Tiger Lily - May Dawson Page 0,61
mugs from the cabinet.
I’d give him the Tinkerbell mug. Tink would totally poison a guy who deserved it.
I poured the water in with shaking hands.
“Honey?” I asked him.
“However you want to make it for me.” His tone was magnanimous, and I bit my lip.
We’d had plenty of good times when we were dating, and yet now those all seemed so distant. How had I stayed so long with someone who thought so little of me? Day by day, I’d accepted less and less.
I poured the potion into his cup, glad the bottle was unmarked, and hid it behind the honey bear as I put it back on the counter top. I stirred it all together with a spoon, whirling the tea bag around the cup. Steam billowed up into my face.
Blake lived to boss me around, but he also saw me as skilled and smart. To be fair, he bossed around Archer and Dylan quite a bit too, as if that was how he treated people he loved. Maybe his inner German Shepherd programmed him that way.
Dylan looked at me as though he adored me, like I was the most beautiful woman and no one else existed. I thought of that moment I’d faced the closet, and I knew that Dylan would never, ever make me feel like I wasn’t as good as another woman.
And Archer…. Archer could be anywhere, but he chose Hot Wheels, his brothers and, if I let him…I would bet he chose me.
My eyes filled with tears. They were just down the street. They were so close… if I made it through these next few minutes and reached them. I didn’t want to lose them. I didn’t want to lose the chance of a life with them.
I carried the mugs over and, even though I wanted to run to them right now, I sat down across from Brad.
“How is it?” I asked, wrapping my hands around my steaming mug.
He picked up the cup, looking at the side, and he smiled. “Tink, huh? Well at least she’s sexy.”
“She’s two inches tall.”
He shrugged. My heart was in my throat as he finally took a sip. He paused, tipping the mug toward him to look at the drink. I tensed, ready to run.
He raised the mug to his lips and took another, longer sip.
“It’s really good,” he admitted as he set it back down. “It’s sweet. You didn’t put this much honey in when I had a sore throat, or maybe I would’ve liked it.”
“Oh yeah,” I said, wondering what he remembered now about his time in Silver Springs so far. My mind raced with how to test if the spell had taken hold yet. “Well, Silver Springs has the best honey bees. And the best frogs!”
“Frogs?” he asked, a smile in his voice. “What’s special about the frogs?”
Relief washed over me.
“Well, I think they’re really cute!” I exclaimed, feeling almost giddy. “And you never know—if you kiss a frog, maybe it’ll turn out to be a prince or a princess!”
If you kissed a Silver Springs frog, it would get you high as a kite… as he should remember. But there was no hint of recognition in his eyes.
The potion really, truly worked.
Silver Springs was safe.
Now I just needed to make sure I was.
“I acted like a frog, not your prince,” he admitted balefully. “I should never have kissed that other girl.”
From her complete absence of clothing as she shivered in my closet, they’d done a lot more than kiss. Kissing would’ve been bad enough, but he was phrasing it like he’d accidentally kissed her while they were drunk at the club—not as if he’d purposefully cheated on me in my own home for lord knows how long.
He added, “No matter what you did. We should have just talked it out, fixed it, instead of me…wandering…when you didn’t meet my needs.”
Holy hell. Anger tightened my chest, then I thought of Dylan and Blake and Archer and it faded.
“It’s all right,” I told him. And it really was. What he did was wrong—but my broken heart had brought me home again to Silver Springs. “It’s okay, Brad.”
“Can we try again?” he asked me. “I miss you, Lily.”
“I miss what we had too,” I said carefully, thinking of the good times we’d had, of the man I thought he was, when we went roller-skating on our first date.
I stood up, giving him a smile, but prepared to dash for the back door if I had to. I resisted looking at the