Bookish and the Beast (Once Upon a Con #3)(41)

“Am I?” she repeats. She steps up to me, and I ease back a little from our closeness. The freckles across her nose look like a constellation, and my eyes follow them down the dip of her nose to her bowlike mouth. She’s strangely intimidating, like a squirrel with a butcher knife.

“N-no, that’s not it,” I find myself replying. “I didn’t tell you because—”

“Oh, I’m sure it’s because—”

“—you’d realize that it was—”

“—you found out that it was—”

“—me,” we finish at the same time.

My eyebrows furrow. Her hazel eyes widen.

A crack of thunder streaks across the purple clouds, followed by a chest-rattling clap of thunder, and a raindrop lands on my cheek.





ANOTHER CRACK OF LIGHTNING streaks across the sky, and I tense up. I don’t think. I grab Vance by the arm and tug him toward the pool house.

There is a brief moment of buzzing—wind rips through the trees. Then a sheet of rain, a gray wall of it, comes rushing across the yard. I throw my hands over my head to try to stop it, but I’m drenched in a matter of seconds. I just got my cowlick tamed, too. Vance is just as soaked, his thin white T-shirt stuck to his body like a second skin.

I shove my shoulder against the pool house door, praying it isn’t locked. The door gives—thank God!—and we stumble inside. It’s a small shed with a few pieces of furniture covered in plastic. The light switch on the left doesn’t work, and the entire place smells like pollen and timber. The rain pounds against the roof like pebbles.

At least it’s dry.

When he clears his throat, I come to my senses and quickly let go of him. Crap, I’m now stuck in a pool house with Vance for God knows how long, and he’s in a very wet shirt that clings to every curve of his broad shoulders and—

Stop it, Rosie, he’s a jerk. You don’t like jerks.

No, but I can still appreciate the view.

“The storm should pass soon, I think,” I say, trying to get my mind off him.

“Mmh,” he replies, and wanders over to one of the plastic-wrapped pieces of furniture and finds a barstool. He pulls the plastic off it, drags it up to the window, and sulkily sits down. Water drips from his shirt onto the cement floor, and a shiver runs through his entire body. He rubs his arms to keep out the chill.

Even though it’s the end of September, climate change hit us with some late storms—probably the outer bands of Hurricane Diana. There are mounds and mounds of boxes behind the plastic-wrapped couch, so I figure there has to be a blanket (or at least an old towel) in one of them—and hopefully no snakes. Or spiders. God, I hate spiders.

I glance over his way as he sifts through the junk. Do you actually mean it? I want to ask. That I wasn’t the reason you didn’t tell me who you were?

But I don’t know how to begin, so I busy myself looking through the boxes, opening one after the other, finding Christmas ornaments and Valentine decorations and Fourth of July banners from years and years past. I take out the head of a Santa Claus—just the head, not the body—before dropping it back into the box and moving on.

Creeeeeepy.

What is more unsettling, however, is the silence between us. Usually we’re bickering—or at least snapping at each other—but this sort of heavy quiet is the worst.

Vance must think so too, because he finally says, “I didn’t mean for you to get the wrong idea. It’s not because of you I didn’t tell you.”

“You don’t have to spare my feelings—”

“I’m not,” he replies, turning to face me. He’s wringing the bottom of his shirt out, like he’s nervous. Him—nervous? Lightning must’ve struck me while I was outside. I must be dead. “I recognized the birthmark on your neck. It looks a little like a rose, so that’s how I remembered it. It’s cute.”

Cute. I touch my birthmark beneath my ear, so glad it’s dark enough for him not to see me blushing like mad. I dig further into the box and find a blanket.

“And I realized that I had already been terrible to you—well, that I’d just been terrible, period—and I didn’t know what else to do. And, I think a part of me was afraid that if you found out it was me, you would go to the tabloids, and I do not need that right now. I’m here because of the tabloids. But…” He takes a deep breath. “I think the real reason was, though, was that I was afraid that if you found out it was me you would be…”

“That I would be…?” I insist, turning to him.

He hesitates and sits down on a pool chair. “…Disappointed.” His voice is so soft, like the whisper of a secret. I drag the blanket out of the box and crouch in front of him. He hesitates a look at me, cornflower blue eyes framed by blond eyelashes.

“That’s funny,” I say with a soft laugh, “because I thought you were disappointed that it was me.”

He shakes his head. “No, never. You’re perf—”

I toss the blanket over his head. It’s an instinctive reaction. Like flinching away from a punch. Or screaming at a spider. But this is different. It’s a compliment I want to hear, but don’t, because while he sounds sincere, I don’t know how much of him I trust.