Phantom: Her Ruthless Villain (Ruthless Triad 5)

Minerva and I exchanged looks because we all knew she wasn’t just having fun. Minerva came from a long line of “spirit women,” and pretty much every lady—and a few men—in Glendaver County had come to her door looking for “quick consultations.” These sessions, which she’d held out in the guest house she’d been given when we lived on the Glendaver estate, had usually ended with the exchange of some potion or cream that would provide a bit of magic.

Including Skylar, who I knew for a fact had asked Minerva for a love potion after she set her sights on Clement Calson of the Cal-Mart Calsons, back when they’d both been attending the University of Kentucky. And another potion, when she’d wanted to convince him to stay and work for Glendaver as opposed to returning to his family business in Arkansas.

I ignored Skylar and asked, “How about your little sister? She unblocked on The Seasons of Fae series yet?”

“Girl, no. Our niece Sharon went up there to help her, you know. But more than a decade later, and still no book.”

“That’s really too bad.” I wasn’t just trying to show empathy for her youngest sister Marleen, who wrote under the pen name Clara Quinn. I’d been obsessed with her YA novels back during my Manhattan U years—seriously, they had been the only thing that got me through my dual degree program.”

She’d said from the start that her fairy books would be a ten-book cycle, but book nine had ended on a huge cliffhanger over a decade ago, and for reasons no one understood, she’d been concentrating on her sci-fi and dystopian stuff ever since.

“Last time I spoke to Sharon, I tried to convince her to sneak one of my concoctions into her morning Metamucil.’ But you know what she told me?”

“What?” I asked.

As a long-time fan, I was always willing to listen to any scrap of real-life information Minerva had on the famous recluse. Growing up, I couldn’t believe our housekeeper actually knew Clara Quinn, much less was her sister. She’d even taken vacations a few times to go up to visit her in Vermont. So I leaned all the way in for the next tidbit.

“She said she doesn’t believe in drugging people against their will, and besides that, she doesn’t drink a morning Metamucil! Can you believe that?”

Minerva slapped her thigh. “So I asked her how she was managing her fiber? I mean, how did her poop look? You’re a doctor, too, so you get where I’m going with this—that’s probably why she can’t write.”

I nodded—not necessarily because I agreed with Minerva but because I was born and bred southerner. I honestly didn’t know how to disagree with any woman over the age of sixty.

But Skylar gasped like the lead she was in our high school’s production of The Crucible.

“Miss Minerva! If you could please refrain from discussing such delicate matters around my children!”

“Mama says that matters below the waist aren’t going to be discussed at the dinner table,” Skylar’s eight-year-old mini-me daughter, Harper, said in a voice that I swear sounded exactly like my sister’s at that age.

See, here was a good reason to come home for Thanksgiving, I decided. My longing to have children was always muted by Skylar’s freakishly perfect ones.

“I changed your mama’s nasty diapers growing up,” Minerva answered the little girl who’d had the nerve to try to scold her. “So if she wanted that to not ever be a discussion, maybe she should have spewed less crap. I’m still haunted by the memory.”

Good ol’ Minerva. Skylar turned a deep red, and maybe her children weren’t so perfect after all. I could tell that, like me, they were working hard not to laugh.

“Anyway, come visit me in the kitchen after your done with your breakfast,” Minerva said to me. “I’ll put you to work shelling peas and peeling potatoes while I catch you up on all the gossip you missed since your last visit.”

Skylar stayed quiet this time until Minerva left. But as soon as the older woman was safely out of earshot, she asked, “Do you think we ought to talk to Mama about putting her on a retirement plan? I swear she gets more and more inappropriate by the day. And I don’t know how to feel about her putting you to work every time you come home for a visit. She never does that to me. Don’t you think that’s a bit…” She lowered her voice to whisper, “racist?”

I held my tongue on all of it. Arguments of Thanksgiving pasts had taught me not to ever try to explain how racism works to my stubbornly “I don’t see color” sister.

Also, I doubted she’d appreciate knowing that Minerva was actually showing me favoritism.

She liked me enough to want me around while she was putting together the hugest meal of the year. Meanwhile, Skylar and her kids mostly got shooed out of her kitchen.