Calla shrugged and feigned indifference, trying to hide her smile. “Not necessarily true. Sometimes we women wax so we can wear bikinis to prevent people from pointing and laughing, or calling in the Bigfoot enthusiasts even.”
“Because there’s so much ocean here in Paris, Texas, that you have a need for a bikini?” Winnie teased.
“Well now, there’s the community pool. If I showed up looking like the long-lost relative of Sasquatch, the way people talk in this town, the ladies of the Bluebonnet Society would be taking up collections for a case of Bic razors before you could say ‘unsightly hair’.”
Winnie scoffed. “The community pool’s been drier than the Mohave ever since little Rhoda Lipstein was practicing elemental spells and drained it. The lifeguard said there was no reason to refill it since the season was almost over. So try again.”
Okay, so she’d gotten a wax. Guilty as charged. But when she didn’t confirm or deny the state of her wax, Winnie poked her.
“Look here, Calla, we’ve all watched for three solid months while you and our favorite cowboy Nash Ryder have circled each other like a clumsy duo, dancing the tango on Dancing with the Stars. We’ve waited. We’ve held our collective breath until we were all blue in the face. In fact, I’m pretty sure Patsy Pinkerton did turn blue in the face at one point. One of my wayward parolee witches even did a mating dance ritual with one hand tied behind her back while she read Shakespearean sonnets on the second night of the full moon at exactly 2:08 a.m. in order to—”
“A Shakespearean mating dance? Did it go something like, ‘How do I bang thee? Let me count the ways’?” Calla was still getting used to how close-knit this community was, how they rallied around when you were down and stuck their witchy noses into everyone’s business with the staunch justification it was for your own good, like it or not.
Winnie threw a hand up and shook her head, strands of her dark hair falling from her ponytail to brush at her jawline. “That’s Browning, and don’t deflect, werewolf.”
Living in a small town full of witches had taken some getting used to as a werewolf. But when her grandfather had decided to give up the building he owned, complete with an enormous four-thousand-square-foot storefront in the center of town, she’d jumped at the chance to return to the place she’d spent so many amazing, if not hotter-than-Hades summers.
Because she’d desperately needed a fresh start. Because the grind of Boston and her job as a personal assistant to the Dark Overlord, aka Reed Redding—famous local talk show host and all around anus-head—had sucked the will to live right out of her. She’d come here for a simpler, quieter life, and she’d gotten it in spades.
In the process, she’d reconnected with Nash Ryder, the mad crush of her teenage dreams. Tall, dark, handsome, sexy, funny, panty-melting warlock Nash—who now owned his family’s ranch just on the outskirts of town.
And a cowboy hat. He owned one of those, too. Oh, that cowboy hat did things to her she couldn’t quite describe.
There weren’t enough adjectives in the land to depict the extent of Nash’s yumminess.
They hadn’t seen each other since her last summer here, when she was eighteen, almost eleven years ago. Yet, the moment she’d seen him again when he’d come in to pick up his ranch hand’s mother for his surprise birthday party, it was as though only eleven seconds had passed rather than over a decade.
Winnie nudged her shoulder with a pink-tipped fingernail. “Hello in there. Deflection. You’re doing it.”
“Me? Deflect? I wasn’t deflecting. I was changing the subject.” Because it was sore. So sore.
Winnie clucked her tongue, brushing her long, dark ponytail over her shoulder before throwing one of Ben’s bibs across it. “Well, maybe that’s how all you fancy Bostonians avoid a straight answer, but here in Paris, we demand the right to stick our busy noses in where they don’t belong, don’t we Mr. Wiffle?”
George Wiffle sucked air between his dentures and dipped his graying head to hide his laughter, folding his hands over his round belly. “A-yup. ’Specially if we’re gonna get some beer.”
Winnie’s eyes twinkled. “Now, we all want to know. Are you finally going to do poor Nash tonight and put us out of our misery?”
Calla toyed with the plastic-lace tablecloth and continued to pretend not to know what Winnie was talking about. “Define ‘we all’?”