Accidentally on Purpose (Heartbreaker Bay #3)(23)

“Well, yeah.” Kylie looked at her. “Both Pru and Willa found love as a direct result of their wishing.”

“You really believe that?”

Kylie bit her lower lip, watching as Willa and Keane came out of the stairwell holding hands as they made their way through the wrought-iron gate to the street and vanished. “I want to believe.” She looked at Elle. “You really don’t ever feel tempted?”

Maybe for a teeny-tiny second . . . but she was over that now, not that she’d ruin someone else’s dream. “I don’t know. But I do know this—I wouldn’t want to have to wish for it. If it were to happen, I’d want it to happen organically.”

Kylie blinked at her. “Wow. I didn’t see that coming from you. You’re a closet romantic.”

Elle hadn’t seen that coming either, but it was unfortunately true. She let out a low laugh and shook her head. “In the end, it doesn’t matter what I think. It’s what you think that really matters.” She took the quarter from Kylie’s hand and tossed it into the water. “Bring Kylie true love,” she told the fountain. She looked at Kylie. “There. It’s out of your hands now. It’s done.”

Kylie flashed a grin. “Because you’ve deemed it so?”

“That’s right.”

Kylie shook her head, still smiling. “Does the whole world always do exactly as you command?”

She got that question a lot. “When it knows what’s good for it,” she quipped.

Kylie smiled. “So are you going to laugh at me if I say I really want to believe the wish will come true?”

“Well, not to your face,” Elle said. “Are you hungry? Because I need Finn’s chicken wings in the worst possible way and you don’t even want to know how badly I need a drink to go with them.”

“Yes,” Kylie said fervently.

“Okay, then. But first . . .” Elle pulled as much of the sawdust from Kylie’s hair as she could.

The pub was crowded. Luckily for them, Finn always kept the far side of the bar open to the people who lived and worked in the building. Pru, Haley, Willa, and Keane were already there, in varying degrees of “cowboy” attire.

Kylie sat, but Elle remained on her feet as they dug into the chicken wings. She’d been sitting all day and she feared getting a flat ass. She wasn’t ready to concede her curves just because she was working her ass off for a better life than she’d ever had before.

She wanted the good life and her curves, dammit.

“There’s one unhappy cowboy,” Pru said, gesturing to one of the dining tables, where a family sat with two little kids wearing more barbeque sauce than their food. The two-year-old was wailing at the top of his lungs, the slightly older one grinning from ear to ear.

Elle shuddered. “Can you imagine?”

“Yes,” Pru said with a soft smile.

Willa nodded, looking a little sappy. “It can’t be harder than having pets. At least kids eventually learn to use the toilet.”

Her boyfriend, Keane, laughed. “Such a romantic.”

“Always,” Willa said. “Maybe we should go practice procreation.”

Keane leaned in for a kiss. “Anytime.”

“You too,” Finn said to Pru. “You just say the word. I could practice the shit out of procreating.”

Elle watched the kids another minute. Small children tended to make her nervous. They were like little ticking time bombs just waiting to go off. “I don’t know if I see myself with kids,” she admitted.

“Hey, you’d make a great mother,” Pru said sincerely. “You’re strong and smart, and you always stick up for those you care about. Seriously, any kid would be lucky to have you as a mom.”

“The whole birth thing though,” Elle said. “It just seems like a poor exit strategy, doesn’t it?”

Someone tapped her on the shoulder and she turned to face a guy in a very nice suit, looking like a million bucks. And his smile looked like another million. Mike, she remembered, one of Archer’s clients.

“Hey,” he said. “Fancy meeting you here.”

Uh-huh. “You know I work in the building,” she said.

He rubbed his jaw and gave a wry smile. “Okay, so I was hoping to see you here. I’d really like to ask you to dance because that’s my signature move, but Archer told me very firmly that you were taken.”

She put her drink down and purposefully inhaled a deep breath, letting it out slowly. “He said what?”

Mike nodded and took a few nuts out of the mixed nuts bowl on the bar. “Yeah. He was pretty clear about it, actually.”

Archer, the man who didn’t want her for himself, had said she was taken. She could actually feel steam coming out of her ears. She hadn’t had a guy into her in . . . well, forever. In fact, she hadn’t had sex in two years and her parts were threatening to mutiny. “He said I was taken,” she repeated, needing to be sure before she planned Archer’s death.

His slow, painful death.

“He did,” Mike said. “I think his exact words were ‘off-limits’ and ‘don’t even think about it.’”

She might have growled. She certainly seethed. But honestly, a lot of the temper was at herself because when would she learn? Archer would never stop thinking of her as a responsibility, and she really did owe it to herself to move on, to find a man who could see her for more than just a scared, vulnerable girl.