Page 40 of Never Been Witched (Starfall Point #3)

Alice

Weirdly, Collin was no longer comfortable with Alice sleeping alone in the hotel’s guesthouse, what with the rampant murder echoes and the previously undiscovered bricked-in corpses and all.

Not to mention whatever Clark or her thwarted grandparents might try to come up with to get her back into the shop.

Alice figured this was a reasonable response and did not put up much of a fuss.

Also, he was going to have to figure out a quiet way to get Samuel’s body out of his wine cellar. His to-do list had grown infinitely more weird since Alice came into his life.

Moving her suitcase from the guesthouse as well just seemed like a logical step. And while Alice appreciated the courtesy of Collin depositing her things in the sumptuous guest room in Forsythia Manor, she had no intention of sleeping there.

“You know, you’re the first girl I’ve really had up here,” he said, waving a hand around the spacious primary bedroom with its elaborately carved four-poster and sweeping view of the moonlit lake. He rubbed the back of his neck. “I mean, as an adult.”

“Do you feel sort of naughty?” she asked.

“Well, my grandparents smiling at us… It doesn’t help.

” He gestured toward the framed photo of an older couple, beaming down at them serenely.

He nodded to another photo, a young couple, both dark-haired and suntanned.

They were smiling at each other, instead of at the camera.

“And my parents. We can just turn those around.”

She giggled as he reached over to do just that, and caught his hand.

“The ring is interesting,” she said, nodding to the cushion-cut solitaire on Collin’s grandmother’s finger and then his mother’s. “Same stones. Different settings. Two carats on the diamond?”

“You can tell that?” Collin grinned at her. “What am I saying? Of course you can. I normally keep this in a safe at my apartment back home, but it made sense to have it here.”

He pulled out a small cherrywood box from his dresser drawer.

It was neatly organized, filled with cuff links, earrings, wedding bands—the ring from the photos.

The piece was indeed a stunner, a perfectly clear two carats flanked by two small rectangular emeralds.

The dresser contained a whole collection of important family jewelry pieces…

unsecured, in a drawer. Alice wasn’t even sure if the front door had been locked when they walked in—and while Starfall Pointers prided themselves in providing a friendly atmosphere, they also didn’t believe in that “town so small that no one locks their doors” nonsense.

“This was my grandmother’s ring, but reset for my mother,” he said, handing it to her. “Grandma Marty wanted Mom to have a fresh start, fresh stories.”

“That’s sweet,” she told him.

He nodded. “I think I would do the same thing for the woman I want to marry, carry on the tradition.”

Alice tried not to think about the sort of woman Collin would give this ring to.

She focused on the beauty of the piece for just a moment.

The only reason she didn’t spend a prolonged, awkward amount of time studying the gorgeous gemstone was that she didn’t want to look like some sort of jewelry ghoul.

“This is valuable and should be in a vault,” she told him, handing it back quickly. “All of this should be in a vault. And maybe guarded by a dragon.”

“I know. I just like having it somewhere I can see it,” he said. “I left it here in the house for so long. I like knowing I can just walk across a room and open the door and bam, there it is. Also, my dragon access is limited.”

“I don’t believe you should let that stop you,” she said, placing her hand on his chest. He wrapped his long, warm fingers around hers and pressed it even closer to his heart. He bent his head to kiss her and she could almost feel the soft brush of his lips against hers when—

“I’ve been engaged,” he suddenly blurted out. “More than once.”

“Oh.” Alice’s chin seemed to retreat into her body for a second. “OK.”

“To the same woman,” he added, his face going beet red.

“Oh.” The way she said “oh” changed. She couldn’t help it. “It sounds like there’s probably a story there.”

She pulled him over to the bed, where they sat on the thick down-filled duvet. She held his hand as he explained, “This is embarrassing, but I figure, the more you know about my history… Forewarned is forearmed, you know?”

“Trust me, engagement stories in my coven tend to be pretty horrific, so my bar is pretty high,” she told him. “Did anybody die in a boating accident?”

“No!” Collin blanched. “No one died in any sort of accident. I mean, no one died in an intentional, murder-y manner either.”

“OK, then,” she said.

“Who died in a boating accident?” Collin asked.

“I’ll explain later,” Alice promised.

“Weirdly, I feel a little better now. So, I mentioned Paige before, my girlfriend during my ‘irresponsible douche’ phase? Her family has been close with my family for years. We’ve known each other since grade school, always being thrown together at parties and dinners.

My parents didn’t discourage it because they thought she was a good influence on me, but her parents were insistent about us spending time together.

They saw it as a joining of two financial ‘dynasties.’ And after my parents passed, it was nice to have that consistency, a connection to something that I knew my parents would approve of.

And Paige, she saw me do some of the most self-destructive, stupid things humanly possible, and she stuck around.

I thought that meant something. I thought it meant she had to love me, that she would love me through anything.

Who smiles and holds a guy’s hand as he has his ass stitched up because he drove a Vespa through a department-store window if she doesn’t love him? ” Collin asked.

Alice marveled, “Wow.”

“At nineteen, I asked her to marry me in a fit of drunken ‘romantic’ idiocy on the street in Rome, with a ring I bought from a souvenir cart,” Collin sighed.

“That’s kind of sweet,” she said.

He shook his head. “We were too young. It was not the dream proposal she wanted, and her family wasn’t pleased with the timing.

We were still in school, after all, and they didn’t want any rumors circulating about us ‘having’ to get married.

And yes, families in our social climate are still quaint enough to be concerned with the appearance of that sort of thing. ”

“You’ve met my grandparents,” she reminded him. “Trust me, I get the ‘concerned with appearances’ thing.”

“So, they talked us into delaying the engagement at least until after graduation, which made sense,” Collin sighed.

“At the time, I was hurt. I thought I was going to get a family, be part of something again. Paige panicked, I think, probably from the very idea of marrying an idiot who proposed to her with a ten-dollar ring from a tourist cart. She broke things off, started dating other people. And after thinking about it for a while, I was kind of relieved. But then, her junior year, her boyfriend cheated on her with one of her best friends and she came running back to me, and that was another eighteen months of dating.”

He rubbed his free hand over his face. “A lot of our friends were getting engaged around graduation. I felt bad, watching her smile get a little tighter every time someone else made an announcement. And I thought, why not? She was an appropriate choice , something I’d been told all my life was important.

Besides, it wasn’t as if I’d found someone I thought I would be happier with—which I know sounds fucking terrible.

I thought… This is what my parents would have wanted for me: settling down, being responsible, making a life.

I was still in occasional contact with Lawrence and Cynthia back then and I wasn’t smart enough to see why they would be pushing me toward that idea—because, somehow, they thought there was money in it for them.

Maybe Paige’s family would give them a finder’s fee?

Anyway, I bought what I considered to be a respectable ring and proposed over dinner very publicly in one of her favorite restaurants.

” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I even phoned in a tip to a society gossip column that I was planning to propose because I knew she would love that sort of thing.”

Alice wasn’t sure how to process any of this, but was careful to keep her expression neutral.

Paige and her parents sounded like pieces of work, taking advantage of a young man who needed help and guidance, and not guidance toward sharing community property with Paige.

Even now, Collin sounded so lost and uncertain, and guilty.

And she knew what it was like, to twist guilt and what passed for love into bonds made of barbed wire.

She knew their sharp weight better than anyone else. “And that one didn’t take?”

“This is starting to sound pathetic. No, it probably sounded pathetic a couple of minutes ago.” He shook his head.

“Let’s just say I see a lot of my own situation in Victoria and her unhappy engagement.

This time, Paige didn’t like the ring. The stone was the wrong shape and the wrong sort of band or something.

And she didn’t like the proposal. She wanted something all of her friends could see in person. ”

“You have a perfectly lovely ring in that drawer,” she told him, pointing toward his dresser.

Collin hesitated. “It wasn’t Paige’s style. She wouldn’t wear it, even if it was an heirloom. She likes, uh, contemporary designs.