Page 7 of Ly to Me (Devils of Alliston Springs #1)

Lyra glanced up at the clouds, her eyes wincing from the thin ray of sunlight piercing through. Or maybe it was my fiftieth random question she had no plan to answer. “Last I checked.”

Fuck. This girl wasn’t biting on anything. I tapped a few fingers on my bag and swung in front of her. Seemed to work earlier just fine.

Her feet halted before the rest of her body, and I reached up to steady her by the shoulder. She flinched, her shock turning into a deep frown. It was kind of cute. “Do you have to keep doing that?”

“Asking you things or making you stop?”

“Both!” She sighed in obvious frustration. Also kinda cute. She started tying her long brown hair up, her face still pinched as she glared up at me. “Just…why are you still walkin’ with me? Are you lost? Think I’m leading you down some magical yellow brick road?”

I arched a brow, trying hard not to smile. “Depends. Is your name actually Dorothy?”

She huffed and shoved her shoulder into my side, storming past me. I grinned and turned to follow.

“Are you tellin’ me you didn’t lie about your name just like you didn’t lie about what you were doin’ in the field?”

“I didn’t lie.” Lyra’s voice lowered, her eyes skirting the street before crossing.

I tailed behind like a lost puppy. As we came up on the sidewalk, she started talking.

Finally. “Why does it matter to you why I was out there? Half the school was out there, and I don’t see you followin’ them home. ”

Alright. I can work with this. “You looked like you needed some company, maybe a hand or two—” I held mine up, then gripped her shoulders, moving her to the other side of me. I hadn’t missed the flinch that time, either. “There, that’s better.”

She exhaled deeply. “What’s better?” Conceding never sounded cuter.

Man, the guys might have been completely wrong about this one.

I’d found three things that were adorable about her, and I’d only just met her.

I also found I kind of liked having to work for the small pieces of conversation she was allowing through whatever thick walls she’d erected.

I wondered how many people she actually let in.

My shoulders lifted into a shrug, half to myself, half to her question. “Where you’re standing. Don’t you know a man is supposed to walk on the side closer to the road where the cars are driving by?”

Her hands tightened around her backpack straps. “And why is that?”

“You didn’t know that?” I chuckled, hoping she’d start laughing, too. Usually girls loved my laugh.

Instead, the space between her brows creased. “This is the part where you tell me why that’s so important—for a man to be closer to the road.”

I paused, rubbing my jaw. “It’s the sidewalk rule. Ya know.” Another few beats of silence passed. “Has no guy ever walked beside you before?”

“No guy who uses the sidewalk rule.” The words seemed to tumble from her, a slight look of shock appearing on her face. Something about that bothered me.

Okay, everything about that bothered me.

“It’s to make sure the woman is safe from the cars passin’ by, like a shield,” I said, glancing at her shoulders. “Do you get scared easily?”

“What?” Her tone pitched with annoyance. Actually, that pitch might’ve been the bulk of the way she’d been speaking to me this whole time.

“You flinched when I moved you away from the road. Did I scare you?”

I studied her movements like it was important to the reason I started walking with her in the first place. She shook her head, her voice low as she said, “No, I just don’t like to be touched, is all.”

“You don’t like to be touched, but you were watching eye candy in the field?” Shit . Probably shouldn’t have said that.

Her steps slowed as we neared a dirt road, and to my surprise, she glanced at me before continuing down it. She was either leading me to a slow, calculated death out in the middle of the woods that surrounded the shack at the end of the road, or—

“Hey!” I hurried after her, not realizing that I’d stopped walking and was now several meters behind. Catching up, she stopped and turned to me, adjusting her bag that I now also realized must have weighed half her body weight.

And there I was talking about being a gentleman and the fucking sidewalk rule.

“Let me carry that for you.” I held my arm out.

She stared at it blankly, her gaze unmoving from my hand as she said, “I’m home now. You can go.”

My jaw worked. “Let me help you carry that inside.”

Her lips pursed. “I carry my bag by myself every day. I think I can handle it the rest of the twenty feet to my front door.”

My eyes narrowed to that door, then to the roof that had a blue tarp over a quarter of it. My gaze continued falling to the busted-out screen covering a thin, old window, and the scraggly weeds growing past the sill. Her home wasn’t a home—not one I was used to seeing, at least.

Lyra’s dark hair swayed beside the door and I bolted to catch up to her, yet again. As I came up behind her, she sighed. “You’re not going to take no for an answer, are you?”

“If I answer with a ‘no’ right now, does that mean you’ll say I can come in?”

“How—”

I pulled her bag from her shoulder and slung it over mine, then held my hand up, directing her to the door. “After you, Ly.”

She muttered under her breath as she fished a key out of her pocket, but when she went to put it in the lock, the door creaked open. Lyra muttered more curses.

“You can put the bag right there.”

I peeked at where she was pointing and tried to hide my frown by rolling my lips in. There was no carpet or flooring of any kind. I’d worked these past few summers with Jared, helping his dad with his construction company, and what she had was subflooring only. “Got a bedroom?”

Her brow arched. “Excuse me?”

“To put your bag in. That’s where you do homework and stuff, right?”

Her sigh lit something inside me, probably because it signaled one thing—she was going to give in again.

“Follow me.”

I did so, but it wasn’t many steps until we reached a small hallway with a few doors. She pulled out another key and pushed it into the lock…on her bedroom door. But, when it opened, I let a genuine smile come to the surface.

Her room wasn’t like the living space we walked past. A circular yellow rug sat in the center, spanning to cover most of the subflooring. A twin bed was pushed into the corner, but made up with a black set and even a few throw pillows.

“This is yours?” She nodded as I set her bag down beside a small, white desk. As Lyra stood in the corner with her arms crossed, my jaw slackened as my eyes roamed the walls. “And…all of these are…”

“Dead?” she finished, letting a giggle slip out.

Make that four things that were fucking adorable. Five for the face she made while doing it.

“I gathered they were dead by the pins sticking out of them.” I grinned at her, and she returned one while walking up to the display closest to me. “Did you catch all of these?”

“Most,” she said, touching the corner of a small, wooden frame with the back punched out. “The ones I didn’t catch on my own were gifts.”

“Oh, a boyfriend?”

She eyed me suspiciously, then turned back to the case. “No. My mom.”

“Oh.” I took a step closer, my arm brushing hers, sending an odd zap of energy through to my bones. I struggled to swallow. “So, no boyfriend then.”

“No boyfriend,” she repeated.

We stared at the wall of pinned and labeled butterflies, entranced by their preserved wings that glowed in hues of oranges, yellows, greens, browns and blues. My tongue swiped over my bottom lip, trying to snap out of the weird bubble I’d gotten myself into.

The small bed beside her flashed in my periphery, but my focus quickly became taken over by her. She was warming up to me, oddly enough, but I couldn’t find it in myself to jump the gun like I’d been so ready to do only twenty minutes ago.

The image of her sitting in the grass as my friends all nudged my shoulders ran through my head again before I shook it out. “Is that what you were doing in the field? Collecting butterflies?”

She hesitated, her eyes fixed on a noticeably empty space in the display in front of us. “ Phoebis philea. ”

“What?”

“The name of the butterfly I was sitting in the field for is called Phoebis philea. ” She blinked, then angled her head just enough for me to see that she had completely morphed.

This girl in front of me had gone from white as a ghost to a vibrant, blushing beauty in seconds.

“Also known as the orange-barred sulphur. It has yellow wings with brownish spots, and the larva feeds on—”

“The money bush.” Her eyes widened, and because that stirred something more in me, I added, “I like the yellow flowers on it. Catches my eye when I’m out there, so I looked up what it was.”

“Yeah.” She nodded and tipped her small body toward mine. “My full name is Lyra Thomas, but you can keep calling me Ly.” Her soft smile snuffed the room from my view completely as something else warmed me. This close to her, I noticed she smelled like that—warmth. Like sunshine.

“Well then, Ly, is it okay if I walk you home again tomorrow?” Her brow quirked up. “As a friend,” I amended.

She brightened more than I believed possible. “Yeah, Car. I’d like that.”