“Thank you,” he murmured against her temple, kissing the damp hair there, and she tilted her head back to look at him.
“For complimenting your bathroom?”
“For all of it. For holding your own against my father.”
“He loves you,” she said softly, reaching down to tangle her fingers with his under the water. “Yes, he’s overbearing and kind of a lot, but he’s scared. Worried. And you can’t blame him for that.”
Rhys didn’t want to think about his father right now, and he didn’t want to explain to Vivienne that family didn’t necessarily mean people who cared about you. She had Elaine and Gwyn, she had warmth and love and home and all the things Rhys had always hoped Simon might be, but never had been.
She was lucky.
And he was lucky to have her, even if it wasn’t for much longer.
Chapter 28
Vivi woke up the next morning and had the brief, disorienting sensation of not knowing where she was.
Rolling over, she pushed her hair out of her face and took in the heavy velvet drapes and flocked wallpaper.
Rhys’s house.
Rhys’s father’s house.
Rhys’s father.
Sighing, Vivi flopped onto her back as last night came rushing back. Simon hadn’t been wrong about them ignoring the curse, or at least not paying it as much attention as they should have. They’d cursed her entire town, and what had they spent the last week doing?
She glanced at Rhys’s side of the bed, already empty, and her body went warm with the memories of this past week. It felt silly to call it magic, but it had been. Just spending time with Rhys again, showing him around Graves Glen, having dinner with him in her apartment, or here in this bizarre mausoleum of a house that had, somehow, started to feel a little homier.
She even kind of liked the canopy if she was honest.
But Simon had been right—Halloween was just a day away, and they needed to get serious about this.
Easier said than done when it comes to Rhys, she thought, pushing the sheets back.
Which is why it was something of a shock to come downstairs and see Rhys fully dressed in the kitchen, a pair of sunglasses caught in the deep V of his shirt, two travel mugs of coffee in his hands.
“Morning, my darling,” he said, entirely too chipper for—Vivi checked the grandfather clock in the hallway—barely seven in the morning.
“Who are you, and what have you done with Rhys Penhallow?” she asked, narrowing her eyes at him even as she took one of the mugs from him.
“I do run a business, you know. I occasionally get up early, and have even been known to make a spreadsheet or two.”
“Entirely too early for dirty talk.”
Rhys smirked at that, leaning over to kiss the tip of her nose. “Go get dressed, and in the car, I’ll tell you all about my spreadsheets and the color-coded folders I keep in my office.”
“The car?” Vivi asked, wishing the coffee would make its way to her brain already.
“We have an errand to run,” Rhys replied, and something about the suddenly firm line of his mouth, the set of his shoulders, told her this was about the curse.
Twenty minutes and a phone call to Gwyn later, Vivi was showered, dressed in a pair of jeans she’d left at Elaine’s and a striped sweater that actually belonged to Gwyn, plus her own black boots from the night before, and she and Rhys were in his rental car, heading north out of Graves Glen.
“I guess about now would be a fabulous time to tell me what this errand actually entails,” Vivi said, reaching up to twist her hair into a messy bun.