Blue (For The Love of Purple #2) - Audrey Faye Page 0,4

he’s not going to throw me out of his apartment, but only because I brought cinnamon buns. “Your stools don’t slide around as easily as my old ones.”

I peer into the bakery bag. I already ate a cinnamon bun on the way over, but my belly has a really short memory. “That’s kind of the point. If they slide around, you die.”

He opens a cupboard door that squeaks loudly enough to have me reaching for my toolbox and takes out two plates. “Art is motion, especially on a big canvas. If the stools don’t move, then I end up leaning precariously, which seems far more likely to add me to the ghost squad.”

I wave a hand vaguely at the rest of his apartment. “Is Mabel here?”

He shakes his head. “No. But she said to tell you that she likes your new mug.”

I swallow a suddenly hard lump of cinnamon bun. Yesterday was weird enough without a ghost being a fly on the wall. “Seriously? She needs to speak up when she’s lurking.”

Drew’s lips quirk. “You can’t hear her.”

I give him the stink-eye that’s worked remarkably well since third grade. “Violet was with me.”

He looks mildly surprised. “Mabel didn’t mention that part.”

I don’t want to hear about whatever she did mention. Mabel is hell on wheels and she really likes me, and that probably isn’t going to end well for my desire to be Perception Bay’s most boring carpenter.

At least she hasn’t sprung a puppy on me yet. I bend down and pick up the one gnawing on the shoelaces of my work boots and pick her up before the sawdust they’re covered in makes her sneeze. “Talk some sense into your human after I leave, okay? Artists who are approaching middle age should not be painting on moving skateboards or stools without proper traction grips.”

Drew grimaces. “The skateboard was a mistake.”

The skateboard was funny as hell and Indi somehow caught it on video, which is going to make it funny until the end of time. “Your technique was pretty good until you hit the cobblestones.”

He shoots me a wry look as he turns back to his cupboard. “My agent thinks it’s funny to send his new assistant to check up on me.”

It is pretty funny. “Rodney’s cool.”

Drew pours something that looks like lemonade into a couple of glasses. “He’s a danger to himself and others.”

He’s a brash young guy who never stops moving and who paused long enough to grin at Trina and say something nice about her work on the inn’s new door trim. He’s welcome back in my town any time he wants to come. I reach into the pup cookie jar and extract a treat that smells like bacon-flavored sawdust. Helio gobbles it up, along with most of my fingers.

Drew’s lips quirk. “I feed her, honest.”

I nuzzle a fuzzy head. “She had a busy morning pouncing on Miss Andy’s dandelions.” Which was pretty cute, especially the confused look on her face every time they dematerialized.

Drew chuckles. “That sounds like Gruesome’s doing.”

I shake my head. “That dog is a terrible influence. You need to find her some better role models, or at least ones that smell better.” There are good reasons that Helio came to Miss Andy’s this morning. Gruesome had to visit the nice lady with the dog shampoo.

Drew shoots me a casual look. “You seem happy today.”

I hate the shutters that try to slam down in my head. Nobody in Perception Bay begrudges me a good mood. “I did some useful work this morning. That always makes me happy.”

I don’t love that answer, but at least it isn’t shutters.

Drew sets a glass of lemonade down on my end of the counter.

I wrap my fingers around it and try to get back to the contentment that cinnamon buns, good deeds, and pup cuddles should have earned me.

Drew gives my hand a light squeeze. “You make stools that don’t slide around. Maybe consider that your own feet aren’t on such slippery ground either, these days.”

The words are soft and kind. The knowledge behind them feels sharp anyhow. I burrow into Helio’s fur and grumble under my breath. “Indigo talks too much.”

“She doesn’t.” His finger draws an absent circle in the condensation left on the counter by the lemonade glass. “I have eyes. I use them.”

I sigh. He does, and he uses them to take really good care of one of my best friends. “And you have a ghost informant.”

His lips quirk. “That, too.”

I make a face. “I don’t