“Bet you wish you were outside now,” Sebastian muttered as he set the coats down on the reception desk. “These are Mabel’s coats for the ducks. I’d probably hide them if I were you.”
The new nurse blushed and took them with a small nod, then got up and took them into the back room where they would be out of the way.
Hopefully, that would be where they’d stay.
“Hey!” Amanda, one of the nurses, walked out of the room the new nurse had just come out of. “Oh, good,” she said, peering over her shoulder. “You got the coats off Mabel.”
“Kinda,” I said. “She dropped them, and we were a little afraid she was going to break a bone trying to collect them, so we got them.”
“Thank you,” she breathed. “I’m going to burn them tonight.”
Well, it was good to know she felt the same as I did about the coats.
“Your grandpa has been sneaking whisky,” Amanda said to Sebastian. “I don’t know how he’s doing it, but I think he brought it back from the wedding. He might have gotten away with it if he didn’t forget that the cleaners take out his trash and tell us when they find the bottles.”
Seb pursed his lips and nodded. “That… I’m sorry to hear that.”
I leaned against the high desk, folded my arms across my chest, and looked at him. “Are you?”
He glanced at me. “Of course I am, Holley. He’s breaking the rules.” He turned back to Amanda. “I’ll talk to him. I promise.”
“Thank you.” She touched his arm with a warm smile. “Are you coming in?”
“In a minute.”
I waited until she’d left and said, “So you’re going to tell him to hide the bottles better.”
Seb held up his hands. “We all do it.”
“I don’t.”
“Fine, the rest of us do it.”
“Kinsley doesn’t.”
“We’re not all angels, Holley. Some of us have demanding grandparents.”
“Sebastian,” I said slowly, straightening up. “When my sister got pregnant, my grandmother called her a whore because she thought she wasn’t married.”
“What kind of grandmother calls her granddaughter a whore?”
“My grandmother.”
“Wait, she’s not married now, is she?”
“Oh, she is now,” I said breezily. “They had babymoon in a lodge in Colorado where they secretly got married with Kai’s parents as witnesses. They’re having some big party next year when they’ve moved and they’re settled. As far as our grandmother is concerned, she was married when she got pregnant.”
He didn’t say anything for a long moment. “That’s… kind of messed up.”
“Yeah,” I said, like it was obvious. “Again, have you met my grandmother?”
“Point well made.” He peered through into the main room. “Do you want to get something to eat?”
It was my turn to raise my eyebrows. “I’m sorry?”
“You don’t need to apologize.”
“I wasn’t. I was expressing surprise at your question.”
“What? A guy can’t ask his fake—” He paused when someone joined us in the hall. “His girlfriend to lunch?”
I ran my tongue over my lips and glared at him as the male nurse raised his eyebrows.
“Well? Are you busy? Do you have to get back to the store, or…?”
“What’s taking you so long?” Kinsley hissed, joining us at the desk. “I’m dying in there.”
“They’re going to lunch,” the nurse said from the other side as he flicked through papers. “Or he wants to, but she doesn’t.”
Who even was he?
I hadn’t seen him before.
“What he said.” I cocked my thumb in his direction anyway. It wasn’t like he was wrong.
“Oh.” Kins looked between us. “You can go get lunch with him if you want. We don’t all need to be at the store this afternoon.”
“I don’t—”
“Then it’s settled,” Seb said. “The seniors are too busy with their gameshows to care about us, and I’ll just bring grandpa some whisky to—”
The male nurse coughed.
“Whisky liqueur chocolates, I mean,” he said quickly. “You know, for Christmas.”
Kinsley fought a laugh. “I’m just gonna—go, before this gets more of us than just Seb in trouble.”
Then she left.
The male nurse chuckled and picked up a file, then disappeared down the hall.
“Shall we go, then?” Seb smirked.
I stared at him.
I was so going to regret this.CHAPTER FIFTEEN – HOLLEYrule fifteen: lying is like a labyrinth; there are a million different routes to get out of it, but you’re almost guaranteed to screw it up and end up back at square one.“And my grandmother already wants to kill me.” I put my phone back in my purse, ignoring her third annoyed message that I’d somehow managed to steal my purse and I had, horror, taken her book with me.
Not that I’d skipped out on our visit.
That I’d taken her book.
And people wondered where I got it, honestly.
Seb smirked behind his glass. “You didn’t have to come.”
“Oh, I did. I was strongarmed into it by both you and my so-called best friend.” I stirred my water with my straw. “I’m getting a little tired of being talked into things I don’t want to do. The last thing we need is the entire town thinking we’re dating.”