He cracked his jaw. “Straight up, GG. Now. Please.”
She hiked up the front of her flowered orange-and-black bathing suit. “It was me who knocked the apple off the column. Now, don’t go gettin’ pissy. I did it to give you a break. You weren’t ever gonna find the love of your life if you were too damned busy guarding the apple. Quinn’s a nice kid. Never wrinkled her nose once on the bus. Even after I rolled in goat shit. Because you know how I am. I like to really become one with the peasant storyteller shtick. Anyway, she gets the whole dealio with love. She’s good at it. She believes. Your mother’s getting wrinkles around her eyes from trying to keep up. I had to do something, and she’s such a control freak, she never would have quit. And that Iris is a twit. Who lets the Goddess of Rainbows make choices the fate of the world relies on? We’d have a bunch of baby unicorns running around and no humans.”
His mother bit her lower lip and winced. “Oh, Mother…”
GG rolled her eyes in disgust. “Don’t ‘oh, Mother’ me. Look, it was time to take charge. So I whipped up a small seismic occurrence, and knocked the apple off the column when you weren’t looking.”
“And you chose Quinn because…?” Khristos asked.
His grandmother snorted. “After hearing your Quinn on the phone with her schmoe of an ex-boyfriend Igor, I knew she was right for the position because she’s got moxie. Plenty of it. Told that Igor to shove his nose clippers into his anus-head.”
His eyes almost rolled to the back of his head. “I can’t believe you did this, GG.”
She flapped her hand at him. “Yeah, yeah. I did this. If she hadn’t taken a bite of the apple, I would have figured out another way to transfer the power to her. But she didn’t go down without a fight, did she? She told you what was what. Loved it!”
But hold on. Maybe there was some measure of relief in this yet. “So you were the one who put a love spell on the apple?”
She wrinkled up her face and popped her lips. “Um, nope. No love spell. That’s all on you.”
He made his way to the couch and dropped down into it.
Shit.
His grandmother dropped down next to him and ran her knuckles over his head. “I’m sorry, kiddo. Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.”
His mother took a seat on the other side of him, blowing a long strand of hair out of her face. “Love stinks.”
In the esteemed words of the J. Geils Band, yeah, yeah.
Chapter 15
“Hey. You okay in there?” Ingrid asked, peeking under the gel pack Quinn had over her eyes.
No. Right now, she was not okay. She patted the gel pack back in place. “I’m great. Just resting my eyes.”
“I heard you matched anus-head with Cantaloupes. You’re a better woman than I am. He’s lucky I’m not Aphrodite or I’d have given him an arrow in his stupid ass.”
“Wasn’t it you who, just before we got on the plane to Greece, said I was frightening you when I went through my I’ll-leave-Igor-drooling-in-his-own-spit-slash-Lorena-Bobbitt revenge phase and that I should knock off all thoughts of payback immediately? You said it wasn’t healthy.”
“Very fair. But looking back, you have to admit, you were super scary. I mean, I knew the Quinn who was rainbows and puppies and suddenly you were all three-sixty, looking to gank him.”
“I was not going to gank him. I was just going to scare him—with a chainsaw. Remember, lots of great romances, in fact, some of the classics, end in tragedy.”
Ingrid laughed. “You’ve come a long way since that day on the plane, baby. Especially if you matched Igor and Miss Cantaloupes.”
Yeah. A long way. “Something you should know, by the way. Igor claims he didn’t cheat on me. He said Shawna wouldn’t allow it. Sure, they were emotionally involved, but nothing physical. He’s more of a man than I thought.”
“You believed him?”
“I did.” She couldn’t explain why, but she did.
“So where’s our resident hottie Khristos?”
She shuddered a breath and scrunched her eyes shut to keep more tears from falling down her cheeks. “He went home.”
“Where is home, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered. But she hoped it was somewhere nice with a stupid soul mate just waiting for him to show up and sweep her off her delicate feet.
Ingrid lifted the gel-pack again. “Let’s talk about whatever’s making you so glum, chum.”
“I’m not glum. What makes you think I’m glum?”
“This,” she said, pulling at the downward turn of Quinn’s lower lip, “all thin, followed by the occasional tremble, is definitely glum.” Cocking a pierced eyebrow, she gave Quinn’s lip one last tug for good measure. “So let’s talk about it.”