Violet looked him in the eye, hers wide and full of fake innocence. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. But we hardly know each other, and I can’t afford to have people talking about me if they see us out here alone. I’m not going to risk it.”
He squinted into the velvety night as she began to walk backward toward the wide steps, leading to the old Victorian’s circular driveway. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Just leave me alone!” she yelped, turning to take the steps with a clack of her heels until the night swallowed her whole.
Ridge blinked in confusion but decided to chalk Octopussy’s behavior up to too many apple martinis and not enough food to absorb the alcohol. He definitely didn’t have a problem leaving Violet alone. Not one.
Problem solved.
He found his feet propelling him in the direction of the interior of the house again, his eyes in search of Bernie.
Why he was so intent on finding her was a mystery. She’d been cool as a cucumber all afternoon while they’d worked to clean the barn. Answering when spoken to, avoiding all eye contact.
But he hated the hint of shame in her eyes. Hated that she might feel lesser than that viper Violet, and he was damn well going to tell her so.
If he could just find her.
Threading his way through the crowd of people, he tipped his hat to Gus Mortimer, one of the seniors from the center, as he made his way back toward the kitchen.
Pausing at the bar, he grabbed a beer from a big bucket and scanned the room. No Bernie.
Arms snaked around his waist from behind, pulling him tight to a lithe form, totally catching him off guard.
“Where’d you run off to after I went to the ladies’ room? You’re not trying to get away from me, are you, Cowboy?” someone whispered low in his ear as a tongue snaked out and licked the lobe of flesh.
Violet?
He spun around, trying to detangle himself from her aggressive hands. “I thought you left?”
She licked her lips, the smell of alcohol rife on her breath when she leaned in even closer. “I told you I was just going to the ladies’ room. Now, why don’t we get out of here and go back to my place? I do things, you know. Lots and lots of things.”
“Like forget your meds?”
She pouted at him, likely a pout most men tripped over themselves to fix, and grabbed the lapels of his jacket to pull him closer still. “Why are you being so naughty, Ridge Donovan?” she slurred.
He grabbed her wrists and set her away from him. “I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing, Violet, and to be real honest, I don’t want to know. I’ve tried to be as gentlemanly as possible, but I’m not interested, and I’d appreciate it if you kept your hands to yourself. So let’s say our goodbyes here.” He tipped his Stetson at her. “Night, Miss Violet.”
He let her wrists go in time to see her eyes flash the kind of hatred only a woman scorned could summon before he slipped around her and headed out to find Bernie.
But not before he made mention to Ben that Violet shouldn’t drive home.
* * * *
“Bernie?”
A warm hand shook her shoulder, warm and large, followed by a deep, delicious voice calling her name.
“Bernie? Are you okay?”
Her eyes popped open as she jolted backward, cracking her head on something. She winced, her hand reaching for the back of her neck. Her gaze flew up to find Ridge looking down at her, his eyes far less sharp than they’d been this afternoon.
“Let me help you up,” he grumbled.
“No, thank you. I’m fine,” she managed, feeling incredibly groggy as she braced her hands on the floor to rise.
Wait. The floor? Hadn’t she been out in the garden?
Where the hell was she?
Bernie’s gaze zipped past Ridge’s cowboy boots and noted cans stacked on shelves, a Swiffer, and more juice boxes than an elementary school cafeteria housed.
“Where am I?”
“The pantry, Bernie,” Ridge offered before ignoring her wishes and yanking her upward.
She fell into him, their bodies caught between the shelves at her back and the door someone had just closed at Ridge’s. The space was small, allowing almost no room for either of them to move.
Her breathing quickened as her heart pressed painfully against her ribs in a rapid thud. Every ripple in his body was hot against her bedazzled shirt, his warm breath almost minty against her cheek. His thick thighs straddling her much shorter frame made her sway.
Oh, this wasn’t good. Not good at all. No fraternizing with the boss.
Ridge caught her under her elbows to steady her, but he didn’t move away, making the tightening of her nipples impossible to ignore. They pressed painfully against the borrowed bra she wore, and heat rose in her belly—hot, needy heat.
She wanted to knock his Stetson off his head, rake her fingers through his thick chocolate-brown hair, press her lips to his mouth and consume him. All of him. Now.
Which was likely frowned upon in parolee/boss relations.
The suddenness of it caught her off guard. The desire was instantaneous. So immediate, she almost stopped breathing. Earlier today he’d been super-hot, but distractedly so, in a sort of yeah-yeah, he’s-easy-on-the-eyes-but-I-have-bigger-fish-to-fry sort of way.
Now? Now he was undeniably oozing sex appeal.
Ridge reached behind him, his hand jiggling the doorknob, his wide chest expanding farther, pushing against hers until she thought she’d weep. “I think someone locked us in.”
In Fee’s words, she felt faint. Jesus and a juice box, if she didn’t get away from all this smokin’ body and manly scented man, she would explode.
Licking her dry lips, she tried to slip around him, knocking over a box of cereal and scattering the colorful circles on the floor. “I’m sorry. I’ll clean that up as soon as we get out of here.”
Ridge gripped her chin, his eyes piercing hers as his thumb sizzled against the flesh of her jaw. “Relax, Bernie. It was just an accident.”
Yeah, that was how all the really rotten things in her life started. Accidents. Oops, sorry I set your hair on fire. Oops, sorry I knocked you down a flight of stairs and broke your arm. Oops, oops, oops. For most of her teenage years, she was like Carrie at the prom minus the buckets of blood.
After graduation, she’d learned to stay as far away from people as possible for a very long time. Every job she took involved working in one cubicle or another, alone as much as possible.
And just a year before she’d met Eddie, after her parents had died in a home invasion the police never solved, she’d really begun to isolate herself, moving from job to job, apartment to apartment, living off the insurance money her parents had left her between failed jobs.
But looking back now, none of those instances—only a mere handful, compared to the actual number of accidents she’d been a party to—could have been coincidences.
Yet, Eddie had convinced her they couldn’t be anything else.
Eddie…
She’d fought hard not to remember him since her incarceration. Fought to forget his betrayal.
Eddie’d wormed his way into her life and her heart at her lowest point, laughed off her mishaps—made her feel special and wanted. With no other family to call her own, allowing him to help isolate her came naturally. In fact, she’d welcomed his encouragement. She’d believed he understood why crowds troubled her and why she’d far preferred to stay in rather than catch a movie or dine out.
And she’d trusted him—with everything she had. But that had helped her get here. She wasn’t going down so easy this time.
“Bernie?” Ridge said her name, letting it roll off his tongue like a warm dollop of caramel.
A shiver slithered along her spine. She had to get out of here. Bad things would happen if she didn’t get out of this damn pantry.
Because this—this right here—this was no good. Ridge couldn’t touch her. He couldn’t look down a
t her with his melty eyes. He couldn’t make her want to sling her legs over his hips and beg him to ravish her like in some old romance novel.
“Bernie? Did you hear me? It was just an accident.”
She forcibly pulled her chin from his grasp, stifling a reluctant groan when the warmth of his fingers left her flesh. “An accident I’ll clean up the minute I can move. But first we need to get out of here. Bang on the door or something. We need to get someone’s attention.”
She knew her voice was rising in hysteria, but being in such close quarters with this man wasn’t just dangerous for her libido, it was dangerous for her parole. There had to be rules against it somewhere.
Ridge raised a fist and banged on the door then waited.
Bernie held her breath, but all she could hear was laughing and what she was able to identify as a Tony Bennett song.
Ridge rested his hand on her waist as she wobbled again, bracing her body against his as he knocked on the door once more. “The music’s pretty loud. We might be stuck in here for a little while.”
Panic was beginning to set in. “Then bang harder!”
Ridge reached up over her and plucked something off the top shelf. “Granola bar to soothe your tattered nerves?”
She held her body rigid—so rigid, her back ached. “What kind?”
He held the green wrapper up to the light. “Honey and oats.”
She wrinkled her nose and shook her head. “I only like the one with those teeny-tiny chocolate chips.”
“Can you afford to be fickle at a time like this?”
Can you move away from me before I ignite? “We need to get out of here.”
“Are you claustrophobic?”
“No. Are you?”
“No. So why so panicked, Bernie?”
Her sigh was ragged, full of frustration. “Because this…this is inappropriate. The people outside that door are going to talk. I can’t afford to get in any trouble. Did you see that whistle my parole officer has? She’ll blow out my eardrums if she finds out we’re in here alone.”
He gazed down at her, his eyes, fringed with dark eyelashes, confused. “That’s the second time someone’s used the word inappropriate with me tonight, and if you mean Greta, she’s a softie. I can handle her.”
“Well, maybe there’s a reason the word inappropriate is bandied about where you’re concerned, and of course she’s a softie. You’re not an ex-con on parole. Also, you’re Ridge Donovan. I’ve noticed you simply have to exist and it does all but make everyone around you swoon-y.” Ridge, Ridge, Ridge.
“Bernie?”
“What?”
He held up a square plastic container with a smile. A delicious, beautiful smile. “Lunchables?”
Bernie couldn’t help herself, she giggled—and that giggle turned into a belly laugh, one she had to cover her mouth to contain.
She shook her head. “The crackers are always stale.”
“Wow. You’re hard to impress. There’s not much else up here but a stray plastic Spork and a lone raisin. How can I win you over with that?”
Bernie frowned, her hand going to the stiff collar of her shirt. “You’re not supposed to want to win me over.”
“It’s just an expression. Why so skittish?”
“Do I have to spell it out for you?”
“Can you do it in numbers instead? English was my worst subject. All that reading. Romeo and Juliet and Hemingway. Worse, possessives and dangling parti-somethings. I’m much better at adding and subtracting.”
Pressing her back into the shelving, she tried to make herself as small as possible and avoid giggling. “Okay, obviously I have to spell it out. This looks bad. For me because I’m sure there are rules about being behind closed doors with your boss when you’re on parole; and for you because, well, I’m an ex-con. You don’t want people talking, do you? Fine, upstanding farmer Ridge Donovan caught in close quarters with felonious Bernice Sutton. So in math-speak, one plus one equals two. That means, when someone finds us, they’re going to add up this little scenario and I’m going to end up with a negative balance.”
He sighed with a roll of his eyes then grinned. “Clearly, math wasn’t your strong suit because that made absolutely no sense. But here’s something I learned today after I talked to Winnie about your parole. It’s not really parole, per se. It’s rehab. Yes, there are rules for your quote-end quote parole—curfews imposed, chores to do here at the rehabilitation house, etcetera. But the rules are catered to your circumstances and conviction.”
“I robbed a bank. I’m pretty sure that means no snack after dinner for me.”
“Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Did you really rob a bank?”
Did she? She didn’t remember the incident. But she’d sure been in a bank vault when the Boston PD had pointed their guns at her and screamed orders for her to get on her knees. That was something she’d never forget for as long as she lived.
“That’s what I’m told.”
“What you were told?” he asked, astonished.
She gave him a sheepish look. “Well, there’s police testimony, too.”
“I’m confused.”
Hah. “You should be me.”
“Did you have an attorney during this?”
“Nope. Things never got that far. One minute I was processed and in a holding cell, the next, Baba Yaga swept in, snatched me up while the Boston PD watched, took me to that place that’s hauntingly like the Salem Witch Trials I saw reenacted on TV—”
“The Council?”
She snapped a finger in the air. “Guys with no faces and smelly robes, sitting behind an imposingly tall thingy with this electrical hum for a backbeat?”
He chuckled, deep and low. “That’s them.”
“Right. BY took me to the Council and they sentenced me.”
“Without a trial?”
“Without a word. The guys with no faces aren’t big on conversation, I hear.”
“So let me get this straight. Baba took you from human jail and sentenced you with no trial to magic-abuse prison, and you didn’t at least protest?”
Right, because she could have gotten a word in edgewise while Baba was waving around her gavel and trying to keep her neon-pink leg warmers from poking out beneath her judge’s robe. She’d been petrified. Not that she’d admit that to Ridge.
“To whom?”
“As a witch, you have the right to a fair trial, Bernie. It’s just like human trials. You could have called sanctuary and they would have had to give you the time to find representation.”
Another word she’d have to add to her witch thesaurus. “Sanctuary? Look, I don’t know what any of that means. I just know it wasn’t like I could have googled witch lawyers. I didn’t have time to do anything. It all happened pretty quickly.”
He rubbed his hand over his jaw, now littered with delicious stubble, so late in the day. “I can’t believe you didn’t demand sanctuary.”
Had she had any idea sanctuary existed, she might have called it—or uncle—or whatever. But of all the people she didn’t want to protest her witchiness to, it was Ridge. It rang false the more she said it, and she recognized that well enough to continue to play this game.
Lifting her shoulders, she pretended nonchalance. “While I was pretty good at English in high school, I stunk at history. I didn’t think about calling anything at the time, I guess. Besides, they caught me red-handed. What else was there to do but let ’em slap the cuffs on me?”
Now his stare was intense and off-putting. “Okay, fair enough. But you do know you can always ask for a retrial, don’t you? I can’t fathom why Baba would railroad you the way she did without allowing you time to summon someone from the realm to represent you, but she broke the law. And despite what she tells you about being the baddest leader in the land, she still has to adhere to our laws—even if some of them are ancient.”
She was still stuck on the words “realm” and “summon”. But if
she asked what they meant, she was stewed.
Flapping her hands, Bernie rolled her eyes. “Summoning someone from the helm wasn’t worth it. I told you, they had a police testimony of my crime. I was an easy conviction.”
“Realm.”
“What?”
His eyes grew suspicious and dark. “It’s called the realm. You summon representation from the realm.”
Bernie nodded as if she knew what the hell he was talking about. “Right. Sorry. I’m crappy at remembering definitions and terms. Besides, the testimony is all the proof even a human court would need. I’ve done the ten months, it’s not like I can get them back, right? Anyway, none of that matters now. What matters now is getting out of here before I get into trouble.”
“You won’t get into trouble, Bernie,” he rumbled, his voice deep and mesmerizing.
Now she was growing uncomfortable. Not in a bad way. No, in fact, Ridge made her want to spill her stupid guts. But it would ruin everything. He’d mock her the same way everyone else had when they’d discovered she didn’t know anything about being a witch.
If she was going to try to figure this out, she was going to have to bluff her way through. And Ridge’s sudden easy conversation, his interest, was something she had to fight against for all she was worth before she opened her big mouth and let too much information slip from between her lips.
Still, she was curious. “So I won’t get in trouble? Says who?”
“Says me. I told you about the rules.”
Bernie’s eyes narrowed and her cheeks flushed hot. “How would you know what the specifics of my parole are?”
“I told you, I asked Winnie. I didn’t want you to have to keep calling me Mr. Donovan if at all possible,” he said on another chuckle.
He’d asked about fraternization between them? Even on a level as simple as a first-name basis, the thought warmed her. “So I will get a snack after dinner? There is a God…ess. Goddess.”
“Looks like it. And you can call me Ridge. Also, you can have a social life. You know—date, make friends, and do all sorts of things within reason. You’re here to be rehabilitated and that has its requirements, but you’re not on lockdown. So if you’re worried people will talk, don’t be.”
Witch Is The New Black (Paris, Texas Romance Book 3) Page 6
