Page 88 of Bride of Choice

Reaching back behind him, he locked the door, the heavy wood creaking with his weight as he leaned back against it.

Bum had one single window, a sad affair that was too high for me to reach, too small to crawl through, and only that door at his back he was crushing to get the hello out of here. “What find?” he grunted out quietly.

He had a funny look in his eyes.

Wondering if this was how it felt to live out a murder mystery, where you know your murder may well start off this whole shebang, I swallowed past the lump in my throat. “Oh, you know… a little of this… little of that.”

Cocking his head, he eyed me.

“Did you find him?” The words came out of me all high and tight. I felt like a fat little mouse being eyed by a lion. “The Krampus?”

“Jo see Krampus? Jo think see Krampus?” he pressed, folding his thick arms over his chest.

Holding up my hand, I promised, “I saw it. It was staring right at me. I woke up to its fugly face watching me, all pressed up against the window like a creepy, stalker weirdo.”

Sucking in my cheeks, I held my breath, waiting for him to tell me what he thought I thought I saw— that hysterical female imagining things bullshit.

“Why do you have hybrid beastie horns in a box by your fancy chair?” More importantly, why were the ones on the top of the pile my hybrid beastie’s horns?

Bum-bum’s dark gaze met mine evenly. We stayed like that, waiting for one of us to break. When neither of us did, he rumbled out, “Kirch think Joadknee likes ‘tention. Say Rek say Joadknee touches feelies on Rek. Rek no want hurt Joadknee feelings.”

He couldn’t have shocked me more if he’d tried to stab me with one of those fucking horns or flat out admitted he was a cold blooded killer.

“Are you shitting me?!” Advancing on him, I shook a finger at him. “Is that what he thinks? That I’m an unwanted groper? Like I’m harassing people?! Those fucking assholes!” I exploded. A barrage of ugliness spilled forth, erupting from me like a deluge of curse word laden verbal diarrhea. Once it started, it just kept coming.

You’d think I was the lion advancing on the mouse, the way Bum-bum was staring down at me uneasily.

“Rek’s telling everyone that? Is that what you think, huh? That I’m some weird, inappropriate groper? That I’m an attention seeking whore?! That I-”

Bum-bum gripped me by my shoulders, jerked me up, and looking a little panicked and lost as my voice grew and my face reddened, rage filling me at Rek’s betrayal yet again, smacked his lips to mine.

This was where it got kinda weird.

Instead of a traditional shut ‘em up kiss, he pressed his lips to mine, almost in an odd, innocent mashing of our faces, mouth touching mouth, and that was it. We just stayed like that, lips pressing, effectively stunning me speechless, nothing more.

“Whut er we doowing?” I mumbled around warm lips.

A grunt left him and air puffed out across my face through his nose. He was breathing so heavily a wheeze was whistling through his snoot.

“Fiss hisn’t how to kwiss,” I felt the need to point out. “Wips mwove awound mwore. Sometimes thweres twongue.”

Bum-bum jerked away from me then, his brow drawing down, until he was glowering down at me.

“What the hell was that for?” I blurted, reaching up to touch my lips, a question in my eyes.

“Makes stop,” he grunted out, but his skin flushed a funny blue with hints of dark purple, the tips of his ears turning dark blue, and he kept clearing his throat, looking anywhere but meeting my gaze directly.

“You can, uh- You can put me down now.” Oh, it was rather nice like this, but he hadn’t sworn he hadn’t killed my Cuddle Monster yet, and until he did, none of this was going any further than that weirdness he’d just pulled.

Staring at him, while his gaze darted around me, off to my left, my right, over my head, I felt it pertinent to hit him while he was feeling discombobulated. I had a better chance of him blurting out the truth, I felt.

“What did you do with my Cuddle Monster? There are more than one set of horns in there, but I know the top ones are his. They have a very distinct shape, color, and pattern. I’d know—I’d had my hands all over them for half the night.” There. I’d said it.

When Bum-bum jerked like I’d slapped him and his gaze fell on me sharply, his shocked to pissed glower, I took that as a bad sign.

“Did you kill him?” I elaborated.

Bum-bum’s death glare went from This is what happens when we don’t mind our own fucking business to Did I do what now?!

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