by Lila Dubois
Then she cringed and waited for a thunderbolt of lightning or frogs to rain down on her head because she’d used her magic to prevent breaking another nail. Sliding out of the car, Winnie waited, letting the oppressive heat of the day wash over her.
When silence prevailed, she stood beside the open door, facing Icabod, and stretched her arms upward, bending forward at the waist to ease the ache in her lower back.
“Turn around, Weenie,” Icabod mocked in a French accent.
She lifted her head from her bent position. “Look, I’ve been mostly decent, but if you don’t want to lose one of your stumpy, stuffing-filled arms, shut up, okay? It’s been a long trip.”
“Okay, but can I just say one more thing? It’s very important.”
Winnie rasped a sigh. “One more thing then no more things. Got it?”
“Got it. Okay, so because you’re mean and petty, and you tipped my head back over to the left, I have a certain vantage point, if you will. Meaning, I can see things you can’t.”
She let her head fall back down between her shoulder blades, utterly fed up. “Make that point, Ic.”
“Look between your legs.”
Winnie frowned but she looked anyway—and found a pair of muscled calves, sprinkled with dark hair.
“It’s a man, right? A man staring at my ass covered in this ugly orange jumpsuit.”
“Uh-huh. It’s definitely a man,” Icabod confirmed.
Her internal antennae went up. “You say ‘a man’ like you know him.”
“This is only supposition on my part, but from where I’m sitting, he looks a lot like the description you gave your father on the phone once. Kind of Manu Bennett with maybe just a hair of Charlie Hunnam thrown in for good measure. Super hot, by the way. Nice going.”
A cold chill of dread swept over her even though the temperature felt like a hundred degrees. How could that be? “No,” she growled. Nononono.
“I know what you’re thinking at this exact moment, Pooh Bear. So let me clear this up for you. Yesyesyesyes!” Icabod singsonged.
Winnie grimaced as the blood rushed to her cheeks. She rose to a standing position and stared off into the flat distance of the landscape for only a moment before she turned around to face the music.
“If it isn’t the Unabomber. Right here in Paris, Texas,” a gravelly, sinfully whiskey-dipped voice said.
Nice. If it isn’t the only man I’ve ever loved who ditched me after making my eyeballs roll back in my head, not once, but four separate times in one night.
Winnie straightened her shoulders, running a hand over her hair to smooth it, desperately trying to figure out what road to take with him.
The “Hey, it’s been a long time. Good to see you again. You meant nothing more than a disposable wet wipe to me” shtick?
Or the ever-popular “Fuck you and your magic hands” angry, bitter, dumped cliché shtick.
“Unabomber. Hah!” Icabod snorted from inside the car.
“Shut up!” she hissed from the side of her mouth.
Ben tucked his tanned forearms over his broad chest and scowled at her beneath the burning sun, his beautiful eyes hidden by his dark sunglasses.
He’d obviously been running, rivulets of perspiration ran down the side of his tanned face, and his wife-beater shirt, accentuating all of his amazing muscles, clung to his pecs.
She sucked in a shaky breath and waited for him to skewer her.
“Two minutes into seeing each other again after all this time and you’re already telling me to shut up, Winnie? You could make a guy believe you weren’t glad to see him.”
Winnie wet her lips, keeping her fingers in a tight ball on either side of her body, her inclination to zap him the hell to Mars and back strong. It was either that or knock him down and have her dirty girl way with him. Because even though he was a dog, he was a hot dog.
“What are you doing in Paris, Texas?” he demanded, his jaw tight and unyielding.
“Just got out of prison. But you knew that, right? Doesn’t Baba Ghanoush keep you abreast, no pun intended, of all the women you’ve dated?” Then dumped after you ravished them completely, ruining them forever for any other man.
He smiled then. Delicious. Dimpled. Swoony. Nipple-hardening “Haven’t heard from Aunt Yaga in quite some time. I imagine she was busy keeping tabs on you.”
That was it. She was just going to cut to the chase. “So is this some kind of joke? Why are you here, Ben?” Why now? Just why?
He rolled his tongue along the inside of his cheek and pulled the earplugs from his ears, letting them dangle to his chest. “Because I live here, Winnie.”
“In Paris?” she croaked.
“Yep.”
As she processed that information, that stunning, life-altering revelation, Icabod’s demonic cackle rang in her ears.