Chapter 3 #3
“Thank God Reverend Kate doesn’t have a dress code,” Luna added, plucking at her T-shirt. “I can go directly from here to there.”
Wait, Kate was the priest at the Baptist church. Luna was a witch. “You go to a Baptist church as a witch?” he asked, reaching for his coffee. He took a sip and shook his head. He needed coffee strong enough to wake up his ancestors to understand Luna.
“Kate doesn’t judge, neither should you,” Luna told him.
He wasn’t judging, he just wanted to… Nope, his head was about to explode. Partly because Luna was impossible, mostly because Poppy stood in the doorway of his kitchen, looking far too pretty.
She’d washed the fake blonde out of her hair, and what remained was closer to the sunflower gold he remembered from years ago.
She’d clearly rummaged through his desk, because she’d found rubber bands and roughly plaited her thick waves into two tails—obviously still her favorite way of containing the chaos.
Barefaced, she looked absurdly vulnerable, in a way that tightened something deep in his chest. His oversized T-shirt swallowed her small frame, but it didn’t hide the soft curve of her breasts, high and full beneath the thin cotton.
The hem brushed her mid-thigh, and beneath it, he caught sight of his sleeping shorts, navy blue and far too big.
The bunched fabric around her stomach told him she’d rolled the waistband over several times to keep them from slipping down.
The sight was unexpectedly intimate. Comforting. Dangerous.
Because it made her look as though she belonged in his house, wearing his clothes. But when he looked closer, he noticed her eyes were cool, her expression cautious, her lips thinner with stress and displeasure.
He wanted to pick her up and take her upstairs. And strip his clothes from her body…
Shit. Damn.
Inconvenient. Seriously inconvenient.
“It’s about time you woke up,” he snapped, annoyed by his reaction to her. Why did she have to run home—run here?
You did, the horrible voice of reason muttered from deep inside him.
Shut the fuck up.
Felony looked around, saw Poppy, and gave a partly anxious, partly excited yelp.
Then he took off at a gallop and launched himself into her arms. Thom yelled a warning, and Poppy managed to react quickly and caught the squirming dog around his tummy.
She staggered backwards and tried to put him on the ground, but Felony scrambled up her body, licked her face, and buried his snout in the space below her ear.
Thom could relate; he wanted to do the same.
But while Poppy might accept Felony’s canine actions, Thom wouldn’t get the same quick smile and breathless laugh.
“Help,” Poppy wheezed, struggling to hold Felony’s weight.
Thom banged his cup on the table and moved quickly, sliding an arm between Felony’s stomach and Poppy’s, taking the bulk of his stupid dog’s weight.
He tried to pull the dog away, but he moaned and wiggled to get closer to Poppy.
Thom met her eyes and inhaled. Mixed in with the smell of his dog’s not-so-nice breath was the distinctive smell of his shampoo, his citrus bodywash, and toothpaste. Shit.
He clocked the confusion in her eyes and on her face as she looked from Felony to him. “Now that I’m out of the dress and have showered, I think he remembers me,” she said.
“Oh?”
He wanted to step away, but his feet wouldn’t let him. His feet wanted to stay where they were, in her space, breathing her in, falling into her big, endlessly blue eyes.
“I spent a couple of weeks here with Grandpa, shortly before he died,” she said. “This dog and I spent a lot of time together, and I got repetitive strain in my elbow from throwing endless sticks for him.”
“Nothing has changed, he’s still psychotic,” Thom told her.
Offended by his statement, Felony turned his head to look at Thom, narrowed his doggy eyes, and farted.
Poppy’s eyes instantly started to water, and Thom held his breath as he finally pulled his canine off her.
Holding him, he walked him over to the kitchen door, put him down outside, and shut the bottom portion of the stable door.
Felony started to howl, so Thom shut the top half, too.
He knew he would pay for his actions later; the only question was how. Would he discover a chewed-up trainer or that he’d pissed on his bed?
His dog was a firm believer in the healing power of revenge.
“Sorry, he can fart on demand,” he said, coming back into the kitchen.
But neither woman, he didn’t think, heard him. Luna had Poppy in her arms, rocking her back and forth. He heard a snort, then Poppy buried her face in Luna’s neck, and Thom suspected that she might be crying. Great, last night’s bride crying in the arms of H-Town’s most inconsistent witch.
Thom sat down, looked at his huge pile of paperwork, and resigned himself to not getting any more work done in the foreseeable future.
After a few minutes, Luna pulled back and cradled Poppy’s now tearstained face in her hands.
Thom’s heart stuttered, bumped, and he told it to cut it out.
He didn’t have the time or emotional bandwidth to feel sympathetic.
“I’m so sorry Wren couldn’t be with you, darling,” Luna crooned. “You needed her yesterday, and she wasn’t there for you.”
“She’s sick, Lune,” Poppy told her. “I’m so mad at her for discharging herself from the hospital to fly back.”
“You would’ve done the same thing for her,” Luna replied, and Thom knew that to be true.
Poppy and Wren’s friendship was fathoms deep, solid as hell, and nothing had, or would, come between them.
When he heard, from Hayes again—his usually reticent friend had been unusually chatty about Poppy lately—that Wren couldn’t stand Benji, he knew that their marriage didn’t have a hope in hell. Not if her best friend didn’t approve.
Wren only ever wanted what was best for Poppy, and vice versa, and if she had doubts, then their relationship was doomed.
Luna twisted her lips. “And if I had been invited to the wedding, you could’ve called me, and I would’ve helped you escape.”
“Nobody from H-Town was invited,” Poppy told her, sounding sadder than he’d ever heard her.
And that included listening to her wail when one of her sisters decapitated her Barbie when she was nine.
“I wanted to, but I was overruled. I only got to have Wren as my bridesmaid by threatening not to get married at all.”
So her family still wasn’t great at listening to Poppy and hearing what she wanted.
“Your mother, always calculating.”
Thom snorted. That was the pot calling the witch’s cauldron black!
Luna was the most calculating, devious, and ambitious woman he knew.
But to be fair, only in the service of H-Town.
Whereas Poppy’s mother just wanted her own way all the time.
And if her youngest daughter’s feelings got squashed in the process, well, tough.
Luna held Poppy’s face and used her thumbs to wipe away her tears, something Thom wanted to do himself. How many times had he wiped away her tears when she was a kid, using his fingers or the hem of his shirt? More than ten. Twenty?
“You do look dreadful, darling,” Luna told her, being her usual frank self.
Poppy shrugged. “It’s dawning on me that I ran away from two-hundred guests, from my mother.” She wrinkled her nose. “And from Benji, I guess.”
Thom lifted his eyebrows. She didn’t seem too bothered about leaving his brother at the altar. Interesting.
Poppy bit down on her bottom lip. “I didn’t let them know that I’m okay,” she said, sounding worried. “And my phone died, so I still haven’t.”
Yeah, he’d done that yesterday, when she’d ducked into the downstairs bathroom. He still had her older sister’s number—Isobel, the most reasonable of the lot—and he’d called, only because it was the decent thing to do. If he had a sister, he’d want to know she was okay.
Isobel had immediately started firing questions. Where was Poppy? Why had she run? Did she know their mother was threatening to disembowel her with a teaspoon?
He’d kept to the basics. Poppy was safe.
She’d be in touch when she was ready. Then he’d disconnected and powered down his phone.
He still hadn’t switched it back on. He had no interest in listening to their voicemails, reading their messages, or returning their calls.
He’d told them she was safe. He’d done what he needed to do.
“I called Isobel,” he told her. “They know you are safe.”
She started to ask him a question, thought better of it, and nodded. “Thank you,” she said, sounding grudging. Then she glared at him. “But I’m still unhappy you are here, ripping apart my grandparents’ house.”