Chapter Twenty
VIOLET
“Look. I appreciate that you’re magically obligated to help me, and yes, that’s entirely my fault, and something I hope to make up to you once we straighten out this whole heart’s desire thing. I also appreciate that you’re going the extra mile to get to know me and help figure out how I can better connect with my customers. But seriously? Why are you pushing me so hard in there? What’s your end game?”
Devlin leans back against the check-in desk, arms crossed, totally relaxed. “It’s no game, mushroom. I’m pushing you because behind all that passion for tea, behind all your words about saving the shop, you’re stuck. Something is blocking you from truly tapping into your magic. Your potential. That elusive heart’s desire we’re supposed to unlock. And I’m trying to get you unstuck. So, you tell me.” He steps closer, backing me against the wall until I’ve got no choice but to look up and meet his eyes. “Why are you pushing so hard to resist me?”
There’s nothing but honesty in his gaze, in his energy.
I sigh, the secrets inside me swirling, searching for a crack in the facade. A way out, just this once.
“It’s not you I’m resisting, Devlin. I just don’t want to talk about the shop’s troubles with my aunts.”
“But… they’re your family, are they not?”
“Not by blood.”
“I didn’t ask if they were your relatives. I asked if they were your family. There’s a difference.”
Compassion floods his energy, the tenderness in his voice slipping behind my walls, edging closer to my heart.
Something about this conversation is getting to him. I can feel it. Hear it. See it in his eyes, full of concern and understanding both.
It makes me wonder what he’s gone through in his long, long life. Does the Devil have a family? Siblings? Does he get along with them? What was he doing in Los Angeles? Why was he asked to leave Hell?
I know the religious stories about the so-called Devil are just that—stories. An invention of flawed men too stubborn and proud to admit their own faults, fabricating a clever bit of fiction so they can blame some scary supernatural force for everything that goes wrong in their lives.
But what I don’t know about the so-called Devil… Goddess. Those stories could fill entire volumes. Libraries. And all this time… The bickering, the grilled cheeses, the romance novel reinterpretations, the days in the shop… All the time he’s been putting in, trying to figure out what makes my heart tick…
I never even asked him what’s going on inside his.
“Devlin, is your family—”
“Don’t deflect,” he says, his energy spiking with sadness. “Tell me why you don’t trust your family.”
I search his eyes, search for a way back into his heart, but I can tell he doesn’t want to talk about it.
Maybe he never will.
I sigh and lean back against the wall. “It’s not that I don’t trust them. I just… I have a hard time asking for help.”
“You don’t say.” He smirks at me, but it’s not snarky or annoyed. Just patient. Probing, but not prying.
“I spent a bunch of time in the system.”
“Funny, you don’t strike me as an ex-con.”
“Not that kind of system.”
“What kind, then?”
“The kind where you learn that messing up gets you noticed—and not in a good way. The kind where asking for help brands you as needy and helpless. A burden at best. A target at worst.”
I lower my gaze, hoping he can’t see the memories flashing behind it. All the moving around I had to do as a teen, keeping my head down, my mouth shut, my magic on lockdown, hoping I wouldn’t commit some unintentional infraction to upset the balance. To get kicked out of whatever temporary home I’d been shunted off to. And Mr. Roach, the aptly named social worker whose favorite after-school activity was leering at me over his grimy glasses while reminding me how difficult it was to place teenage girls because all of us were just a bunch of—and I quote—money-grubbing, backstabbing whores-in-training.
No, not all the foster placements were horrible. Some of the families really did want to help, and tried their best to make an impossible situation slightly more bearable. But none of them knew about my magic, none of them lasted for long, and none of them ever felt like home. Not the one I’d lost when Gigi died, and not the one I eventually found—thank the goddess—in Wayward Bay.
“I ran the minute I turned eighteen,” I say. “I was in the midwest at the time, and something just told me to head east. I had no money, no friends or family, nothing but the clothes on my back and a few things my grandmother had left me—things I guarded with my life. So I followed that tug inside me, made it all the way to a diner about an hour from the Bay. The waitress took pity on me—brought me a meal on the house. Told me to hang out until closing, so I did. I thought she might offer me a place to stay, but then, a few minutes after closing, Althea showed up. She said she was a witch, like me. That she and her sisters knew I was coming—they’d been waiting for me and asked the waitress to keep an eye out.”
Devlin’s eyes soften. “You’re lucky to have them in your life, Violet.”
“All of us are. My sisters… That’s pretty much how we all ended up in Wayward Bay over the years. Each of us finding our way, following the magic. The aunts say it calls to us, right when we need it most.” I swipe a lone tear from my cheek and smile. “Coming here, to the B&B, meeting the other aunts, my sisters… It was the first time since Gigi died that I felt like I was home. Truly home. And no matter what happens, I can’t… I can’t risk it.”
“Risk what, love?”
“Messing up again.”
“Ah. I see.”
“See what?”
“You’re not afraid of messing up, mushroom. You’re afraid that if your family—the women who’ve chosen you after years of the rejection you endured as a child—discovered that you’re ever-so-slightly less than perfect, they might abandon you, just like all those other so-called families did.”
His words are a volley of arrows that pierce my heart, but I’m shaking my head anyway. “It’s different,” I insist. “Totally different.”
“How so?”
“I’m not a needy child anymore, Devlin. I’m a grown woman who owns her own business. I’m a witch with access to magic most people only dream about, and unlike that lost and lonely fourteen-year-old girl, I know how to harness it. I should be able to figure this out on my own.”
“Says who?”
“Says… everyone?”
“Even if that were true, don’t you think making mistakes along the way is part of figuring it out?”
“I don’t have time for mistakes. I let my financial situation get out of hand, and now I’m in one hell of a mess.”
“It’s okay to be messy. Life is messy. That’s part of what makes it worth living.”
“Says the immortal with no fear of death.”
“Death, no, you’ve got me there.” He tucks a finger under my chin, forcing me to meet his gaze again. Then, in a soft whisper that almost breaks me, “But loss? That’s something we’re all faced with, mushroom. Even me.”
Another tear escapes. He catches it with his thumb.
“You don’t have to be perfect, love,” he whispers. “You just have to be real.”
I shake my head. “I made her a promise, Devlin.”
“Who? Your gran?”
I nod. In Gigi’s final days, I slept on a cot in her hospital room, right next to her bed. She was pretty out of it by the end, but one night, I woke up at three a.m. and found her watching me, her gaze as sharp and clear as it had ever been.
“I need you to promise me something, Lettie,” she said, the nickname she’d given me as a baby when I couldn’t say my own name. And just like her gaze, her voice was suddenly clear. Intentional, even in its softness. “There are many times in life when our heads are louder than our hearts—so loud they can overwhelm us, make us lose our way. But dreams? They thrive in our hearts. Follow them, and you’ll never be lost.”
I tell him the story—one I’ve never shared with another living soul.
“I promised her I’d always follow my dreams. That I’d never let anything push me off my path, whichever path I chose. And now, every time I think about losing Kettle and Cauldron, I feel like I’m letting her down, and I… I can’t…”
I turn away from him and grab a tissue from the desk, wiping away my tears and forcing a fresh smile.
“Anyway, the foster stuff… it’s all in the past now. Yes, it sucked at the time, but ultimately, it molded me into the woman I am today. A perfectionist—okay, yes, occasionally problematic. But also a woman who dreams big and doesn’t give up easily, even when the deck is stacked against her. How could I not be grateful for that?”
Devlin smiles, but it’s as sad as his energy, heavy with the weight of his own losses, his own fears. “Being grateful for the outcome doesn’t mean we can’t acknowledge the pain of the experience. That, too, is part of figuring it out. No way around it, I’m afraid.”
Tears prick my eyes again, and I look away before they can spill.
It’s taken years of practice, but these days, I can typically sense the edges of people’s energy fields. The border where their feelings end and mine begin. But something about Devlin blurs everything in a way where it all just feels like… like ours. This vast, shared experience and wordless understanding you can spend your whole life searching for with another person and never, ever find it.
And somehow, I’ve found it with the Devil.
I turn back to him, overcome with the sudden urge to hug him.
He returns the embrace, one hand cradling my head, the other holding me close, just… just being with me.
“I’m sorry for hurting or embarrassing you in there, Violet,” he whispers, stroking my hair. “The last thing I want is to put that worry in your heart or drudge up painful memories. But I can’t sit back and let you succumb to—”
The front door swings open, and I’m swamped with the energy of… well. A swamp. That’s exactly how it feels. Cold and fetid. Stale. Teaming with things you don’t want to look too closely at.
I know at once who it is.
“Brandt?” I turn to face him, my lip curling involuntarily. “Why are you here?”
He takes in the sight of me and Devlin, still wrapped up in each other’s arms. Clearing his throat, he says, “I’m meeting a friend from New York. He’s staying at the inn a few days, checking out some properties in town. Why are you here?”
I fold my arms over my chest. “Um, my aunts live here?”
“Oh! That’s right. I knew that.” He glances at Devlin, offers a bullshit man-nod. Another awkward throat-clearing, then back to me. “I’m actually glad I ran into you again. We never got to finish our conversation the other day.”
“I’m ninety-nine percent sure all our conversations are finished, Brandt. So what, exactly, are you talking about?”
“The Halloween Ball? I figured you wouldn’t have a date, so I thought I’d do you a solid and offer to take you.”
“Do me a solid?”
Devlin leans close and mutters into my hair, “Really sweeping you off your feet, this one.”
Ignoring Devlin’s comment, Brandt sighs and shakes his head. “Violet, why are you always making things so difficult? I’m offering you a chance to go to the ball as my date. Lots of women would kill for the opportunity.”
“We best alert the police commissioner,” Devlin says, “lest the murder rate skyrocket overnight.” He wraps an arm around my waist, pulling me in close again. “Very kind of you to offer, Brandt, but your services won’t be needed. Violet and I are attending the ball together.”
My heart jumps into my throat, but I don’t dare contradict this breaking newsflash. Watching Brandt’s face contort like melting candle wax is its own reward.
“So you two are, like… a thing?” he asks, still with the melty face.
Devlin wraps his hand around the back of my neck, giving it a possessive squeeze that sets off a string of sparks all the way down to my—
“We’re, like, many things,” he says. “Would you care for the full list? A diagram, perhaps?”
“Excuse me?”
“Violet is a rich, complex woman, Mr. Remington cubed. One thing would no more encapsulate her than it could the vastness of the world’s oceans.”
Brandt’s jaw drops, but before he can unearth a witless comeback, his so-called “friend” finally plods down the stairs, calling his name. Middle-aged guy, cheap suit, hair the color of hair—yes, he’s that boring—and off they go, with no more than a cursory nod goodbye.
“I can’t believe you said all that to him!” I turn around to face Devlin, my smile wide. “Did you see his face? Goddess, Devlin. Never thought I’d say this, but you’re my hero. Truly.”
“I get that a lot.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“I have to ask, mushroom. What on earth did you ever see in that man?”
“A question I would be asking myself, if I gave even one iota of a molecule of a shred of a shit about him.” I shake my head and bite back a gag—still can’t believe I let that absolute mollusk into my bed last year. “You know how some girls go through a bad-boy phase? I was the opposite.”
“Ah, yes. The old khaki-pants-wearing, laptop-bag-slinging, personality-of-a-wet-napkin-boy phase that has fathers locking up their daughters all over creation.”
“Pretty much.”
“The safe choice is the boring choice, Violet. Write that down. Preferably not on a wet napkin.”
“Forgive me if I don’t make any plans based on that excellent life advice.” Laughing, lighter than I’ve felt all day, I head back to the kitchen and steal a fresh scone from the cooling rack, because nothing chases off the oogy-ex-boyfriend vibe like a boatload of sugary carbs. “And speaking of plans… were you serious? About going to the party together?”
Devlin plucks the scone right out of my hand and downs it in two bites. Then, with a mouth full of crumbs and a sparkle in his eyes that reignites all the desperately throbbing parts inside me, he says, “Are you serious about entertaining the idea of allowing me to accompany you?”
“Hmm. Is this the thing where you try to surreptitiously find out if you’ve got a chance before you officially invite me, just in case I say no and feed into your deep-seated rejection issues?”
“Violet?”
I select another scone from the rack. “Yes?”
“Are we going to this hometown hoedown together or not?”
“It’s not a hoedown.”
“But is it a date?”
“Yes.” I bite into the pastry—sweet, crumbly perfection.
“Yes?”
“Yep. But not a date-date.”
“A date-date? Who said anything about a date-date? Absolutely not!” Devlin laughs, then taps his lips. “It’s… it’s a… there’s a word for it, but it’s not coming to me—”
“Work function,” I supply. “Two professional colleagues attending an event together. An event that has a calendar date, but is not a date in and of itself.”
“Ah, a team-building exercise.”
“Yes! Very good for morale.”
“Exactly.”
“Precisely.”
“As long as we’re clear.” I shove in the last of the scone.
“Crystal, little mushroom.” Devlin swipes a crumb from the corner of my mouth, then licks it off his thumb. “Absolutely crystal.”