But every once in a while, she came to mind. Her pretty smile. Her hazel eyes. The way she’d tug at the ends of her honey-blond hair when she was nervous.
How she tasted.
No, definitely not a helpful memory right this second.
Better to remember her angry tears, her arms crossed over her chest, the pair of jeans she’d thrown at his head.
Christ, what a wanker he’d been.
Shaking himself slightly, he stepped closer to his father and said, “Graves Glen? Why?”
Simon scowled at him, the hollows beneath his cheekbones deepening.
“It’s the anniversary of the founding of the town and the college,” Simon said. “A Penhallow must be there. Your brothers have other responsibilities, as do I, so it will be you. You should leave as soon as possible, and I’ll see to it that the house is prepared for you.”
He waved one elegant, long-fingered hand. “You are dismissed.”
“I fucking am not,” Rhys countered, and Simon straightened up. Rhys was over six feet, but his father, like Wells, had him beat by an inch or two, something Rhys felt profoundly in this moment. Still, he held his ground.
“Da,” he said, reverting to the name he hadn’t used since he was a child. “You know their whole ‘Founder’s Day’s’ thing has nothing to do with us now, right? It’s basically a Halloween party. They sell pumpkins, for Christ’s sake, Da. Little painted ones. I think there are stuffed bats involved. It’s nothing that requires our presence.”
“And yet our presence will be felt because you will be there,” his father said. “Every twenty-five years, a Penhallow must return to strengthen the ley lines, and this year, that Penhallow shall be you.”
Bollocks.
He’d forgotten about the ley lines.
A hundred years ago, his ancestor, Gryffud Penhallow, had founded the town of Glyn Bedd in the mountains of North Georgia in a spot where the veil was weak and magic was strong. Naturally, the town had called to witches over the years, and the college there, named after the Penhallow family home, taught both regular classes to humans and the arcane arts to witches.
Not that the humans who attended the college knew that. They just assumed the Historical Folklore and Practice major was exceedingly hard to get into and also accepted a fuckton of transfer students.
Rhys had been one of those transfer students nine years ago, just for summer classes, and he had several reasons—well, one very big one—not to want to go back.
“How do you know that, by the way?” his father asked now, narrowing his eyes slightly. “About Founder’s Day. You didn’t stay long enough to witness it the last time you were there.”
Because I occasionally have one whisky too many and see what The One Who Got Away is up to and she still lives there which is why I definitely don’t want to go back was the truth, but, Rhys suspected, not the answer to give here.
“That town is our family legacy, Da,” he said instead. “I’ve kept up with what’s going on there.”
Rhys was certain the look on his father’s face wasn’t pride because he was equally certain that Simon taking pride in anything Rhys said or did would cause a rip in the fabric of space and time, but at the very least, his father didn’t look actively irritated with him, and that was something.
And he hated that that still mattered to him. The last time he’d tried to win his father’s approval, it had ended up costing him Vivienne.
All right, so part of that had been his own utter idiocy in not bothering to mention that he’d agreed to let his father find him the perfect witch bride, but all of it had felt so far away, and Vivienne had been right there, real and immediate, not some abstract concept of a woman, and it had been so easy to put off telling her.