finished.
“I’m being real here. Every morning on the way to work, you get inside your head and stay there until we get to the farm. Wanna talk about it?”
Bernie decided to be truthful. “I was just thinking about my parents and how much I miss them lately.”
As she’d searched for Eddie’s existence, she’d also relived the painful memories of the small, almost unnoticeable article in her local paper about her parents’ deaths. Two local schoolteachers, loved by everyone, senselessly taken before their time.
“Where are they, B? Back in Beantown?”
“Gone. They died well before I landed in prison.”
“Aw, Bernie love, I hate that. I hate it so hard. Someday we’ll talk about it, yes? Maybe when things aren’t such a jumbled mess in your head?”
She gave him a distracted smile. “Sure, Fee.”
Back when her parents had been killed, she’d harassed the local police until she was blue in the face to figure out who had murdered them in their sleepy town where nothing particularly interesting ever happened. According to the police, the scene of the crime was virtually spotless. No evidence, no fingerprints, no witnesses, nothing.
Just her parents gone forever—killed senselessly in their beds as they slept, and no answers. As she’d packed away their things in storage, she’d scoured every scrap piece of paper, every magazine from front to back, every drawer, searching for a clue to who would harm two such gentle souls.
For months their unsolved deaths had haunted her, but now—now she was looking at their murders and everything that had ever happened in her life with fresh eyes. Maybe she’d missed some supernatural cause because she wasn’t looking for it? Who would have thought witchcraft could be the culprit?
The night in the pantry had sparked this renewed search, and it also left her with many questions—not just questions about her instant attraction to Ridge, either.
For instance, how had she fallen asleep in the pantry when she’d last remembered being in the garden?
“Bernie?” Fee jumped up on the split-rail fence and followed along, the green-and-brown pasture his backdrop.
“Uh-huh?”
“Question?”
“Sure.”
“I’ve waited all week for you to explain, but it’s obvious you’re retreating again. So I’m yanking your ass out from under the covers, like it or not. Here comes the cold bucket of water over your head. What the hell were you doing in that pantry with Ridge Donovan?”
Instead of hedging, she said the first thing that came to mind. “Lunchables.”
“Don’t play with me, Cookie.”
She gave him a wide-eyed look of innocence. “I’m telling the truth, Tiara Wearer. He offered me a Lunchables.” Which was true.
“Bullshit.”
“You say bullshit; I say tiny crackers and cheese.”
“Stop right there, Bernie!”
She ignored him and kept walking, hauling the Frozen Elsa and
Olaf backpack Lola had loaned her over her shoulders, loaded with bottles of water. “I can’t afford to be late.”
“Bernie, I’m gonna learn you a thing or two, baby girl. When I say stop, you do it or I make you do it.”
Bernie giggle-snorted and kept walking, kicking up dust with her ugly brown shoes. “Oooo, are you gonna go all ballerina-ninja kitty on me and put the hurt on with your fluffy tutu and dagger-like tiara?” She laughed at her own joke, continuing to stroll at a brisk pace.
But then the air grew thick and a scent similar to a layer of ozone burning accosted her nose. Just before she was unable to take another step.
Fee skittered to face her from his fence perch, stopping in front of her glaring eyes. “I said stop. That means you collaborate and listen.”
Bernie attempted to move her feet, but no luck. It was as though they were stuck in concrete.
She narrowed her gaze in his direction. “What did you do to me, Fee?”
If cats could give haughty glares of disdain, Fee was giving her one. “I stopped you. Now, you don’t get to move an inch until you answer the question. How did you get in the pantry with Mr. Delicioso?”
Her feet were literally rooted to the ground. “Fee!”
He tilted his head and yawned. “Answer or it’s the next level. Swear it on my Liza with a ‘Z’ DVD, honey.”
“You mean the one with her in the Bob Fosse costume?”
“The very one,” Fee offered with deadly calm.
Damn. He was serious. “What’s the next level?”
“I’ll give you a rash on your tender bits to rival all rashes. In fact, I’ll turn your entire body into a rash. You’ll itch until your damn creamy, peachy flesh falls off your bones. Answer, Bernice. Why were you in the pantry?”
She let the backpack fall from her shoulders and shrugged, giving in, but her eyes couldn’t meet Fee’s. “I just woke up there, okay? I don’t know how I got there. I was in the garden after my escape from Violet ‘Breasty’ Hammond, and then Ridge was waking me up in the pantry.”
She’d been too afraid to ask what could have left her sitting in the garden one minute and in the pantry the next. Thankfully, there’d been no residual fallout. That she knew of anyway, but she hadn’t decided to shelve the idea that the other shoe could drop at any moment.
Fee appeared to ponder that for a moment before he said, “You don’t remember leaving the garden? Are you blacking out, Bernie? Has something like this happened before? You have to tell me if I’m going to be able to help you, Sugarsnap.”
Blacking out? She’d never referred to it as such in the past, but then, this particularly weird witch benefit had only begun to manifest in the last year or so. “It’s happened once or twice.”
“When? Wait! Did you…did you black out when you pulled off that heist?”
“Well, that would have been impossible. How could I black out and pull off a bank heist at the same time? The two don’t add up.” She wasn’t ready to talk about that day just yet. So much of that brisk October afternoon had a huge question mark attached.
Besides, her side of the story sounded crazypants.
Any more crazypants than the fact that you’re a witch?
Fee bristled, the fur on his spine ruffling. “You know what I mean, Bernice! Help me help you, Princess. Tell me about that day. Every single detail.”
A horn blared to the tune of The Partridge Family theme song, making Fee tumble from his perch on the fence and lose the focus he’d kept so intently on her feet. Her orthopedic shoes shifted then, leaving her unglued.
Calla, whom she’d found out was one of Paris’s rare werewolves, stopped the beat-up bus in which she drove the seniors to and from the farm alongside Bernie and pulled the creaky doors open. “You want a lift?” she asked with a grin, her pretty eyes glittering, her glistening black hair in a messy ponytail.
Still coming to grips with the fact that she now lived in a place where mythical creatures walked upright, she couldn’t deny Calla’s charm.
The werewolf was as nice as Winnie, and her patience went unmatched where the seniors of Hallow Moon Senior Center were concerned. They were a handful and a half of aging witches and warlocks, all capable of creating havoc given an opportunity, which was what had led Calla to open Hallow Moon. Giving the children of the troublemakers a modicum of peace while they worked.
And Calla was good with them. She could wrangle a fussy senior out of zapping others’ dentures from their mouths like nobody’s business.
Still, the week and a half she’d spent with them, wherein they’d welcomed her as if she belonged, had left Bernie falling a little more in love with them each day—whether she wanted to or not.
They’d given her a reason to get up in the morning, ever since Calla had requested she help organize their jaunts on the farm rather than muck the stalls.
And they loved Ridge, too. More than once she’d had to bite her tongue when Flora or Glenda-Jo had poked her to point out when Ridge was sweaty and shirtless—and for some reason, their reminders of his hotness stuck in her craw. But that hadn’t stopped her from stealing glances at him right along with the seniors.
“Bernie! Don’t you dare get on that bus before we finish our conversation!”
Ignoring Fee, she hightailed it inside the bus and smiled at the rows and rows of senior faces. “I think I’ll take you up on that. Thanks, Calla, and mornin’, campers!” she said to the group with a grin as she looked for a seat. A genuine grin. One she felt in her soul.
Clive Stillwater winked at her from the back of the bus and waved a weathered hand. “I gotta seat for ya right here, Saucy Pants.” He patted the cracked vinyl beside him with a lascivious cackle.
Bernie gave him a coy bat of her eyelashes as she made her way to the back of the bus. “Do I have to make you a sandwich in order to be worthy enough to sit in the hot seat, Mr. Stillwater?”
The bus broke out with raucous laughter as she took her seat, and Flora Watkins patted her on the shoulder with a warm hand of encouragement. “That’s right, Bernie. You give that sexist old bag o’ wind hell and tell ’em you’re saving yourself for Ridge!”
Ridge, Ridge and more Ridge. It shouldn’t surprise her after a week’s worth of batting eyelashes and breathy sighs, but it was sort of starting to annoy the shit out of her. There wasn’t a soul immune to the man’s charms.
But she was. And she wasn’t saving herself for anyone or anything except freedom.
Yeah.
More laughter ensued, erasing the probing questions Fee had for her and Ridge’s charms, replacing both with a new hint of belonging.
* * * *
Gus settled his favorite horse, Gumby, in his stall. “Yer gettin’ better at this, good-lookin’,” he said with a wink and a nudge to her ribs as the horse chuffed.
Wiping the sweat from her brow, Bernie smoothed her hands over her Laura Ingalls dress and gave him a skeptical look. “By ‘better’ do you mean he only tried to kick me once this time?”
Gus cupped Gumby’s muzzle, palming him a carrot and running his hands over the horse’s thick black mane. “He’s just a persnickety old coot, is all. In no time flat, you’ll have him eating out of the palm of your hand just like me and Orchid over there. Gumby can’t resist a pretty girl for long.”
Bernie chuckled and curtsied, splaying her ugly dress on either side of her like a fan. “Why, thank you, kind sir. But I think you’re the only match for Gumby.”
“You’re good with all the horses, not just Gumby. You have a gentle touch and they know it.”
If there was one thing Gus was right about, it was the horses. She’d loved them from the moment she’d been handed Orchid’s reigns and led her back into the barn for grooming and a good rubdown after her walk with the seniors.
As she’d stroked Orchid’s cheek, nuzzled her nose, fed her carrots, Bernie decided she could spend all her days with the horses and be content. She was growing attached to them, looked forward to seeing t
hem each morning and at the end of each day.
“You’re a nice girl, Bernice Sutton. We like havin’ ya around, you know.”
Her cheeks flushed, making her dip her head to hide the bright spots. “We?”
“Yeah, we. Me and all the rest of the Depends Patrol.”
Her throat tightened as she looked down at the stray bits of hay littering the floor. No one had said those words to her in so long. She couldn’t even remember if her parents had ever said them. Mostly people were screaming ugly curses as they ran from the debris of whatever she’d taken out.
“I like all of you, too,” she whispered, her throat tight, her eyes burning with unshed tears. In only short amount of time, she really liked them. The seniors, the horses, Calla and Winnie—and whether she wanted to or not, Ridge.
“Don’t suppose that means you’ll let me take you for a spin on my broom?”
That made her giggle. She fanned herself with a grin. “You have a broom? Phew, talk about a kickass ride, huh?”
Gus patted her on the back. “Nah. Warlocks don’t get brooms. But I’d take you for a spin if I had one, for sure.”
“Gus Mortimer, are you in here flirting with Bernie again?” Calla teased from the barn door as she strolled in, her long legs carrying her toward them, her iguana familiar-by-adoption, Twyla Faye, following behind. “Seems every time I turn around, you’re buzzin’ around Miss Bernie like a bee around some honey.”
“All boys flirt with pretty girls,” Gus teased, sticking his thumbs under the suspenders holding up his plaid shorts. “I was just tellin’ Bernie how much we all like her.”
Calla pulled off her riding gloves and smiled at Bernie, her pale skin flushed, her eyes clear and bright. “Now that much is true. We do like you, Bernie. In fact, we like you so much, we were all wondering if you’d come over to the center tonight? Call the numbers for bingo for us? The seniors, every last one, enjoy your company so much, and while sometimes bingo can be a bit chaotic—”
“It’s that damned Glenda-Jo!” Gus crowed, sticking a long thread of golden hay between his teeth. “Her and all those fruity troll dolls she lines up like soldiers of bingo death as if they’re gonna take out her opponents. Damn batshit, is what she is. All I did was breathe on one and I thought she was gonna bust a vein.”
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