What Not to Were (2 page)

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’?”

Winnie rolled her eyes and tapped the table. “You know damn well who ‘we all’ means, but if you want a list, I can oblige. First,
me
, every employee at Miss Marjorie’s, including Miss Marjorie,
me
, BIC aka Greta,
me
, all of the seniors here at the center,
me
, Daphne and her husband Fate, not to mention every employee who’s ever worked at the hardware store since 1952,
me
, the Paris High School marching band, and pretty much anyone else with a pulse—and again,
me
. We all want to know if tonight’s the big night when you two seal the wookie-wook deal.”

Calla swallowed hard, shaking off the bad she’d left behind in Boston and replacing it with the good she’d found here in Paris—in a town full of witches and warlocks where she was only one of four or five werewolves, including her grandfather.

She was a nervous wreck about tonight. The walking, talking embodiment of neurosis—because, in fact, tonight
was
the night.

Winnie’s little girl Lola came up behind Calla and asked, in all her six-year-old innocence, “What’s wookie-wook?”

Lola was one of Calla’s favorite visitors to Hallow Moon ever. Before her uncle Ben had married Winnie, Calla had heard she was quite a handful of toddler witch, out of control, but you’d mostly never know it these days.

She pulled Lola to her lap and tweaked her pert nose with a grin. “It might be a new name for one of my super-duper cupcakes, Lola-Falola. Will you be my taste-tester if I make a batch of wookie-wooks?”

The pink in her cheeks heightened, and her sweet smile went wide. “Uh-huh. But I think we better find a new name for ’em. Wookie-wook is stupid.”

“Out of the mouths of one of the most powerful up-and-coming witches in the universe,” Winnie muttered under her breath with a shake of her head.

Lola, a witch in training, was a tiny powerhouse of magic and a direct descendant of the great Baba Yaga, who just happened to be Winnie’s aunt by marriage.

Calla smoothed one of Lola’s long braids and chuckled. “It kinda is a stupid name. I’ll let you think up a new one. How’s that?”

Winnie handed Lola a napkin and pointed to her mouth, indicating she should wipe the crumbs from the corner. “Why don’t you go finish that picture you were drawing with Miss Gertie so Miss Calla has something nice to hang on her kids wall, nugget? And when I’m done we’ll go get Uncle Ben.”

Winnie’s husband Ben was technically Lola’s uncle, left to him to raise after her mother and father were killed in an accident. But you’d never know it by the way the family had blended so beautifully or by the way Winnie and Lola felt about each other.

Winnie was Lola’s mother in every sense of the word, aside from biology.

Lola grinned and hopped off her lap to head back toward the area she’d designated especially for the children in town when they came to visit their relatives. Calla loved nothing more than to see the pictures they colored for the wall or the dinosaurs they built with Legos when she entered the center each morning.

Winnie leaned closer, her raven eyebrow raised. “Now, about that wookie-wook…”

“What’s so special about tonight that would lead you to believe anything is happening between me and Nash other than the usual dates we’ve been going on regularly?”

Winnie giggled, settling little Ben against her shoulder and patting his back. “The Harvest Dance, of course. Duh.”

Calla barked a laugh. This town and their celebrations and their gossip were all part of the reason she’d grown to love Paris so much. “Does the Harvest Dance have some special magic that inspires sealing the wookie-wook deal?”

“It did for Beulah-Mae and Ed Kowalski. They did it right on a bale of hay on the side of the gazebo just outside the VFW hall in the square during the fall festival of 2013, and had their triplets nine months later. Three little witches in training. Two girls and a boy. Just ask Miss Marjorie. She almost saw it. Also, there’s Nester and Rhonda Goodwin. Their seal-the-deal story is still bandied about in hushed whispers to this day, mostly because I’ve heard rumor it was a pretty raucous event, and that happened way back in ’82. Thus, I conclude, the Harvest Dance really is magical. So you tell me?”

Calla laughed again, tucking her hair behind her ears. “Okay, so just between you and me and the Paris High School marching band, BIC, and anyone else who’s interested,” she paused for dramatic effect and drew in a breath, “it’s no one’s business but mine and Nash’s.”

Winnie made a pouty face, her pink-glossed lower lip thrusting forward. “Boo-hiss. How about if I pinky swear not to tell a soul?”

“Oh, for sure if you pinky swear, I’d give up intel that sensitive. Pinky swears are sacred and bound by horrific punishments if broken. Or not.”

Gus Mortimer shambled up to them, stopping to lean down near Winnie, a conspiratorial gleam in his eye, his grin wicked. “You want me to whip up one of them tell-all spells? We’ll have her singin’ like a canary in no time.”

Calla pointed to the air-hockey table. “You, go get your air hockey on with Miss Maisey and mind your P’s and Q’s or you only get one vegetable with dinner tonight, pal, and absolutely no fruit cup,” she teased.

He stuck his tongue out at her, the flaps of his old pilot’s hat bobbing. “You’re the meanest old-geezer babysitter in the land.”

Winnie reached for her hand and grinned when she patted it. “You do know I’m just razzing you, right? That I would never pressure you to tell me if you’re finally going to commit to Nash by making his eyeballs roll to the back of his head unless you really, really,
really
wanted to share.”

Calla loved Winnie—from the second she’d come into the senior center at the very end of her pregnancy and brought four dozen cupcakes for the seniors. Cupcakes she’d sworn she was going to eat all on her own in an effort to crowd little Ben out of her uterus via cake batter and a rush of sugar.

She loved that, to hear people in town tell it, Winnie had overcome some huge obstacles of her own when she’d first arrived in Paris. But what she loved most about Winnie was that she helped others with their obstacles, too, by continuing the legacy Ben’s sister had begun, running a halfway house for witches who were on parole for magic abuse—the very position Winnie had been in just a little over a year ago.

Calla treasured their almost immediate friendship, but this night with Nash was a touchy subject for her—almost too touchy even for girl talk with Winnie. She’d never confided what happened to anyone, but it would be the first intimate encounter she’d had with a man since…

“Oh, you would too pressure me.” But it wasn’t malicious pressure. It was done in the spirit of girl-bonding, and Calla knew that in her heart.

But still…

“Okay, I would,” Winnie confessed with an impish grin, her beautiful face wreathed in that special glow she always had. “So tell me or I’m going to have to use my magic wand. You don’t want me to break out,” she lowered her voice so the two other customers wouldn’t hear her, “The. Wand. Do you?”

Calla mock shivered, running her hands over her arms. Winnie’s magic wand was legendary here in Paris. To Calla, it looked like a purple sparkle stick, but to hear the people of Paris tout its abilities was to compare it to the Holy Grail.

“No fair. I’m nothing but a lowly werewolf with no magic. But I defy you to out-shed me.”

Winnie giggled, placing Ben in his carrier and securing the seatbelts. “Okay, so you’re not going to tell me. Fine. But I’m here to tell
you
, I won’t be there for the festivities because Ben’s aunt Yaga needs us in Salem. So we’ll be gone for the entire weekend and I won’t be able to dish. But I’ll make sure Daphne looks out for you.”

Daphne, another witch, who was married to the actual Fate, was fashionable and fabulous and had welcomed her with warmth and friendship. She loved Daphne, but she wasn’t Winnie.

Panic seized her. Winnie wasn’t going to be at the dance. Shit. What if she needed some girl support? What if everything with Nash went horribly wrong and she needed a shoulder to cry on?

What could go wrong, Calla?

You know what could go wrong
.

Would it hurt to talk about her deep-seated fears and insecurities with Winnie? Would it hurt to tell her why she’d waited as long as she had to sleep with Nash instead of always avoiding the question?

Mostly it was because she couldn’t bring herself to say the words out loud. Still. After an entire year.

So rather than share the one last intimate detail of her life, the one that had made her leave Boston forever, Calla made something up. “I’m worried about what I’m going to wear. I hear the Harvest Dance is a reason to gussie up. Most of my stuff is still in boxes in Boston.”

At the Dark Overlord’s, in the guesthouse where she’d lived for six solid years while she’d catered to his every outrageous, only-sparkling-water-in-a-bottle, wafer-thin-cucumber-slices-for-the-eyes, one-quarter-cup-of-no-pulp-orange-juice-and-not-a-drop-more whim. Reed still had it all because she couldn’t face him long enough to reclaim it.

The dicknuckle.

Fuck, she hated what a coward she’d turned into that last night as Reed’s assistant. But she was working toward healing her shame one day at a time. And she was almost there.

Except for tonight. If she could just get past tonight. If Nash turned out to be the man she thought he was…

Why does everything hinge on Nash being anything, Calla? You are who you are, and if he or any other man doesn’t like it, they can shove it up their unworthy, shallow asses!
the feminist in her screamed.

But the feminist in her wanted Nash to be a decent guy. Wanted it desperately—because she was falling; falling hard for him and it would never do if he ended up being a bag of dicks.

As Winnie rose, interrupting her troubled thoughts, she smiled at Calla and waved a dismissive hand. “Is that all? A dress? Don’t be silly. I have a million things you can wear. Just borrow something of mine.”

She shook her head. Winnie was pretty tall, but at five-ten, still shorter than Calla was by at least two inches. “I’m too tall to wear anything of yours. My leg alone is as long as your torso.”

She wiggled her perfectly plucked raven eyebrows. “Then whatever you choose will be a little short, and if tonight’s the night, not that I’m pressuring you, short
so
works. Now, not another word. Kirby should be home by the time you need to get ready and if not, BIC won’t be far behind. She’s our parolee babysitter for the weekend.”

Calla laughed at the nickname Winnie had given Greta. “Why don’t you just call BIC Greta? It’s been a year since she was your parole officer.”

“Because she’ll always be Bitch In Charge to me, and I secretly think she likes it. Anyway, if BIC’s not there, Kirby will let you in, right?” she asked one of Calla’s favorite employees who handled pickups and drop offs for the seniors.

As part of the rehabilitation program for magic abusers that Winnie and her warlock husband Ben ran in a big, rambling Victorian, the women on parole had to work and contribute to society without the use of their magic.

When Kirby had first come to the program, Winnie had encouraged her to apply at Hallow Moon despite her doubts about Kirby’s potential for rehabilitation. But Kirby had proven them all wrong. She’d never once, to Calla’s knowledge anyway, used her magic for ill-gotten means, she was dependable, always on time, and the seniors really liked her, and so did Calla. She’d come to depend on her more than any other employee she had.

Kirby wiped her hands on the towel she was using to dry tables and nodded with a slight smile—but still, a smile. One that had grown brighter in the six months since she’d begun to work for Calla. “You bet, Boss.”