Page 86 of 10 Rings I Hate About You
Chaos walked further into the diner, glanced around like he was considering the menu options, and then lay down near Matt’s counter.
“Well!” Glamma clasped her hands together. “I’ve had the mostbrilliantidea. Every bachelor walks with a shelter animal. You can walk with Chaos.”
Marc stared at her. Then at the goat. Then back at her. “I’m not participating,” he protested stubbornly.
“But you already have the animal,” Glamma explained reasonably.
“That isnothow consent works.”
“You’ll beadorable.” Glamma reached up and pinched his cheek.
I had to hold back a cackle. She’d actually pinched his cheek. Marc Kingsley, six–feet-two inches of composed, bespectacled, insufferable man, stood there and got his cheek pinched by an eighty-something year old woman. “Come an hour early and we’ll get you all sorted.”
Something happened in my chest. Something I absolutely refused to examine. The idea of Marc walking down an auction stage with a baby goat while some woman in the audience decided what she’d bid …
Nope. Not my problem. Not my feelings. Filing that all under “not applicable” never to be taken out again.
I pushed it down. Way down. Into the same locked drawer with the full-sentence texts and the thing about glasses.
A smile settled on my lips instead, unbidden and completely genuine.
There was no way I was going to miss this auction and the hilarity that ensued.
I would sit at the front with my coffee—or maybe a big tub of popcorn—and watch Marc Kinglsey get auctioned off while a little goat committed various small crimes beside him.
It was going to be a disaster of the highest order.
I might have a better understanding of Marc after this past week, but I was petty enough to still want to watch this trainwreck of a situation. Maybe it would make me feel better from all the small injustices he’d doled out over the years, and I could watch him squirm and put this animosity I’d held toward him to bed.
Now the only question was how much of that disaster was going to somehow become my problem.
Knowing this town? Knowing Glamma?
Knowing me?
All of it.
It was absolutely going to be all of it.
Chapter Fifteen
MARC
I’d noted Delaney the second I walked into the diner.
How could I not?
My gaze found her as if she was my personal homing beacon anytime we entered the same space. The more time we spent together lately, the more I recognized that it had always been this way with her.
Which was incredibly and annoyingly inconvenient.
Chaos chose that exact moment to yank on the leash hard enough to nearly dislocate my shoulder.
“I think the fuck not,” I told him.
He stared at me as if I’d said something deeply offensive.
Glamma had already shifted her attention to Wyatt. She knew better than to trap him the way she had me. Actually, that wasn’t accurate—Glamma would totally trap Wyatt. She just preferred to work her way down a list with the patience of a very organized predator. I had no doubt she’d win. She’d produced genuinely miraculous things in less than twenty-four hours before.
