Winnie peered at them from behind a kitchen towel, her cheeks bunched up in a smile. “Sorry about that. Sometimes the pantry door sticks.”
Ridge rolled to his stomach instantly, falling off her. Clearly unfazed by the looks they were getting, he turned his head and gazed over at her. “Wow! That was amazing. Where’d you learn to do that?”
“One-Eyed Lorraine from cellblock C.”
Ridge laughed, and despite herself, despite the scene they’d just made, despite the curious eyes, despite the insinuations, Bernie laughed too.
And it was nice.
Chapter 6
Fee skipped ahead of her, his tiara bouncing on top of his head, bow securely tied around his tail as they wound down the long dirt road from Winnie’s house to Ridge’s farm.
He attempted to vault over the wildflowers in the field lining the road, his dark head disappearing and reappearing as she followed. Winnie always offered her a ride to work but she took solace in these moments alone, when she gathered her armor around her and prepared for a silent battle no one else knew she was waging.
This time, while the sun wasn’t eating a hole in her head and was only just beginning to peek its angry hot face over the horizon, was the time she spent reliving her moments with Ridge.
A week and a half had passed since the party and their encounter in the pantry—ten and a half days where she’d done all but make herself invisible in order to avoid Ridge.
Once the laughter had worn off, and he’d helped her to her feet, Bernie had realized how bad it all looked and made a mad dash for her room. Upon seeing her reflection, she’d groaned. Her ponytail was mussed, her cheeks were a pretty shade of red, and her eyes glowed as though she were consumed by fever. Not to mention, her doily shirt was a little wrinkled.
There’d been a couple of snickers about exactly what they’d been doing in the pantry, snickers she shrank from, scurrying off to hide rather than defend herself.
Though, several of the comments were about how lucky she was to land in a pantry with Ridge Donovan. There was a theme to Ridge and it always revolved around batches of women fanning themselves while they clutched their proverbial pearls.
Regardless, she didn’t care what Ridge said about the rules, if Baba got wind of their tryst in the pantry, surely there’d be more trouble than some spilled Fruity-Os. She wasn’t here to flirt with her hotter-than-lava boss—she’d have to get in line to do that anyway. She was simply finishing out her time.
While she did that, she spent a good deal of her off-work hours scouring the Internet on Winnie’s laptop for any information on her parents and Eddie, other than what she already knew about their lives. Any small hint about what was happening to her would be more than she had at this point.
Eddie was a no-go. There was absolutely nothing online about him. It was as if he’d disappeared after the bank robbery and fallen off the edge of the earth.
“Penny for them,” Fee said, his words soft on the warming breeze.
“If only we had a penny between us,” she joked. Baba Yaga had informed her that her banking accounts had all been frozen during her incarceration, and would remain so until her parole was finished.
“I’m being real here. Every morning on the way to work, you get inside your head and stay there until we get to the farm. Wanna talk about it?”
Bernie decided to be truthful. “I was just thinking about my parents and how much I miss them lately.”
As she’d searched for Eddie’s existence, she’d also relived the painful memories of the small, almost unnoticeable article in her local paper about her parents’ deaths. Two local schoolteachers, loved by everyone, senselessly taken before their time.
“Where are they, B? Back in Beantown?”
“Gone. They died well before I landed in prison.”
“Aw, Bernie love, I hate that. I hate it so hard. Someday we’ll talk about it, yes? Maybe when things aren’t such a jumbled mess in your head?”
She gave him a distracted smile. “Sure, Fee.”
Back when her parents had been killed, she’d harassed the local police until she was blue in the face to figure out who had murdered them in their sleepy town where nothing particularly interesting ever happened. According to the police, the scene of the crime was virtually spotless. No evidence, no fingerprints, no witnesses, nothing.
Just her parents gone forever—killed senselessly in their beds as they slept, and no answers. As she’d packed away their things in storage, she’d scoured every scrap piece of paper, every magazine from front to back, every drawer, searching for a clue to who would harm two such gentle souls.
For months their unsolved deaths had haunted her, but now—now she was looking at their murders and everything that had ever happened in her life with fresh eyes. Maybe she’d missed some supernatural cause because she wasn’t looking for it? Who would have thought witchcraft could be the culprit?
Witch Is The New Black (Paris, Texas Romance #3)
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