Witch Is The New Black (Paris, Texas Romance #3)

They sat on the front steps of Ridge’s porch, a beer they’d decided to share sitting between them, with Fee at her feet snoozing and her favorite horse, Orchid, tethered to the railing of the stairs. The stars winked, bright and yellow in the big Texas sky, bathing the farm with a hazy glow.

Ridge had talked her into driving to the farm where they couldn’t be interrupted while she explained.

He’d caught her red-handed. Called her right out. To look him in the eye and tell him she wasn’t lying at all was going too far at this point. After tonight, after they’d experiencing the damage she’d wreaked, she couldn’t keep telling everyone she was innocent.

Orchid bent her head, rubbing it on Bernie’s shoulder. She reached up and cupped her muzzle, giving it a scratch.

“Orchid’s really crazy about you. In fact, all of the horses respond well to you. You’re good with animals, Bernie.”

That he’d noticed surprised her. “I like Orchid, too. I like it best that she’s one of the few animals in these parts who don’t actually talk.”

Ridge chuckled and nudged her shoulder. “Speaking of talking, let’s talk about how you had no idea you were a witch.”

Bernie took a long, satisfying swig of the beer and shook her head. “I don’t even know where to begin.”

“How about your arrest, and do me a favor—no-holds-barred. No judgment on my part either, but I can’t help if you don’t let me. If you don’t let all of us help—and we will, if you’d just stop running and ducking and apologizing. You apologize far more than anyone who’s not a serial killer should.”

The better part of her life was an apology. It was second nature to back out of a room with the words “I’m sorry” on her lips as walls crumbled and floors buckled.

But Bernie’s breathing shuddered, her limbs stiffened. This would be the first time she’d confided the full story to anyone. She hadn’t even told Fee everything.

“I was arrested for robbing a bank I don’t even remember robbing. Now, before you say that’s ridiculous, I’ll swear until the day I die that I have absolutely no memory of walking into that bank vault. I don’t know where all the money came from, but I sure had fistfuls of it in my hands. One minute I was in my car, waiting for my boyfriend Eddie. The next I was in the bank’s vault.”

“Your boyfriend?” His tone oddly changed from curious to hard.

“Well, nowadays he’s the scum-sucking pig who betrayed me and somehow disappeared when the smoke cleared, but back then he was my boyfriend.”

“So it was his idea to rob the bank, I take it?”

She’d never understand where something as crazy as committing a felony had come from. Eddie had never given her any indication he was a criminal. He managed a cleaning company, for crap’s sake.

That’s how she’d met him. When she’d bumped into him at the final job she’d had as night security at a big law firm in Boston before her incarceration, he’d made it his mission to get her to go out with him.

“I didn’t even know it was an idea. But I can assure you, it wasn’t mine. I met Eddie at the bank that day because he owed me his last half of the rent. I’d kicked him out after I caught him…cheating. We had a huge fight in the parking lot about it just before he went in to get me the rent money. It was pretty ugly.”

So ugly. The whole scene had been ugly. Coming home to find Eddie and their downstairs neighbor, Doris, naked in their bed. The damn bed they’d shopped for together.

She’d trusted him. He’d been the only person alive she’d trusted after her parents died, and he’d broken her.

But she’d booted his ass out anyway, brokenhearted, fear of being alone and all.

“So,” Ridge prompted softly. “He went into the bank to get the money he owed you, and…?”

“And the next thing I know, I’m in the bank, too, and the Boston PD’s screaming at me to get on the ground with guns pointed at me, and Eddie was nowhere in sight.”

“And there’s proof of this?”

Bernie closed her eyes and tried to ward off the memory. “Yep. The Boston PD. They found me in the bank vault—surrounded by a pile of cash. Which is why it was impossible for me to tell anyone otherwise. Not to mention, there were several people hurt. The security guard was blindfolded and handcuffed to a desk. The bank manager was unconscious, and the only two customers inside the bank were knocked out cold. The only thing working for me was the fact that no one was able to identify me as the person who knocked them out. In fact, the bank manager claimed it was Eddie who held a gun to her head and made her open the vault.”