Page 13 of Halloween Town

Luna held Poppy’s face and used her thumbs to wipe away her tears, something Thom wanted to do himself. How many times had he wiped away her tears when she was a kid, using his fingers or the hem of his shirt? More than ten. Twenty?

“You do look dreadful, darling,” Luna told her, being her usual frank self.

Poppy shrugged. “It’s dawning on me that I ran away from two-hundred guests, from my mother.” She wrinkled her nose. “And from Benji, I guess.”

Thom lifted his eyebrows. She didn’t seem too bothered about leaving his brother at the altar. Interesting.

Poppy bit down on her bottom lip. “I didn’t let them know that I’m okay,” she said, sounding worried. “And my phone died, so I still haven’t.”

Yeah, he’d done that yesterday, when she’d ducked into the downstairs bathroom. He still had her older sister’s number—Isobel, the most reasonable of the lot—and he’d called, only because it was the decent thing to do. If he had a sister, he’d want to know she was okay.

Isobel had immediately started firing questions. Where was Poppy? Why had she run? Did she know their mother was threatening to disembowel her with a teaspoon?

He’d kept to the basics. Poppy was safe. She’d be in touch when she was ready. Then he’d disconnected and powered down his phone. He still hadn’t switched it back on. He had no interest in listening to their voicemails, reading their messages, or returning their calls. He’d told them she was safe. He’d done what he needed to do.

“I called Isobel,” he told her. “They know you are safe.”

She started to ask him a question, thought better of it, and nodded. “Thank you,” she said, sounding grudging. Then she glared at him. “But I’m still unhappy you are here, ripping apart my grandparents’ house.”

He started to tell her it was his house, then decided he wasn’t up for an argument.

Poppy narrowed her eyes. “I’m going to talk to the lawyer on Monday, and we’ll get to the bottom of this,” she told him. Beneath her sharp words, he caught her exhaustion. She was running on fresh air and emotion, and he’d bet this house she hadn’t eaten anything yesterday.

“This is Thom’s house, Poppy. He bought it off your grandfather before he died,” Luna told her.

Poppy looked at Luna and stubbornly shook her head. “Have you seen the deed of sale, Luna?”

Luna lifted her hands in frustration. “Why would Thom lie? Why would he pour an insane amount of money into a property he doesn’t own?”

Excellent points, Luna. But Poppy had entered Stubborn Mode, and he knew, from experience, that once Poppy dug in her heels, it would take a meteor to dislodge her. And sometimes not even that would work. She wasn’t going to believe anyone but the lawyer, and only after she saw his copy of the deed of sale.

Then Poppy caught sight of the jar filled with her pearls and let out a strangled yelp, not unlike the sound Felony had made earlier. She rushed over to the table, grabbed the jar and unscrewed the lid. Looking around, she reached for a kitchen towel and, pushing aside his laptop, spread it on the table. Carefully, so carefully, she tipped the pearls onto the towel. Using the tip of her finger, she rolled the pearls into a necklace-shaped half circle, with the smaller pearls at the top of the circle, and the bigger pearls in the middle. When they were laid out to her satisfaction, she counted them.

Then she frowned and counted them again. She lifted her head and glared at him. “There are two missing.”

Like he was the one who dropped them. “Okay,” he replied.

“What do you mean, ‘okay’?” she demanded. She placed her hand on the pearls, as if he was about to snatch them out of her grasp. “These are my grandmother’s pearls. Grandpa M. gave them to her as a wedding present over sixty years ago.”

“Okay,” he repeated, purely to wind her up.

“They are Hanadama pearls, which are as good as you can get. They are rare, expensive, and two of them are missing.”

Right, she was working herself up into another paddy. God, what had he done to deserve a Sunday morning full of drama?

“You were the one who broke the string,” he reminded her. The fire in her eyes intensified. “I picked up your pearls last night and put them in the jar. A thank you wouldn’t go amiss.”

“Two are missing.”

Annoyed, Thom stepped forward to scan the floor and quickly found one rogue pearl.

After another ten minutes of increasingly half-hearted searching, Luna declared herself late for church and scuttled off, reminding Poppy—pointedly—that Wren would meet her here later.

The second Luna disappeared, Poppy dropped back down onto her hands and knees and resumed the search for the pearl with focused determination. And Thom couldn’t help noticing that his shorts, baggy on her, rode up just enough to reveal the unmistakable curve of her round, soft—and completely inappropriate—butt in the air. Thoroughly distracting.

His attention snagged hard and stayed there, even as his brain yelled at him to look away and called him several inventive, and colorful, shades of stupid.

It wasn’t just the view, though—hell, it was the way she moved, unselfconscious and stubborn, focused on her search, as if her world hadn’t already been turned inside out and sideways. He was acutely aware of her in his space, in his house, and it was hot, low, and dangerous.