“That was informative,” Prudence says, and there’s a sad note to her voice.
“Was it?”I ask her, hurrying to the kitchen to grab the salt.
At this rate, I’ll need to keep boxes of salt on hand.
“I know what we have to do,” the cat says, licking her paw.
“Oh, hell yeah, Prudence!”I hold up a hand for a high-five, and Prudence looks at me like she’d rather cough up a hairball.
“Go salt the door so you can get some more sleep.You’re going to need it.”
“Ominous,” I tell Aiden.He’s still standing in the living room, looking around with a wild-eyed expression.Right.
“What do we have to do?”I ask Prudence.
She stops licking her paw and gives me a long, serious look.
“You’re going to need back-up.It’s time to call in the big guns.”
“Big guns?”I repeat.
“The Romantics.All three of them.We’ll need them to set this to rights.”With that, she hops off the counter and bounds down the stairs, leaving me goggling behind her holding a box of salt.
I guess she was paying attention while I was chatting with Tara about them.
I follow her down the stairs, salt clutched to my chest, immediately thumbing through my phone.
I can’t say I’m shocked when Ivy picks up the phone on the first ring.
20
Sylvie
Two Weeks Later
“You good?”Aiden asks, only the very top of his head visible from behind the heavy-duty shelves stacked with books.
He’s been over here almost every day, helping me stock books, take pictures of books, finish setting up my online store, and basically get all my ducks in a row.
Essentially, he’s the chief duck herder at this point.
Quack, quack.
“I mean, other than feeling like I want to throw up, yes?”It’s somewhere between an answer and a question, which pretty much sums up how I’ve been feeling the last two weeks.
“You’ve got this, sweetheart,” he says, and from the way he says it, I know he’s thinking about how he told me exactly that in bed last night.
Yeah, he has been helping me with more thanjustthe store.Heh.
“I feel good about opening,” I tell him, because that’s what today is—the soft open for To Be Read.
“Oh, let me guess, it’s the spellwork you’re planning that’s got you feeling sick?”
“Ugh,” I say, throwing my head back.
He laughs, and the sound makes me smile, just like it always does.“You know, I never in a million years thought I’d be saying something like that as anything but a joke.”
With that, I drop the checklist I’ve been pouring over and run over to pull him into a huge hug.“You’re the best,” I tell him, the words slightly muffled in his chest.
