Page 26 of Just One Little Bargain

“I don’t have a girl problem.”

“Sure you don’t.” She flips the bar towel onto her shoulder. “Just so you know, a girl who’s got you this twisted up is worth the effort.”

I stare after her as she moves down the bar, wondering how a stranger could see so clearly what I’m only beginning to understand myself.

She’s right about one thing. I am twisted up. I’m sitting in a bar, drinking something the color of a sunset, thinking about a woman who never wants to see me again.

But only because she’s my last chance. The final opportunity to prove I can do this job before Hell decides I’m more trouble than I’m worth.

That’s why I keep thinking about her.

She’s a contract. An assignment.

That’s all this is.

Chapter 9

Evie

Ijerk awake. The clock reads 3:33 A.M. in glowing red numbers, and Marmalade is sitting on my chest, staring down at me. For one awful second, his eyes look violet in the darkness, before he blinks and they’re just normal green again.

Sleep is officially off the table. I know this the way I know burnt toast and overdue invoices. My body has decided we’re awake now, and no amount of deep breathing or pillow rearranging is going to override that decision.

So at four in the morning I’m crossing the cottage with an armload of folded towels. I dump them on the bathroom counter and start refolding them. They were fine. Perfect, actually. But my hands need something to do before I start clawing at my own arms.

By five, I’ve moved to scrubbing the floors while Marmalade supervises from the doorway. He sits there with his tail wrapped around his paws.

“This is your fault,” I tell him, attacking the grout between tiles with a brush I normally reserve for truly disgusting jobs.

He blinks slowly, which in cat language translates to something deeply insulting, then wanders off to knock things over in another room.

Now it’s six-thirty, and I’m making my way across the dewy grass between the cottage and the inn. The morning air bites at my cheeks, slipping under the thin, peach cardigan I’d yanked from the hook. I hike the sleeves up for the third time in ten steps.

My raw heels scrape against the back of my sneakers with each footfall. When I fumble with the inn’s rear door key, tiny smears of blood mark the white canvas of my shoes. I stare at them, blinking three times to bring them into focus, then push inside without bothering to wipe my feet.

The Foxglove’s kitchen door opens with its familiar creak, and I don’t bother with the overhead lights. My hand finds the oven dial and turns it to 375. The hiss of the appliance ticking to life is louder than expected, swallowing the brittle silence.

I reach left to the second drawer from the sink, the one that always sticks before giving way. My hand plunges in, expecting the soft cotton of neatly folded dish towels, but instead meeting crinkly plastic and paper tags. Someone made themselves tea last night and decided my organizational system was more of a suggestion than a rule.

Fine. It’s fine. Guests are supposed to feel at home here.

I find the towels in the next drawer over and the good mugs shoved onto the wrong shelf. I pull down the mixing bowls and set them on the counter harder than necessary. I grab the flour canister, and nearly drop it because someone moved it six inches to the left and my hand expected it to be where it’s lived for years.

I measure out three cups, leveling each one with a butter knife. The white powder poofs into the air, and I breathe in that clean, wheat smell while my brain runs its post-mortem on last night.

The guy didn’t hurt me, threaten me, or so much as raise his voice. He crouched on my floor, petted my cat, complimented my spice rack, and left when I told him to. If I strip away the demon nonsense, what remains is a tall, annoyingly attractive stranger with good manners and a flair for dramatic entrances.

Brindlewood has had exactly zero violent crimes in the last decade. The most dangerous thing that happened here was when Old Gary backed his truck through the garden center display and took out forty dollars’ worth of ceramic gnomes. This is not a town where women get murdered by handsome strangers. Nobody even gets mildly inconvenienced here, unless you count the seasonal parking situation near the river walk. Which I do, because it’s atrocious.

Salt goes in next, and I toss a pinch over my left shoulder automatically. Mom taught me that one. I’ve collected superstitions my whole life the way other people collect stamps or grudges, and right now I’m running through all of them, trying to determine which sign I missed.

Cinnamon leaves rusty streaks on my fingertips and under my nails. I learned to bake from my mom in this order. Dry ingredients first, always. She used to stand next to me at the counter and say it was just chemistry. Follow the rules, get predictable results. That was before Dad left and she stopped entirely, because it was their thing.

The stand mixer groans when I turn it on, and I wince. I should’ve played along. That’s the part that keeps needling me as the mixer thrashes flour into pale clouds. Not the fear or the weirdness. The fact that I might’ve figured out what was happening if I hadn’t screamed at him to leave.

Daisy would’ve been fearless. She practically lives for this kind of encounter. The unexplained, the strange, the things that hover at the boundary of what’s rational. She runs ghost tours for a living, and has a bookshelf dedicated to local folklore and unexplained history. A man claiming to be a demon would have been her personal Christmas morning.

Maddie would have sized him up in about three seconds, decided he was worth her time or he wasn’t, and acted accordingly. She would’ve poured herself a drink, settled onto the couch, and said something devastating enough to make him forget he was supposed to be collecting souls.