Chapter 17 #3
“Yes, ma’am, you have a great day too,” I said into the phone the very next day, only partially paying attention while holding out my thumb at Pascal who was waving his arms like the lunatic he was.
He was trying to get my attention again. The little boy had a radar for knowing when he wasn’t someone’s sole focus, especially when it counted, which it did at that moment because the kids were having a cartwheel competition, and I was the lucky judge. There was a small whiteboard on my lap, and someone had already tried to bribe me. That someone being Pascal. With a piece of onyx he’d found in his pocket.
Except I was scoring all the kids 9s and 10s. The 9s were given out if they couldn’t complete the cartwheel, but as long as they landed on their feet, they got a 10. They were adorable. And with the weather being amazing and a steady breeze keeping the area where we were at cool, I was having one of my favorite days yet with the kids. But with everyone else?
I waited until the other end of the line went totally dead before I did my best Henri impression by keeping my features neutral as I set his phone back into my fanny pack. Heaven forbid someone see me rolling my eyes, figure out who I’d been talking to, and it get back to them. The truth was, I had no clue how Henri did this crap every day, having to keep cool while dealing with people acting like their issue—no matter how big or how small—was life or death.
I’d made a list of the problems people had called with. Some of it had been important, but some of it hadn’t been. The list was saved in the notes app on Henri’s phone as: MFer. Someone’s satellite TV wasn’t working. Someone else couldn’t log on to their Wi-Fi. Margaret needed to vent about her hot water heater again. Someone wanted to know if they could add on to their house. Another resident burned themselves and the PA wasn’t answering her phone. Someone thought they sensed something they shouldn’t have. A teenager called to complain about their parents grounding them. Margaret called again to complain some more about her water heater.
And that had just been in the first four hours.
“Nina! Nina! Watch this! Watch this!” Pascal shouted until I gave him another thumbs-up and he threw himself into a cartwheel.
I drew the number 10 on my whiteboard and held it up.
The little boy started jumping up and down like he’d won a gold medal.
“He’s so dumb,” Agnes muttered from a few feet away. She had decided from the beginning she wasn’t participating in their competition—the prize was two strips of my beef jerky—and had sat off to the side, drawing with markers.
In between us, Shiloh let out a little laugh that had me peeking at him. He had done a couple of cartwheels before wandering over and plopping down so close to me that he’d kneed me in the thigh. He was stacking flat rocks on top of each other, or at least that’s what he was trying to do while wearing my bracelet.
That was a new thing with the kids, them taking turns each day wearing it when they got home from school. I wasn’t sure how they decided who was going to get it, but I went along with it. I loved it because I got the cutest reaction from them every time I took it off. “ You smell soooo yummy, Nina,” Shiloh had cooed as he’d let me put it on him.
They liked the way I smelled with my bracelet on, but without it?
Their comments were good for my soul.
One of the ogre boys, Billy, did a beautiful cartwheel. I wrote 10 with a smiley face beside it.
“We’re gonna do one at the same time!” two very sweet werewolf twin girls yelled before they chatted for a moment, nodded seriously at one another, and twisted into their own cartwheels. They got a 10 with two hearts.
The ogre boy and Pascal huddled together, and I wondered what they were planning on doing. You never knew with these crazy asses.
Agnes’s head shot up, her upper body twisting around just as I felt a familiar presence from the same direction.
“Nina!” Pascal started shouting. “Nina! Nina! Check this out!” He and the other boy high-fived and did two back-to-back cartwheels as the strength—and proximity—of the magic behind me got stronger. I drew them a score of 10 with two stars on either side, and the way they did some dance I had never seen before made me grin.
A figure approached and crouched beside Agnes, speaking to her softly, and out of my peripheral vision, I saw Shiloh set his rocks down and get a hug from our visitor.
One of the twins yelled, “I can do a roundoff, Nina!”
To which Pascal shouted, “Me too!” before he froze. “What’s that?”
Snickering, I watched the girl do a cartwheel but land with both feet instead of one at a time. I wasn’t sure what the boys told them, but she did another, and that got them trying to replicate one—they looked like cartwheels to me though.
Two hands landed on my shoulders then, and I turned my head to see the face I’d been expecting. The eyes I had memorized at this point. The cheeks and jaw I might be able to draw from memory too.
I couldn’t go as far as to say that he looked different, but Henri did somehow. Maybe it was his energy, maybe it was the brightness in his eyes, or it might have even been the faint curve to his mouth. He looked better than ever.
“Hey.” I grinned at him. “You’re back soon.”
“I missed home,” he admitted.
Before I could ask him where he’d gone, how it had gone, or if he wanted his phone back, this wonderful man leaned toward me and pressed his lips against mine, softly, sweetly, a smooth touch that lasted a single second, but it might have been the longest second of my life.
“Thank you,” he murmured after he’d pulled back, his voice just about a whisper.
“For what?” I practically gasped, not sure what year it even was when my mouth could still feel the pressure from his lips, and he was looking at me like I’d brought a loved one of his back to life.
“For the nicest thing anyone’s done for me,” he replied.
I’d do nice things for him every day if that was what I got, I thought. I’d answer all his phone calls. At least most of them.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Shiloh’s head angled to watch us, his mouth wide open.
Henri must have seen it too because he let go of my shoulders like they were hot potatoes. His throat bobbed, and in the blink of an eye, his face had smoothed into his neutral one. “Did I miss anything?” he asked, all evidence of his affection gone.
Right.
All right then. I forced a smile like my mind wasn’t still centered on him kissing me a minute ago. There was a lot you could blame on being a werewolf, but that wasn’t one of them. And I wasn’t sure I could handle trying to guess why he’d done it, much less what it meant.
“Everything went fine,” I told him.
I would break my own legs before I complained about how needy the ranch’s residents were and how around midnight, when Margaret had called for the millionth time, I’d considered running his phone over.
He raised an eyebrow like he could tell there was something I wasn’t telling him. There was a lot I hadn’t told him, but I shrugged and gave him the only piece of honesty I was willing to share with him in front of the kids. “I made some friends, maybe some enemies, and I might’ve considered calling a priest to come and exorcise M-a-r-g-a-r-e-t, but you have nothing to worry about, Fluff. I handled it.” I clutched my whiteboard. “All that matters is that you had a good break.”
And I would do it again if I got another kiss for it.
Not that I would tell him that.