A chipper voice interrupted the canoodling. “Keep it PG, kids,” Cheryl said.
From Wes’s lap, Erin turned to her best friend and partner in the franchise they were creating. “Don’t you have some paperwork to go over for our franchise venture?”
Cheryl scrunched her nose at Wes. “Control your woman, please?” She shot a pseudo-mean look at Erin, grabbed some empty mugs, then took off toward the back room.
From the teeny bopper end of the bar, giggles sounded. The newspaper patron turned a page, ensconced behind the inked barrier.
That reminded Erin…
She tugged over the morning edition Wes had discarded on the bar’s surface. She’d been reading it earlier while taking a break.
“You’re not going to believe what I found today,” she said, opening to the Baxter Hills announcements page. “Look.”
Wes scanned the paragraph she’d indicated. “Evan Sawyer and Lacey Perkins announce their engagement…”
“Remember?” Erin just about bounced on Wes’s lap. “They’re the other couple that dissed Madame Karma’s prediction. They managed to beat the curse, too, just like Chloe and Ian.” The accountant and Erin had started talking more, ever since the fortune-teller crisis. They’d even bonded over their shared experience, Chloe inviting Erin to her own engagement party.
“‘Curse’? Did you say the word curse?” Wes asked. “I thought we were never going to mention the damned thing again.”
“Don’t call it damned!” Erin whispered. “Don’t curse the curse. You don’t know what can-”
Wes cut her off with a kiss-a deep, long, limb-melting press of his lips. At the end of it, he sucked her lower lip in a sexy promise of what would happen when they were finally alone again.
“I love you,” he said, “but stop fretting. You know what fretting brought on back when you were having those issues-”
Now she kissed him, shutting him up for good.
As they fused into each other, the preteens giggled even louder at the kissing adults and sprang from their stools, leaving the candy shop as if they had much better things to be doing.
And, at the other end of the bar, the shop’s newest customer, Isabelle Girard, aka The Legendary Madame Karma, peeked out from behind her newspaper at Wes and Erin.
She smiled, then went back to her horoscopes and hot chocolate, pleased at seeing yet another prediction come true.
Jacquie D’Alessandro
Jill Shalvis
Crystal Green
