“Marty! Look at you, mingling with the living!”
He returned the smile. “Hey there, Shelby. How’ve you been? How are Stanley and the kids?”
Shelby shrugged. “Same as usual. It’s the running of the bulls every day at the Stomper house.”
Marty’s smile was as bemused as mine. Ah, small town eccentricity at its finest.
“I had a reservation for three. Is the table ready?” Marty asked.
“Sure is,” Shelby said, giving him a glittering grin. She’d barely glanced at Finn or me, her focus all on Marty. Maybe that ought to have made me jealous. After all, I was here with him. Then again, she’d basically admitted she was married with kids, so I was probably just being silly.
Besides, Marty and I were just friends.
Right. And why did I have to keep reminding myself of that?
Shelby sashayed toward the back, gait long, leggy, and confident like a show horse that knew its paces.
The booth Shelby led us to was set just beneath a rounded window in the back. If you squinted, you could see a large pergola patio, sheltering a much nicer dining area outside. It allowed guests to dine al fresco and afforded a view of the sprawling countryside beyond. Water features decorated the lawn, alongside a few wicked looking garden gnomes. I could have sworn one of the little buggers stooped down to pick up a tree frog but, when I blinked next, the tiny bearded man was stationary.
Hmm.
Must have been a trick of my mind.
Kind of like the creature I’d seen in the graveyard and in my nightmares?
Yeah, that was a subject I’d firmly placed inside a tomb and sealed shut, never to see the light of day again. After I’d decided I couldn’t help the murdered man, even if he was posthumously reaching out to me, I’d changed the subject whenever my thoughts had returned to him or the nightmare visions. And, luckily, I hadn’t had the nightmare in a while.
Still looking through the window, I watched as the wind tossed yellow, orange and red leaves in the treeline beyond, dislodging several and carrying them to land elsewhere. This town really was beautiful.
And small. Really small.
The booth itself was built like a pew, low to the ground, with a wooden back and a padded bench seat. The table was unvarnished wood, topped with a napkin dispenser, ketchup and mustard bottles, and a sugar dispenser. All of which were pushed up against the faded red planked-wall. The paint job was peeling, but strangely, it didn’t detract from the decor. A glance up revealed the bare beams of the rafters. The whole place was rustic and charming, honest and without pretense. I found it oddly refreshing.
Shelby slid three shiny menus beneath our noses and gave us all another of her professional smiles. “Seraphina will be your server tonight.”
Marty’s eyebrows bounced up. “Fifi? She’s working here now?”
“Sure is,” Shelby answered.
“I thought she had a job at the realty office?” Marty continued.
Shelby let out a theatrical sigh and jammed one fist into her hip. She leaned in to stage whisper. “She is, technically, but I’d say those days are numbered. She lost another client. Coming on too strong, of course. You know she’s so hopeless with men. Anyway, Ophelia is about to kick her out on her ass if she screws up again.” Then she looked at Finn and gave him an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry about my language.”
“It’s okay,” Finn said and waved away her concern. “I say it all the time.”
“No, you don’t,” I said, frowning at him.
Finn looked at Shelby and smiled. And she giggled right back at him. I was going to have a heartbreaker on my hands in a few years—the writing was on the wall.
“Anyway,” Shelby continued as she faced Marty again. “Roy promised to take Fifi on full time, bless him. You wouldn’t think it from his size, but he’s such a teddy bear.”
She jerked a thumb over her shoulder, toward the bar area across the room, to indicate the man in question. At first, I couldn’t make him out among the mass of shifting bodies around the bar. Then a gap cleared, and I could finally see the bartender, who apparently was also the owner of the place, haloed in the rays of one of the drop lights that hung from the rafters.
And my breath caught.
I didn’t know how in the hell I could have missed him when we first walked in. Because he was in one word—enormous! He stood, very literally, head and shoulders above every other person in the restaurant. On tiptoe, he would probably stand seven feet tall!
“That’s like the biggest dude I’ve ever seen,” Finn said, his mouth dropping open to reveal his braces.
“Right?” I asked, my mouth just as wide.
Roy wasn’t just tall and broad. He was also… handsome. Ahem, really handsome.
He had an impressive barrel chest, short, thick brown hair, and a sexy amount of stubble. He barely had to flex and chiseled muscles showed beneath the three-quarter sleeve, red-plaid shirt. It was then that I recognized him from his Match.com profile. Mr. Brawny Paper Towel man. Maybe I’d underestimated him then. He looked like he could take the Paper Towel man and Mr. Clean on in a tag team wrestling match and win. And maybe The Rock, too.
Roy glanced up, as if he’d heard Shelby say his name even all the way across the room. Impossible, over the squealing laughter of children and the warbling karaoke attempt at Shania from a pair of tipsy college girls at the bar. Still, he was staring at us, as though he knew he was being discussed.
Our eyes locked and the intense gray of his seared into me with such energy, it drew a blush to my cheeks. I tore my gaze away from his quickly.
What are you doing, Poppy? Staring at a stranger from across the room when you’re out to dinner with McFly and Finn?
I didn’t have long to contemplate my bad behavior, however, as a woman approached our table, successfully diverting my attention.
Diverting everyone’s attention.
People simply stopped whatever they were doing as she shimmied past, moving like a sultry shadow through the crowd, all eyes glued to her. She looked to be around the same age I was, forty, or maybe a little under. Thirty-eight? A very fit, busty thirty-eight. She had a few lines on her face—the only hint to her age—and her hair was entirely silver. Not steel-wool silver, in the way some women’s hair colors as they age. No this was legit silver. A shimmering sheet of fine hair the same color as moonlight. Her eyes were dark, though I hesitated to call them brown. Instead, they were a deep wine color, closer to purple than brown. They dominated her face and, even though I wasn’t attracted to women, I couldn’t help but stare at her.
There was something about her… something powerful. I had to focus on her to really catch it, but it was there, just the same. A certain energy that filtered through the air around her. She was something… magical. Of that, I was sure. But, as to what type of magical? I didn’t know. She definitely wasn’t a witch, which was a relief in and of itself. Yeah, not a witch, so what then?
Hmm…
It didn’t look like she had a lick of makeup on, but her skin was still flawless, minus the few lines around her eyes. I couldn’t see even a trace of lipstick or mascara. She just had this aura of natural beauty that surrounded her—like nothing was fake, not even her ample bustline. Or her impossibly silver hair that reached her waist. And I was fairly sure her lashes really were that long. Her cheeks were pink, her teeth white and perfect, her lips plump and perfectly shaped.