Page 18 of Silver Linings

Then she put on a smile that looked somehow forced and said, “Some pretty flowers grow out here, but I know they don’t sparkle.”

“Well, this one did.” What had gone wrong with his phone? He’d taken some snaps at the convention over the weekend, and it had been working just fine. Had all the damp out here in the forest somehow fogged the camera lens?

Somehow he knew that explanation, while rational enough, wasn’t the true answer. No, something else was going on here, something that all his instincts were telling him was connected to the shimmering white horse that supposedly had been spotted in these very woods.

“You know something,” he said.

Sidney’s eyes narrowed. In her pet shop, he hadn’t noticed what a clear, crystalline gray they truly were, like a reflection of the cloudy skies above. When he’d first seen her, he’d noted how pretty she was, prettier in person than she’d appeared in that photo her father had dropped, but now he realized how creamy her skin was, how flawless.

Well, except for the faint line that appeared between her brows as she frowned at him.

“I know you can get yourself in a lot of trouble out here if you wander off the path.”

He knew that as well as she did, and under normal circumstances, he would never have left the trail unless he had a damn good reason.

Then again, a sparkling plant unknown to humankind had seemed like a pretty good reason to him.

“I wouldn’t have gotten lost,” he said calmly, and lifted his phone. “I’m using the AllTrails app.”

Now her mouth pursed in amusement. “What, on the same phone that took a bunch of pictures of gray nothing?”

Touché. “I can still see the trail from here,” he replied. “And I appreciate your concern, but I’m a big boy and can take care of myself.” He paused before adding, “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

“It’s Tuesday,” she said simply, and he stared back at her, wondering how the hell he was supposed to respond to that non sequitur.

A very faint smile touched her lips. “On Tuesdays, I don’t open the pet shop until noon. It’s sort of an exchange for being open a half day on Saturdays. Everyone knows I go hiking on Tuesday morning if the weather is at all cooperative.”

The intimation being, of course, that he couldn’t possibly know such a thing because he was a newcomer to Silver Hollow, an interloper.

Fine.

“Do you come out here because you’re still looking for clues as to what happened to your mother and grandmother?”

For what felt like an unbearably long moment, Sidney Lowell only stood there, hands planted on her hips, her face so blank that Ben could only believe she was holding it that way deliberately until she could figure out what in the world to say in response to his comment.

Apparently, she decided on nothing at all, because she turned and stalked away from him in angry silence.

That hadn’t gone well. He stood there for a second or two, and then, almost as though of their own volition, his feet began to propel him forward.

One way or another, he needed to get this straightened out.

Chapter Seven

I was so angry in that moment that I knew the only thing I could do was walk away from Ben Sanders.

And that’s exactly what I did.

It was stupid to have followed him. I understood that intellectually, but when Mabel Whitaker called me and told me she’d seen her latest guest disappearing into the woods — apparently, Eliza had bumped into her at the market and had told her it sure looked like Ben was poking around and asking the sorts of questions you wouldn’t expect from a casual tourist, so Mabel felt compelled to pass that information on to me — I knew I needed to see just what in the world he was up to.

And even though I’d done my best to act outwardly disbelieving, I knew he really had seen something unusual out there. Those same flowers had popped in and out of existence in these woods ever since I could remember, none of them lasting very long. At first, I’d wondered if they had some kind of connection to the unicorn, because they certainly seemed sparkly and ethereal enough to be a sort of companion plant, but since they didn’t always appear in the same place a unicorn did — and showed up much more frequently, to be honest — I couldn’t draw any clear parallels.

Like so many things about this forest, they seemed to defy explanation.

A crunch of feet on leaves a pace or so to the rear told me that Ben had already caught up. He moved surely and swiftly out here, like someone who knew his way around rough country. Even though he’d looked like a total city boy when he arrived in Silver Hollow yesterday, it seemed he could hold his own on a woodland trail.

And it also seemed as though he wasn’t about to let me just walk away.

Fine. Time to fight fire with fire.

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