The Belle and the Beard by Kate Canterbary (good book club books .txt) 📕

I tucked a few strands of hair behind her ears. "Everything looks like a dead end right now and that's why you need to give yourself a break."

"I don't have time for any breaks. I'm already several weeks into this break and I can't waste any more time with"—she flapped a hand at the hardy geraniums—"wandering in the woods and exploring the depths of my soul."

"Nothing blooms in every season," I said. "You shouldn't expect that of yourself when it doesn't occur in nature."

"That's a charming sentiment but I've been figuring out how to bloom nonstop since primary school. Not going to kick back now just because my life went to hell in a handbasket overnight."

I scooped her up, my arms cradling her backside and her spine against a tree trunk, because I didn't want to hear any more of this bullshit. "I'll find the time for you. We'll start by eliminating the baking from your day."

"Ahhhhh. There's the rude bear I've come to expect."

I watched the humor drift over her lovely face. She was beautiful in a painful sort of way, the kind that tightened your chest a bit too much. "Did you like being nightmarish?"

"What?"

"You said you'd been featured in nightmares and we had a laugh about it but I want to know if you liked that."

"I…I liked being taken seriously."

Nodding, I gave her ass a thorough squeeze, seeing as it was tremendously squeezable. Every time I laid eyes on her, I just wanted to dig my fingers in and squeeze. One more perversion where this woman was concerned but this was as far as I'd let it go right now. There was no fun in taking a bewildered, emotionally exhausted woman to bed, not for anyone. Especially not her. If we were going to do this, we were going to start it up the right way.

And that meant waiting until she didn't look like a breeze would blow her over.

"Sometimes," she continued, "people look at me and…they think I'm not intelligent or I can't do anything—"

"First time I saw you, I was positive you could crack open the earth to discard the bodies of those who got in your way."

"And yet you still came over and got in my way," she mused. "Put me down. I feel like a doll."

"What's the trouble in that?"

"Dolls aren't in charge. They have to wait to be taken off the shelf to play and even then, it's someone else's game."

I set her down, purposeful in running the length of her body against mine. "It's your game, Jas. There's no question about that. But you will sleep tonight. If you can't, call me. I'll bore you to sleep with stories about fungi."

She gave me a tart look. "Do you have many fungi stories?"

"Everyone has some good fungi stories but to someone who doesn't find that sort of thing intriguing, it could be the difference between sitting up and making a ton of lists and sleeping a solid eight or nine hours."

"Now I'm curious about this. What kind of fungi stories are we talking about?"

I pointed to a decaying conifer several yards away. "That's a Purplepore Bracket. It only lives on dying trees. Same with the False Turkey Tail, although we don't see that in this species of tree. And that, near the trunk of that red oak, is Bitter Oyster. It starts out small and knobby like that, but when it's fully developed it becomes bioluminescent. Since glowing mushrooms are not what anyone would expect to find and the whole thing is rather disarming on moonless nights, the glow they give off used to be known as fairy fire. There was a load of Native folklore around it but that's just how saprophytic fungi behave—unexpectedly."

"You really do have fungi stories."

"Look, mushrooms are wild. They exist in their own kingdom, neither plant nor animal even though they possess many qualities of both. And they hate being classified. Every time it seems like we have it all worked out, someone finds a new mushroom somewhere and the whole thing gets fucked up again. All we know is some of them are poisonous, some of them are edible, some of them are medicinal. Some will kill you with a single touch. Some will activate portions of your brain that rarely pop. Others are bioremediative and others might be immortal. We don't know for sure. We just don't know. It's very complex."

Jasper pressed her lips together in a flat frown. "Yeah, none of this will put me to sleep. I just have a million more questions."

Even though I knew better, I really did, I said, "I'll find a way to tire you out, Peach."

Her eyes widened. "I'm sure you will."

Because I knew better, I pointed to the Bitter Oyster again. "I can also talk about mushrooms."

With a nod, she leaned into me, her head tucked under my chin. "Okay. Let's talk about mushrooms."

12

Jasper

I woke up with the earliest light of dawn and spent a full minute blinking at the ceiling because I didn't know where I was. There was a moment where I gazed at the hand-carved beams running along the midline of the ceiling and I believed I was in Texas. There was a hotel in Houston we favored for campaign stops that had beams just like that one.

It took that full minute to realize I wasn't in Texas. I wasn't on a campaign stop, and I wasn't married anymore. Not legally, at least. I hadn't been emotionally married since before Preston left for Northern Ireland. Since…ever, really.

I was single in all the ways that counted and I felt nothing. Nothing new, nothing different. Maybe this was numbness. I didn't feel anything because I couldn't feel anything, not because I'd already felt everything associated with this part of my life ending.

My gaze shifted away from the ceiling beam and settled on the rich blue wall. I had no memory of falling asleep on Linden's big