Which meant get the hell out.
Fine. She could do that. She needed a shower and a stiff drink. But she’d settle for a shower and a hot cup of cocoa. Jingling the keys under his nose, Poppy nodded. “Ladies, let’s go check out my new, probably not-forever home.”
Turning on her heel, she began to make her way across the wide room, planning to make a big exit like she’d just dropped the mic. But as was her MO, and maybe one of the reasons she wasn’t Broadway’s biggest hit, she stumbled in her platforms and tripped over Rick’s big, clunky shoes that sat by the door.
His laughter as she yanked the door open rankled right down to the tips of her cold, numb toes.
Son of a bitch.
Pacing the length of his kitchen floor, Rick, kicked at the dust left by the gaping hole in his ceiling with an angry foot.
He did not want a new damn familiar.
He’d had a familiar. That lifelong friend, that trusted confidant, that almost-like-a-father-to-him familiar.
The familiar who had up and left him. Literally abandoned him a year ago, leaving everything he owned behind.
Everything that was, in fact, all still in what they’d both once jokingly called the very shed he’d sent Poppy and the group of women to settle into. But who needed everything when you could buy more everything? If what Rick suspected was true, Yash didn’t need his things from the shed.
The shed was a sore spot for him now. Yash had turned that shed into his solace. His sanctuary, a place he could seek respite when the weight of a being familiar and the world became too much. And then he’d jumped ship after twenty-five years.
No explanation. No note. No phone call. No whispers from the other side about his whereabouts. Yash had just been gone, and he’d left Rick frantic and worried sick.
But that wasn’t all he’d left Rick with. He’d also left his business in ashes. Well, almost. Somehow, Yash had siphoned millions from his development company. Rick had found the proof on a thumb drive in the shed. All just out there for anyone to find.
Likely, he’d used his magic to find the passwords he’d needed, conjured a spell dripping with greed, and then he’d stolen away like some thief in the night. But what bothered Rick the most was the fact that Yash hadn’t taken any pains to hide his deception. Not a one.
Yash was one of the smartest men Rick knew, and he’d desperately wanted to believe the theory his partner and longtime friend, Avis Mackland, spouted as a way to explain Yash’s one-eighty, which was that something had happened and his familiar had experienced an event so horrible, he couldn’t share. Avid had said time and again he didn’t believe Yash was a crook. Yet, it was a theory Rick still couldn’t swallow.
Stealing those millions of dollars had nothing to do with some crisis Yash had encountered in his life—something he couldn’t tell anyone else—no matter how strong a case Avis pleaded in his favor.
Thankfully, all their assets weren’t wrapped up in the development company he shared with Avis, and they’d managed to save their asses with their own personal capital, but it’d been one rough year.
One they were finally digging themselves out from. The black hole they’d been in had a light at the end of the tunnel, and due to Avis’s business savvy and numerous connections, they were once more seeing a profit. But it was small and still in the process.
But goddammit, Yash had really ripped them a new asshole. It hadn’t only been the two of them who’d suffered, but their employees, their employees’ families.
And he still didn’t understand it. There’d never been a single sign Yash was even a little shady, let alone capable of stealing millions from him. In fact, he’d spent a lot of Rick’s childhood poo-pooing money as the root of all evil, and, instead, taught him the ways of kindness and about the simple joys drawn from the earth and sky.
When he’d surprised Yash with the shed, he’d at first been too humble to accept it because it had cost more than the earth, as his familiar had put it.
And that total betrayal of life lessons damn well still smarted. So no way was he exposing himself and all his regained assets to a new familiar just so he could end up screwed over again.
Not even if she was cute. And Poppy M to the C to the Guill-i-cudd-E was definitely cute.
It was harder to tell how cute she was with all that KISS makeup on, but when she’d yanked her wig off and thrown it down on the floor, and her chocolate-colored hair had spilled down over her shoulders to the middle of her back like some wave of silk, he’d decided she was as cute as he’d first feared when they’d met outside his place.