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“No, ma’am.”
She knew this would not be the end of this story. She was sitting on a keg of dynamite, and the fuse was already lit. It was just pointed slightly away from her. She looked down and fingered the canvas coat. “Look at the pair of us.”
Instead of looking, he spun to the front door and the little window just to the side of it. “My mother is coming to visit.”
“What?” Her heart rate doubled in five seconds. She just didn’t have “meeting the parents” on her getting kidnapped bingo card.
“She said she would,” he added.
Just like that, she wanted to strangle him again. “Between the horse ride and the sex and confronting my family and the assholes and cleaning the house and sleeping on my feet, you also went home to mommy?”
“She came to me.”
Goldie crossed her arms. “That’s the salient detail you took from my little speech?”
“No, ma’am,” he said, this time with a grin. “She’s bringing mascara.”
Her arms slipped to her sides again. “If you paid me a thousand dollars, I could not predict what is going to come out of your mouth next.”
He stepped back quickly. “I am paying you a thousand dollars. And it’s not just mascara. It’s clothes and shit.”
“Oh good. I’ve always wanted more clothes and shit.”
“And she can help us with the wards.”
Goldie felt a well of disappointment and elation.
“If Buck won’t open them, I’m gonna get her to tear them down and get you home.”
A sting of rejection swelled at his words, but she told herself to be smart. “Why not try that from the beginning?”
He shook like a wolf. “It took us thirty years to build them, so it isn’t my first choice.”
“Thirty years!” She looked around the house with fresh eyes. They’d spent thirty years on these wards?
There was a decisive knock on the door, and Aiden opened it without a by-your-leave.
A petite woman came in hauling miscellaneous shopping bags full of clothes and shit. She looked between the two of them with the same brown eyes as Aiden. “I’m not even going to ask.”
Goldie was fascinated despite herself. She rarely met other witches from other covens, and she desperately wanted to know the witch who first fell in love with a shifter and made this man. She wondered how many pairs there were in the world, hiding out with wards like this to guard their love.
“Ma, this is Goldie Abbott. Goldie, this is my mother, Kathleen.”
“Hi,” Goldie said awkwardly and waved since the other woman’s hands were full.
Kathleen was somewhere in her fifties, though the wiry muscles of her arms belied her age, visible because of the tank top she wore under a pair of worn overalls even on this chilly winter morning. Goldie didn’t see Aiden in the woman at all except for her coloring.
“You don’t need to tell me it’s nice to meet me,” Kathleen said as she dropped the shopping bags. “Since I don’t think anything about your sojourn with our pack has been very nice.”
Goldie didn’t know what to say to that, so she reached for humor. “You lied, Aiden. She’s not the Wicked Witch of the West.”
Kathleen’s laugh ran through the house. “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too.” She hugged her son and looked like a child engulfed in his arms.
“Am I the little dog in the scenario?” Aiden asked.
“Of course, dear. Or wait, was that the Wicked Witch of the East? Who ended up under a house?”
Goldie tried to think back. “I don’t remember.”
