Chapter 28
Vivi woke up the next morning and had the brief, disorienting sensation of not knowing where she was.
Rolling over, she pushed her hair out of her face and took in the heavy velvet drapes and flocked wallpaper.
Rhys’s house.
Rhys’s father’s house.
Rhys’s father.
Sighing, Vivi flopped onto her back as last night came rushing back. Simon hadn’t been wrong about them ignoring the curse, or at least not paying it as much attention as they should have. They’d cursed her entire town, and what had they spent the last week doing?
She glanced at Rhys’s side of the bed, already empty, and her body went warm with the memories of this past week. It felt silly to call it magic, but it had been. Just spending time with Rhys again, showing him around Graves Glen, having dinner with him in her apartment, or here in this bizarre mausoleum of a house that had, somehow, started to feel a little homier.
She even kind of liked the canopy if she was honest.
But Simon had been right—Halloween was just a day away, and they needed to get serious about this.
Easier said than done when it comes to Rhys, she thought, pushing the sheets back.
Which is why it was something of a shock to come downstairs and see Rhys fully dressed in the kitchen, a pair of sunglasses caught in the deep V of his shirt, two travel mugs of coffee in his hands.
“Morning, my darling,” he said, entirely too chipper for—Vivi checked the grandfather clock in the hallway—barely seven in the morning.
“Who are you, and what have you done with Rhys Penhallow?” she asked, narrowing her eyes at him even as she took one of the mugs from him.
“I do run a business, you know. I occasionally get up early, and have even been known to make a spreadsheet or two.”
“Entirely too early for dirty talk.”
Rhys smirked at that, leaning over to kiss the tip of her nose. “Go get dressed, and in the car, I’ll tell you all about my spreadsheets and the color-coded folders I keep in my office.”
“The car?” Vivi asked, wishing the coffee would make its way to her brain already.
“We have an errand to run,” Rhys replied, and something about the suddenly firm line of his mouth, the set of his shoulders, told her this was about the curse.
Twenty minutes and a phone call to Gwyn later, Vivi was showered, dressed in a pair of jeans she’d left at Elaine’s and a striped sweater that actually belonged to Gwyn, plus her own black boots from the night before, and she and Rhys were in his rental car, heading north out of Graves Glen.
“I guess about now would be a fabulous time to tell me what this errand actually entails,” Vivi said, reaching up to twist her hair into a messy bun.
Rhys glanced over at her. He had his sunglasses on, the sleeves of his dark gray button-down rolled up, and Vivi wondered why it was that she could’ve had so much sex with this man, and still be so turned on by something as basic as his forearms while driving. Was that some kind of heretofore unknown fetish of hers, or was it just that everything about Rhys turned her on?
Then he said, “We’re going to let that ghost out of the candle,” and her libido got a healthy splash of cold water.
“I’m sorry, what?” she asked, her hands still frozen on top of her head, the ponytail holder stretched between two fingers as she stared at him.
“Piper McBride,” he answered, as calm and collected as ever, and Vivi scowled at him as she let her hands drop, her hair falling back to her shoulders.
“That would be the who, Rhys. What I meant was, ‘What the hell do you mean, we’re letting her out of that candle?’ We don’t even know where that candle is right now.”
“Actually,” Rhys said, reaching over to pick up his travel mug, “we do.”
He casually sipped his coffee and Vivi grumbled as she went back to fixing her hair.
“This is punishment for not telling you about the ghost in the first place, isn’t it?”
“Little bit, yes,” he said, then gave her that half smile that always hit her somewhere squarely in the chest. “All right, cards on the table. I couldn’t sleep last night, and while staring at you while you sleep is a treasured pastime—”
“Creeper.”
That grin again, and a quick squeeze to her thigh. “I decided to put my insomnia to use. My father was right, much as saying that makes me want to die. It’s almost Samhain, and we need to be focused on the curse. So I thought to myself, ‘Rhys, you devilishly handsome bastard, what was the last truly solid lead you got on the curse?’ And then I remembered ol’ Piper with her ‘cursed Penhallow’ bit, and it struck me that she might know more than we let her reveal before the candle sucked her in.”
Vivi nodded slowly even as her stomach went icy at the thought of dealing with Piper again. “Okay, I can see all that,” she agreed. “But Tamsyn Bligh has the candle if she hasn’t already sold it. And god knows where she is.”
“She’s two towns over,” Rhys said, turning left off the highway. “In a place called Cade’s Hollow.”
Vivi blinked at him. “How do you know that?”
Rhys tapped the side of his nose with one long finger. “Can’t trust doing magic in Graves Glen, but that doesn’t mean I can’t get other people to do magic for me. Specifically, in this case, my brother Llewellyn. Wanker owes me one. So I called him, had him run a little tracking spell for me. Now, had Miss Bligh already been on the other side of the country, we might have needed a plan B, but turns out, she didn’t go far.”
“But she might not still have the candle,” Vivi said, not wanting to get her hopes up, and Rhys nodded.
“She might not,” he agreed. “But we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.”
“Cross. The saying is ‘cross that bridge when we come to it.’”
“Huh,” was Rhys’s only reply, and Vivi settled back into her seat, watching the early morning sun play over the purplish-blue mountains, watched as the fields slowly became houses, and as the houses gave way to a town even smaller than Graves Glen.
Once the downtown was behind them, Rhys took another series of turns, eventually pulling up in front of a Victorian mansion that looked like a wedding cake, all gingerbread trim and peaked roofs, a wreath of autumn leaves adorning the front door.
Shutting off the car, Rhys ducked his head down to study the building through the windshield.
“She’s at a B-and-B?” Vivi asked.
“This was definitely the address Wells gave me,” Rhys said, then, after a pause, added, “You know, when we’re done here, we could get a room, and—”
“Rhys.” Vivi gave him a look. “Focus, please.”
“Sorry, you’re right. Curse work now, sex later.”
They got out of the car, the morning chilly and still a little damp, dew sparkling on the thick bushes outside the bed-and-breakfast as they made their way up the steps, and Vivi smiled at the little jack-o’-lantern sitting on a wicker table just outside the front door.
Bells chimed overhead as they opened the front door, and a cheerful blond woman behind a large oak counter beamed at the two of them. “Good morning! How can I help you?”
Vivi realized she hadn’t asked Rhys if he had a plan for how they were going to talk to Tamsyn. Any hotel worth its salt wasn’t just going to offer up the room number of a guest, and Vivi wasn’t sure how long they could just hang out in the lobby, hoping Tamsyn came down.
Rhys smiled at the woman behind the counter. “We’re actually hoping to say hello to a friend,” he said, his accent thicker than usual, and Vivi fought the urge to elbow him in the ribs.
Charm. That was his entire plan. Smile, drop a few Welsh words in, do that Leaning Thing against the counter while his hair did that Other Thing, and hope for the best, aka the Rhys Penhallow Special.
But before Rhys could even do the Leaning Thing, footsteps were pounding down the massive staircase to their right, and Amanda—no, Tamsyn Bligh—was suddenly there, practically leaning over the bannister. “Hi, you two!” she said, her voice so bright and cheery that Vivi was surprised cartoon birds didn’t appear by her head.
And then Vivi noticed how pale she was, the deep shadows under her eyes and that her smile had a kind of rictus quality to it.
She waved at both Rhys and Vivi. “Come on upstairs! So glad you’re here!”
Rhys shot Vivi the most eloquent What the fuck? look she’d ever seen, and then the smile was back, the easy charm, and he slipped an arm around Vivi’s waist, pulling her toward the stairs as the blond woman behind the counter went back to her computer.
“Good to see you, too,” Rhys said as they climbed the steps, following Tamsyn, who nearly sprinted to her room.
This B-and-B still used big old-fashioned keys, and Vivi saw Tamsyn’s hands tremble a little as she unlocked the door.
Rhys and Vivi followed her inside, and Vivi immediately gasped at the cold in the room despite the fire crackling in the fireplace, tugging the sleeves of her sweater down over her hands as she glanced around. The room was dark, curtains drawn, and there, in the middle of the floor, was the Eurydice Candle.
Tamsyn closed the door, and whirled around to face them.
“You guys have got to help me.”