He couldn’t quite make out what she was doing, and she disappeared from his sight for a moment, stooping to the floor—but after a moment, she stood again, with a cloth draped across her shoulders. And then she lit something, another cloth, it looked like, dropped it onto a plate, and began to move in a circle, swinging something over it.
Flynn drew a long and soft breath. Perhaps he’d been running on fumes so long that he’d lost his mind, but then again, he could swear the bird was doing some sort of witchcraft.
He was so fascinated by it, in fact, that when she had finished her strange little dance and moved to the back part of the house, he did, too, stealing into the darkened area between houses.
Certainly he knew what he was doing was not only lewd but unlawful, and really, he could lose his job and be booted back across the pond were he caught. He knew all that, but the man in him was far too intrigued to pay much mind to the laws of this country, and standing between the neighbor’s rubbish bins as he was, he watched her emerge in a towel from a candlelit bathroom, watched her with that large book again, watched her do some sort of dance around two of those candles, her lovely back exposed, before disappearing into the bath again.
At that point, Flynn regained some of his senses—precious few, really, but enough to make him move back to his car.
He sat in the driver’s seat, staring blindly at the windshield, imagining her, naked, in her bath, doing some sort of witchcrafty thing.
That had been remarkable. That had conjured up all sorts of images of Wiccan-like sex (whatever Wiccan-like sex might be, but at the moment he was beyond randy and ready to entertain any number of theories). That had cast this enticing young woman in a whole new light.
A light that was, strangely, a lovely shade of lavender.
An hour later, Flynn met Joe at the coffeehouse where the locals liked to read poetry. Joe was seated in the very back, in the shadows. So deeply shadowed, in fact, that Flynn had a difficult time finding him He sat, asked the girl who followed him for a cup of hot tea, then turned and smiled at Joe.
“Any luck?” he asked.
Flynn shook his head.
Joe groaned. “You’re starting to make me think I’m gonna have to do it for you, pal.”
Flynn laughed, straightened his tie. “The day I need you to do it for me is the day I will bloody well kill myself, thank you.”
Joe laughed, clapped him cheerfully on the back. “If it comes to that, you have my word we’ll ship you home in one piece—at least no more than two. Scout’s honor, dude.”
Chapter Ten
Rachel was beginning to get a little depressed.
It wasn’t her temporary job, which, incidentally, was not typing medical transcripts as she had been led to believe, but in fact, a backlog of autopsy reports (DOB 8-16-39. Subject a fully developed Black adult male. Legs unremarkable. Arms unremarkable. Torso unremarkable . . .).
It was enough to depress anyone, and while reading about people’s unremarkable body parts was not exactly ego-boosting, it wasn’t that which had Rachel down. And it wasn’t her weight-loss program, either, which, if anyone was interested, wasn’t working for shit, regardless of her trips to the gym and general state of poverty. All right, it had only been a couple of weeks or so. But still.
Nor was it the fact that she had just received her utility bill, which was now officially forty-five days delinquent. That came to $175 plus fines and penalties.
It was none of that. It was that Flynn had disappeared. As in, off the face of the earth. As in, one day, she was seeing him all over the place and the next day, it was like he’d never existed. Which, Rachel thought, was not exactly out of the realm of possibility. In spite of Dagne’s assurances to the contrary, she was nearing the end of her one-week experiment in “really believing,” and no Flynn.
It was more likely, given her thirty-one years of experience thus far, that just as she’d feared, Flynn really had been horrified, and worse, he really did think Myron was her boyfriend. Okay, all right, so Myron had been her boyfriend once, but he wasn’t her boyfriend now, and seeing him through Flynn’s eyes, well . . . Rachel thought she might as well crack open the cookie dough and mainline it, because Flynn wasn’t coming back.
Except that, thanks to her new status as pauper, she didn’t have any cookie dough.
She checked her horoscope in the paper instead. Some ideas seem new and interesting but are better left unexplored.
Great. That made her feel so much better about the witchcraft thing. Not.
With a sigh of resignation, Rachel tossed the horoscope aside and went to dress for her weaving class.