Bewitched by Bella's Brother (4 page)

works better.”

Sebastian made an “ick” sound. “That’s going to be one

thing I don’t miss,” he told her seriously. Sebastian hated the heat, and Bella had always claimed to as well. That

didn’t stop her from looking stunning in a bikini, but neither of them was a happy camper on days like this one, where the mercury didn’t climb anywhere because it was too busy

melting. “If it gets any hotter, I’m going to have to break out the cargo shorts; that’s always a bad idea.”

“I don’t know,” Bella said, seeming to lapse into their

normal banter again. “You look pretty hot in cargo shorts.”

“Yes, why yes I do,” Sebastian agreed, winking at

Jordan, who giggled. “But I don’t like sweating anywhere but inside a gym. It’s against my creed.”

“But you can’t run if you don’t like to sweat!” Jordan

protested, and Sebastian nodded seriously.

“That’s the idea!” he said, making his eyes big.

The kid giggled again, this time through a mouthful of

cereal.

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“And if you sweat in a gym, they’ve got the air

conditioning cranked to south of an Eskimo’s cold toes, and
poof
”—he wiggled his fingers—“no sweat!”

“Only if you’re not vain, Sebastian,” Bella said dryly.

“I’ve seen you sweat at the gym.”

Sebastian blushed. “It’s not nice to point that out,” he mumbled.

Bella laughed and looked at Jordan, as though to get

him to share the joke. “He’s very fond of his pretty muscles,”

she said with mock seriousness, and Jordan wrinkled his

nose.

“I just like running faster,” Jordan said. “I like to run across an African jungle and pretend I’m a lion.”

Sebastian smiled at him again. “Do they have any lions

in your book?” He nodded to the origami book, and the kid looked excited and then depressed.

“No. Only bugs. Bugs don’t run. Lions are mammals.

Lions run.”

Sebastian nodded sagely. “I’ll look for a book with lions in it at the bookstore.”

Jordan smiled at him, but gave no effusive thanks.

Sebastian was coming to realize that the greeting he’d gotten when he’d walked into the kitchen was as talkative as the kid got. Silence fell again, and Sebastian’s attention

wandered as he thought about how to fill it. Asa was making himself busy at the counter, and without meaning to,

Sebastian felt his attention zero in on the most inappropriate place possible.

“Sebastian—spicy or sweet?”

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“Gurk?” He’d been trying not to look at Asa’s backside.

It looked good in khakis—tight, muscular, tasty. It had

looked better naked. The question had been too close to his own, more prurient thoughts for comfort.

“Your bagel. I’ve got tomato pesto spread or cream

cheese and strawberry jam; how do you like your bagel?”

“Spicy,” Sebastian said dumbly.

“Do you want ham in the middle?”

“Yes, please. Why are you making me a bagel again?”

Asa caught the bagel as it popped out of the toaster and didn’t answer.

“Because he likes to mother us,” Bella said, and Asa

shrugged. Another silence fell, one in which the only one who seemed to be uncomfortable was Sebastian himself.

“I’m going to be talking to myself by the end of the

summer, aren’t I?” Sebastian wondered aloud, and Jordan

looked at him guilelessly.

“I’ll talk to you. As long as you tell me about bugs.”

Asa put down what looked to be a gourmet bagel with

some amazing
schmear
and some sliced ham in the middle.

It was on a plate with an orange garnish, and Sebastian

thought he’d never been served breakfast with quite so much cavalier grace.

“Can we stick to lions, kid?” Sebastian asked, shaking

out the napkin that had come with the bagel. He took a bite and closed his eyes. Oh God. Did this guy have a bagel

delivery truck or something, because this thing had that

“just baked” taste soaked in every pore of the bread. “I really want to enjoy this,” he said through a partially full mouth.

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This time, he didn’t seem to mind so much when silence

fell over the kitchen.

But by the time he and Bella had hopped into

Sebastian’s Volkswagen Beetle (second generation, of course) and they were zipping around an appalling number of curves to get to Auburn via Ophir, the full impact of the situation had sunk in.

“Oh my God!” Sebastian whined, as Bella took the turns

like a pro. “You’re a family of non-talkers. I mean, I thought I was safe, because I met the rest of you—but you and Asa, for the love of sitcom television, has neither of you heard of light conversation?”

Bella arched a perfectly shaped brow at him. “I didn’t

hear you complaining after he fed you.”

Sebastian gave a satisfied grunt, in spite of himself.

“Really—who would complain about a bagel like that? But

Bella—don’t you guys ever talk?”

Bella shrugged. “I told you; we’re the quiet ones.”

“That’s an awful lot of white repression for me… I don’t know if I can make it.”

They came to a three-way stop on Fowler, and Bella

paused to let a procession of cars pass her on 193. “I think it will be good for you, sweetie.”

“Oh please… it’s like going without oxygen!”

Bella shook her head, put her car into first, and hit the accelerator like a linebacker sacking a quarterback. The car lurched across the road and gunned into its place in the long procession of cars wending their way through the foothills, and Sebastian sent a green smile over his shoulder at the car behind them. A woman with coffee, a cigarette, and a

Bluetooth headpiece glared at him, and he shrugged,

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figuring someone with that many activities to do in the car couldn’t be in that much of a hurry.

“You talk too much, Sebastian. You’re always trying to

cover silence with banter. Asa always just listens. You could learn a lot from him.”

“Easy enough for you to say,” Sebastian muttered. “You

grew up with happy noise. I grew up with silence—

remember? Happy noise trumps silence, hands down.”

Bella couldn’t look at him this time because they hit a

series of curves that made Sebastian glad he wasn’t driving, but he felt her regard anyway.

“Not when you’re using the happy noise to cover up

what you really want.”

What? “Huh?”

She shook her head. “Never mind. Tell me again what

kind of tool our GM is?”

Sebastian chuckled evilly. “Princess, I don’t wear this T-shirt to piss off just anybody.” It was true. Sebastian might have had a flamboyant T-shirt collection that he loved as much as framed Impressionist prints, and he could talk like it was an Olympic sport, but he only went totally swish when it would annoy the hell out someone who looked down on

him.

Their general manager was a conservative man in his

forties, with a wife and two children and a chip on his

shoulder about working in a bookstore. Sebastian and Bella were not the
only
ones with master’s degrees, and he wanted to make sure they both knew it. (Sebastian only wished there were some way he could remind the guy he had a PhD

without looking totally pretentious.)

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The man took one look at Sebastian’s T-shirt, turned

purple, and sputtered. Sebastian and Bella met eyes and

waited to see if he’d tackle the moment head-on, with the

“not appropriate work attire” speech, or if he’d just cast furtive glances at Sebastian for the rest of the day, to see if he really
acted
as gay as the T-shirt implied.

He chose option B, which was a great deal of fun as far

as Sebastian and Bella were concerned. Every time

Sebastian smiled, shifted his hips, or laughed, there was Mike Greavy, looking to see if Sebastian was doing that

because he was gay, or because he was just a funny guy.

The fifth or sixth time he caught Mike’s eyes on him as he helped a customer, Sebastian blew the guy a flirty little kiss and waved.

Mike turned red and went back to over-ordering on the

Nora Roberts titles. Bella saw it, too, and the two of them burst into a fit of giggles that sustained them until lunch. On their way across the plaza to a salad place for lunch, one of the girls whose shift had just ended caught up with them as they walked. Julie was older—probably in her forties, with three children. She worked part time, and from what

Sebastian could see, she had an absolutely zinging sense of humor.

“That wasn’t nice,” she said with a mild smirk as they

adjusted their pace to hers.

“What wasn’t?” Sebastian asked guilelessly.

Julie snickered. “I saw that; you know, Mike holds

grudges. If you’re not careful, you’re going to be working four-hour closing shifts six nights a week.”

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Bella shook her head no. “Naw—Sebastian’s buddies

with the regional GM; she got him our job here. Mike’s gotta be nice to us or we’ll tell Rhonda on him.”

Sebastian was more than buddies. Rhonda had told him

more than once that if Sebastian so much as looked at her pretty, she’d give him the GM position of his choice and oust whoever was there already.

Julie tilted her head back and laughed. “Brilliant!

Excellent—I know you guys aren’t here for long, but do me a favor, would ya? Give him hell! Man, I’ll go to Hot Topic myself; there are T-shirts
way
more offensive than that.”

Sebastian and Bella looked at each other. It had been a

long time since they’d gone shopping together. “We are living rent free,” Bella said, and Sebastian grinned.

“We’ve got Wednesday off,” he said. And then he

thought, “We can take Jordan too.”

Bella looked surprised—but not unhappy. “Asa’d like

that,” she agreed. Sebastian had learned his lesson, though; he didn’t mention that she sounded like Asa’s opinion of her really mattered.

Julie looked at them wistfully. “Alas, I can’t go,” she

murmured. “Too many kids, too little time. But look at

something for me, wouldya? You know, some sort of large-

sized Goth-mom thing.” Julie was pleasantly round. “Don’t buy it, you know, because I can’t afford it—but look at it and say, ‘Yeah—that weird old woman from work would like that!’

It’ll be just like I was in high school again.” Sebastian and Bella had been holding off on a laugh as she spoke, but by the time she was done—with a pitch-perfect and straight-faced delivery—they were giggling helplessly, holding onto each other in support.

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“We’ll do that,” Sebastian told her, looping an arm

around her shoulders. She was barely five-foot-two, and she grinned up at him from eyes that were young, even if her face looked comfortably middle-aged.

“Oh my god—honey, if I’d known you in my theater

days, I would have been so helplessly in love with you!”

Sebastian cocked his head, bemused. “I bet you say that

to all the gay men,” he said, hoping she hadn’t thought the T-shirt was just a joke.

She hadn’t. “Oh yeah—you name a gay theater major, I

had a crush. Worst. Gaydar. Ever. That’s okay, though,” she said, grinning. “When you’re that bad at figuring out who’s gay and who’s not, you pretty much have to be liberal, or you’re going to offend a whole lot of people.”

Needless to say, Sebastian and Bella were completely in

love with Miss Julie-middle-aged-mom-with-a-philosophy-

doctorate well before they’d finished their salads. She was acerbic, funny, and obviously in love with her three children and their equally middle-aged father. She was also Mike

Greavy’s most helpless victim.

“Here, watch,” she said grimly as they walked back

inside the store. “He’ll have changed my schedule just to dick with me, because he knows he can’t do it to you.”

She was right, of course, but the good news was that

she worked Wednesday night now instead of Wednesday

morning. They totally tabled the shopping trip and asked Julie if she wanted to bring her kids to Asa’s to swim.

It wasn’t until they’d clocked out and were driving

toward Asa’s work site that it hit Sebastian that he and Bella had just changed their plans twice in one day in order to help make Jordan’s summer a little less lonely.

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“And ours too,” Bella pointed out gently. “It’s not like we hung out a lot with the people down at the Davis store.”

Sebastian shrugged. “Yeah, well, you and me are

usually pretty self-sufficient.”

Sebastian was driving this time; since he knew the

roads now, he didn’t have any excuses to let Bella take the wheel. That didn’t keep him from catching the enigmatic look Bella sent him.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said, shaking her head. “Nothing. I….”

She looked out the window. “I don’t think self-sufficient is what my family needs right now, that’s all.”

Sebastian took his hand off the gearshift and used it to stroke her hair back from her face. “Are you ever going to tell me what happened?” he asked. “You love your brother very-much-a-lot; even a selfish bitch like me can see it. Why haven’t you talked to him in so long?”

He had to shift into second again as they neared a

curve, so he moved his hand, but he saw Bella lean into the touch as it left her. She was not usually so needy.

“Not now,” she sighed, moving away to rest her forehead