Witch Is The New Black (10 page)

“All boys flirt with pretty girls,” Gus teased, sticking his thumbs under the suspenders holding up his plaid shorts. “I was just tellin’ Bernie how much we all like her.”

Calla pulled off her riding gloves and smiled at Bernie, her pale skin flushed, her eyes clear and bright. “Now that much is true. We
do
like you, Bernie. In fact, we like you so much, we were all wondering if you’d come over to the center tonight? Call the numbers for bingo for us? The seniors, every last one, enjoy your company so much, and while sometimes bingo can be a bit chaotic—”

“It’s that damned Glenda-Jo!” Gus crowed, sticking a long thread of golden hay between his teeth. “Her and all those fruity troll dolls she lines up like soldiers of bingo death as if they’re gonna take out her opponents. Damn batshit, is what she is. All I did was breathe on one and I thought she was gonna bust a vein.”

Calla tsked Gus with a grin, swatting him with her glove. “Oh, you did not just
breathe
, Mortimer. You wiggled your little warlock finger and knocked them over like dominos. I saw you, buddy. You know how Glenda-Jo feels about her trolls and bingo and her crazy superstitions. It was all-out war that night. You provoked her into summoning a Gila monster. Do you have any idea how difficult he was to get rid of? It took Winnie and three other witches to banish him.”

Twyla Faye swished her long tail, her eyes blinking in slow motion up at Gus. “Y’all need a leash, I tell you. I’ve never seen so many ill-mannered centuries old witches in my life! I was almost eaten that night, Gus! Why, you’d think you were all raised in a zoo,” she drawled.

Bernie looked down at Twyla Faye and chuckled. She was still getting used to the talking iguana Calla had adopted after being abandoned by her former witch, but along with everything else, a talking iguana was just another addition to this new world she lived in.

Calla grimaced as she leaned on the barn door. “I swear it’s not as bad as it sounds. Don’t let a little old Gila monster scare you off. We managed to rustle him up…eventually.”

Bernie couldn’t help but grin. “Me, scared? Troll dolls, Gila monsters, brooms, and chaos. Who’d wanna miss that? I’m so in. I’d be happy to help on bingo night.”

Suddenly, she had more than a mission. She had inclusion into this circle of people who claimed she belonged to them, and while she was here, she wanted to treat that with the utmost care and respect.

* * * *

Ridge hadn’t been able to forget that night in the pantry. And as he watched Bernie, sitting with the seniors at the picnic table under the shade of a pecan tree, helping them plant herb seedlings while holding his hen, Miss Prissy, in her lap, his jeans tightened.

She even looked beautiful in a dress three sizes too big for her, billowing about her legs, her strawberry hair falling around her shoulders in waves of blonde and red. Not even the lazy roll of his favorite creek, just behind his mother’s potting shed to the far right of his equally favorite tree, soothed him today. He was restless and cranky and that had everything to do with Bernie.

This incessant thinking about Bernie didn’t make any sense at all. He’d spent maybe ten minutes in what was essentially a closet with her, joking about food and her parole. Yet, he couldn’t stop seeing her big green eyes staring up at him. He couldn’t stop reliving her much shorter, svelte frame pressing against his own.

This wasn’t like him—to linger for so long when it came to a woman. No woman in at least a hundred years had haunted his dreams quite this way.

He tried to tell himself he was merely intrigued by her elusiveness, curious about her obvious fear she’d make one wrong move, but those things had nothing to do with his body’s reaction to hers.

All while she’d sidestepped his questions, Bernie’d sent signals, making it pretty clear she was here to do her time and hit the road.

Which was something else troubling him. Her time served. Why hadn’t she called sanctuary at Council? At least in order to get a fair trial? And how had she managed not to have a trial at all and still come away only doing ten months when she claimed there were official witnesses to her guilt?

He smelled fish. Rotten fish. The moment Baba Yaga would take his call, he was going to find out what the hell was going on.

But why did he care if Bernie wasn’t given a fair trial? Why was that his business?

She’d avoided him all week, and he’d done the same for obvious reasons. He didn’t need to sate his curiosity with a woman who was as hell-bent on leaving Paris as he was.

All that aside, now he was gawking at her from the cover of his old pickup, Betty-Boop, his mouth watering at the flare of her hips in her outdated dress, the luscious upward tilt of her breasts. She was sexy as hell, even in a dress that did little but cover everything she owned, and still he wanted to peel it off her body to find out
what
she owned.

Fuck.

Grabbing her check, her shoved the paper in his shirt pocket and popped open the truck door, closing it with a hard shove for good measure.

As he approached, Calla’s grandfather, Ezra, waved. “Ridge! Good to see you. You senior-slumming today?”

Ridge liked Ezra, respected him, had known him the better part of his life. What he respected most about Ezra was he’d somehow managed to stick it out in a town full of witches as a werewolf.

He chuckled down at him. “You know I can’t resist this bunch, Ezra. I’m like a moth to their flame.”

“That’s not moths, Ridgie-boy,” Clive snickered, tucking his chew inside his cheek. “That’s moth
balls
, and it ain’t no flame. Unless you’re smellin’ Flora’s clothes burnin’, that is.”

Ridge watched Bernie fight a grin when she tapped Clive on the back and gave him “the look”. “Clive Stillwater, I can’t believe you just said that! Didn’t we agree it’s not nice to pull Flora’s pigtails in lieu of putting in the work and using your words? Your honest ones? Honey gets you more than vinegar ever will,” she chided the old man, and did so quite comfortably, Ridge noted.

Flora scooped up some of the dirt from her seedling planter and flicked it at Clive. “You just watch yourself there, you pruney, geriatric Magic Mike, or I’ll see the image of your face in my cauldron’s brew tonight!”

Bernie threw up a finger as she looked across the wide table at Flora, her eyes surprised. “Wait, you really have a cauldron?”

Everyone paused a moment, silent, while a puffy white cloud passed over the sun, and every senior eye was on Bernie.

The breeze lifted her hair as she stared back at them.

But then Glenda-Jo’s fingers went directly to the pearls around her neck as she laughed. “You’re so funny, Bernie. Some of the things you say make my stomach plum hurt from laughin’! Of course we don’t have cauldrons anymore. Tupperware is much easier on the back than hauling around those big cast-iron things these days. Why, we haven’t had cauldrons in at least two hundred years. I use my old one as a planter.”

Ridge saw the way Bernie’s face changed, a brief flicker of recognition to cover her confusion before she blurted, “Right! Sorry, it must be the heat, messing with my brain. Phew, like an inferno out here, right? Nonetheless, no more talk of mothballs and cauldrons. We have oregano to plant if we hope to have some fresh for the spaghetti dinner come early fall.”

Her reaction to cauldrons was odd. Curiouser and curiouser still.

But you’re not going to linger, are you, Donovan?

Nope. He wasn’t going to linger. Rolling his shoulders, he looked directly at the woman he was no longer lingering over. “Bernie? Can I have a word with you, please?”

She rose slowly and hesitantly, planting her palms on the table and slipping off the bench. “Of course, Mr. Donovan.”

“
Mr. Donovan
,” George Wiffle spouted on a cackle. “Hah! We’re all friends here. No need for formalities.”

“You hush now, George, and mind your manners,” Calla reprimanded, her stern teacher’s look in place.

Bernie’s footsteps followed behind him toward the barn, and if footsteps could be reluctant, hers sure sounded heavy with dread.

He didn’t want her to hate the idea of having a conversation with him. In fact, that bugged the shit out of him.

Stop lingering
.

Turning to face her, he pulled her paycheck from his pocket and held it up. “Your paycheck for the week, with a small added bonus for keeping Flora from killing Clive.”

She visibly swallowed when she took the slip of paper and calculated the amount. “I can’t take that.”

“Of course you can.”

She backed away, her poofy skirt fluttering around her legs. “No. No, I can’t. It’s too much.”

“It’s only an extra fifty dollars, Bernie. No big deal.”

“It’s fifty dollars I didn’t earn.”

“On the contrary. You more than earned it when you kept Flora from holding Clive under the creek while y’all were skimming rocks.”

She fought a grin, but it happened anyway. “You heard about that?”

“Who
didn’t
hear Clive caterwaulin’ like he was being skinned alive? All of Paris heard it.”

Her beautiful face relaxed for a moment as she recollected the memory. “I can’t tell you the kind of grip Flora has. For a woman of her age, she had Clive’s shirt in a hold that would rival The Rock’s strength.”

Ridge found himself smiling, too. “Hah! Flora’s a livewire, huh? Either way, you’ve done a really good job helping Calla, doing your chores and such. You deserve the extra money.”

Now she licked her lips in a nervous flick of her tongue, making his stomach shift and his chest tighten. “Please don’t pay me any special favors. I just want to do—”

“Your time and hightail it on outta here. I know. I think you’ve said that once or twice. Look, this isn’t a special favor. This is me thanking you for keeping me sane all week long while I try to get this place back in order. That’s all.”

“I don’t want the other girls at the house to think you’re playing favorites,” she added, her lips thin and almost angry.

He took a step closer to her, just to get a long-distance scent of her sun-kissed hair. “You mean like Vanessa, who spends more time staring at her reflection in the watering trough than she does actually feeding the chickens? Or Katrina, who claims she’s allergic to the sun and sits under the pecan tree napping?”

“I don’t mean that at all, and you know it.”

“Then what do you mean, Bernie?”

Her chest heaved upward when she breathed in, as though she were fighting to keep something from spilling out. “You know what.”

“Nope. I sure don’t. So why don’t you tell me what?”

“I can’t afford to have people talking. I told you that at the party.”

He dipped his head in a nod, growing irritated by her suggestion he was playing favorites. Did he find her attractive? Yep. But he’d pay Vanessa just as much without the attraction if she lifted a single finger.

“Riiight. I’m a fine, upstanding farmer; you’re an ex-con. I remember. But I feel differently about it than you. I’d pay the other women more, too, if they took half the initiative you have. So take your check, say thank you, and let’s move on.”

“I bet you always get what you want.”

“Obviously not. You’re standing here not giving me what I want.”

She shook a finger at him, moving in closer. “You know
why
you always get what you want?”

Ridge crossed his arms over his chest and lifted one eyebrow. “I’m all on pins and needles.”

“You get what you want because you’re good-looking. Winnie and Calla gush over you and they’re married. What is it about you and that charm that makes you think you’re irresistible to all women? Even the senior ladies are always talking about how amazing you are. Oh, that Ridge Donovan, he’s soooo handsome. Swoon, swoon, swoon,” she mocked with a southern drawl, fanning herself with the check.

Did they really say that about him? It was kinda cute. Maybe not so cute to Bernie, but he was getting a kick out of it. “And this bothers you why, Bernie Sutton?”

She held up the check, her eyes fiery when she stood on tiptoe. “I’ll tell you why,” she hissed—just before she reached upward with both hands, bracketed his face and planted one right on him.

Her full, soft lips covered his until he thought his eyeballs would roll back in his head, tasting like sin and cherries, consuming, discovering, until his arms wound around her waist and he hauled her upward, molding her against him.

They fell back against the barn wall, their breathing harsh, their tongues meeting, meshing, dueling, raspy silk against silk.

Her breasts crushed against his chest, her hips molded to his as he tucked her close, and his jeans tightened.

And then she was pulling away on a gasp, struggling out of his arms and dropping to the ground, the check still in her hand. Her wide green eyes round with surprise.

“Oh hell! Oh God. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. I’m sorry! I—I—I don’t know what…why…I’m sorry. That won’t ever happen again. I promise,” she said on an almost strangled sob.

He was still trying to recuperate enough from the instantaneous desire she stirred in him to reassure her, when there was a loud crash of screeching metal, followed by screams.

They both turned and ran out of the barn together just in time to see his truck take out the gardening shed behind the pecan tree, swerving into the pleated side of it with a howl of metal against metal.

Both the shed and Betty Boop ended up teetering on the brink of the creek. But the squeal of her tires, the chasse wobbling back and forth on the edge, gave Ridge small hope she might hold.

“She’s gonna blow!” George yelled, waving his arms as the seniors gathered in a huddle, their magic wands appearing in their grizzled hands as they began to chant a prevention spell.

But likely, that wouldn’t help old Betty Boop. Nothing would, with the lockdown his father had on magic at the farm. Because Betty was a farm truck—used for farm labor.

Shit.

Betty paused for a moment, almost as if daring anyone to try to prevent her from pushing the whole damn shed into the creek—just before it pushed the whole damn tin box into the creek.