Ever since she’d come back to town, when he’d seen her lugging boxes up the stairs to the apartment she lived in with her grandfather above the senior center, her dark hair falling around her shoulders, the glisten of sweat on her forehead, her curvy bottom swaying and her firm breasts encased in frilly lace top, he’d known.
She’d just turned eighteen when she’d left Paris for the last time that summer, and he was five years older. Though, even then, Nash had wanted her. But she was too young, and her life needed living before she made serious choices.
So he’d never told her about all those feelings she evoked in him as they shared inner tubes in the creek and snuck bottles of beer from his father’s fridge.
But tonight he would. He’d tell her before they made love for the first time. He’d tell her afterward, too.
And he wasn’t going to let her Council or a needle-dick like Denny screw that up.
Chapter 3
BIC popped open the cheerfully colored stained-glass door to Winnie’s house, letting the scent of lavender and blissfully cool air flow out. “Calla! Winnie said you’d be dropping by. C’mon in.” She motioned with a chubby hand for Calla to enter, her other hand gripping the beloved whistle hanging securely around her neck; the one she used to keep the children in line at Miss Marjorie’s Preschool for the Magically Inclined.
Calla smiled at her, pulling one of her signature pink-and-purple swirled boxes from behind her back as she set Twyla Faye on the floor. “Good to see you, Greta. I brought a little something for you.”
Greta’s stern, round face lit up. “You’re killin’ me with these Peanut Butter Cap’n Crunch cupcakes, kiddo. Can’t wear all those fancy clothes Winnie talked me into buying if I keep eating them.”
Calla headed to the long kitchen table, where several of the witches residing at the house were busy making dinner, and propped the box top open. “But they make you smile, and I love seeing you happy, because I never want to make you and that whistle angry.”
“You love seeing the competition for your hottie Nash Ryder blown outta the water while I get fatter eating these things, is what you love,” she groused with a chuckle before biting into the peanut butter cupcakes and sighing. “I’m letting you have him out of the kindness of my heart because, honey, I’ve seen him stacking bales of hay without a shirt. Consider yourself lucky I don’t take you out in your sleep. But your cupcakes fill the hole of my empty longing.”
Calla laughed, preening at the look on Greta’s face as she took another bite of her cupcake.
She loved to bake for her seniors. Baking for others brought her not just great pleasure, but peace. There was a very strict order to baking, every ingredient had to be measured exactly, and when she’d worked for Reed, whose life was chaotic and noisy, baking had helped her find a modicum of control.
It had begun as a hobby, until guests attending many of the dinner parties Reed hosted had convinced her that her grandmother Lettie’s recipes were something special.
They became standards that all of Reed’s important friends insisted upon when he hosted a gathering.
Food was a universal language everyone spoke. How could anyone stay mad when you offered them a whimsical cupcake? It was her secret weapon with even the crankiest of seniors who, in some cases, resented having someone babysitting them during the day while their families worked.
“I see you brought Twyla Faye? Should I warn Icabod?” Greta asked, preparing to put her infamous whistle to her lips.
Twyla Faye had a bit of a crush on Winnie’s familiar Icabod—who was, of all things, a Cabbage Patch doll from her childhood—which made everything very weird. If TF had hair, she’d twirl it whenever the subject of Icabod came up.
“Nah. I say we surprise him with his love muffin. Besides, Twyla Faye promised to keep her scales to herself like all good lizards should, didn’t you?”
She slow blinked up at them as though she had no idea what they were talking about. “I’m only here to consult on Calla’s dress hunt, and I resent any implication otherwise.”
Greta chuckled, peering down at the lizard. “Is that a promise? Because the last time you said that, you tried to put a love spell on Ic, and we all remember how that ended, don’t we?”
Twyla Faye sighed, a long, raspy sound. “Oh, y’all stop bein’ so dramatic. It passed, didn’t it? No gnomes were psychologically damaged in the making of that spell.”
Greta bent down and looked Twyla Faye in the eye. “Only after Winnie broke the spell, you crazy, lust-mongering amphibian. It was the only way to pry Icabod off that garden gnome in the backyard. He proposed marriage to it, Twyla Faye.”
Yet another reason—among many botched spells and their resulting mayhem—why her iguana just wasn’t cut out to be a familiar.
Twyla Faye didn’t twitch when she said, “Garden gnomes get lonely, too.”