“I bet they did. I’ve called my boyfriend worse,” Bryan said.
“Just one more. I promise I’ll get help in the morning. I’ll go to counseling and support groups and—”
“What stage is bargaining?” Bryan asked.
“It’s somewhere in the middle,” Caroline said, and then straightened, her face brightening. Only one guy did that to every girl and every other guy I knew.
It was him. He was here.
“Thanks for calling,” Reyes said, his voice like smooth bourbon.
I’d gone back to resting my head on the bar. It had gotten so heavy over the last couple of hours. So all I could see when the son of evil incarnate walked up was his crotch. The same crotch that got Miz Clay pregnant. The same crotch that I craved like a heroin addict craved, well, heroin.
“You ready to come home?”
“No.” I held up a finger. No idea why. “I’m hanging out with my friends Caroline and Bryan. And I have no idea who you are. I already told you that once today.”
I heard the humor in Reyes’s voice when he said, “Dutch, do I need to bend you over my knee?”
When he took my hand and started to drag me off my barstool, I yelled to no one in particular, “Stranger danger!”
Sadly, both Caroline and Bryan were too busy passing flirtatious glances Reyes’s way to call the cops. Damn them. No, damn him!
He stopped and lifted my face off the bar. “Are you actually drunk?”
“I think she may have been doctoring her mocha latte,” Caroline said, her face all soft and sparkly. “We aren’t supposed to have alcohol on the premises.”
He searched my pockets, causing a stir deep in my belly, and found my flask. “Sorry about this,” he said.
Just kidding. I didn’t have a flask. Like a tiny flask would get me drunk. I’d had to stop by a package store and buy a fifth of Jack. I downed half before I even walked in, then I smuggled the pint that had come with it in my jacket.
“Oh no. No problem,” Caroline said, waving off the very idea. “I think she’s had a hard day.”
“You, my friend,” I said, pointing at her, “have no idea. First, I find this homeless girl who’s been cursed and is going to die soon. Then I find out not one, but two ghost-hunting teams are following me. Stalking me. EMFing me.”
“Is she going to be okay?” Bryan asked Reyes.
“I feel so violated.”
Reyes didn’t respond to Bryan’s question. He was looking at me with his brows drawn, concern lining his face.
“Then,” I continued since I still had the floor, “I find out the ADA has a secret file on me and my husband and my baby.” I stopped and looked at them, a sadness falling over me like a shadow that blocks the sun. “I had her at the bottom of a well.”
I’d fallen down it. The well. And since I’d been close to popping, anyway, the fall sent me straight into labor.
“It’s much trickier to have a baby at the bottom of a well than one might think. First, there’s all this dirt you gotta deal with. Then you gotta boil water. No idea why. Then—”
Before I could even finish act 1 of my tirade, I was haphazardly tossed over a shoulder—admittedly a wide one—and carried out of Satellite Coffee like a sack of potatoes. Only I’d never actually seen anyone carry potatoes like that.
Reyes strapped me into Misery, his movement sharp and aggressive and just plain sexy. I started to turn the key and floor it before he could get in the other side, but my steering wheel was gone. Someone stole it! How on earth was I supposed to drive home without my steering wheel? Then it hit me. Maybe that was part of my powers.
I concentrated really hard, and Misery purred to life.
Oh, hell, yeah.
The only thing I remembered from that trip home was pretty lights reflecting off the windows, sliding past as we drove the streets of my hometown. They glittered in his eyes and reminded me of Christmas morning. He would be the present in this scenario.
* * *
I woke up days later on Fabio and wondered how I’d gotten there.
“I take it you’re awake?” It was Cookie. She sat beside me on the sofa. “You were supposed to call me the second you found anything out.”
“I know,” I said, turning away in shame. “I was so surprised and hurt and suicidal.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” she said, pulling me into a hug. Kind of. She’d actually pulled my face into her cleavage, and while it was great cleavage, I started having difficulty breathing.
I patted her shoulder.
“Now, now,” she said, rocking me.
I patted again and tried to talk from between her breasts to no avail.
“You just rest. It’ll be better tomorrow.” She tightened her hold. “If you live that long.”
Okay, she was pissed. It didn’t happen often, but it did happen.
“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice muffled. “I was upset.”
“So, instead of calling me, you sit in a bar—”
“In a coffee shop.”
“—at a bar in a coffee shop and get wasted? Were you planning to drive home like that?”
“Of course not!” I said, aghast. I shot up to look at her. “It just kind of happened.”
She rolled her eyes. “You didn’t drive home, Charley. Reyes drove you home, and Robert drove Reyes’s Cuda.”
I brightened. “I bet he enjoyed that.”
She giggled. “Made his day. First thing he said when he walked in the door: ‘That thing has so much power.’”
“Uh-oh. You don’t think he’ll get the bug, do you?”
“I hope not. But you know what?” she said, changing her mind. “He deserves to have fun. Let him get a muscle car. Or a sports car.”
“Or a Harley?” I asked, teasing.
“No. No motorcycles.”
Cookie’d had an aversion to motorcycles ever since she banged a biker on one in her younger days. She fell off and burned the shape of Indiana on her calf, the tailpipe was so hot. She’d been scared of them ever since.
“I wouldn’t have driven home,” I told her. “Surely you know that much about me.” Driving drunk never ended well. “It’s just—it’s his. I think the boy is his.”
Cookie gaped at me until the whole exchange turned uncomfortable and then asked, “Your friend from the prison told you?”