Chapter 3
Chapter three
Roan
Roan paced back and forth in his office, struggling to remember anything past the moment when the man had pointed the wand at him. He hadn’t thought magic was real until today, but now it was plain to see.
Not only was it real, it was dangerous.
What had happened, and how was he going to break the curse that held him trapped in his tavern?
What was he going to do if the doors never opened again?
Would he and Abigail die of starvation?
What would happen to the sleeping men in the tavern? Would they wither away in front of him? Would he be forced to watch as the few people he knew and liked, the few people who didn’t hate him, remained forever trapped in a sleeping curse?
He fought the urge to retch as Beastie flopped into the corner and watched him silently, no longer putting in the effort to try to keep up with him.
Would she be able to go into the back garden, or would he end up with a pile of dog excrement in the corner of his office?
He should have checked if they could get into the garden or not. Maybe he could scale the fence and get out that way.
Or maybe this was all a bad dream, and he would wake up soon.
That made much more sense than a ruffian with a magical stick attacking him in his own tavern.
Perhaps that was the answer, and this would all disappear shortly. Yes, that had to be it.
It was only a dream.
Roan reached for the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out a hammer. If he was dreaming, he might as well get the enjoyment of accomplishing a few things from his never-ending list of things to do, like fixing the booth that was separating from the wall.
He made his way out of his office, walking past a surprised Abigail, who glanced down at the hammer in his hands.
“Gonna fix that booth,” he said, gesturing with the hammer.
She raised an eyebrow at him, seemingly surprised by his decision to accomplish something. He shrugged. “Might as well make something happen while I’m dreaming.”
Not that he owed her an explanation. She should know better than to expect one from him, but she’d been helpful when he’d been stuck on the floor, so perhaps he should at least clue her in on the fact that they were stuck in a dream together.
Or maybe she wasn’t even aware of it. Maybe it was simply his dream, and she was only a character in the story.
It didn’t matter.
He was going to fix the booth to pass the time until he awoke.
He made his way over and used the hammer to pull out the nails that had started to slide out of the wall. He carefully pounded them straight again and put them in a new spot before hammering them through the back of the booth into the wall.
This was satisfying, at least.
He tried not to glance over at all the men sleeping around him, because when he did, he had the feeling that this might not be a dream after all—and that was far too unsettling an idea for him to entertain for long.
But they hadn’t woken up when he’d started banging, so it wasn’t that they were really asleep.
He couldn’t think about it, so instead, he hammered all the nails back to where they should have been in all the unoccupied booths.
When he got to the booth where Tom and Edgar lay slumped over a table, he stared at the exposed nails for a moment, then stuck his hammer into his pocket and walked away.
No sense in going through the effort of moving them if this was a dream, and he’d wake up in the morning with nothing done. He glanced at the empty booths, their backs firm against the wall again, and smiled in satisfaction at a job well done.
Even if he hadn’t fixed everything, he’d made one thing better.
He looked around the tavern, taking in the dim, cozy room that he spent the vast majority of his time presiding over.
The Lucky Goat was his home, and someone had come into it and turned his sanctuary into a prison.
Beastie let out a whine as she made her way toward the kitchen, and Roan turned to follow her.
Abigail was probably there and would let her out, but he was curious if whatever had stopped him from leaving through the front door was also effective on the back.
He walked through the swinging door just in time to see Beastie head out the back.
Abigail looked back at him, her eyes bright, and she smiled. “Did you get the booths fixed?” she asked.
“I did.” He nodded toward the door. “That one works for you?”
Abigail nodded in confirmation. “I haven’t tried the gate in the fence, though. I suspect it’ll be the same as the front. I’m just glad that we can let Beastie out.”
Roan grunted. “I’ll try the back gate.”
As he made his way toward the door, Beastie came bounding back with a brightly colored ball in her mouth. Roan knelt as Beastie dropped it at his feet and picked it up to inspect it, dread filling his gut. “This is…” he began, turning to Abigail, who nodded again.
“The same ball,” she said quietly.
Roan stood and tossed the ball back to Beastie, who settled in the corner and began to tear it to shreds.
“I knew this was a dream,” he said.
“I hope it is,” Abigail said quietly.
“You don’t think so?” Roan said. It wasn’t really a question.
“I’m afraid it’s a curse,” she said, the words barely a whisper.
“But magic isn’t real,” Roan said.
Abigail simply raised an eyebrow. “I’m glad that you think that,” she said, “but I’m afraid it isn’t true.”
“How could it not be true?”
Roan didn’t want the answer, so he simply stomped out through the back door to inspect the garden.
This was a dream. Magic wasn’t real. He was simply dreaming about the ball that Beastie had destroyed last week.
He leaned down, picked up a stick, and threw it over the back fence, muttering a curse under his breath when it hit some invisible wall and bounced back toward him.
That wasn’t what he wanted to see—he wanted to see it sail straight over.
And the ball was here, and it was the same ball that Beastie had destroyed last week.
Had the owner of the ball made a second one to throw over his fence and lose again?
Things couldn’t be repeating like this in real life—this had to be a dream.
He marched indoors and informed Abigail it didn’t work before making his way back to his office.
He could have tried the gate, perhaps, but he didn’t feel like using his body to discover if the barrier existed there, too. He’d already gotten hurt too many times.
His head was beginning to hurt again, whether from the magic that had been pointed at him or the effects of being knocked unconscious, he wasn’t sure. But he didn’t usually feel pain in his dreams, and Abigail seemed so certain that it wasn’t one.
If it was a dream, it was a beastly dream.
He clenched his teeth as he glanced around his office.
What did he need to do if this was, in fact, real, and he wasn’t going to wake up in the morning with all of this behind him?
What steps were important to make sure that he and Abigail would make it through this experience?
First, he needed to get all those sleeping men out of his tavern. He didn’t want to stare at them for however long this might take—the idea of them sitting there in a peaceful slumber while he and Abigail lived and worked around them was entirely unappealing.
But he couldn’t shove them outside, and he couldn’t put them through the front door. He could maybe put a couple of them into the pantry, but then Abigail would have to see them.
In the storage room, however…that could work.
How many men had been in the tavern? There had been seven or eight, perhaps.
They would fit in the storage room, and if they woke up, it wasn’t as if they could do too much damage there.
Yes, the storage room would work.
He marched out of his office and poked his head into the kitchen. “Can you help me move them?” he asked.
“You want to move them?” Abigail’s eyes widened in surprise. “Are you sure that’s a good decision?”
“I don’t see any other option,” he said, “unless you want them sleeping around us the whole time we’re trapped here.”
Abigail shook her head. “No. I was just thinking how eerie it was,” she said. “And I don’t want any more of them falling like Conrad did.”
“Conrad fell?” Roan asked.
“I kept his head from hitting the floor,” Abigail said, wincing. “Though I couldn’t catch the rest of him. That was when I looked over and saw you.”
Roan grimaced. He hated that she’d seen him in such a vulnerable state. “We’re moving them into the storage room.”
He turned on his heel and stalked out into the tavern.
She could follow him or not. He didn’t care.
He ignored the traitorous part of him that was glad when she followed.
They started with Conrad, since he was closest to the storage room, and they carefully carried him in and laid him against the wall.
Conrad, he could have carried on his own, but the others would be heavier.
The storage room was even darker than the main room, and full of things they wouldn’t need without any customers. It was a good place to keep the sleeping men until they woke again.
Conrad was young and lean; the others proved a far more worthy challenge, and it took both of them straining to carry Edgar, who spent entirely too much time sitting in his tavern with a drink or eating instead of being active.
They moved on to Tom. Roan scooped him up into his arms like he would carry a baby—not that he had any experience, but he’d seen his brother do it a few times—and heaved upward.
The man was perhaps even heavier than Edgar, or perhaps Roan was simply exhausted already.
Abigail reached underneath to also support Tom’s weight, her arms settling just inside his, and if they hadn’t had a sleeping man cradled between them, the pose might have felt intimate.
It only felt awkward.
“I wasn’t planning on doing this today,” Abigail said, her voice straining just as much as she was as they shuffled awkwardly into the storage room.
The man’s arm fell off his chest, landing solidly against Abigail’s.
“I’m sorry,” Roan said, not quite meeting her eyes.
“It’s fine,” Abigail said, though her tone suggested otherwise.
As they entered the storage room, she quickly stepped back, allowing the arm to fall and hang freely instead of resting against her bosom. Roan grunted as he tried to carefully set Tom down, his face probably as red as the beets lined up on a nearby shelf.
But he couldn’t blame her for stepping back.
The rest of the men proved easier, though more than one of them put them in an awkward position. “I suppose it’s a good thing none of them were awake when they were touching me, or you’d be tempted to throttle them,” Abigail said with a slight giggle as he set down the last man.
Roan nearly dropped the man to the ground before whirling around to stare at her. “Has that happened here?” he asked, the words pouring out of him unbidden.
If someone had hurt her in his tavern, they would pay.
“No, no,” she said hastily. “I mean, there have been times before, but not here. No one would dare to do that here—not when you and Beastie have made it perfectly clear that they’re all expected to leave me alone.”
She’d experienced it…but not here.
At least there was that. Roan nodded curtly, then strode out into the main room. “If anyone ever needs a reminder of that rule, you tell me,” he said over his shoulder. “I want this to be a safe place for you.”
He didn’t dare voice the rest of the words in his head. That he wanted this to be a safe place for her because even though she had only been here a few months, she was the best barmaid he’d ever had, and he hoped she would never leave.
Saying that would be far more vulnerability than he ever intended to express to her, especially after she’d already seen him unconscious on the floor.
“I appreciate that.” She’d followed him out, and something in him was glad.
“I’ll get our supper. It’ll be ready soon,” she said, smiling up at him before bending over to pick up the white rose on the floor.
Roan couldn’t tear his gaze away from it as she picked it up.
She smiled down at the bloom and extended her hand to offer it to him before wincing and examining her thumb, where a small pinprick of blood had appeared.
A twinge of concern hit him and Roan frowned. “You ought to be more careful,” he told her, swiping the flower from her before striding off toward his office.
This whole situation was highly inconvenient, and she had this bizarre way of making him feel things he didn’t want to feel.
He didn’t want to feel any more emotions.
All he wanted was to break this curse and figure out how to make his tavern make money again.
He joined her in the kitchen after a little while and they ate dinner in silence. Roan said nothing more to her except, “You’ll sleep in here. I’ll sleep in my office.”
Abigail nodded, and he left the kitchen.
There were no late customers and no extra mess to clean, so he worked on the bookkeeping a little longer before he reached for the blanket he kept in the closet of his office.
He was preparing to bed down on the floor when he realized there would be no blankets in the kitchen, and Abigail would be sleeping on nothing.
His conscience and duty to her as a woman and his employee fought with his selfishness, but in the end, he brought the blanket into the kitchen. Abigail was curled up in the corner, her dress tucked around her feet, and her hands folded under her head as a pillow.
Moonlight streamed in one of the large windows in the kitchen, illuminating her face.
She was beautiful.
And staring at her while she slept probably made him a creep.
Roan sighed and gently placed the blanket over her before returning to his office, lying down on the floor and staring up at the ceiling.
Beastie flopped down next to him, and he leaned into her warmth. The sooner he fell asleep, the sooner he could wake up to find that this had all been nothing more than a dream.