Rhys glanced over at her. He had his sunglasses on, the sleeves of his dark gray button-down rolled up, and Vivi wondered why it was that she could’ve had so much sex with this man, and still be so turned on by something as basic as his forearms while driving. Was that some kind of heretofore unknown fetish of hers, or was it just that everything about Rhys turned her on?
Then he said, “We’re going to let that ghost out of the candle,” and her libido got a healthy splash of cold water.
“I’m sorry, what?” she asked, her hands still frozen on top of her head, the ponytail holder stretched between two fingers as she stared at him.
“Piper McBride,” he answered, as calm and collected as ever, and Vivi scowled at him as she let her hands drop, her hair falling back to her shoulders.
“That would be the who, Rhys. What I meant was, ‘What the hell do you mean, we’re letting her out of that candle?’ We don’t even know where that candle is right now.”
“Actually,” Rhys said, reaching over to pick up his travel mug, “we do.”
He casually sipped his coffee and Vivi grumbled as she went back to fixing her hair.
“This is punishment for not telling you about the ghost in the first place, isn’t it?”
“Little bit, yes,” he said, then gave her that half smile that always hit her somewhere squarely in the chest. “All right, cards on the table. I couldn’t sleep last night, and while staring at you while you sleep is a treasured pastime—”
“Creeper.”
That grin again, and a quick squeeze to her thigh. “I decided to put my insomnia to use. My father was right, much as saying that makes me want to die. It’s almost Samhain, and we need to be focused on the curse. So I thought to myself, ‘Rhys, you devilishly handsome bastard, what was the last truly solid lead you got on the curse?’ And then I remembered ol’ Piper with her ‘cursed Penhallow’ bit, and it struck me that she might know more than we let her reveal before the candle sucked her in.”
Vivi nodded slowly even as her stomach went icy at the thought of dealing with Piper again. “Okay, I can see all that,” she agreed. “But Tamsyn Bligh has the candle if she hasn’t already sold it. And god knows where she is.”
“She’s two towns over,” Rhys said, turning left off the highway. “In a place called Cade’s Hollow.”
Vivi blinked at him. “How do you know that?”
Rhys tapped the side of his nose with one long finger. “Can’t trust doing magic in Graves Glen, but that doesn’t mean I can’t get other people to do magic for me. Specifically, in this case, my brother Llewellyn. Wanker owes me one. So I called him, had him run a little tracking spell for me. Now, had Miss Bligh already been on the other side of the country, we might have needed a plan B, but turns out, she didn’t go far.”
“But she might not still have the candle,” Vivi said, not wanting to get her hopes up, and Rhys nodded.
“She might not,” he agreed. “But we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.”
“Cross. The saying is ‘cross that bridge when we come to it.’”
“Huh,” was Rhys’s only reply, and Vivi settled back into her seat, watching the early morning sun play over the purplish-blue mountains, watched as the fields slowly became houses, and as the houses gave way to a town even smaller than Graves Glen.
Once the downtown was behind them, Rhys took another series of turns, eventually pulling up in front of a Victorian mansion that looked like a wedding cake, all gingerbread trim and peaked roofs, a wreath of autumn leaves adorning the front door.
Shutting off the car, Rhys ducked his head down to study the building through the windshield.