No Quick Fix: Torus Intercession Book One, page 14
“What if he comes back once he gets out?” Jenny asked me.
“Then you’ll call me,” I told her, reciting my number so she could put it in her phone.
I saw her exhale all her fear, utterly certain I would protect her, and I had my own stab of worry about how I would go about doing that once I went home, but the director of the Ursa Women’s Shelter, Megan Farraday, who was on Emery’s board of directors at Darrow, was there helping out, and she and I had a nice talk about her excellent relationship with the Whitefish Police Department.
“They’ll come running if you’re not here,” she assured me.
I didn’t like the idea of the delay. “Well, I’m here now, and I run twice a day, so I’ll check on her when I do.”
She was smiling at me. “And who knows, Mr. Calder, you just might end up staying. I’d love to have our group endorse you for sheriff.”
I squinted at her. “Ma’am, I live in Chicago.”
“For now.”
For now? They were all nuts. “I’m sure you’ll find a wonderful candidate for sheriff.”
Her eyes were locked on me. “Yes, Mr. Calder, I’m sure we will.”
All of them were seriously insane.
Olivia called me when I was on my way home, having left Jenny Rubio with more people than she actually needed, and asked me to please come to the craft fair and pick her up because she wanted to go home but her father was stuck there and couldn’t leave.
“It’s all junk, Brann. I wanna come home and play with you.”
“Does your father know you’re calling me?”
“Yeah,” she said like I was an idiot. “’Course. I’m using his phone.”
“And where is he?”
“He’s looking at metal suns with Lydia.”
“I have no idea what that is.”
“Well, come see, then. It’s really lame.”
“You’re supposed to be spending time with your father and Lydia and your sister. I don’t want to interrupt family time.”
“It’s not family time if you’re not here; don’t be dumb.”
Her telling me I was part of her family only gave me a small heart attack. It didn’t kill me outright like I thought it would. Stupid kid making me have stupid feelings about things I couldn’t have. It was annoying as hell.
“Don’t you have to paint the flag of Argentina?” I reminded her.
“Oh, yeah,” she said, less than thrilled. “I forgot I told you about that.”
I chuckled because I could just imagine her little scrunched-up face. “I’ll see you guys at home later.”
“No,” she whined. “Come now.”
“I don’t—”
“Daddy!” she yelled into the phone, which nearly took out my right eardrum. “Talk to Brann and tell him to come get me.”
I was going to reiterate that I would see her back at the house, but then there was his voice, all silvery and rumbling on the other end of the line.
“Brann?”
“Hey, sorry about her calling me. You shouldn’t have let her have the—”
“Are you done visiting with the sheriff?”
“How did you know I was—”
“I saw you drive by in the patrol car a little while ago. I waved, but you didn’t see me.”
“I’m sorry. I was probably still reeling from having Mrs. Velazquez hit on me.”
He laughed and it rolled through me, warming me up all over and especially in places that were not helping me want to go back to Chicago anytime soon. Thinking sinful thoughts about a man who was about to get married was ten kinds of stupid.
“Every time she sees me, she tells me to leave Lydia,” he said, chuckling. “And her pumpkin cheesecake is amazing. I think she uses it as bait.”
“Yeah, I got offered the same thing.”
“Well, of course you did. I’d offer you pie myself.”
I would take whatever he offered in a heartbeat. “So,” I said, gulping around my rapidly closing throat, my voice a raspy whisper, “where are you?”
“We’re looking at metal sculptures toward the back. Olivia’s about to go catatonic, and April is walking around with her friend Lucy and her mother and a couple of other girls.”
“Okay then, is it all right if I come and get my girl, because she does actually need to color the map of Argentina and explain to her class about one great export, besides Lionel Messi, that the country has.”
“We’re almost done here; we can all go home together. Take a walk over here so we can ride home and stop at the store.”
It sounded so settled and domestic, and the longing that surged through me was a surprise. Because yes, I knew I wanted him, but to think there was even more I wanted—family, home—was not something I had given much thought to before.
“Don’t you have things to do with Lydia? I don’t want to—”
“Stop trying to get rid of me,” he teased. “I like spending time with my family too, you know. And Lydia has a lot to do, and now she has friends in town.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean to imply that you didn’t want to spend time with your girls or—”
“Not only the girls,” he murmured. “You just arrived, and you’re sort of interesting.”
My heart squeezed with words that seemed simply kind and generous on the surface but struck a chord in me much deeper.
“Walk faster, Calder,” he ordered and then hung up.
The man would be the death of me, I could tell.
I thought when Emery said metal sculptures that he meant small pieces that would go on an end table or something. That wasn’t what it was. These were ginormous, “fill up a wall in your house” sized installation works.
Olivia saw me and bolted over, grabbed hold of my hand, and squeezed tight.
“What?”
“Dying… of… boredom,” she choked out, pretending to faint.
I picked her up, and she draped herself over my shoulder. “Are you gonna make it?”
“Need… ice cream… hurry,” she said, her face muffled in the side of my neck.
“You’re layin’ it on a bit thick, don’t ya think?”
She coughed for emphasis as I felt a hand on the small of my back. Turning my head, I found Emery there beside me, close.
“Hey,” I greeted him, holding his reclining daughter. “I think Ophelia and I are gonna head home.”
“O-liv-vee-ah,” she said, enunciating the syllables for me. “Geez, how old are you?”
I started laughing, and so did she, and I couldn’t miss the way Emery was looking at me. He liked me as much as his kid did, or I was getting really bad at reading people.
Lydia joined us then, along with her friends from the night before, and I said how nice it was to see them again as Emery stepped around me, bumping my side, my shoulder, my back and then drifting over to the other side as I shivered, not at all from cold.
“That jacket isn’t going to cut it too much longer,” he said, tucking a long strand of hair behind my ear. “We need to get you a heavy scarf too.”
“And a beanie,” Olivia said, putting her arm around my shoulder before pointing. “Lookit, April wants us.”
I followed where she was pointing. “Yeah, she does. Excuse us,” I said, tipping my head to Emery, including him, not wanting to leave him with Lydia.
“We’ll return shortly,” he said with a smile at his fiancée, hand again at the small of my back, easing me forward.
April looked sad as we joined her and her friends and a woman—had to be Lucy’s mom—who appeared uncomfortable as we reached them.
“Donna,” Emery greeted her, his hand between my shoulder blades. “I’d like you to meet Brann Calder. Brann, this is Donna Bailey, Lucy’s mom.”
We shook hands, and then I met Lucy herself and another girl named Kate.
“What’s wrong?” Emery asked April.
Before she could answer her father, Donna chimed in.
“She wanted to go to the Wiccan tent, but it’s Sunday, Emery, so I didn’t think you’d want her there on the Lord’s Day,” she said indulgently, nodding. “I mean, I would never let my kids go anywhere near anything with devil worship, but—”
“Wicca’s not devil worship,” Emery replied smoothly, his tone indulgent but firm as April moved forward, leaning into his side. “I taught a whole unit on it last year before Halloween. We had a great speaker from the university come out and talk with my class, and a couple of my kids are doing projects with that same professor, with an emphasis on pagan studies.”
Donna stood there in front of him, mouth open, utterly floored.
His smile was warm when it curled those lush lips of his. “I mean, really, when Christmas originated as Yule, we have to keep an open mind, don’t we?”
She nodded.
“It’s important for us to model tolerance,” he professed before turning to his daughter and taking her chin in his hand, lifting her gaze to his. “You know, at the farmer’s market where your mother and I used to live in New York, there was this amazing Wiccan booth that sold essential oils and a really great organic beeswax lip balm.”
April smiled tentatively up at him.
“What did you see at the booth you found?”
“I didn’t get to look around,” she told him, glancing at Mrs. Bailey and then back up at her father.
“Maybe we should go check it out,” he offered, grinning at her.
Her whole face lit up. “That’d be awesome.”
He turned to me. “Sound good?”
“Absolutely,” I assured him. “I could use some stuff.”
April leaned around her father so she could see me. “You wanna go?”
“Yeah, I wanna go,” I said, noticing that the smile I was getting from Emery warmed his rich brown eyes. I put Olivia down and then took her hand. “Show us where the booth is, kid.”
“Are you certain you should—”
“You don’t have to come, Donna,” Emery said over his shoulder, letting April lead us.
“Well, if you’re going, we should all stay together,” Donna said quickly, she and Lucy and an excited Kate trailing after us.
At the deserted booth, there was a tall, willowy woman with long, golden-blonde dreadlocks piled up on the top of her head, and a lean muscled man with straight black hair that fell to his shoulders, pulled back from his face with a leather cord. They looked like college students to me, and from their expressions, were happily surprised to see us.
“Afternoon,” I greeted them both.
“Hello, welcome to Kitchen Witchery,” she said brightly. “I’m Miranda and this is Ben, and we’re so happy to see you all.” Even as she spoke, she offered all four girls a small red velvet drawstring bag. “Go ahead and pick out five stones to put inside your mojo bag.”
“Oh, that’s so nice of you,” Emery said quickly before he turned to the kids. “What do you think, guys?”
There was a chorus of quick thank-yous, but none of the girls moved.
“Hey, look,” I said, pointing to one of the baskets full of rocks. “Do you guys know what this is?”
It was cute how all four girls shook their heads at the same time.
“This is tigereye. A buddy of mine had a bracelet made of this that he wore the entire time we were deployed. He always said he felt safer with it on.”
All four girls grabbed one as Ben gave me a wide smile before explaining to the girls about hag stones and then the geodes and the raw amethyst.
I drifted away, looking around until I found some eucalyptus oil as well as peppermint.
“Do you have a cough?” Miranda asked me.
“Not right now, but you never know, and I hate taking medicine, so it’s better to just diffuse it.”
“It is, yes,” she said, grinning at me as other people started hovering around.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Calder,” Mrs. Whitley, the woman I’d met the day before outside Jenny Rubio’s house, greeted me.
“Brann, please, and how’re you, Mrs. Whitley?”
“I’m better since you took care of things for Jenny yesterday.”
“It was nothing.”
“No, no,” she corrected me, smiling, moving closer. “It was a huge deal actually, the biggest and bravest, and please, call me Susan.”
“You know,” I told her, ignoring the compliment, “we should probably grab some white sage for Jenny and some palo santo wood so she can smudge her house and get any residual bad juju outta there.”
“Do what now?” She chuckled, reaching for me.
I snorted as she took my arm, and I led her over to where the sage bundles were and explained how even if you didn’t believe in it, the process of doing it was helpful.
“You see, I think sometimes there’s this bad, sticky energy that lingers in a place, you know? Sometimes you gotta get it out so you can breathe easy.”
“I think I need some of that for my house too.”
“Keep in mind that not everyone loves the smell, but it dissipates pretty quickly.”
“Well, that’s what open windows are for,” Mrs. Whitley offered cheerfully.
“That’s exactly right,” I said, handing her off to Ben, who started explaining what different kinds of smudging sticks were used for.
“Do you have any tea tree oil?” I asked Miranda.
“I do, yes. And since you asked for the eucalyptus oil, I have some dried eucalyptus if you want some for the shower.”
“Oh, that’d be great, thank you.”
Donna Bailey was hovering close to me, and I passed her the peppermint oil, which she took without thinking.
“If you put that in water and spray it around the house, it’ll get rid of a lot of bugs. Spiders for sure—they don’t like the smell,” I explained to her.
“Really?”
I nodded. “We used to put it in our water so it tasted better, makes you wake up a little, and bonus, helps with your breath.”
“Oh,” she said, looking at the small bottle in her hand. “I had no idea that they would have things like this here. I mean, I usually have to drive to Helena to pick up my oils or order them online.”
“One of my buddies, in the spring and summer, his wife sprays her curtains with sandalwood so that when the breeze hits them, the whole place smells awesome.”
Her slow smile was good to see. “That sounds lovely.”
I turned back to Miranda. “Do you guys have any beeswax lip balm or those wrapped candles?”
Miranda nodded like she was in a daze, staring at me.
“Could you show Donna where that is?”
“Yes,” she said sweetly, waiting on Lucy’s mother. “They’re right over here.”
“Thank you,” Donna said, stepping around me to follow Miranda.
Moving off to the side, I squatted down so the girls could show me what stones they picked out. Lucy and Kate wanted me to see too. I didn’t miss that the booth was now swamped with people, and Ben was quickly working the Square Reader attached to his iPad.
“Do you get a cut of the action?” Emery teased, his hand on my shoulder as I stood up beside him. “Because your interest in those things certainly sold them to others.”
Half of me wanted to say, you touch me a lot and it’s doing weird things to my breathing, so knock it off. The other half didn’t care. Standing there, staring at him, brain addled, my focus not what it should have been, I wasn’t sure what to say.
“How do you know about all this stuff?”
“Well, whenever my unit wasn’t deployed, I stayed with my buddy Huck Riley, and he’s ‘that guy’—the all-natural, ‘God keep us from prescription medication’ type. He tries to never put anything chemical into his body, which was impressive when we were in SEAL training together, because you fu—” I noticed Olivia close to me. “—you hurt all the time. I don’t care what kinda shape you’re in. So the fact that he wasn’t popping eight hundred milligrams of Ibuprofen every few minutes was a surprise.”
“I’ll bet,” he said, drawing me forward, out of the way of some more people trying to get into the booth. “Who got your friend interested in his pursuit?”
“His grandmother,” I answered, passing the oils I had to Ben, ready to pay for them. “And he explained it to me as certain things have been around a long time. I remember being in Thailand, and there was stuff there I’d never seen and really didn’t even wanna try, but Huck insisted, and he’s right—sometimes a good cup of tea can cure what ails you.”
“Along with good company, I would agree.”
“I saw you gave away your peppermint oil,” Ben reminded me. “You want me to grab you another one?”
“And some kind of orange, if you have it. Please.”
His gaze met mine, lingering, softening, and then one eyebrow lifted. “I have that. Is there anything else?”
Handsome man, with his dark blue eyes, long lashes, and fair skin. Normally I would have actively noticed, like seen him and flirted and checked to see what he was into or up for. But standing there, with Emery at my side, his gloved hand loosely gripping my bicep, showing, whether he realized it or not, possessiveness, made me impervious to the charms of other men. I still noticed the beauty around me; I just didn’t care.
“You have any lavender?” I asked Ben.
“Oh.” He was surprised I was still shopping, I could tell from the almost audible pop of the spell breaking. He’d been staring at me, which I got a lot, and me talking had rattled him. “Yeah, lemme—hold on.”
He stepped away, and I turned to find Emery scowling, gaze on Ben.
“Hey.”
His attention returned to me.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Does that always happen? People hit on you wherever you go?”
“Oh, yeah, are you kidding? All the time, just throwing themselves at me right and left.”
He chuckled, shaking his head. “Why the lavender?”
“I need it for Livi. I think if I grab a diffuser for her and run it in her room with some lavender, she’ll sleep better, between the smell and the sound the machine makes.”
